Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Rolling out a new color at a handball court near West 133rd Street.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo earned about $200,000 last year from his salary as state attorney general and income from investments, according to tax filings his office made available on Monday.
The governor’s returns contained little information that was unexpected, and his income was on the same order of magnitude as the year before, for which tax information was made available in December. In the new returns, Mr. Cuomo listed $143,870 in wages as attorney general, plus about $55,000 in income from interest and dividends. Read more…
To a certain slice of New Yorkers, it’s the kind of gossip that is whispered over lunches at Bergdorf’s and mentioned during air kisses at fund-raisers: being rejected by a Fifth Avenue co-op board. But a Turkish businesswoman’s story is a bit different. After being rejected by the board at 812 Fifth Avenue, she has spent nearly two years fighting to get back her deposit on the $3 million apartment.
The case turned on whether the woman, Demet Sabanci Cetindogan, had tried to sabotage the board interview — that is, deliberately made a bad impression so the board would turn down the deal.
Last week, Justice Louis B. York of State Supreme Court in Manhattan ruled that the seller’s lawyers had not proved that she tried to “throw” the interview. So the judge said the seller, Harvey Schuyler, had to return the $300,000 deposit, plus interest.
Court papers show that Mr. Schuyler’s lawyers had relied on e-mails and comments from an unidentified board member. Justice York said that was not enough to show that Ms. Cetindogan didn’t really want the apartment. Read more…
The ripples created by an explosive television report challenging the veracity of “Three Cups of Tea,” a bestselling memoir dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan, have reached Queens.
On Monday afternoon, Women for Afghan Women, an advocacy group based in Fresh Meadows, issued a statement distancing itself from the book and its author, Greg Mortenson, and declaring the transparency of its work to help women and girls in Afghanistan and in the Afghan diaspora in the United States.
Though it has no connection to Mr. Mortenson or his charity, the Central Asia Institute, the women’s organization in Queens said that its funders “regularly visit our facilities to verify our reports. Our financial system is transparent and open to anyone — agency or individual — who wishes access to it.” The statement added: “We welcome this close attention.” Read more…
Ángel Franco/The New York Times Former Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch giving a speech in 2010.And now, another example that no good deed goes unpunished.
On July 8, 2009, Richard Ravitch was hastily sworn in as New York’s 75th lieutenant governor, filling a vacancy that occurred the previous year when David A. Paterson succeeded Eliot Spitzer as governor. Mr. Paterson filled the position to end a deadlock in the State Senate’s leadership and recruited Mr. Ravitch both to enhance his own sagging political credibility and to help solve the state’s increasingly dire fiscal crisis.
Mr. Ravitch, a wealthy businessman and veteran public servant, signed on and agreed to serve without collecting the $151,500 annual salary.
During his nearly 18 months in office, Mr. Ravitch delivered several cogent analyses of the state’s financial challenges, including specific solutions that were largely acclaimed by outside watchdogs and rejected by Albany insiders, including the governor.
After leaving office, he was asked whether he had made a difference. Read more…
MTA
The new trash can design was introduced at Bowling Green and Whitehall in February. It will be rolled out on 5,000 garbage cans throughout the system over the next six months. Say hello to the latest salvo in the subway’s long-running War on Trash.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has quietly started plastering thousands of the subway system’s black trash cans with a newly configured decal anchored by the slogan “Litter Stops Here.”
The decal’s modern, stripped-down look is a stark departure from the agency’s previous approach to the school of informational trash can aesthetics. Close observers of the subway ecosystem will recall the last batch of garbage-related posters featured the rhyming instruction “Can It for a Greener Planet!” above a haiku-like poem: “Your City / Your Subway / Your Station / Your Litter.”
Now, poetry is out; clean, uncluttered design is in. The new poster takes advantage of the two-tiered structure of the average subway garbage can, or “trash receptacles,” as they are known in in-house M.T.A. parlance. The slogan, printed in large white-on-black letters on the top rim of the can, is easily spotted by straphangers; it is also the only three words on the entire poster, which depends on visuals rather than text. Read more…
A 56-year-old woman and her 28-year-old daughter were found stabbed to death in a Brooklyn apartment late Sunday night, the police said.
Officers discovered their bodies when they went to look for the younger woman, Larisa Prikhodko, who was reported missing on Sunday.
When Ms. Prikhodko did not pick up her 2-year-old son at the end of the weekend, her former fiancé, the boy’s father, went to the station house in the 61st Precinct in Brooklyn. Read more…
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Nate Fredette with his drum set inside his apartment on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn.The sounds of New Yorkers clunking across floors, the peals of construction that stretch from dawn until dusk, the neighbor who takes pleasure singing Fergie songs off key: these are all sounds that New Yorkers tolerate each day from their neighbors. Most New Yorkers don’t want to complain because they don’t want to make enemies of people they have to see at the annual building barbecue. But plenty of New Yorkers have been known to reach the breaking point and speak up.
This week’s Appraisal is a tale of New Yorkers who actually reached a resolution with their neighbors about the noise they make.
The Appraisal wants to know what kind of racket your neighbors have made and whether you have been able to reach a resolution. Did you bring them a bottle of wine and ask them to be quiet between midnight and 7 a.m.? Have you resorted to giving them dirty looks in the elevator? Have you moved out or even filed a lawsuit?
Let us know your thoughts, or actions.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Trinity Church, which runs St. Paul’s Chapel, is about to restore what historians call America’s first national monument. The restoration will begin Tuesday.Even then, 235 years ago, Congress worried about spending. All right, officially it was still the Continental Congress when it approved the new nation’s first official monument, a monument that ended up in Lower Manhattan. But right there, in its instructions to Benjamin Franklin, it said to watch the cost.
He did his best. Later on, when the sculptor complained that he was underpaid, Franklin himself paid the shipping and handling to send the completed monument from France to the barely united states.
Ten years passed before it was installed on the exterior wall of St. Paul’s Chapel in Lower Manhattan, where it is about to get a 21st-century touch-up. Starting Tuesday, a restoration team will take it apart and repair damage from age, from drippings that splattered when the window behind was being painted, and from birds that perched above. Read more…
A high of about 60 degrees with mostly cloudy skies. This evening, there’s a possibility of showers.
Passover begins this evening, and amid the Jewish celebration of the escape from Egypt, there is a raging debate over quinoa, a South American grain product. In most cases unleavened and gluten free, quinoa has found its way to Seder dinner despite its questionable status as a kosher food. In the past few months, several rabbinical experts have reached conflicting conclusions about quinoa’s status.
In Peru and Bolivia, where quinoa is typically grown, it often shares farmland with wheat or corn, leaving the possibility of grains susceptible to leavening in the packaging. But diners that exhibit vigilance in determining their quinoa’s origins can feast away, says Rabbi Sholem Fishbane, director of the kosher supervision service of the Chicago Rabbinical Council. For now, that is the best Jews can do, Rabbi Fishbane says, until a rabbi makes the “four-day trek into the wilderness” of Bolivia to inspect quinoa operations. [NYT] (Also on Passover: Daily News.) Read more…
