At the Ethnic Market highlights international specialty foods and ingredients that you're very unlikely to find at your local Gristedes. What you see before is bag of dried hibiscus flowers, or karkade, as these dried little blossoms are known in Egypt. You can boil them up to make a wonderfully red-hued tea that's packed with plenty of vitamin C. As you can probably guess from the image on the packaging it's sometimes served hot......

Former NBC News reporter John Hockenberry now a Distinguished Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab writes an interesting piece in the January/February Issue of Technology Review about his time at the network’s Dateline NBC. He claims that Dateline really cared about ratings and how it would mesh with the other shows on the NBC schedule. None of this is really a shock, nor is his tale of how a proposal to go......

Former mayor Rudy Giuliani is in Florida today, skipping the Iowa caucus that his team never counted on anyway. Still, his staffers are trying to remain relevant in Iowa by "contacting reporters, reminding them that even though the former New York mayor is lagging badly [in Iowa]...he will remain a player in the big states that hold their primaries in upcoming weeks." We kept Giuliani on the brain by reading Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a scaffolding collapse on 5th Ave. and 115th St. in Manhattan, a stabbing on Franklin Ave. in Queens, and a homicide at 83rd St. and 4th Ave. in Brooklyn. The new Kaleidoscope Light Show is now on display at Grand Central Terminal's main hall. The Toshiba company returns to Times Square after being absent for several decades. The company signed a 10-year lease to capture the top sign spot......

A look at some noteworthy television this week: Lincoln Center Tree Lighting 2007 (Monday, 5:30 p.m, WABC 7) Good Morning America’s Sam Champion and WABC’s Sade Baderinwa host the first televised tree lighting of the season. There will be some performances by Lincoln Center’s resident companies and some guest’s from channel 7’s owner Disney on hand for entertainment for the 8th annual Lincoln Center Holiday Tree lighting. America at a Crossroads (Monday, 9:00 p.m &......

The bicyclist who died while riding on the Manhattan Bridge Friday night was identified as 27-year-old Brooklyn resident Sam Hindy. Hindy's father Stephen, a former Middle East correspondent for the AP and Newsday reporter who later co-founded the Brooklyn Brewery, said, "We're just devastated. This is the worst thing that could happen to any parent. It's any parent's worst nightmare." Sam Hindy and a friend were riding back from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the upper......

A Mighty Heart (directed by Michael Winterbottom) Being a journalist doesn't sound like a very dangerous profession, but for Daniel Pearl, his investigations while reporting on the situation in Karachi for the Wall Street Journal lead to his untimely end. Michael Winterbottom's most recent film starring Angelina Jolie offers a brief snapshot of Pearl, as played by Dan Futterman, and his stoic widow Mariane who used her own investigating skills to try to track down......

With a heavy heart, we say farewell to another wonderful film festival at Lincoln Center. The program closed with an animated movie, an adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels about growing up in Iran called Persepolis. Using the voices of French actresses Catherine Deneuve as Marjane's mom and Deneuve's daughter with Marcello Mastrioanni, Chiara, as Marjane, the movie is a charming and evocative snapshot of life during the Islamic revolution and subsequent war with Iraq.......

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is getting a lot of ink in our newspapers today after it was revealed that (A) he had requested a visit to Ground Zero - to lay a wreath, no less - and then shortly later that (B) the city had denied the request. Way to work fast, city agencies! Iranian mission to the United Nations says that Ahmadinejad still wants to go to Ground Zero, but the Daily News sends......

Take a Palestinian professor with a critically praised and questionable book about Middle Eastern archeology and add her desire for tenure at Barnard College, and you have a big headache for school administrators. The NY Times notes that Nadia Abu El-Haj's tenure bid is yet another instance of the "struggle over scholarship on the Middle East" at Columbia University. Barnard officials have already approved tenure for Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology who has......

Movie blogger Jeffrey Wells counts 12 films about America’s entanglements in the Middle East coming down the pipe this year. It’ll be some feat if even one of them matches the urgency, power and electricity of Iphigenia 2.0, Charle’s Mee’s self-described “sampling” of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. You may know the essential storyline: Agamemnon’s army is left stranded en route to the Trojan War when the goddess Artemis stifles the wind to punish him for......

MUSIC: Ever wonder what former Weezer bassist Matt Sharp has been up to? Well, he's back fronting his other old band, The Rentals. With a long list of former members, amongst them Maya Rudolph and Petra Haden, the group is now six-strong, and playing Nokia Theater tonight in support of their new EP, The Last Little Life. 8pm // Nokia Theatre [1515 Broadway] // $22.50 Over at Sound Fix Camera Obscura will be serving a......

Debbie Almontaser, the erstwhile founder and principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, resigned this week after controversy arose over a t-shirt. With less than a month before kids report to school, Almontaser resigned when she failed to initially denounce a t-shirt that was being sold by a group called Arab Women Active in Arts and Media that read "Intifada NYC". Almontaser said that the word "intifada" literally meant "shrugging off" in Arabic and was......

THEATER: The annual Soho Think Tank Ice Factory, arguably New York’s most impeccably curated theater festival, has been hosting an exhilarating array of new shows every weekend since July 4th . Starting tonight you can sink your teeth into Vampire University, in which “a struggling vampire family descends on an evangelical college in the Midwest, the dad’s mid-life crisis of immortality triggers a desire to come back to life and the gulf between first and......

PARTY: Nostalgic for the Blackout of 2003? Someone has put together an event that will recapture the night of no lights so we can all enjoy it once again (with reassuring knowledge that the contents of the fridge aren't melting back at home). Stain's blackout party will be complete with candles, canned goods, beer, a battery-run boombox, board games, grilling and other non-electricity-dependent activities. 8pm // Stain [766 Grand St, Williamsburg] // Free MUSIC: Before......

