Results tagged “tech”

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• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: an unconscious baby on Ralph Ave. in Brooklyn, a construction accident on Bedford Ave. and Crown St. in Brooklyn, and a found grenade at 54th Ave. and Junction Blvd. in Queens.
• Dave Chappelle made an unannounced appearance at a comedy club, where Radar learned he "took the stage at approximately 12:30 a.m. and didn't leave until club management turned off the lights at 4:20 a.m."
• Busta Rhymes got three years probation, 10 days of community service, $1,250 in fines and will have to cover court costs in relation to assorted offenses related to DWI and assault.

Mayor Bloomberg still claims he's not running for President, but he's spending thousands of dollars to run a full page ad in The Des Moines Register--Iowa's largest circulation local paper--with his face on it. One can see the full ad here. The Mayor also placed an identical ad in The New Hampshire Union Leader. We're running this ad to the Bat Cave, to see if there are any subliminal "Mike Bloomberg '08" messages!

A rendering of Brooklyn's proposed City Tech Tower, designed by Renzo Piano, at Tillary and and Jay Street sent some into speculation mode, especially since its height seemed to be up to 1,000 feet tall. Which would make just about twice the height of the 512-foot tall Williamsburgh Savings Bank, currently the tallest building the Brooklyn. However, the rendering of the building is apparently old. A representative at Forest City Ratner, the development company which...

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a construction accident on East 46th St. in Manhattan, a stabbing on Grand Concourse and Bedford Park Blvd. in the Bronx, and an industrial accident on Quentin Rd. in Brooklyn.
• New York jeweler Tiffany & Co. is accusing online auction site eBay of pawning off bogus baubles as the genuine item.
• Fark.com may have failed in its bid to re-name a Boston sports stadium UFIA Arena, but it did get itself its own "Jeopardy!" category.
• Developers are falling over themselves to build housing on the Brooklyn site of a former fuel plant, which is considered environmentally contaminated.
• What could be of more importance than a proposed fare hike to board members of the MTA? Practically anything, as half of them didn't bother to show at a hearing to discuss jacking up ride prices.
• Brooklyn Tech got a "B"-grade on its first ever public rating. It's the first of New York's specialized high schools not to get an "A" rating.
• Robber suspected in more than a dozen city robberies taped while holding up an ice cream shop.
• Tickets are being distributed for free to an upcoming mass with the Pope at Yankee stadium, and the Vatican wanted to emphasize that scalping would be discouraged. Ticket holders who receive them for free are thus faced with an economic moral hazard.

The Manhattan District Attorney's office announced that the Reverend David Ajemian was arrested on charges of stalking and threatening Conan O'Brien. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston placed Ajemian, a 46-year-old priest in Stoneham, Massachusetts, on leave. The DA's office says that Ajemian had sent letters (some on parish letterhead!) to O'Brien's offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and home, contacted his parents, and tried to attend tapings of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He was...

Today, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Klein released the "first-ever" public school progress reports with letter grades. The reports are meant to give educators and parents a snapshot of how well schools are doing and empower them to keep improving. Mayor Bloomberg said, "With these Progress Reports, parents no longer have to navigate a maze of statistics to determine how their child's school is doing and how it compares to others. And our educators now...

It was supposed to be an afternoon on the football field during a match-up between the Wadleigh Harlem Hellfighters and McKee/Staten Island Tech Seagulls. Unfortunately, it turned into a terrible day, as the Harlem team found the message "Y'all n-----s suck MSIT" written in black marker on their sideline bench.

Stuyvesant High School is known for many things - high SAT scores, award winning students, and admission to elite universities. Football is certainly not of of those things. A new documentary, The Peglegs of Stuyvesant High, airing tonight at 6:30 pm on CSTV, focuses on the 2006 Stuyvesant Peglegs (named after Peter Stuyvesant, who had a wooden leg). Coming off a winless 2005 season, new coach Brian Sacks tries to lead his team to its first winning season in years, but is up against parents that would prefer that their students join the chess team and some players that have never played football before.

A student carrying a single shot .50 caliber rifle was arrested on the Queens campus of St. John's this afternoon. WNBC reports that the male student had the gun in a bag, as well as a President Bush mask. Also:

Police sources said the man is a student of Guyanese descent who lived in a campus dorm. Sources said the student takes medicines for psychiatric issues and that police were investigating whether he had gone off his meds.

A report being released tomorrow by the Industrial Assistance Corporation (IAC) titled "Buried Treasure: New York's Hidden Tech Sector" asserts that New York City rivals cities like Seattle and areas like Silicon Valley as the largest technology center in the country. The study counted the number of tech workers in the city, at branches of corporations like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and the research and development departments of medical centers in the city. The IAC report actually considered all of the "New York Metropolitan Statistical Area," which includes southern New York State and northern New Jersey. The Associated Press story says that IAC found 620,000 tech workers in that area, more than twice the number found in Silicon Valley.

In his latest installment, Jordan headed to Wi-Fi hotzone Bryant Park to see what people were using the Internet for in a completely public place. The results are interesting: a religious study group, marketing Mandy Moore's new album, yoga, an online opera audition, and managing a business where giant rats are used to detect explosive land mines. We'll have to pay more attention to what people are working on the next time we're in Bryant Park.

