Oh, Berkeley law professor and torture-sanctioner John Yoo's not going to be happy about this (or maybe he will be!) -- Cal has tentatively agreed to accept a controversial collection of paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, based on the Abu Ghraib photographs that repulsed the world. Botero showed the paintings at Berkeley earlier this year at the Doe Library, to large crowds, and in April, emailed Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies to say......

We always hate it when we see a new Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker, because we know it's going to be something really upsetting that the Bush Administration's done. Last week's article detailed just how badly Donald Rumsfeld treated Gen. Antonio Taguba, who did the investigation on the abuses and torture at Abu Ghraib. Give Gen. Taguba a hero's welcome and hear his story in person at the Commonwealth Club tonight at 6......

--At Intersection for the Arts, an evening of performances, readings, and conversations with formerly-incarcerated youth in The Prison Project, their year-long artistic exploration of the California penal system. $5-15, 7 p.m., 446 Valencia (x 15th). --At the Balboa, you've got a documentary about Hitler's theft of European art works in one theater, and Knocked Up in the other. 3630 Balboa (x 38th), $8.50 (unless it's your birthday, in which case it's free!). --Tonight at the......

-Could the 49ers and the Raiders be planning to move in with each other? -Soldier from Hayward was killed in Iraq. ...

-Treasure Island Development Authority passes development plan for Treasure Island. Long John Silver pleased. ...

In this week's Stage Fog, we check out some hot theater in small spaces....

Okay, we all know what the internet is best at -- porn, porn, rants and porn. Sure, blogging is nice, but it doesn't really pay all that well. There was certainly a point after the dot-bomb where the only people hiring HTML and Photoshop wizards were porn sites, and yes, we totally took their little nudie-photo color correction tests and sent them our resumes. Hell, we might have even considered acting in a few......

Hey, congratulations to local magazine Dwell (on contemporary design and architecture) for winning the National Magazine Association's prestigious "Ellie" award, for best magazine with circulation from 100,000 to 250,000! Dwell beat out Baseline, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Magazine, and Teacher Magazine for the cute li'l Alexander Calder elephant statuette. In other local Ellie Award news, San Francisco Magazine was nominated for an article about the Santa Clara Law School Innocence Project in the public interest article category, but lost to Seymour Hersh's Abu Ghraib coverage in the New Yorker. Eh, we guess there was probably no real surprise in that category, huh? And finally, you'll all also certainly be shocked to hear that our little site here did not win (and was not even nominated for) the special "general excellence online" award, for "weblogs that have a significant amount of original content." That went to Style.com, of the Conde Nast machine....

Bay Area crime roundup...

Stanford Prison Experiment Lecture...

SFist can't get enough of our local bookstores. When we've blown all our money on beer, we've also been known to reserve books from the San Francisco Public Library. That's how much we love that reading thing. Sfist Emily has been burning the midnight oil with The Social Contruction of Reality: a reatise in the sociology of knowledge by Berger and Luckmann (and a book so esoteric that even the venerable SFPL doesn't have it......

Thomas Hawk, local San Francisco photo/blogger, posted an interesting essay on his experiences taking pictures at different private cultural venues around town. EssEffist found the link on Boing Boing, which often covers issues related to freedom of speech, expression, media and fair use....