23rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Labor and Community Breakfast this morning at the San Francisco Hilton...

A photo of the FiDi at night with holiday lighting...

Chenery House owner, colorful San Francisco ad man, and entrepreneur Bob Pritikin bought Hitler's globe this week for a cool $100,000. The globe, snatched fom Hitler's desk in the ruins of his Eagle's Nest retreat, was found by WWII U.S. soldier John Barsamian and put up for auction this week in San Francisco. Now, before you go labeling Pritiklin an anti-Semite, this man is character -- a true collector and unique hoarder. His home......

From your SFist editor's district supervisor's blog: A day before the polls open, local reporters already started writing their Election winners and losers stories. While I won’t make any big predictions, I am confident in calling this season the biggest win for me… Saturday morning at 5:51, Grace Eolen blessed us with her arrival. Sarah had a brief but exciting labor and mother, baby, and proud big brother are doing great. Oh wow, she's......

Oh is it a voting day or something? It totally sneaked up on us! It still feels like Monday today. Actually it also feels like October. Anyway, you should probably vote yes on A and no on H, because that's what everyone else is doing. Prop A will protect The Mt Soledad National War Memorial and do something to the air force? and will transform some colleges. Also, Aristotle endorsed it it. Proposition H......

No, no -- not these freshly-scrubbed little blessings As if Don Fisher doesn't have enough on his hands, now this: in addition to environmental carelessness and No-on-A-isms, the Gap founder can now add human right violations and child labor abuse to Gap Inc.'s growing list of fires to put out. San Francisco-based Gap Inc. has been caught in a child labor scandal after Dan McDougall's report in The Observer informed the world that kids in......

Aw. This kind of sucks. School teacher Margaret Pavese got slapped with a misdemeanor charge for causing the 47+-acre Lick fire that erupted on Labor Day Weekend. Apparently, she was using a burn barrel to get rid on some refuse the environmentally happy way. Oops. According to the Chronicle, she could "face a maximum of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine...or all of the $13 million it cost to fight the fire, prosecutors......

One day we're planning a going-away party there, and then -- ta-da! -- it's gone. Wired workers' favorite watering hole and one of the last dive's around the Eastern SOMA area, the Eagle Drift-In Lounge was a good place for cheap booze, comfy booth seating, playing a game of darts, or to catch our favorite pregnant smoking bartender making a drink, waiting for that call from CPS....

Labor Day may mark the end of summer for most, but for TV fans, it's the beginning of the Fall TV season that really signals the end of summer and its often crappy TV offerings. Instead, we've got the return of OLD crappy shows and new (possibly) crappy shows to look forward to. Like tonight, when Fox jumps the gun on all the other networks with its Fall season premieres of "Prison Break" and......

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

Was it just us, or did you also think, as soon as the Bay Bridge closed, that the only things you wanted to do over Labor Day Weekend were on the other side of the bay? Well, all those days are now nothing but a hazy memory, with the bridge reopening a full 11 hours earlier than planned (at around 6 p.m. last night) and traffic flowing relatively normally (i.e., jammed, but no more......

We were coming back from our Labor Day we're-outta-here yesterday and saw this over the hills to the north. It was big enough that we turned on the radio to make sure that nobody had bombed downtown San Jose. No terrorists here, but the Lick Fire is plenty scary on its own. Good luck to the firefighters who are trying to contain this beast.......

...And that's not even the curviest part! A car chase that started in Marin County around 3:00 a.m. Monday morning ended abruptly when the driver, speeding at around 75 mph over the Golden Gate Bridge, overshot the turn from Doyle Drive onto Lombard Street and flipped over. A open fifth of Hennessey was found in the car, and the passengers are in SF General with non-fatal injuries. Your SF Labor Day weekend homicide count: 3.......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

Since our trimethyldioxypurist is on the road for Labor Day, we're stepping in on the caffeine beat to pass along some sad news: Peet's Coffee founder Alfred Peet died earlier this week (Wednesday) in Oregon. Mr. Peet, born in Holland, opened the first Peet's at Walnut and Vine in Berkeley in 1966, and watched it spread nationwide (there's Peet's in New England now?). And the rumors you've heard about the Peet's/Starbucks connections are true: the......

We had a good time going through the recipes and eating stories in Street Food, the new book by wunderkind Tom Kine - that is, when we got over the insane jealousy. He got a book contract to travel for three months and eat all he could! How do we get something like that? We're excited to try his takes on bolani (Afghan flat bread) and Kadu (roast pumpkin paste), which he got from......

Last week's winner, the Bay Guardian. We should totally put needle disposal boxes in Golden Gate Park. Also, C.W. Nevius says that Newsom called him and yelled at him for 45 minutes after he wrote his first article on the issue. We'd put that call on mute. Gentrification is destroying Polk Street. City contractors still use sweatshop labor. Annalee Newitz has mice. Sonic Reducer's still at the Guardian. Cover article: Local bands to watch. You've......

