How does Staten Island get spared the attack of the snow?
Screen shot from Google alert of National Weather Service predictions.
The ominous grey skies over NYC hang low as Hurricane Sandy approaches.
Tornado warnings for NYC. Stay indoors in Brooklyn and Queens.
Gothamist, citing the National Weather Service, reports one has touched down along the Belt Parkway.
Here’s the first pic I’ve seen of a tornado touching down in the Jamaica Bay.
It’s by Kevin Kuffner. Used with permission.
Two inspiring men proving physical disability need not prevent boldness, bravery, daring … nor professional success.
Chen Guangcheng, Chinese dissident gives his first nationally broadcast interview to PRI’s The Takeaway hosted by John Hockenberry. Listen out Tuesday and hear them discuss the intersection between human rights and disability rights in the United States and China.
My latest radio story is a saga: my mostly failed quest to get the city to remove abandoned bikes. We also made a cool SeeClickFix map to help. But alas, we were too digital and not officially derelict enough.
An excerpt:
The life cycle of a bike left to rot on NYC streets is long, and intentionally so. The complaint process is as clunky as the cast off bikes themselves and the criteria for removal is stiffer than the U-lock holding this pilfered cruiser to a bike rack on Bleecker Street.
The first obstacle is opinion. What you consider an abandoned nuisance taking up prime bike parking real estate is property to someone else. Most bikes reported to the city as abandoned aren’t abandoned enough to be removed (see definition below).
Before we started collecting abandoned bike photos, the City received 429 official complaints since July, the start of the fiscal year. Of those, just 60 bikes were removed, less than 15 percent.
That’s because …
California social enterprises stormed the Secretary of State’s office to file as Benefit Corporations this morning.
Here’s what it looked like as more than a dozen CEOs waited for the doors to open at 9:30 to be the first to become a legal Benefit Corporation. Read my full article on GOOD.
Photo courtesy of B Lab.
In honor of the Iowa caucuses today, here you have a defense of the state as radical bumpkin bombasts. Funny.
Should the disabled be insulted by this?
Photo by D’Arcy Maine.
John Keefe of WNYC made this pretty (and pretty addictive) map of New York City by income. See which neighborhoods are the richest (the Upper East Side) and the poorest (the South Bronx). Average income for each census track is listed in the interactive version.
And more interestingly see how close the very wealthy live to the very poor in some parts of the city (Brooklyn).
CBO Chart Looks Like Occupy Wall Street Propaganda Poster
The Congressional Budget Office is, of course, the official non-partisan government research agency for members of Congress. They are a trusted and beloved bunch of bean counters. They are reliable and reasonable. So, it’s a little more meaningful to see the claims of Occupiers corroborated so directly, in that this government report breaks out income into the top 1% as it’s own bracket for consideration. That’s not standard practice.
The report was written at the request of Senate Finance Committee. Wonder what they will use it for.
Full report in PDF. Please note the data is from 1979 - 2007, it does not cover the financial crisis.
What appears to be about 1,000 Occupy Wall Street protestors have marched part of the way across the Brooklyn Bridge, stopped eastbound traffic, and are staying put under the western arches of the bridge with a heavy police presence.
For a while, cars were stopped waiting for the march to continue, but they have all now turned around and gone the wrong way back west to Manhattan. For a moment it was a site to behold as a couple dozen cars made awkward U-turns in the narrow lanes, facing in all directions at once. Traffic on the other side, westbound, is fine.
It’s been going on for about 15 minutes on the bridge so far, and some protesters seem to be trickling back to Manhattan.
According to Occupy Wall Street organizers at least 20 people have already been arrested. Here’s the live stream for closeups.
And I’m posting a few more pics, including one with the full arches visible to my twitter feed, @alexgoldmark, since this Tumblr seems very slow at loading now.
Think shrinking the number of government workers will save taxpayers money? Not so fast. The average contractor is paid 1.83 times what a public employee gets for the same work. Read more, see full infographic at GOOD.
![That is a hoax story! But it is from the Sun website, sort of.
The hacking group LulzSec is in a battle with the U.K. newspaper the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch. So far, it’s not working out so well for the Sun. The screen grab above (again, of a hoax, so don’t spread it around that Rupert Murdoch is Dead) is from about 5:40pm ET. Besides the fact that it’s false, other tip offs were that you got redirected to another URL, American style punctuation and spelling, and copy editing errors.
Right now, almost an hour later, the Sun website is still inaccessible, but readers are now redirecting to the LulzSec Twitter page which has tweets up like this one:
“TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun! How is your day? Good? Good!”
And this taunting tweet:
This is just as fun on the inside. We are battling with The Sun admins right now - I think they are losing. The boat has landed… >:]
NewsCorp just can’t catch a break.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lojvospFxF1qlwxdoo1_1280.png)
That is a hoax story! But it is from the Sun website, sort of.
The hacking group LulzSec is in a battle with the U.K. newspaper the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch. So far, it’s not working out so well for the Sun. The screen grab above (again, of a hoax, so don’t spread it around that Rupert Murdoch is Dead) is from about 5:40pm ET. Besides the fact that it’s false, other tip offs were that you got redirected to another URL, American style punctuation and spelling, and copy editing errors.
Right now, almost an hour later, the Sun website is still inaccessible, but readers are now redirecting to the LulzSec Twitter page which has tweets up like this one:
“TheSun.co.uk now redirects to our twitter feed. Hello, everyone that wanted to visit The Sun! How is your day? Good? Good!”
And this taunting tweet:
This is just as fun on the inside. We are battling with The Sun admins right now - I think they are losing. The boat has landed… >:]
NewsCorp just can’t catch a break.