Two teen-aged males were arrested on Long Island yesterday after a notebook was found that described their desire to plan a Columbine-like attack on their high school. It's hard to determine whether to take this incident seriously, as the younger half of the hapless pair left a notebook containing their terror blueprints in a McDonalds parking lot, where it was found by someone who turned it over to police. 17-year-old Michael McDonough was the older of the duo, and was arrested with his 15-year-old accomplice, who was on long-term school suspension. The pair wrote about recreating a high school massacre like the one that occurred in Colorado years ago.

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.

Continue reading "Police Search For Suspects in Double Cop Shooting;
One Cop is "Clinging to Life""

The authorities gave details about the Philadelphia apartment of Rebekah Johnson, the woman suspected of shooting a Staten Island commune leader last year. Like how they found an AK-47 rifle and 1,000 rounds of ammo.

If it's almost the end of the school year, it must be time for another story about grown-ups freaking out about messages in high school yearbooks. Staten Island claims the first of these stories, as the Staten Island Advance reports that one senior's inscription scared a parents and prompted an investigation at Staten Island Tech:

In the space reserved to say thanks to friends and family and often to leave school on a lighthearted note, senior Samantha Endrom thanked her parents for their love and support before turning her attention to her friends.

Continue reading "Adults Just Don't Get Baby Stewie"

A look at some noteworthy television this week:

The Dept. of Education released its list of where 8th Graders are choosing to attend high school and apparently Queens is the place to be in the fall of '07. Townsend Harris High received the largest number (3,452) of incoming freshmen applicants listing the school as their first choice for the next academic year. According to the NY Post City schools and their students aren't bound by geography. 8th Graders are asked to list their 12 most-preferred schools they'd like to attend and then they are assigned a high school. The high school matching program is separate from the admissions process to the city's nine specialized schools, where 27,000 students took an exam to gain entrance to schools like Bronx Science and Stuyvesant that have a total of 5,500 seats.

A Para-Ordnance pistol and a Varmint Stalker rifle were the prizes two people won in a Virginia gun giveaway raffle to raise money for gun shop owners who Mayor Bloomberg alleges sell guns illegally and who the Mayor has filed a federal lawsuit against. The event, organized by the Virginia Citizens Defense League, was open to everyone except for Mayor Bloomberg and his immediate family. The Fairfax County government building attracted Bloomberg haters as well as the parents of some Virginia Tech shooting victims.

Day three of the Peter Braunstein trial brought information about places and things, as well as a look at evidence and the now common debates about the defendant's mental state. Lawyers for Braunstein, a journalist who is on trial a 13-hour attack on a former colleague that occurred on October 31, 2005, contend that their client is schizophrenic and that leaving some much evidence behind is not normal. Whereas prosecutors say his actions show premeditation and a clear mind.

Middle College High School in Queens decided not to leave things to chance when a senior wrote a note saying, "So you think Virginia Tech was bad? Just wait for the MCHS Prom! Unlike VTech there won't be any injured, I'll get the job done." The student, 17-year-old Michael DiGiovanni, was found out because the note and fliers made from it were found in the school computer lab on Monday. And the city wants us to be impressed with high school graduation rates?

As the Virginia Tech story broke last Monday, cable news, as always, took the lead with their normal oversaturated speculative coverage transferring the energy and resources normally reserved for non-story stories like the Anna Nicole Smith saga into covering a real story.

The wedding season is in full swing: Second week in a row where there are over 30 weddings in the NY Times Weddings & Celebrations section. Here we go:

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs.

The Sanitation Chronicles, a new play by and about New York’s Strongest, premiered on Wednesday. Actor/playwright Paul Brno, who’s been moonlighting for the Department of Sanitation for the past 17 years, says “every day is still a great day to be on a garbage truck.” The “slice of life” play explores the daily prejudices, anger and violence faced by “Sanmen”, all of which is exacerbated when one of the guys shows up for work dressed as a lady. [Tickets.]

Hundreds of Virginia Tech alumni, NYU students and other New Yorkers gathered for a candlelight vigil in Washington Square Park last night. Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, who had traveled to Virginia Tech earlier in the week, brought back a candle from a vigil there and used it to light candles last night. And today, many people are also wearing orange and maroon, Virginia Tech's colors, for "Orange and Maroon Effect" day to show support for the school.

Sad news about Sludgie the whale: The baby minke whale, who captivated our attention as he frolicked in the Gowanus Bay, died yesterday afternoon. He beached himself near Clinton Street around 5PM.

Yesterday, NBC News revealed that Virginia Tech shooting gunman Cho Seung-Hiu sent them a package of photographs, writings, and video - a "multimedia manifesto." The network turned over the materials to the authorities but also shared the package's contents during the evening news last night and on its website.

Update: WNBC reports that Cho Seung Hui sent a "box containing a manifesto of sorts, photographs and other material" (including videos) to NBC News. NBC News received it today and president Steve Capus turned the box over the FBI, but MSNBC says that the box was sent between the two shootings.

The package included a long, “rambling, manifesto-like statement embedded with a series of photographs,” Capus said. The material is “hard-to-follow ... disturbing, very disturbing — very angry, profanity-laced,” he said.

Continue reading "Questions About Gun Laws Surround VT Shooting "

The man who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech yesterday morning was identified by authorities as Cho Seung Hui. He is described as a 23-year-old student, a senior majoring in English, who lived in one of the dorms. He is also a legal resident from South Korea.