After news of a Greenpoint jewelry store selling swastika earrings made news yesterday, area politicians wasted no time heaping on the outrage. It's good red meat for the base, but there's just one problem: the symbol—which as we noted yesterday, predates the Nazis by thousands of years—isn't the same one that Hitler used. There has been plenty of analysis about this, but if you look closely (below), the differences are undeniable. Whereas the Nazi symbol is angled in the shape of a diamond, the symbol when used in Tibetan Buddhism is oriented as a square. And, more importantly, the branches of the symbol are reversed for the Nazi sign. But whatever, outrage! more ›

Think your job is bad? A Korean Buddhist monk and his family have been accused of keeping an immigrant woman prisoner for 12 years in their homes in Queens and forcing her to be their "slave," the Times reports. 60-year-old Oak-Jin Oh says that the family patriarch, Soo Bok Choi, smuggled her into the country "under the cover of night" after finding her through an employment placement agency in South Korea, confiscated her passport, made her work 14-hour days without pay, deprived her of medical care and "'usually' refused to give her a bedroom or a bed to sleep on." more ›

In 1994, Eric Ripert became the executive chef of Le Bernardin after chef-owner Gilbert Le Coze died of a sudden heart attack. The following year, Ripert was only 29 years old when the restaurant was re-reviewed and kept its four-star rating from the New York Times. Le Bernardin has had a total of four four-star New York Times reviews since its New York opening in 1986, and has consistently been awarded a top rating of three Michelin stars since guide inspectors first set up shop here in 2005. more ›