Congressman Tom Lantos died this morning from esophageal cancer at the age of 80. He represented most of the Sunset, as well as a big chunk of San Mateo County. He was the only survivor of the Holocaust to be elected to Congress, and worked for years on human rights issues. That said, he ticked off quite a few people locally by supporting the Iraq war, although he had recently been pretty critical of the......

After staunching out the Arizona Cardinals last week, the Niners head to St. Louis to try to get ahead at the expense of the reeling Rams and claw ahead in the NFC West race....

Cal Performances' biennial Berkeley Edge Fest is dedicated to presenting works of contemporary music and performance. Starting this Thursday (June 7) and running through Sunday June 10 at Zellerbach Hall, the Edge Fest seems to be pushing an anti-Bush theme this year. Oh, they're just giving the people of Berkeley exactly what they want to hear! This year, the Edge Fest is featuring a musical theater piece by Paul Dresher called The Tyrant, based on......

From the Daily Show to the Googleplex -- Republican presidential hopeful Walnuts John McCain, struggling in the polls and in fundraising, gamely stopped by Mountain View yesterday afternoon for an hourlong forum with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google employees. The questions were respectful but tough from the fairly-liberal crowd, touching on McCain's flip-flopping reembrace of religious fundamentalists after calling them "agents of intolerance" in 2000, his support of the Iraq war, the firing......

Huzzah everyone, the Iraq War is over. Yesterday, the Board of Supervisors passed the resolution calling on congress to end the war. Like now. The measure passed by a 7-1 vote with cranky Ed Jew being the only dissenter. Even the usually hesitant Michela Alioto-Pier hopped on board the resolution saying that all things considering, it's a good time to take a stand. ...

If a visit from Barrack Obama Superstar wasn't exciting enough, today we were blessed with a visit from New York's Senator, a Hillary something. God, we've never heard of her. Who is she again?...

-State Senate votes for an early primary and to extend term limits. -College students everywhere to put down the bong and stage a national day of protest over the Iraq War. Then they'll go back to using the bong. ...

SFist Rita is on vacation, so we're guest-reading the weeklies for her this week. Plus, it's the last weekly week of 2006, so we will be tallying up this year's picks to anoint a Weekly of the Year at the end of this post. Last week's winner and in at 4th place for 2006 with 6.5 WotW points, the Metro: Gary Singh on Rudy Rucker's new book Mathematicians in Love. Cover: Year in Review for......

The new bishop of the Northern California Episcopal Diocese, Rev. Marc Andrus, was arrested at the federal building yesterday afternoon after leading a group of 200 protestors from Grace Cathedral to participate in a die-in against the Iraq war. Rev. Andrus, who was carrying a shepherd's staff, celebrated communion outside the building before lying down in front of the door of the building and getting himself arrested. The murder trial for 3-year-old Cha Cha (Chazarus......

We had a great time at the Between the Bridges reading/concert on Friday night and got all excited about the upcoming week. So what else is out there in Litquake World? ...

It's that anti-war protest time of the year again! Traffic in the city will be tied up tomorrow as your favorite scruffy kettle-drum wielding and peace-flag waving World Can't Wait-ers march up and then down Market Street at noon. Oh, we love The World Can't Wait folks -- remember Bush Ter Down? This is part of an international 190-city protest against the Iraq War (with 70 of the cities are in states that voted for......

Get out the Kibbles and Bits -- UK prime minister Tony Blair, widely derided as Bush's "poodle" for his unhesitating support of the questionable Iraq war, is making an unannounced visit to the Bay Area this weekend. It'll be the first ever visit by a sitting British prime minister to the state of California. (What, Maggie Thatcher never made it out here?) Blair gets out here today, is having dinner on Saturday with George and......

We have got to program our TiVo DVR to get a season pass for CHRIS DALY -- we missed our favorite moonbat left wing District 6 Supervisor yakking it up about impeachment with "you're hurting America"'s own Tucker Carlson last night! Check out that picture of Tucker eating a ceremonial shoe when he was wrong about Hillary Clinton! Always makes us laugh. (but not as much as when Charles Barkley kissed a donkey ass after losing that bet about Yao Ming.) Good thing about the show: Daly did not say America could be defended by the Coast Guard. Bad thing about the show. Chris was rocking some sort of mountain-man unshaven look. Chris readily admitted that SF has no impact on whether Bush gets impeached, "absolutely not." But -- and you know we're always happy to mock Daly -- we have to say, he did a pretty good job defending his resolution. He noted that it cost no money to pass the resolution, that the tax revenues from San Francisco that went to the Iraq war total $800 million, and that San Francisco is right to be outraged about the way the presidency's been going.

CARLSON: There are Republican fundraisers sitting at home right now, taking notes on you, ready to raise more dough in direct mail pitches. DALY: That's beautiful. CARLSON: Congratulations. DALY: I'll take on their direct mail and square off on them and I'll beat them. And San Francisco will lead the country. And George Bush will go down as the worst president in American history.

Obviously you're going to spend a good portion of the holiday weekend doing holiday-type activities like going to the beach, scarfing down BBQ and tipping back a few beers in the sunshine. You might even head out to the Mission to catch the Carnaval parade on Sunday. SFist highly recommends all these things. That's what Memorial Day is all about afterall. Sort of. Memorial Day is also meant to honour those service men and......

An 18-year-old woman in Salinas named Erin Shatraw was convicted of child molestation for molesting a 14-year-old female family friend. Shatraw told the 14-year-old that she (Shatraw) was a vampire and she would cast a spell on the 14-year-old's family if they didn't have sex. The 14-year-old said she believed Shatraw was a vampire because Shatraw was wearing so much black. And this is not technically in our coverage area, but -- yipes! A white supremacist in Sacramento decided to celebrate Hitler's birthday by having a friend nail him to a board so he could be crucified outside the State Capital to protest the Iraq war and U.S. immigration policy. He had a doctor's note saying it was okay, and had crucified himself once before, in 1987. A man who stabbed a card dealer at the Lucky Chances casino in Colma pled not guilty to attempted murder charges. The man had apparently lost money at the table a few weeks earlier. And finally -- Anna Ayala, the lady who found the finger in her chili, was arrested at her home last night, while watching a DVD of "Meet the Fockers." And Wendy's is giving out free Frosty shakes to everyone who stops by a Bay Area store this weekend....

Sometimes we wonder if Gavin Newsom wakes up in the middle of the night and wonders why he had to become Mayor and didn’t just stick with Flapjack where he’d be the toast of the town in Manhattan with Kimmers. Case in point, the fracas now brewing over the hoisting of the flag over City Hall. With the two-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War this Saturday, the Board of Supervisors, once again delving into foreign policy, unanimously passed a resolution to have the flag at half-mast to honor the war’s dead. Gavin, however, said thanks but no thanks and will keep the flag furled high. Now the BoS are all a-twitter with Ross Mirkarimi, in a tone of complete understatement, called Gav’s actions “deplorable.” He added that in a city that is predominantly anti-war, Newsom’s refusal to not lower the flag “sends contradictory signals of the priorities of the administration. " Damn, that Gavin. Gavin, who has spent most of the week putting together a proposal to land the Stem Cell Center and bring jobs and money to the city, had no comment. ...

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......