A mix of today's news and observations and some from the weekend. Inside after the jump.

• KCRW will stream today's Sonia Sotomayor hearings online starting at 7 am. ImpreMedia will stream a Spanish version of the PBS feed.
• ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times collaborated on an investigation by ex-Times staffers Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber into failures of the California Board of Registered Nursing to regulate, investigate and discipline dangerous nurses. LAT
• Sarah Palin is scheduled to speak Aug. 8 to a Republican women's club gathering at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that is closed to the media, with AM radio shouter John Ziegler the emcee. AP
• Today is the 50th anniversary of the first venting of radioactive gases from a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in the hills west of Chatsworth. LAT
• Profiling the race for City Council in CD 2. LAT
  Plus: Councilwoman Janice Hahn endorses Essel, via release Sunday night.
• Old animosities in the 53rd assembly district race gathering steam for next year. Daily Breeze
• Sunday's New York Times praised Highland Park as a new culture district in Los Angeles, drawing a wait a minute from author J. Michael Walker.
• Dennis McCarthy finds a 104-year-old man who bowls once a week at Pickwick Bowl in Burbank. DN
• In "Bruno," Sacha Baron Cohen sets out to become, as he says, "the most famous gay Austrian entertainer since Arnold Schwarzenegger."
• Jamie McCourt goes to Israel to throw out the first pitch. Jewish Journal
• Susan Anderson, managing director of the “LA as Subject” program at the USC Libraries, is moving to UCLA as first curator of the “Collecting Los Angeles” program. UCLA University Librarian
• Los Angeles author Maile Meloy's new story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It," was praised in Sunday's New York Times — "such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club" — and by Samantha Dunn in the LAT.
• Also getting the double exposure was Richard Rayner's "A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age," reviewed in the NYT and in Sunday's L.A. Times.
• Kate Gale finally watches, and reviews, "The Graduate." A Mind Never Dormant
• New Yorker writer Tad Friend, frequently sent out from Brooklyn to cover California, tweets: "in beverly hills which, on a sunday night, is as quiet as myanmar after curfew."
• Dustin Hucks, a 28-year-old screenwriter, plans to begin running next month from Burbank to Lubbock Texas to raise money for cancer research. Burbank Leader