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 ›

We just can't keep up with fashion, what with the chocolate and jewel-encrusted brassieres that seem to be all the rage these days. Still, these earrings that a reader found at Bejeweled in Greenpoint strike us as a fashion "nein." more ›

The hot and humid weather didn't stop a Staten Island couple from digging through a landfill to find a pair of $20,000 earrings mistakenly thrown out. WCBS 2 reports that jeweler Haya Sharon had put her earrings in a "small jar of cleaning solution," which one of their jewelry store employees "accidentally threw it away Tuesday." The Sharons contacted the Sanitation Department, which directed them to the old Fresh Kills landfill, where their trash--amid all the other collected garbage--was waiting to be compacted and shipped elsewhere. The couple found the earrings on Thursday, after 30 minutes of searching. more ›