Today, the Daily News put Amarjit Singh on its cover and asks New Yorkers to help him. Who is Singh? He was the cook at the Texas Smokehouse BBQ in Murray Hill until October 6, when a mentally ill man, Lee Coleman, stormed into the kitchen and grabbed four knives. Singh tried to stop Coleman, but Coleman slashed him in the head before heading outside to repeatedly stab pedestrian Susan Barron. Coleman only stopped when... more ›

Linda Stein's daughter says that her mother had been recently diagnosed with a brain tumor and was, according to the Daily News, "taking medication that caused severe mood swings." Stein was found bludgeoned to death on October 30, and her personal assistant Natavia Lowery was arrested for her murder on Friday. Samantha Stein-Wells said, "My mother didn't deserve this.... They had just found a brain tumor a couple of weeks before she was killed. Everyone... more ›

Evidence continues to be collected and associates continue to be questioned as the police try to solve the murder of "broker to the stars" Linda Stein. Stein, who managed the Ramones back in the day and had many famous friends, was found bludgeoned to death in her exclusive Fifth Avenue apartment on October 30. So far, the police have spoken to former business associates, her family, construction workers and building residents, as well as removed... more ›

Through some strange stroke of Manhattan Supreme Court scheduling, Ja Rule, Remy Ma, Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes all appeared in court yesterday (at different times) to face various charges. Ja Rule and Lil Wayne faced gun possession charges from separate incidents on July 22. The pair, who collaborated on a song "Uh Oh," also shared the same attorney, Stacey Richman. Richman said that Lil Wayne couldn't be guilty, because when his tour bus... more ›

As the city and state start to get to work on West Side redevelopment, the Mayor said that one entity won't be getting tax breaks if it moves. Mayor Bloomberg was asked if Madison Square Garden would continue to get $10.9 million in tax breaks if it moves West to the Farley Post Office building (that's what a map in the draft Environmental Impact Statement notes). Bloomberg decisively said, "Not if I'm mayor they won't. Madison Square Garden isn't going to move, and there's no reason to justify that." more ›

A homeless man was shot in the stomach by an off-duty transit police officer after he stabbed two people randomly in Murray Hill yesterday afternoon. The assailant, identified as 38-year-old Lee Coleman, was wounded and is in serious condition; he was charged with attempted murder, assault, and criminal possession of a weapon. more ›

The NY Times has a Section A, Page 1 article about a woman whose identity since the WTC attacks has been defined as a September 11 survivor but her September 11 story doesn't quite add up. Tania Head said she had been on the 78th floor of the north tower, still bearing some burns, and gave tours at the Tribute 9/11 Visitor Center. She also acted as president of the Survivors’ Network and said her fiance died in the south tower. But her supposed fiance's family and roommate never heard of her, no hospital has a record of treating her, and she was not employed by Merrill Lynch, the company Head said she was working for at the time. more ›

Just five days after the Deutsche Bank building fire, two firefighters investigating the site at 130 Liberty Street were injured when a 300-pound piece of construction equipment fell from the 23rd floor. It turned out that a construction worker had lost control of a forklift; luckily a work shed broke the object's fall. more ›

As many people wonder about the state of the bridges in the New York City region, in the wake of I-35 collapsing in Minneapolis, the city's Department of Transportation is trying to reassure residents that our bridges are safe. Though many bridges meet the definition of "deficient" - 19% of bridges are in "fair" or "poor" condition, 15% meet the federal definition of "structurally deficient" - a DOT first deputy commissioner Lori Ardito says, "In New York, we do not have any bridges that are structurally deficient." more ›

On Friday, Brooklyn blog Brownstoner was alarmed about a Clinton Hill resident on Grand Avenue who was painting a brownstone's archway white. Though the second comment wondered "are you sure it's not primer?", the comments thread turned into a heated debate about the rights of owners of buildings in landmarked neighborhoods, calling the painting a "disgrace" and a "mortal sin," and whether publicly outing the owner was appropriate. more ›

The NYPD has announced that both suspects in the Brooklyn traffic stop shooting of two police officers have been captured. Last night, Dexter Bostic was arrested as he and the other suspect Robert Ellis were walking along Interstate 80 near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. more ›

