Bombers To Homeless: Drop Dead

More proof that the Yankees are evil:

Yankees apparel and a shave was the disguise of choice for would-be bombers planning to blow up the Herald Square subway station, according to court testimony yesterday.

The idea was that “we should not look like Muslims, we should look like regular people,” Osama El-Dawoody, an NYPD informant, said in Brooklyn Federal Court.

El-Dawoody spent his third day on the witness stand providing an overview for hours of secretly recorded conversations with alleged bomber wanna-be Shahawar Matin Siraj in the summer of 2004 as details of the plot took shape.

Siraj, 24, suggested that the 50-year-old El-Dawoody would look more discreet by trading his kufi — a Muslim headpiece — for a baseball cap.

“Wear, like, this kind of stuff with the New York Yankees on it or something,” Siraj said.

Don’t worry, though, because the plot gets stupider and stupider:

According to their plan, the bomber would take the F train to the 42nd St. station and place an explosive device in a garbage can. Then he would board another train to the 34th St. station, place a second device in the garbage or a toilet there and take the train to the Broadway-Lafayette St. station.

It was unclear whether the bombs would be triggered by remote control or timers.

Siraj said he hoped the explosion would “take down” the shopping mall above the Herald Square station.

Idiots! No one actually uses the Manhattan Mall! No matter:

Killing people was not their main goal. They had hoped to minimize casualties by striking in the early-morning hours on the weekend when the stations subways were mostly deserted — except for the homeless, the tapes show.

“You cannot save [the] homeless,” Siraj said.

These guys sound very American, actually, with this you-cannot-save-the-homeless bootstrapper talk . . .

If The Russian Diplomatic Mission Hadn’t Acted, It Would Have Put All Diplomatic Scofflaws At Risk

The Sun reports (link reveals just enough to get the gist of the story), that the Russian who took advantage of his diplomatic immunity to avoid having a Breathalyzer test administered is being sent back home:

Yielding to pressure from the State Department and city politicians, Russian officials sent the diplomat who hit a police officer with his car while allegedly driving drunk last weekend back to Moscow, officials said yesterday.

Ilya Morozov, 28, an attache at the Russian Mission to the United Nations for the last year, boarded a plane for Russia just hours after the consulate received a diplomatic note from the American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, requesting Mr. Morozov’s diplomatic immunity be waived or that he be sent out of the country, a spokeswoman for the mission, Maria Zakharova, said.

What Would Jane Jacobs Do?

The Times’ David Dunlap pays his respects to Jane Jacobs, and gives some current examples of her influence:

The idea that city planning should be informed by the city block — its people, texture, layering, scale and age — can be traced in good measure to her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” written while she lived at 555 Hudson Street, a little block between Perry and West 11th Streets peppered with old buildings.

She liked short blocks with a lot of diversity.

On Tuesday, she died at age 89 in Toronto, where she had moved in 1968. Along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, diversity still reigned around the unremarkable three-story structure at No. 555 (“modest” seems too grandiose a word for it), now home to the Art of Cooking, a cookware and accessories store. Elsewhere on the block are the White Horse Tavern, three restaurants, a cafe, a news dealer and a combination card store, florist and T-shirt shop.

Farther downtown, Ms. Jacobs’s hand can be seen in the redevelopment plan for the World Trade Center. A central tenet of that plan is to break down the super-block site into four smaller blocks through the re-establishment of Greenwich and Fulton Streets.

It is no coincidence that this framework was developed while Alexander Garvin was vice president for planning at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. His roommate at Yale gave him a copy of “Death and Life” as a Christmas present in 1961. “It changed my life,” Mr. Garvin said.

. . .

Another example of her influence, Mr. Garvin said, was the neighborhood preservation program that he oversaw as New York’s deputy housing commissioner from 1974 to 1978. “We were trying to save old buildings,” he recalled, “which was something I always had an inclination toward but until I read that you needed a mix of old and new buildings to have a healthy neighborhood, it wasn’t part of my repertoire.”

John E. Zuccotti was so taken by “Death and Life” that he wrote his Yale Law School dissertation in 1963, “Some Tools for Mrs. Jacobs,” on whether diversity could be enforced by zoning. He is now chairman of Brookfield Properties in the United States, whose holdings include enormous buildings on either side of the trade center site.

“Her ideas are as pertinent today as when she wrote,” Mr. Zuccotti said. “Take our problems down here. We’re talking about a 24-hour community, residential uses mixing with office uses, different kinds of commercial uses.”

. . .

