Early Addition

Queens Plaza Grand Concourse by onesevenone

• Here is a very moving story about an elderly autistic man who has spent his life working at a Coney Island Avenue hardware store.
• The Post profiles a shadowy Russian socialite who may have financed her rise in Manhattan society with $1 Billion dollars worth of stolen Russian property.
• Sad but true: if your name is Muhammed, you might want to be careful about getting drunk and locking yourself inside airplane bathrooms.
• The Public option may be dead. Is anyone here surprised?
• The Linda Stein murder trial starts tomorrow. Prosecutors will show a confession tape in which the alleged murderer says she beat the victim after Stein "blew marijuana smoke in her face and hurled racial epithets at her."
• Mayor Bloomberg's charitable foundation lost $279 million dollars in 2008, almost all of it from soured hedge fund investments. But no worries: the mayor dropped another $460MM into the charity that year, which was more than enough to cover the $235MM it gave away.
• Jim Dwyer follows up on the New York Clothing Bank, which accepts unsold clothing for donation to the poor. The city stopped funding it last year.