■ Accentuating the negatives: This week’s Common Council agenda included seven notices of negative declarations, which exempt developers from undergoing a lengthy and expensive environmental impact study before getting the go-ahead on a project. These are often issued for small-scale builds, or reuses of sites or existing structures that don’t stray far from past uses—cases when the only environmental impact will be those transient issues related to construction itself.

■ Voulez-vous Rendezvous? Looks like a renaissance for that corner of Niagara and Pennsylvania: According to filings in Common Council this week, an individual has applied for a liquor license for the Rendezvous, which has been dark for nearly a year and moribund even longer. A recommendation: Replenish the stock of glassware; the last operators served everything in plastic cups.

■ Copper coppers: A particularly enterprising copper prospector joined his increasingly bold fellows this weekend when he broke into an occupied East Side residence and stole its copper plumbing. While it’s become commonplace for vacant or abandoned structures in Buffalo to be stripped of their material goods—particularly copper piping—it’s only since the beginning of 2007 that occupied buildings have been targeted.

■ Drive, he texted: Adam Taylor was text messaging in the wrong place at the wrong time last Saturday night, a fact that eventually led to his arrest. Taylor, 32, of Newfane, was behind the wheel of his car, driving drunk down Lockport-Olcott Road in the vicinity of a Niagara County sheriff’s deputy when he became too engrossed in his texting to pay attention to the road, and he all but ran the deputy off the road. Coming to his senses, and with some quick, clearheaded thinking, Taylor switched off his headlights and tried to lose the deputy on side streets before being pulled over near his home. He now faces six charges, including driving while intoxicated, failure to keep right and, we can only guess, drunk texting (a new spin on drunk dialing).

■ Feds suppress report on Great Lakes toxins: Two weeks ago the Center for Public Integrity obtained and released a suppressed federal report on public health conditions and exposure to toxic substances throughout the Great Lakes region. The report, titled “Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern,” was intended to be released in July 2007 but was withheld at the last minute by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which produced the report. The 400-page document, an aggregation of existing studies requested by the International Joint Commission in 2001, identifies more than 15,000 instances in which contaminants of concern were found at higher than accepted levels; without positing a causal relationship, the report also identified numerous instances of elevated infant mortality rates, low birth weights and premature births, as well as elevated cancer and cancer mortality rates among populations living nearby these areas of concern.