The police department has launched a citywide dragnet to find suspects who fired at two police officers during a Brooklyn traffic stop early yesterday morning. 23-year-old police officer Russel Timoshenko was shot twice in the head while 26-year-old police officer Herman Yan was shot in the arm and chest. A surveillance video showed that the cops were shot before they had reached the driver and passengers in the car. The Daily News' Michael Daly describes:

Footage from the surveillance camera mounted outside the Little Red Riding Hood preschool shows the green BMW SUV pulling over. more ›

Well, there's nothing like having a barely-one-hour blackout on a sultry weekday to make you consider stocking up on flashlights, batteries, water, and maybe a Go Bag. Con Ed is still investigating the cause of yesterday's brief power failure to parts of the Bronx and Manhattan; Newsday reported "the blackout was caused when breakers opened at an Astoria substation and cut off power to stations servicing Yorkville and parts of the Bronx." It's unclear why the breakers were opened in the first place. more ›

Even though a Sunni insurgent group claimed yesterday that two captured U.S. soldiers had been killed, one of the soldiers' mothers hoping that her son is still alive. Maria Rosario Duran spoke to reporters outside her Corona, Queens home. She said, "I can't even imagine that he's not going to return alive, that I will never see him again." more ›

The new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says the NYPD thinks it's the NPD - the National Police Department. The Daily News reports that Democratic Mississippi representative Bennie Thompson is critical of the NYPD's tactics that stretch into other jurisdictions. He told the News, "While I understand that chasing down leads in other locales might help keep the city safe, I emphasized that the NYPD is not the FBI, that it does not have national jurisdiction." more ›

Chloroform. High-heeled shoes. A message written on the bathroom mirror. All these were things mentioned during the first day of Peter Braunstein's criminal trial, which proved graphic and upsetting. Braunstein's lawyers do not deny that the journalist attacked a former Women's Wear Daily co-worker in her apartment on October 31, 2005, by posing as a firefighter. But his defense team says that he's so mentally ill that his actions could not intentional and that Braunstein's brain "just broke." more ›

Families, neighbors, and others mourned Wednesday night's fire that gutted a 4-story Bronx home and claimed the lives of nine people, including eight children. Fire officials investigated the Highbridge section structure, which was home to twenty-two Malian immigrants and believed that a space heater on the garden floor bedroom overheated and caused the fire, which spread uncontrollably due to what the NY Times calls "the most basic of human oversights and seemingly innocuous events." The space heater apparently ignited clothes and mattresses. more ›

In week 2 of the NYC Department of Education's busted school bus route changes, parents are still complaining and the media is loving it. There's 5 year old Michelle Baum in the Post today, waiting outside in the freezing weather for her bus. And the hotline the DOE has been directing parents to seems to be just as bad: In yesterday's Daily News, there was 11 year old Eleanor Shanahan whose family was told a bus would return to take her to school earlier, versus dropping her off 45 minutes late - only for her dad to find out from the school bus hotline that she would be "unrouted." more ›

Two days after Wesley Autey jumped into subway tracks to save another straphanger from an oncoming train, everyone still wants to hear his story. With good reason: Not only is it an incredibly heroic story, Autrey's matter-of-fact explanation for his actions ("it's just being able to be here and help the next person.") and his humble demeanor:

"I don't think I did anything heroic. I just saved a life. I don't call myself a hero because the real heroes are overseas dying for you and me."

Yesterday, thousands of people walked down Fifth Avenue in to protest a police shooting against three unarmed men. Sean Bell was shot to death just hours before his wedding while his two friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, were wounded in a barrage of 50 bullets in less than a minute; undercover police claimed they saw a fourth man with a gun. more ›

"Probably a lot of Republicans would want Hillary, but I think they'd be making a mistake," he said, pointing out that Democrats licked their chops over Ronald Reagan in 1980. more ›

State and federal agencies may have agreed to lease over a third of the space in Freedom Tower, but it doesn't mean people actually want to work there. The NY Times spoke to prospective employees from agencies who have mixed feelings about going. While some think it would be an honor, one state Department of Transportation employee, Alicia Ferrer who escaped from the World Trade Center on September 11, said:

“If my life depended on it, I couldn’t go there. It would be beyond imaginable to put someone back there. If you had to go back there every day where you know their souls and spirits have to be, I don’t know. I couldn’t do it every single day.”

