BROOKLYN, NY — Community leaders and elected officials from throughout Brooklyn gathered Thursday, March 27th at Borough Hall to denounce hate crimes in the wake of the beating of a rabbi in Park Slope.
A new Web site is prompting outrage among many police officers.
RateMyCop.com lists cops’ names — some 140,000 and counting — as well as the badge numbers of many of them, and enables people to rate them.
That, say many law enforcement officers, violates their rights, in part because there’s little or no — policing — by the site of the information posted on it.
ALBANY, NY — David A. Paterson, minutes after being sworn in as New York’s 55th governor, sought yesterday to woo lawmakers with humor, inspiring words about public service and a call for compromise in the face of a potential economic meltdown.
More pictures and videos of the speeches in the Extended Article!
NEW YORK, NY — The collapse of a construction crane that toppled a New York City townhouse and killed at least four people just barely missed the headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch of Beekman-Sutton, home to Rabbi Shmuel and Raizel Metzger, and their two children.
There was the joke about shooting the police commissioner.
There was the defense of illegal immigrants, because who else “takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?”
There was the concern that pushing them out of the country would make the United States a “piranha,” not a pariah, in the eyes of the world. And there was the description of a tree the Parks Department was cloning as being the one that “George Washington supposedly slept under and had an apple fall on his head, or maybe it was Newton, or one of those guys.”
BROOKLYN, NY — The crazed hatemonger arrested for stashing pipe bombs in his Brooklyn Heights apartment and scrawling swastikas on local synagogues has worked as a paid confidential informant for the NYPD.
The startling disclosure that the shadowy Ivaylo Ivanov, 37, was employed as a witness for hire emerged in a public hearing in Brooklyn Criminal Court last Tuesday, where red-faced prosecutors were forced to drop charges against a businessman for alleged possession of stolen property after Ivanov’s involvement in the case surfaced.
In that case, Officer Eddie Lau, of Park Slope’s 78th Precinct, last July used Ivanov to launch a criminal case against Abdul Rehium, an Egyptian national who owns Computer Wiz, a Flatbush Avenue store that buys and sells new and used electronic gear, court records reveal.
BROOKLYN, NY — On March 7, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz joined Assemblymember Jim Brennan (D-Bklyn), Senator Frank Padavan (R-Queens), Queens Borough President Helen Marshall and Bertha Lewis, Executive Director of ACORN, at a Brooklyn Borough Hall press conference announcing foreclosure moratorium legislation. The bill would place a one-year moratorium on foreclosure and give at-risk homeowners a chance to work with lenders to find fair and equitable ways to restructure their loans and protect their homes.
BROOKLYN, NY — Take the D train to 55th Street in central Brooklyn, and you feel as if you have set foot in a different world.
The station sits at the junction of New Utrecht Avenue, 13th Avenue and 55th Street in the heart of Borough Park, home to a quarter-million Orthodox Jews, one of the largest concentrations of Jews outside Israel. To travel to Borough Park is to journey through both space and time.
The founder of NYPD Rant – an Internet forum for disgruntled cops – has agreed to change the name of his controversial Web site in exchange for his police pension, the Daily News has learned.
Ex-cop Edward Polstein has surrendered to the city’s demand that he drop “NYPD” from the title, but he’s already planning a new site where disgruntled cops – hiding in anonymity – can spew racist rants and hate-filled attacks on the public, their superiors and other targets.
The settlement would mark the end of Polstein’s bitter federal lawsuit charging that he was fired in retaliation for criticizing Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly on the Web site.
Second Grant Available to Those in Crisis
Governor Eliot Spitzer today announced that additional emergency home heating assistance is being made available to New York’s most vulnerable residents, in response to rising energy costs. The state has approved offering a second emergency benefit to qualified applicants through the Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP). HEAP, a federally-funded program administered by the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA), assists eligible households in meeting their home energy needs. So far this winter heating season, HEAP has issued benefits to more than 719,000 families, totaling more than $178 million.
OTDA Commissioner David A. Hansell appeared today at Senior Services of Albany on Delaware Avenue to help publicize the additional benefits.
BROOKLYN, NY [CHI] — The national weather service issues a severe weather alert today covering most of New York City, warning residents of winds gusting up to 60mph, this advisory is in affect till 6:00am Monday.
More pictures in the Extended Article.
Junior High School 22, in the South Bronx, had run through six principals in just over two years when Shimon Waronker was named the seventh.
On his first visit, in October 2004, he found a police officer arresting a student and calling for backup to handle the swelling crowd. Students roamed the hallways with abandon; in one class of 30, only 5 students had bothered to show up. “It was chaos,” Mr. Waronker recalled. “I was like, this can’t be real.”
Continued in the Extended Article!
NEW YORK, NY — Believe it or not, fewer car windshields got slapped with parking tickets in Brooklyn last year.
Overall, cops wrote 59,589 less tickets in 2007, an 11% drop from 2006, preliminary city records show.
Stats in the Extended Article.
NEW YORK, NY [CHI] — A heavy snow warning remains in effect from 9:00pm this evening to 12:00pm Monday.
A mixture of rain and snow is expected to begin this evening… changing over to all snow by midnight. The snow may be heavy at times overnight into early Monday morning before tapering off around noontime. Total snow accumulations are expected to range from 5 to 8 inches.
More info in the Extended Article.
NEW YORK CITY, NY — After two decades, New York City’s birth rate finally registered some growth. According to city Deputy Health Commissioner Lorna Thorpe, 125,506 children were born in 2006, more than 3,000 babies compared to 122,725 infants born in 2005.
January 8, 2008 — Hot times!
The weather was a balmy 62 degrees yesterday and it’s expected to be 63 degrees today.
That’s more than 20 degrees above normal.
And it’s expected to last through Saturday – with maybe a few showers here and there.
NEW YORK, NY — The city recorded its lowest murder count in four decades last year – but violence erupted Tuesday just hours into 2008.
Three people were shot dead and another was fatally stabbed.
Cops were targeted, but not hit, by gunfire at three separate scenes, and at least five people were shot and wounded, all before sunrise, police said.
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