The Reverend Al Sharpton, who has been representing the family of police shooting victim Sean Bell, weighed in about the taxi driver who Bell shooting cop Michael Oliver allegedly assaulted 12 years ago. Sharpton held a press conference, where he said that revelations about Oliver show that's he's "inappropriate at best, and biased and racist at worst." more ›

Before the house lights dim, ¡El Conquistador! begins with a breezy prologue by the play’s sole live performer, Thaddeus Phillips, who introduces the audience to the quirky world they are about to visit. His story is set in an upscale condo in Bogota, where apartment dwellers are never issued keys to their buildings. Phillips tells us that for security reasons, metropolitan Columbians are usually at the mercy of their doormen who, in ¡El Conquistador! at least, find work to be a constant distraction from their telenovela TV shows. more ›

As news of what could be the biggest real estate deal in history spread, residents of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village - and the rest of New York City - wondered what this could mean for the real estate market. Though selling the 110 building complex and changing over ownership of all the units would probably take years, questions about what Mayor Bloomberg will do about the city's housing policy arose, as well as what this will mean for the middle class residents who live there as a large swath of housing is taken away. The Tenants Political Action Committee tells the NY Sun, "This sale is the perfect illustration of the hole in the bottom of the bucket of the Bloomberg housing plan. The plan deals only with production. They will never build as much as we're losing." more ›

As far as long-standing feuds go, the tiffle between the City and the U.N. over diplomatic immunity for parking tickets is always a good one. Currently the tab for diplomats unpaid parking ticket bill runs to 18 million, not much of which Gotham is likely to see anytime soon. But at least now some clever researchers have put all those tickets to some good use. In a paper [PDF] for the National Bureau for Economic Research, Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel have found that the number of parking tickets that a country's diplos accumulate is a swell way to measure the corruption found in their home countries. From the papers abstract:

Diplomatic immunity means there was essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations, allowing us to examine the role of cultural norms alone. This generates a revealed preference measure of corruption based on real-world behavior for government officials all acting in the same setting. We find tremendous persistence in corruption norms: diplomats from high corruption countries (based on existing survey-based indices) have significantly more parking violations.