Results tagged “nystatedepartment”

Governor Spitzer said that the NY State Department of Health's response regarding the Nassau County doctor exposed over 600 patients to hepatitis C and HIV was "unacceptably slow" and ordered an investigation. Dr. Harvey Finkelstein, an anesthesiologist, reused syringes and multiple-dose medicine vials between January 2000 and January 2005; some patients learned they had contracted hepatitis in 2005, but the state and Nassau County officials waited 34 months to contact other patients. It turns out...

The NY State Department of Taxation and Finance is pretty sneaky. After years of observing the Yankee captain's comments, lawyers are saying that DJ owes hundreds of thousands in back taxes. Though Jeter's Yankees salary is partially taxed by NY State, he has claimed that his primary residence is in Florida, which has no state tax. The argument from tax officials is that Jeter has made statements "professing his love for New York" and that...

A school in Aberdeen, NJ, was locked down yesterday after a deer jumped through a classroom window. More specifically, it was a buck that joined a fifth grade class that was finishing up a vocabulary lesson.

Early Sunday morning, an 86-year-old man was found driving in the opposite direction as traffic on the Belt Parkway. Luckily no one was hurt, but the highway patrol had to divert traffic in order to stop Bernard Hummel.

Earlier this week, Governor Spitzer said that a quick review of the state's bridges showed that all are basically safe, including ones with similar designs to Minneapolis' I-35. However, some bridges, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, rated low on a 7 point scale (7 being the safest) for safety. Still, Spitzer touted the fact that this year's budget added another $900 million to the $18.8 billion infrastructure plan.

The city's Health Department is investigating three hepatitis C infection in people who "received intravenous (IV) anesthesia from the same NYC-based anesthesiologist." Oh, dear. The incidents occurred in August of last year, and it seems like the anesthesia was given in an out-patient (not a hospital) facility. The DOH is contacting about 4,500 patients who received IV anesthesia between December 1, 2003 and May 1, 2007 at the 10 outpatient facilities the doctor worked in to recommend they get tested.

Yesterday, a suicidal man on he George Washington Bridge caused traffic delays up to two hours. Newsday reported that the man was "armed with a box-cutter razor climbed a bridge cable, slashed his arms and wrists repeatedly and threatened to jump," but police officers were able to talk him down. We wrote about New York bridge jumpers last month.

The Mayor touted the news that NYC's unemployment rate dropped to 4.3% last month, saying, "News that our average unemployment rate in 2006 was the lowest on record is yet another example how New York's recovery from 9/11 is exceeding our wildest dreams." The unemployment rate has been below 5% September through December, which Crain's says is the "first below-5% performance since the 1980's." (The record low was in October, when the rate was 4.1%.) And in December of 2005, the NYC unemployment rate was 5.8%.

Last week, the virtues of organ donation were extolled with news that actor Jerry Orbach had made sure to donate his eyes to two New Yorkers. But making sure that people know you would be a willing organ donor is not so easy. The Daily News points out the license format is not very donation-permission friendly. The surface quality of the licenses which is meant to prevent counterfeiting does a good job of not registering pen ink. (And it also turns out that simply signing the back of your license "doesn't constitute full legal permission to harvest organs, but it may at least indicate a desire to do so.")

The intersection of 94th Street and Ditmars Boulevard in Queens became the scene of a violent confrontation last night. An off-duty corrections officer shot another man during a struggle that stemmed from road rage.

The murder of beloved Bronx pediatrician Leandro Lozado may be solved: Police arrested Bronx resident Samuel Sanders for the crime. Lozado's body was found on Wednesday in his Yonkers home, with Lozado shot in the head multiple times. Police looked into Lozado's finances and found that he bought his house from Saunders - and the house had been in foreclosure.

One part of last week's NY State Department of Environmental Conservation press release about the Greenpoint oil spill was "information on planned vapor and indoor air sampling will be discussed" during next Wednesday's meeting. And it looks like it means sampling in homes, as the Daily News reports that Greenpoint homeowners are being urged to sign up for emergency gas testing. The fear is that toxic gases have been affecting people's health. While ExxonMobil says, "there is no indication of any methane or benzene impacts to local residences," residents are concerned and one woman even has a pipe in her backyard so toxic vapors can be released!

Critics of red light cameras, take note. A woman was given a $50 ticket after the camera didn't catch her license. Yes, didn't! Lisa Sims of Ohio who has never been to New York City was issued the ticket when, somehow, her license plate which starts with DQN was mistaken for a car with DON that ran a red light on West Houston in June. Sims offered pitch perfect quotes to the Daily News,

"I didn't want to go there to begin with and now I really don't want to go... If I'm going to get tickets like this when I've never been there, then what's going to happen if I do go.. They're pretty much slackers if you ask me. It makes me wonder how many people who don't want to go through the hassle end up just paying the ticket."

Bad, elite high schools, bad! Investigators found out that Brooklyn Tech, the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant all made low-income students pay for AP exams, while the schools received NY State grant money to fund them. Some of you may remember that AP exams are expensive - $82 a pop nowadays (we think they were around $70-some circa 1993), and the NY Times explains that students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches qualify for free AP exams. But the schools would charge those students $20-52 an exam. The whistle was blown on the operation when Brooklyn Tech's AP coordinator, Margaret Blau, wanted to refund the students after receiving the state's reimbursement of $13,000. Brooklyn Tech principal Lee McCaskill told her "he did not wish to be troubled issuing 259 checks to students, and that the surplus should be kept in the Brooklyn Tech account to be used for student activities."

The Roosevelt Island tram continues to sit still as the NY State Department of Labor investigates what Tuesday night when it just stopped working...and the two backups systems didn't work. And the culprit for the problems that caused people to be stuck midair for hours? The air brakes didn't work properly, according to DoL sources, though Roosevelt Island officials disagree. The AP reports DoL will check out the first backup system - a diesel one - at Roosevelt Island today to figure out if it would have worked if the brakes worked; the DoL will also review ConEd's doings, to see what caused the initial power surges that downed the system. Ah, when in doubt, blame ConEd!

The smoking ban in bars, which turned two in March, seems to have worked a-okay, according to a study by the NY State Department of Taxation and Finance. The Post got a copy and says that business has rebounded steadily since early days of the ban. In fact, business seems to have grown faster at bars than restaurants. But the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association thinks that figure is skewed because of the increase in sales tax, which caused some bar owners to hike their prices. Still, the article has a bevy of quotes from bartenders and bar patrons alike that show they've learned to deal with the smoking ban ("I still see a lot of smokers coming out. They go outside, and it's become a very social thing."). The manager of Red Bench Bar in Soho told the Post, "It was quiet for a while, but now a majority of my customers are nonsmokers." Excellent, turning smokers and nonsmokers alike into drunks.