Surveillance video shows that two rookie police officers were not patrolling a Brooklyn housing complex where a 30-year-old woman was raped in a stairwell last week. The two officers were disciplined for lying about doing their jobs, when in fact they were not. The victim of the assault was trailed from the subway by a man she recognized from the neighborhood and he followed her into her building's elevator. After producing a knife as she......

The video of City Councilman James Oddo letting the f-bombs drop on a Norwegian TV comedian is getting mixed reactions - and a fair number of chuckles - from New Yorkers, but now it turns out that he wasn't meant to be a poor sap duped into answering stupid questions about whether Barack Obama is an American citizen and "Hillary Clinton's incident with a cigar." A spokesman for the Norwegian program "Rikers Rost" tells the......

It's no secret that we love the succulent Texas 'cue on offer at Hill Country. Like many folks we also love the rockin' live music, but sometimes we're just not in the mood for beef, or more likely there are some noncarnivores joining us who are more interested in music than meat. All of which make us very glad that seafood house Black Pearl lies directly across the street from Hill Country. As you've no......

Green Brooklyn (via Brownstoner) has a not-surprising-as-it-should-be post on, well, the Gowanus Canal having a touch of the gonohorrea. According to a Scienceline article, "a biologist at the New York City College of Technology, has her students analyze water samples and observe the oily substance that coats the water’s surface each afternoon. 'One group of students found gonohorrea in a water drop,' said Haque. She’s particularly interested in fluorescent white gauze that lies near the......

EVENT: Join Chief Jim Riches, 9/11 families, rescue and recovery workers in an effort to Tell Rudy Giuliani to "Stop Politicizing 9/11". Rudy will be at a fundraiser at the Waldorf later today, and will be greeted by those who believe he's no hero. Why? They say: "He failed the FDNY & uniformed & civilian victims. He gave us incompetent commissioners ( FD,PD, OEM). No integrated command. He abandoned us on 9/11. He gave the......

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......

A number of buildings with a possible connection to Brooklyn's abolitionist past and the Underground Railroad may be razed to make way for a public park and an underground parking garage. The commuter daily amNewYork reported yesterday that the Duffield Houses are slated for replacement by a public park along the lines of Manhattan's Bryant Park, mixed-use residential and commercial development, and the expansion of local colleges. Opponents to the plan include Lewis Greenstein, who......

Generally, when one thinks of baseball game food, the usual suspects come to mind -- hot dogs, sausage and pepper sandwiches, Cracker Jacks, maybe some nachos, complete with day-glo cheez -- but tucked away in a corner of Shea stadium lies something that puts them all to shame. Mama's of Corona is squirreled away on the third base side on the Field Level of the stadium, and those of us with the cheap seats have......

Now making picnics better for mankind: ants, no; algorithms, yes. Instead of people bringing computers to dinner, a man named Conrad Barski hopes that computers will soon be bringing people to picnics. Enter Picnic Mob, a multi-city, “non-commercial art experiment” created and curated by the computer programmer and thinker. Through its website, Picnic Mob organizes aspiring picnickers into small groups based on similarly reported interests and dispositions; those groups are then fitted cohesively into......

The cold front that visited us several times this week has been pulled out to sea by a developing low pressure system over Maine. During it's many crossings the front managed to squeeze a couple of inches of rain out over western portions of the city and three inches or more over Queens and Long Island. Wednesday morning's storm even spawned a weak tornado over Islip. Behind the front lies a whole lot of......

Albany seemed to be its usual stagnant self, as the legislative sessions closed on notes of rancor, versus happiness and optimism on the job well done. Many issues were left unresolved, and Governor Spitzer and Senate Majority seem to be rarin' for a fight. Baruch College professor Douglas Muzzio notes that "There's been bad blood" between Spitzer and Bruno for a while, which has now turned into a "full frontal assault on Joe Bruno."......

MUSIC: You know summer is just around the corner when the Seaport Music Festival has their first show of the season. Tonight Animal Collective, Danielson and XXXChange (Spank Rock) will all be on Pier 17 for a FREE show! Come, drink, listen. Friday // 7pm // South Street Seaport, Pier 17 // Free THEATER: Critics are loving Passing Strange and now it’s extending its run at The Public Theater to July 1st. The sly yet......

In a city that has everything, there are always a few things that we can use more of. For starters, maybe one or two more cheese shops, an extra beer garden wouldn’t hurt and who wouldn’t like another Trader Joe’s? Just saying. The same rule applies to wine bars. Sure we have a bunch, but after a while, the circuit gets old. Luckily, we have a new stop to add to our list. Wined......

THEATER: Len Jenkin's Kraken imagines the details of an actual 1856 encounter between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville, his Moby-Dick long since met with a critical “meh”, was in the midst of a spiritual journey to Jerusalem – a trip that would, two decades later, yield the back-breaking, 2 Volume, 18,000 line Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. En route he stopped to visit his old Berkshire homey Hawthorne, now the......

A religious schism that's been ongoing for 34 years(!) recently elevated to charges of theft and looting at a Harlem synagogue. The congregation is made up of Orthodox Ethiopian Jews, and one faction in a legal holy war is suing 200 members. The filers of the suit allege that an unelected official of the synagogue misrepresented himself as the temple's owner and sold the building for $1.6 million. It also alleges that the defendant, Julian......

Last month we posted on our special relationship with Britain. With the British pound recently topping $2 in exchange for an American dollar, England is maybe entertaining a slow and gradual do-over of 1776: suggesting that a slice of the West Village be renamed Little Britain. Damn the Britons if they didn't do it in a fashion that we didn't find encouraging. The video above is fairly persuasive. Our only reluctance lies in the......