A look at some noteworthy television this week: Wide Angle: Dishing Democracy (Tuesday, 9:00 p.m., WNET 13) Imagine "The View" in Arabic being beamed via satellite television throughout the Middle East. This documentary gets behind the scenes of the show, "Kalam Nawaem" which just may bring about some revolution. P.O.V.: Following Sean (Tuesday, 10:00 p.m., WNET 13) At the height of the hippie movement in San Francisco, filmmaker Ralph Arlyck was a graduate film student......

Today is Memorial Day, the federal holiday where U.S. men and women who have died in military service are remembered. Federal and state offices are closed, as well as post offices, schools, financial markets, and banks. The subways and buses are running on a Sunday schedule; Metro-North is on a Sunday schedule while the LIRR is on a holiday schedule; and the PATH is on weekend schedule. Mayor Bloomberg marched in two parades in......

Last night, Rudy Giuliani appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman. It took about 2 minutes for Rudy to invoke September 11. Until someone uploads the whole segment on YouTube, we've only got Giuliani's thoughts on Iraq, which prompted applause from the audience. And made us wonder how many Late Show attendees are out of towners. Anyway, it was a very welcoming stage for Giuliani (as it is with many candidates on the......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: an EMT was assaulted on Hazen St. at Rikers Island, a dead body in the water off Emmons and Ocean Aves. in Brooklyn, and another dead body in the water off Manhattan's Pier 11. The doctor taped swearing allegiance to Al Qaeda claims that his trip to Saudi Arabia to treat injured terrorists was actually just a ruse. He wanted to go to the Middle East to find out......

Playwright Adam Rapp etches elegantly bleak portraits of America’s young lost souls; his Red Light Winter was an Obie-winner and Pulitzer-prize finalist, Blackbird was recently adapted into a film which Rapp also directed. (He wrote and directed his first feature, Winter Passing, which starred Ed Harris, Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell.) Rapp’s published seven novels, plays in a band, and is not someone you’d want to play one-on-one basketball with to settle a bet. His......

If you haven't heard about Christina Ricci, Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake's Southern Gothic exploitation movie, Black Snake Moan, you may have been living under a movie-free rock. Ricci plays a bad, bad girl who must learn to mend her ways under the racially and sexually fraught tutelage of jazz musician Jackson. How shall he do that? Why chain her to the radiator until she repents of course. One of this movie's key words......

February 17-18: Year of the Pig at The Spotted Pig The good folks at The Spotted Pig are ringing in the Year of the Pig with, you guessed it, a pig roast. 314 W. 11th Street at Greenwich. Call 212-620-0393 for details. Feburary 18: Year of the Pig at LeNell's LeNell's brings on the swine with free tastings of pork-related booze, including Wild Hog pinot noir and Pig Nose Scotch. 416 Van Brunt St between......

DISCUSSION: Tonight Thurston Moore and Jim Jarmusch will have a little talk, titled "Transforming New York: Music and Film at Night". This is in conjunction with Doug Aitken's sleepwalkers, so Aitken will be there too, and the three discuss nighttime, just after the sun goes down. 6:30pm // MoMA [11 W 53 St] // $10 SIGNING: Ron Jeremy has gone and written a book, of course, it's as dirty as most of his films. You......

A few days after Saddam Hussein was hanged, he became the subject of an art exhibit. And who does Hussein share the canvas with? None other than Donald Rumsfeld. Back when Rumsfeld was Special Envoy to the Middle East under the Regan Administration, he and Hussein met to discuss the Iran-Iraq War. Oh yeah, and oil (see sections 18-19 on pages 15-17 of this then-confidential report). Two years ago, Jonathan Podwil began a series......

MUSIC: We've been enjoying us some Ford & Fitzroy, and are eager to hear what they've got in store sonically (as there is only one track available online right now). But the ex-Asobi Seksu bassist and his talented bandmates have got us hooked off just that one tune. Give a listen at their MySpace. And check them out tonight with V2's Roman Candle. Friday // 11pm // Sin-e [150 Attorney St] // $10 THEATER: Radiohole......

Ever since the Apple store on Fifth Avenue opened its glass doors to the public we knew that eventually somebody was going to throw a story around about its similarities to the Kaaba in Mecca. And so we weren't really at all surprised when we saw this story in the Post today. We were, however, impressed with whomever wrote the articles hed: "QAEDA CUBE BOOBS 'MECCA' BIG STINK." Sadly, the story is pretty much......

If you ask a random sampling of people about their experiences with okra, you are likely to hear stories of a fantastic pot of Louisiana gumbo or a dish consumed at an Indian restaurant. Less often, you might hear about a deep fried, potentially battered, version often associated with Southern foods including fried chicken and BBQ. While the prime examples of fried okra are all about individually crunchy and greaseless bites of self contained......

After a day of the world could not afford to take. The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. And now the challenge is to help the Iraqi people build a democracy that fulfills the dreams of the nearly 12 million Iraqis who came out to vote in free elections last December. Al Qaeda and other extremists from across the world have come to Iraq to stop the rise of a......

Yesterday, the NYPD's counterterrorism head Richard Falkenrath said that the city is still viewed as "a prime target for another terrorist strike." The AP reports that Falkenrath was briefing security executives in prepartion for the UN General Assembly. And what do you know, a Al Jazeera airs a tape of Osama bin Laden and some September 11 hijackers (well, supposedly September 11 hijackers - their faces are masked). While the President sought to point out......

As we've said before, it can be hard to figure out how to write about the conflict in the Middle East when writing a 'blog about New York'. But then a photograph like this one comes our way. Here's the story behind the chalking, from the Beirut Update, a blog kept by a 30-year-old woman named Zena living in Beirut: so, i have not been able to draw or paint since the attacks started,......