What's new and/or interesting in Philly theaters this weekend Witnesses or Svjedoci Set in a small town in Croatia during the civil war of the early '90s, this film adaptation of the novel Plaster Sheep tells the story of the investigation into the murder of a Serbian smuggler and loan shark. The story is told from multiple perspectives and only slowly does the reason for the murder become clear. Sounds interesting, and the majority of......

Local sketch comedy group Meg and Rob...

Sorry we left you craving more juicy commentary on yesterday's evening preview. We've added more juice to today's listings and we hope the added flavor is subtle but effective, leaving a lingering but not unpleasant aftertaste. PHILADELPHIA FUTURE SALON Most of us can agree that we want to be around for as much of the future as we can, but not everyone agrees on what it should like when we get there. Luckily, someone......

Animal cruelty investigators raided some rowhouse stables on Fletcher Street yesterday, giving the owners 24 hours to relocate the 60 horses on the site. The Daily News paints a pretty horrific picture of the conditions the animals were living in. Chelsea Clinton was at Penn yesterday, stumping for her Mom, and said we should expect to see her and her family a lot in the near future. Which sounds like a threat to us. Beware,......

Senator Vincent Fumo was eating dinner at his Spring Garden home at 7PM last night when he started experiencing chest pains. He was taken by ambulance to Hahnemann University Hospital where it was determined that he had suffered a heart attack and that his right coronary artery was 100 percent blocked. He had emergency surgery and remains in critical condition this morning, although he was alert and speaking with his family after the procedure. Hey,......

For awhile there, it was looking like this column could be retitled "Educators Gone Wild," as one of our winners and a number of our runners-up work(ed) in the Philadelphia area's schools. There was the ecstacy-dealing high school basketball coach, the "abstinence education is the only appropriate sex education" administrators at Archbishop Ryan, the elementary school teacher who wrote threatening messages throughout her school and the pedophile special ed teacher. But it's not just educators......

Teamsters plan to rally outside the Four Seasons Hotel at 18th Street and the Ben Franklin Parkway at 1:30PM today because AmerisourceBergen Corp.'s annual shareholder meeting is being held there at that time, and the teamsters are accusing the company of unfair labor practices. Remember how Rick's Steaks was fighting to stay in the Reading Terminal Market? Well, the fight continues. A recent court ruling dismissed most of Olivieri's claims against Reading Terminal, but Olivieri's......

The best of the internet, squirted out in flavorful neon globules, just for you. We don't normally like Sarah Silverman, or Jimmy Kimmel, but we have to admit, her music video about Matt Damon, and Jimmy Kimmel's response, are pretty funny. A far filthier parody can be found here, just make sure to keep the headphones on. (Via Jill) Ladies and gentlemen, we present the new pinnacle of food: the meat bundt. (Via Sarah) Wow.......

Phillyist's favorite news item this morning is this one: twin 25-year-old internet hardcore gay porn stars Keyontyli and Taleon Goffney (apparently known as Keyon and Teyon in the biz), of New Jersey, have been arrested for a series of robberies in Philadelphia and New Jersey wherein they gained entry to businesses by cutting holes in the roofs using a handsaw and ax. In Nether Providence, they broke into Wawas, and Chief Richard Slifer of......

SEPTA will announce its "Go Green Go SEPTA" initiative this afternoon at Market East Station. (We've already seen the ads up there; they're posters with real moss or grass glued to them.) The idea is to increase ridership to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming, and they've timed it for the Philadelphia Flower Show, which runs March 2-9 at the Convention Center and is typically a time of increased ridership. General manager Joseph......

The kids at my high school pulled some pretty elaborate pranks back in the day. The most memorable was the kidnapping of Manny, Moe, and Jack from the neighborhood Pep Boys and their subsequent erection on the roof of the library building at our school. But never, never, never did anyone let livestock loose in the hallways, like these intrepid Northeast Philadelphia High School students did. At five a.m. today, one of the school's janitors......

I'm going to come out and say it: I hate Valentine's Day. And no, it's not because I'm historically single when it rolls around. I'm not single now, and I'm still against the holiday. Blame it on my hatred of chocolate. Blame it on my preference for yellow roses over red. But most of all, blame it on my high school. Or, more specifically, blame it on many of the girls I went to......

Mayor Nutter has cut taxpayer-funded nonprofit Philadelphia Safe and Sound's funding by $21 million, and City Council's majority leader said she would call today for hearings to look into how Safe and Sound conducts its business. The funding cuts will result in the closing of ten school-based community centers; the termination of a parent-truancy program; and the elimination of many after-school programs. As the head of one after-school program put it, "It's a fiasco."......

Fun around town, for $10 or less: FRIDAY Massive: WZT Hearts, Wet Hair, Secret Abuse, Nimby, Evan Miller, Teeth Mountain, and Prince Hand Vs. Prince Hand at the Rotunda (4014 Walnut), doors 7:30PM. $5 Celebration: Opening reception for A Celebration of Life and Art, works by the late Marge Peterson, at Highwire Gallery (2040 Frankford), 5-9PM. Free Reading: David Levithan reads from his new short story collection, How They Met and Other Stories, at Giovanni’s......

What's new and/or interesting in Philly theaters this weekend. Most Likely to Rule: Nanking We offered you free tickets to this movie earlier in the week, and as we said in that post, the film is a documentary about an event known as the Rape of Nanking, when the Japanese army invaded the Chinese city of Nanking in the winter of 1937 and murdered over 200,000 people, raping tens of thousands. A small group of......

