New York State's dire budget situation gets the front page treatment from the NY Times today. And the Times sounds the alarm bells and points a finger in the direction of a certain state body:

"Without a budget deal, New York will be left with just $36 million in the bank by the end of December, according to current projections. And the money will last that long, officials say, only if the state chooses to fully exhaust its emergency reserves by tapping several billion dollars’ worth of temporary loans from its rainy-day fund and short-term investments.

Continue reading "New York State Running Out Of Money"

Today's mid-day links: Deep-fried turkeys mean the very real possibility of a fire, a man tried to shoplift two suits by stuffing them into his pants, volunteers were out in force on Thanksgiving, and more.

On Wednesday afternoon, DOT officials had met with the pastor at Our Lady Queen of Peace church on Staten Island to discuss the problem of reckless divers on the street that runs by the church and its school. Rev. Pancrose Kalist warned city officials about the dangerous situation on New Dorp Lane, where crossing guards routinely witness drivers blasting by them and running the red light. Six hours after his meeting, an elderly married couple was killed by a hit-and-run driver with numerous traffic violations who sped through a red light.

For some reason, spending billions on skyscrapers and man-made palm-shaped island leads to...debt! So far, the Dow Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq have fallen at least 1% (even up to 2% as soon as the markets opened today), due to, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, "fears...about the potential fallout of debt prolems at Dubai World, the city-state's largest corporate entity, which asked creditors for a six-month stay on repayment of its $60 billion in debts." UBS actually estimates that Dubai's overall debt may be over $80 billion.

Graphic photos have surfaced from the recent murder on the D train. Photography student Paola Nuñez Solorio was on her way home with fellow students when Gerardo Sanchez allegedly stabbed Dwight Johnson because he wouldn't move his bag from an unoccupied seat to make room on the half-empty train. The two men did not know each other. Solorio took 120 photos during the murder, and today the Times has published four of them online. The images are very disturbing, as is Solorio's first-hand account of the murder:

Like clockwork, stores hyped up their Black Friday/Doorbuster sales and potential shoppers waited outside for hours, in hopes of getting great deals. A crowd was waiting outside a Jersey City Best Buy; one person told WCBS 2, "There's a lot of people on this line for laptops, like HP laptops for $197. Normally it's $500 or $600," with another possibly bragging that he "was here yesterday since 12 o'clock in the afternoon"—as in noon on Thanksgiving.

For those that thought the Giants' overtime win over the Falcons last week spelled a turn around, think again. New York gave up the first 16 and final 10 points in a 26-6 loss to Denver on Thanksgiving night. That drops the Giants to 6-5 and puts them in a world of hurt in the NFC East. The Giants, who snapped a four-game losing streak of their own Sunday, helped the Broncos break theirs. Denver held the Giants to 57 yards rushing and sacked Eli Manning three times. Big Blue's quarterback needed 40 attempts to accumulate 230 yards and an interception.

                  

The day was clear and perfect for watching giant balloons and floats meander down from the Upper West Side to Herald Square during the 83rd Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. This year, the parade's new route took the procession down Sixth and Seventh Avenues instead of Broadway (the route is now slightly longer) and millions lined the streets for the festivities.

Today's end-of-day links: Roman Polanski will be under house arrest, neighbors rally around an elderly Brooklyn couple who lost their home, a Thanksgiving Eve suicide on the Upper West Side, and more.

Yesterday, WikiLeaks began posting "half a million US national text pager intercepts," saying, "The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war."

City Island residents have finally gotten rid of the NYPD firing range on nearby Rodman's Neck in the Bronx, which has been disturbing their peace since the Kennedy administration. Last week the City Council approved the site of a 40-acre Police Academy in College Point, Queens, where the NYPD will relocate training to an enclosed firing range. But some residents say their aural nightmare endures!

Police arrested two 3rd graders and a 5th grader suspected of bringing a box cutter and a knife to their Bronx elementary school on Wednesday. According to the Post, a school safety agent nabbed a 9-year-old with a box cutter inside P.S. 2 on Franklin Avenue in Morrisania at around 9:30 am. When questioned, the student ratted out his accomplices — an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old — who reportedly were plotting an assault against a faculty member.

       

The New York Public Library has a great collection of photographs from 1933 of "Thanksgiving Ragamuffins." Unfamiliar with the term? According to this website, kids would get dressed up and "go from house to house yelling, 'Anything f' Thanksgiv'n?' In return they would be rewarded with coins, or a piece of fruit, or a piece of candy. Apparently in those days it was called Ragamuffin Day and was practiced the day before Thanksgiving."

After his surprisingly competitive mayoral bid against Mayor Bloomberg, there have been various rumors about what City Comptroller Bill Thompson might do next. First there were murmurs of a Senate run, and then ones that Andrew Cuomo was eyeing him as a running mate during for his gubernatorial campaign. Now the NY Times says the Senate run is just one of three options that Thompson is mulling.

While the Obamas' first State Dinner was hailed as a glamorous evening, one thing is looking bad: The security, because a couple from the now-filming "Real Housewives of D.C." managed, somehow, to crash the dinner and mingle with the VIPs. While the Secret Service emphasized that no one was in danger because of the "magnetometers and several other levels of screenings," a spokesman did admit there was "a Secret Service checkpoint which did not follow proper procedure to ensure these two individuals were on the invited guest list."