The Hamptons may reek of money, but Coney Island is getting its very own scent, courtesy of downtown fragrance company Bond No. 9. Inspired by all the recent development along Brooklyn's bayshore, parfumeur Richard Harpin designed a location-based scent that is the borough's first from the company. It will retail for $40 an ounce, $125 for 1.7 ounces or $180 for 3.4 ounces, indicating to us that the value lies in the increasing size of......

SCIENCE: The UnCoolKids always know about all the best science events. Tonight is The Revolution in Physics at the Turn of the 20th Century, featuring “a presentation by Richard Liboff, Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of Central Florida, formerly Professor of applied physics, applied mathematics, and electrical engineering at Cornell University, author of the best- selling college text book, Introductory Quantum Mechanics, featured in “Spider-Man 2" movie.” 5:30pm // NYPL, Science, Industry and Business Library......

THEATER: Theodora Skipitares is a Greek-American playwright, director and puppeteer who uses near life-size puppets and Greek tragedies to look at our current situation in Iraq. (Her rendition of the Iliad and the Odyssey was a sold-out hit at La MaMa last year.) Her new show, which features puppetry and video, is The Exiles, an adaptation of the Orestes/Electra myth. “In this particular story of betrayal and vengeance, these puppets are an eerie construction of......

We can't figure this out! Apparently former NJ Governor James McGreevey wants custody of daughter Jacqueline AND child support from ex-wife Dina Matos. The last time we checked, McGreevey was living in a 17-room mansion with his boyfriend Mark O'Donnell, a financier. And he wrote a book that could pay some of the bills, we think. According to the Star-Ledger, Matos makes $82,000 as the executive director of the Columbus Hospital Foundation. She has over......

Sonics 100 Knicks 99: Don’t blame this one on Stephon Marbury. Yes, he missed the tying free throw with under a second left, but after scoring 40 points, the blame for this loss lies elsewhere. Start with the defensive effort by the entire team, which was nonexistent until Malk Rose showed up in the third quarter. Seattle shot 52% for the game, which is inexcusable. You can also point the finger at Eddy Curry who......

If you haven't heard about Christina Ricci, Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake's Southern Gothic exploitation movie, Black Snake Moan, you may have been living under a movie-free rock. Ricci plays a bad, bad girl who must learn to mend her ways under the racially and sexually fraught tutelage of jazz musician Jackson. How shall he do that? Why chain her to the radiator until she repents of course. One of this movie's key words......

THEATER: For a limited run at HERE, James Scruggs and Kristin Marting are presenting RUS, a “multimedia psychosexual murder mystery”, that uses experimental “video puppets”, salsa and tango-inspired movement to “recreate the seedy reality that lies just beneath our everyday lives. Lost in a labyrinth of repeating memories, and trapped in a failing marriage, Rus, an African American man, yearns to feel something new, full and real. But when a car accident connects Rus to......

The city's Franchise and Concession Review Committee is scheduled to vote this coming week on whether or not to approve a proposal to have twenty Manhattan private schools pay for part of the renovation of Randall's Island athletic fields in return for exclusive use of a majority of the fields. The plan, which is separate from the controversial water park, calls for schools such as Dalton and Spence to pay the city $52 million dollars......

At its best, Michael Puzzo’s two-character comedy, The Dirty Talk, blows by with a breezy jokiness that’s laugh-out-loud funny, but my periodic chuckling proved no match for the explosions of raucous laughter that repeatedly rocked the house. It was the kind of roaring laughter one imagines pealing from a well-lubricated Borscht-belt crowd; at times the howling was so disproportionate to the one-liner that sparked it that I had to fight the urge to look back......

In the wake of President Bush's Wednesday night address to the country, when he announced that he will send thousands of more soldiers to Iraq, hundreds of people protested the plan. They convened at the tiny island in the middle of Times Square in front of the U.S. Armed Forces recruiting station, with signs like "Stop the funding, stop the war" and "When government lies, Democracy dies" with drivers passing by honking their horns.......

In more James Brown news: He will lie in repose at the Apollo on Thursday. "The Godfather of Soul will get a New York-style tribute tomorrow, when he lies in state at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Tomorrow afternoon and evening the public will get the chance to say their goodbyes to James Brown in person, starting at 1 p.m. His close friend Reverend Al Sharpton will deliver a sermon at 7:30 p.m. The......

MOVIE: Now that the big jolly guy in the red suit has done his job, he's back to scare the yuletide cheer right out of ya. "Christmas Evil: You Better Watch Out", a 1980s slasher flick in which a Santa imposter is on a killing rampage, is playing in town tonight. Better hope you're on the "nice" list. After the screening there will be a poster signing by the director, Lewis Jackson. 7pm // Two......

The conflicting interests of Columbia University and the West Harlem community continue to spawn new polemics from both sides, as the university inches ahead with its proposed 17-acre, $7 billion expansion. As the land-use contest heats up, so has the quest to find the perfect metaphor. The high-stakes name game begins with the conflicting designations of the territory in question. While Columbia has used the term "Manhattanville" to describe the area, which lies between 125th......

Never one to let a good story end after one day, the Post has a follow-up to the shocking story of an 80 year old cemetery worker attacking a young man - after he peed in the urn of the young man's grandmother's tombstone! The Post delivered a port-a-potty to Washington Cemetery yesterday. But no one really wanted the unexpected present: "Ungrateful employees of the Washington Cemetery in Bensonhurst cursed and angrily spurned the delivery......