Officials have sent tubing found in the wreckage of 34 East 62nd Street for testing. The townhouse that once stood there was blown up on Monday, apparently by the owner Dr. Nicholas Bartha in a suicide bid and elaborate revenge plot in order to not pay his ex-wife a hefty divorce settlement, thus gassing the four story building. Fire officials found clamps and lengths of rubber tubing at the site, and there are conflicting reports about gas problems (former tenants say they've existed while Con Ed says they responded to only two complaints made). While no one has been able to question Bartha yet, we think he'd probably get off with an insanity defense - have you read his email? more ›

The hate crime trial of Nicholas Minucci, aka Big Nick, began yesterday at the State Supreme Court in Queens. The Queens DA's opening statment argued that Minucci and his friends wanted to intimidate and injure Glenn Moore because he was black, while Minucci's defense lawyer Albert Gaudelli said their dispute was "minor dustup between six young men," especially since Moore and a friend were in the neighborhood to steal. Gaudelli also called the 19 count hate crime trial a politically motivated attempt to bolster black support for Mayor Bloomberg right before reelection. There's a lot of media attention on this case, so much so that the judge had to tell the courtroom "it's not Yankee Stadium, or the movies." more ›

The Daily News continues its Licking Lothario coverage of 23 year old Joseph Weir, arrested for licking women's shoes and feet on subways, with revelations from two victims, one of them approached by him twice (he licked her boots and said "I'm not worthy") and another woman whose ankle was Weir's target. Brooklynite Curly McDimple emailed us to say she had been attacked by a foot fetishist two years ago. And by attacked, she means first seeing a man do a downward-facing dog type of pose on the floor of an R train. Then:

And then he touched one of the toes on my left foot. My head snapped in his direction and I said firmly, "Don't touch me, please." And again, he flashed his creepy smile. I'm not easily frightened but this sent a chill down my spine. I looked the other way and counted down the seconds until this hellish ride was over. more ›

Police are searching in vain for clues in the murder of graduate student Imette St. Guillen, who was last seen at a downtown bar 18 hours before her naked body was found in Brooklyn. They released images of the comforter she was found wrapped in, alongside Fountain Avenue, saying the Springmaid comforter is something one would find at a cheap motel, asking the public to call Crimestoppers (800-577-TIPS) with any clues. Police have ruled out St. Guillen's ex-boyfriend from Boston and a John Jay grad school classmate as suspects, leaving them with a few theories about what could have happened: She might have been attacked by someone on the street or by a cabby; she could have left with someone she met at a bar who she later tried to escape; or she was jumped by someone on the street. The police are hoping to find the person who made the 911 call that led them to St. Guillen's body; detectives think the person has some inside information because the body was in a very remote area that wasn't very accessible. more ›

Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes charged both parents of Nixzmary Brown, the 7 year old girl who died of abuse, with second degree murder. Stepfather Cesar Rodriguez had beaten Brown to death on January 10 as Brown's mother Nixzaliz Santiago did nothing, and originally Rodriguez was charged with second degree murder and Santiago with manslaughter - but yesterday DA Hynes said the grand jury found that Santiago "created a grave risk of death" for her daughter. And with the indictment, the DA's office offered grisly details about Brown's death. From the NY Times:

That pattern approached its climax on Jan. 10 as Nixzmary's siblings were compelled to accuse her of eating yogurt without permission and breaking a computer printer, prosecutors said. As punishment, they said, the girl was stripped naked, beaten, dunked in cold water and thrown on the floor to lie untended for hours in a place the other children called "the dirty room."

Officer Alton Walker, a friend, recalled in his eulogy a story the Jamaica-born Stewart had told him about moving to New York as a boy. On his first day in his Brooklyn apartment, Stewart thought it was a mansion, and didn't realize he shared the building with others until he visited the upper floors, Walker said. more ›

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg gave his fourth State of the City address (which was titled "Building a City of Opportunity"), which was notable for how positive he was about the city. The NY Times called it "feel-good," Newsday called it "upbeat," with lines like "The state of our city is strong -- and we are going to make it even stronger for the future." Clearly, that was the only way to go since he's running for re-election this fall, but some things, like keeping the streets safe and improving education standards, are timeless in being effective at publis sentiment. Here some gold from his closing:

We may not agree on everything. In fact, that’s one thing that will never change in this city. But I know we all share the same love and passion for this great city. And with our passion, our pride, and our people how can we not succeed? more ›