Starting at noon, pedicab owners began a protest down Broadway to voice their opposition to a new city law that started today. Pedicab owners sued the city yesterday in state Supreme Court, claiming the Department of Consumer Affairs distrusted licenses for pedicabs unlawfully. A law passed earlier this year, which pedicab drivers protested, limits the number of pedicab licenses to 325 and preference was supposed to be given to existing pedicab owners before any......

The city has agreed to pay $2 million to the parents of an unarmed Brooklyn teen who was fatally shot by a police officer three years ago. In January 2004, police officer Richard Neri was patrolling a Brooklyn rooftop with another officer at 1AM. Around the same time the other officer had opened a door to the stairwell, Timothy Stansbury and his friends were heading upstairs, to go to a party in another building in......

One couple who got married this weekend had a leg up on many other brides and grooms: They know event planning. As Lauren Berger and Stuart Ruderfer's NY Times wedding announcement explains, Berger works for NYC Big Events, a city agency that works on landing and promoting high-profile events, while Ruderfer is the founder and CEO of Civic Entertainment Group, which creates marketing opportunities and events. And they met when Berger worked at Civic......

The Brooklyn DA's office arrested four NYC Transit Authority workers for trying to bilk the Workers' Compensation system of thousands of dollars for "injuries they either never sustained or grossly exaggerated." For instance, there's Valerie Scroggins, a bus driver who said that she suffered a shoulder injury last September. Between September and January of this year, she received $13,348.98 in checks for her injury. But in November, she took a fateful trip to Europe. MTA......

To tape or not to tape? That is the question before a Federal district court this week. The issue at hand is whether the police may videotape political protestors, and whether a judge would reconsider his decision that answered that question: "No." Gail Donoghue, special counsel for the city’s Law Department, began the hearing by telling Judge Haight that he overstepped his judicial powers in February when he essentially made his own court the......

A judge sided with the city and is allowing police files to remain secret. After the NY Times ran two stories about how the NYPD spied on groups at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention - and some of the groups did not seem to be intent on breaking the law - questions were raised about police conduct and whether the police broke the law (police cannot spy on organizations unless......

After its story about how the NYPD spied on organizations for at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, the NY Times reports that the city wants to keep NYPD records sealed, in fear that the media will "fixate upon and sensationalize them." Well, that's probably too late. The Times also reports that the city is worried the sealed information will hurt its "ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests."......

In a move that makes bag checks at subways look tame, the city has been rolling out biometric scanners for agencies to track its workers. The NY Times reports that scanners are "part of CityTime, an ambitious effort by the city’s Office of Payroll Administration to automate timekeeping," because there's nothing the Bloomberg administration likes better than technology. Unions support automated timekeeping, but they do not like their members needing to scan their hands every......

The family of Matthew Velez, a 17 year old who was fatally beaten while in a juvenile jail at Rikers in 2000, has accepted a $650,000 settlement with the city. Velez was being held there for a minor drug charge, but was attacked by members of the Bloods. Back in 2004, Newsday found that Rikers guards made "major errors...[that] contributed to Velez's beating and his subsequent death.": As the teen was being beaten and......

Brooklyn Ramblings pointed us to this great elevation map (PDF file) of the marathon route on the official marathon website. We all know that the Verrazzano Bridge is the highest point of the race, but that's early in the course. The bumps at 8 (around Fort Green where the courses combine), 16 (the Queensboro Bridge), and 24 (Central Park) are probably harder to summit. The Daily News looks at the crazy costumes worn during......

In May 2003, the NYPD were trying to raid a CD priacy ring at the Chelsea Mini-Storage. A cop, Brian Conroy, walking the dark labyrinth of the facility ended up fatally shooting Ousmane Zongo, an immigrant from Burkina Faso who had been working on African art in another storage unit. Yesterday, Zongo's family accepted a $3 million settlement from the city as an "apology" to end their wrongful death lawsuit. The city Law Department said,......

Is someone blaming a first year associate somewhere? The lawyers for Paul Esposito, a 26 year old man whose legs were amputated after being mangled in the 2003 Staten Island crash, accidentally sent out a news release saying that the city had settled with Esposito for over $25 million. The NY Times says the release showed up on the AP wires, only for the city's Law Department to say there was no settlement (and that......

The NY Times has an obituary for 95 year old Edith Spivack, a lawyer for the city's Law Department, and she lived a long, amazing life. Spivack started working for the city in 1934 and only retired last year, and in those 70 years of working for the city (and through 10 mayors, from LaGuardia to Bloomberg), she helped keep the city out of bankruptcy in the 1960s and would make foreign consulates pay their......

A great Associated Press story about NYC's corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo and counsels past. What is a NYC corporation counsel, you ask? Well, it's the city's lawyer, in both "affirmative and defensive" actions, as the website says, and approves all the contracts that the City signs. And a fun fact: NYC is the most litigious city in the country, and the story has lots of bizarre lawsuit stories, like a the corporation counsel arguing that......