Fun around town, for $10 or less: The Kids Are All Right: High Ball Kids, Black Souls, C of Cortez, The Karma Whores, and Qwirk at the Khyber (56 S. 2nd), 8PM. $8 (21+) Foxy: Foxy Shazaam, Karate High School, Peachcake, and Blue Collar at the Troc Balcony (1003 Arch), 6PM. $10 College Jazz: The Oberlin College Conservatory Jazz Septet at Chris’ Jazz Café (1421 Sansom), 9PM. $8 “Art Is Just a Way to Think”:......

The presidential race will be coming to the area tomorrow when Bill Clinton travels to Cherry Hill, New Jersey to campaign for his wife. 23-year-old Chante Wright, as part of a deal to cut her boyfriend's jail sentence, agreed to testify in a murder case. It was a dangerous move, and her testimony was crucial, so "she became the first state witness in Philadelphia to enter the federal witness-protection program." She was given a......

Fun around town, for $10 or less: Really, It’s Comedy: Die Actor Die hosted by Don Montrey and Juliette Pryor at the Khyber (56 S. 2nd), 8PM. $5 Double Feature: Two Hands and Beethoven’s Hair, part of the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, at the Gershman Y (401 S. Broad), 7PM. $10 Fitting Tribute: The Philadelphia Orchestra, with the Philadelphia All City Choir, perform at Martin Luther King Jr. High School (6100 Stenton Ave), 7PM. Free......

Upper Darby police say that a sickly 84-year-old man in Drexel Hill, apparently unable or unwilling to imagine his blind 53-year-old daughter going on without him, killed her and their dog before turning the gun on himself Saturday night. A five-alarm fire blazed for more than three hours yesterday evening in a warehouse in the 1300 block of North Front Street in Kensington. Service on the portion of the Market-Frankford El that runs nearby......

Have a nominee for Asshole of the Week? Send it to us! There were some strong contenders for Asshole of the Week this week, a couple of whom probably might have won on another week. But this week, there was one asshole who stood knees and ankles below the rest. Our Asshole of the Week is... Adrian Matthew! Right about now, you're asking yourself, "Who the hell is Adrian Matthew?" This guy is the upstanding......

We learned yesterday that City Councilman Jack Kelly and his staff are being investigated by the FBI. Two sources close to the investigation told the Inquirer that what's being looked at are contributions to the councilman by Northeast Philadelphia's largest property owners, and the relationship between them and Kelly's chief of staff. The Delaware River Port Authority plans on spending $25 million on inspections and paint jobs on its bridges between Philadelphia and South......

The Daily News suggests strongly that if the city made use of private ambulances when Fire Department medic units are swamped with calls, it could make the difference between life and death for certain patients. Philadelphia doesn't use nonmunicipal ambulances because of legal issues. Also in the Daily News this morning is an article providing more details on the case of the three North Philadelphia teenagers killed in a car accident on Saturday. Last......

Hey There Philly: Politics aside, I'm a proud Texan. But I've just returned from a two-week visit to my folks' house and I discovered that... I really missed you. It wasn't the kind of missing you I've had in the past, where I was just kind of bored with sitting on my ass at my parents' place and wanted to get back to work or to school – although boredom did play a small factor.......

There's a new big boss man in the City of Brotherly Love, which means there's a new column on Phillyist. Each week, we'll be tracking Michael Nutter's mayorship (which we only found out was a word when spellcheck didn't correct it) and giving you the Reader's Digest version of the week that was in Nutter's tenure. Think of it as SportsCenter for the new man in charge: You might not have seen the whole story......

The Daily News checks in with Nicholas Yarris, the first man exonerated by DNA evidence from Pennsylvania's death row, on the occasion of his receiving the last installment of a recent $4 million cash settlement in a malicious-prosecution lawsuit against Delaware County. A 15-page report, put together by an independent technical firm and commissioned by the advocacy group Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future, states that two Montgomery County manufacturers in the Collegeville area whose emissions......

Rev. Charles Newman, the disgraced former Archbishop Ryan High School president accused of stealing $900,000 from the school and his religious order, had his preliminary hearing, scheduled for New Year's Eve, postponed until March. Meanwhile, an alumni group expressed their complete confidence in the administration of the school. A man outside at a New Year's party in East Germantown, confronted by police for firing his gun into the air, turned the gun on the officers,......

On the last day of 2007, the Daily News takes a look back at the biggest story in Philadelphia this year: the murder rate. A disturbing and surreal faux funeral motorcade took place yesterday, organized to bring attention to the problem. The Daily News asked a bunch of experts what was causing the problem and got a lot of different answers, but it seems to be generally agreed that guns and poverty don't help. Finally,......

The Philadelphia Inquirer takes a look at how yesterday's shocking assassination of Benazir Bhutto is affecting Pakistani Americans living in the Philadelphia area. After a three month pause, a grand jury resumed its investigation yesterday into wealthy businessman, and owner of the Mount Airy Casino Resort, Louis A. DeNaples. DeNaples is suspected of lying to the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board about his connections to organized crime. DeNaples' brother Eugene, a former state gambling investigator, showed......

In the wake of the deadly tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo, the Inquirer takes a look at the safety of the tiger exhibit at the Philadelphia Zoo. Seven state lawmakers, naming the city as the defendant, brought a lawsuit before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court yesterday asking that all construction of the proposed SugarHouse Casino be halted, "contending its license to build on submerged land beyond the river's edge is illegal." Chester Township......

The teen with charged with plotting a Columbine-style attack on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School was ordered to enter a juvenile treatment program near Pittsburgh yesterday, but not before the judge sharply criticized the boy's mother, saying the relationship between the two was "the most unhealthy I've seen in a long time" and that the woman was "not very good at being a mother." Three attacks on young girls have been reported in Camden since......