You know how the Bay Bridge is going to be closed on this Labor Day weekend? And how that means there'll be fewer car-trips into San Francisco? A reasonable person might assume that that'll mean an increased demand for public transit -- but Muni's response to that is, "reasonable people? What on Earth are those?" Not only is Muni not adjusting service levels to accommodate the bridge closure, they're actually reducing service levels on......

A warm spell is rolling into the Bay Area -- so it's time for our perennial post complaining about how much we haaaaaaate it when it's hot. Bring back the fog! Bring back the fog! So it's going to be stiflingly hot for the next few days (yes, we know, it's not as bad as it is in every other part of the country, but that's why we don't live in those other parts of......

-- Paranoia, feeding faux stories, and NYT's Laura Albert (AKA Miss Leroy) article. Depressing is right, Rita. [CultureBlog] -- Newsom defends Halloween shutdown. [BAR] -- San Francisco's other (but not nearly as stellar!) Matty. [BeyondChron] -- Pssst. We heard a rumor that the Bay Bridge will close during Labor Day Weekend. Pass it around. [511] -- Mandy Moore at the Fillmore. Eeeeeeeeee! [SF Weekly] -- SFBG's political art of the week. (Yay, Kool-Aid guy!)......

Well, first the MediaNews conglomerate moves the Oakland Tribune from its iconic downtown Oakland tower (at left) and then they take away recognition of the Tribune's Newspaper Guild labor union. MediaNews claims they're doing this because when they consolidated their Alameda County newspaper holdings, it turns out union members are no longer a majority of their workers when you factor in all the people they employ at the non-union papers they own. (This doesn't affect......

-- Michelangelo Antonioni dies; Mick LaSalle suspects Eric Rohmer will fade to black next. [Chron blogs] -- Chronicle wanted Gonzalez in the mayoral race. Alas. [BeyondChron] -- A baseball trader "shocker" happened involving the Giants. [Chron] -- Firefighters get raise. Hot. [Examiner] -- Murdoch to get WSJ. [Chron] -- Bay Bridge to shutdown during Labor Day weekend. Again. [Oakland Tribune] -- Overpass falls on FedEx truck and driver near Sacramento. [KGO7] -- CHP officer......

Wow, sorry all the news we're posting today is such a downer, but San Jose is reeling from the news of the brutal sexual assault and murder of Sany San, a recent Cambodian immigrant who had survived the Khmer Rouge. Last Sunday, San had walked a mile from her home in East San Jose at 6 a.m. to catch the bus to her job as a janitor at a doughnut shop in Palo Alto when......

An Alameda County judge has ordered Waste Management to start picking up the garbage again. The City of Oakland, who filed suit, says they're gratified by the ruling, since this means, you know, the garbage will get picked up. Waste Management says this doesn't mean anything because they were picking up the garbage already anyways. This doesn't end the lockout, though (the judge didn't have the authority to do that), so Waste Management says they're......

When he's not busy getting impeached or whatever for indecent exposure, Aaron Peskin's trying to fix Muni. And SPUR, the urban-planny folks, are grateful: they're encouraging everyone to give Aaron's amendments a thumbs-up. You can read it in loathsome .doc format here, or as a Google Document here -- but honestly, you don't want to read either, since it's about a billion pages long. Here's a condensed version of what the amendment would do: give......

Just some random news items on the wire: There was a three-alarm fire at Thurgood Marshall Alternative High in the Bayview this afternoon. School's out for the summer, so there weren't any students around, and the authorities think the fire was started by roofers working with tar. Some unscreened yutz snuck into Terminal 1 (the non-Southwest one) at Oakland Airport this morning, necessitating a two-hour search of the entire place as TSA tried in vain......

Who ya got? The cowboy or the samurai? That's the question posed by the Asian-American Theater Company's Cowboy v. Samurai, a story about two Asian-American cowboys in Montana who fall in love with the same Korean-American new girl in town. Our Gothamist cousins liked it when it played in New York. 2 p.m. at the Thick House (1695 18th Street, x Arkansas), $20. Other events: --The workers united -- have a whole month to celebrate!......

You want to know the best thing about the San Francisco Courtesan Carnival, a "solidarity party that will support labor rights and education funding for erotic service providers"? Their PR is handled by a man whose last name is "Buttner." Hee hee hee! Ahem. Anyway, the Carnival's happening this Thursday, the 7th. Short notice! Better start polishing your buckles and straps now. They're raising funds for erotic services workers to attend labor training camps.......

For many of us with standard 9-5 jobs, a long weekend is coming up. Naturally, our minds turn to libations. Always plenty of booze news around these parts; here's a roundup of some of the ones we found to be interesting....

Mari Naomi is one of the most prolific bay area artists we know-- just when we think she's going to rest for a while she unveils a new set of kick ass clown sumo wrestler watercolors, or tells us she's going to be on TV, at a reading, or putting up a new show. We not only admire her humming bird like motion, we adore her art. Mari will be reading at a Pet Noir event on April 5th at the SF public Library. You can also find volume four of her comic Estrus in stores now. Read on to learn why we're such big fans of this native bay area artist. ...