“She taught us how to look at blocks,” said Ada Louise Huxtable, who was the architecture critic of The New York Times when Ms. Jacobs was battling Robert Moses and other powerful advocates of urban renewal and slum clearance.

“The intimate view of the city and its humanity really is indebted to her,” Ms. Huxtable said.

New York returned the favor yesterday. The owner of the Art of Cooking, Kate Humphrey, arrived at work to find several bouquets on the doorstep of No. 555.

One, a mixture of lilies and daisies and other springtime flowers, carried this unsigned message: “From this house, in 1961, a housewife changed the world.”

From the op-ed assignment desk: Are city-affiliated fundraising offices (e.g., the Department of Education’s Fund For Public Schools and the City Parks Foundation, to name just two) in danger of becoming the 21st century equivalent of Robert Moses’ Title I-assisted shadow government? Or to put it another way, by more fully integrating private fundraising into the daily routine of city agencies (e.g., The Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City) are we creating a situation in which bureaucrats can bypass City Council/elected official oversight vis a vis agency budgets in order to promote programs or projects over which the public has no oversight? The problem isn’t with the types of programs that are being funded — I’m sure there is a de facto consensus that education and parks are worthy aims — but rather the method they are being funded — i.e., through shadow budgets without public oversight, which was the way Robert Moses, through federal Title I funding, bypassed the municipal legislative structure. I don’t know that Jane Jacobs ever commented on the potential pitfalls of this new system of fundraising but I’m guessing she would raise questions. If any writers want to take a stab at this topic, they should strike while the iron is hot — say, for this Sunday’s Week in Review!

Cellphone Crackdown In Effect; City Children In Danger Of Returning To The Bad Old Days Of Overprotective Parents

Will the Board of Education crackdown on cellphones lead to a return of the bad old days of children not being allowed to take the subway to school? Parents are concerned:

During the final stretch of David Ritter’s hourlong trip to middle school, he pulls a cellphone from his jeans and calls his mother in Washington Heights to say he is out of the subway and moments from the Salk School of Science on East 20th Street.

“It’s one thing I can cross off my list of things to worry about,” his mother, Elizabeth Lorris Ritter, said. “It’s a required part of our everyday life. We have a refrigerator, we have running water, we have cellphones.”

Cellphones are the urban parent’s umbilical cord, the lifeline connecting them to children on buses, emerging from subways, crisscrossing boroughs and traipsing through unknown neighborhoods.

. . .

Some of these parents, also fearful of child predators and terrorist attacks, say that sending their children to school without cellphones is unimaginable. “I have her call me when she gets out of school, and she’s supposed to get on the bus right away,” Lindsay Walt, an artist, said of her daughter, Eve Thomson, 11, a sixth grader at Salk. “Then I have her call me when she gets off the bus, and I have her call me when she gets in the house. The chancellor will have civil disobedience on his hands. No one in New York is going to let their child go to school without a cellphone.”

. . .

“We sit here and we tell our parents, ‘Care about your kids, do this, do that,’ and then you say, ‘You’ve just lost that safety net that you rely on,'” said Jane Reiff, a Queens parent whose daughter Nikki, 12, uses her cellphone to call for a ride if the friends she usually walks home with are out sick. “It’s just not safe out there.”

Other items included in the crackdown — besides obvious things like boxcutters — include MP3 players:

Dumbfounded students said cellphones were essential, so familiar they were like an extra limb. But they had different reasons from their parents’. “I feel so empty,” said May Chom, 14, speaking wistfully after hearing of the policy and leaving her phone at home in Queens. With no cellphone, May said, there was also no way to listen to music on the way to the Lab School, on West 17th Street, making for a “really, really boring” trip.

If You Outlaw Cigarettes, Only Outlaws Will Have Cigarettes

I’m guessing the lucrative black market for cigarettes was an unintended consequence of the city’s 2003 smoking ban:

The smoking ban imposed in city jails three years ago has made cigarette smuggling so lucrative that a single smoke can command up to $20 from nicotine-starved inmates — leading to concerns about corruption behind bars, officials reported yesterday.

News of the thriving sky-high black market came as the Department of Investigation announced arrests in separate cases of three correction officers, two cooks and a nurse’s aide on charges of taking bribes of $50 to $1,000 to sneak tobacco, cocaine and a cellphone onto Rikers Island over the past year.

Two of the suspects — Correction Officer Glenda Glenn and nurse’s aide Cleveland Porter — were the first to face criminal charges for cigarette smuggling since the new rules were enacted in March 2003.

“When the ban went into effect in 2003, that created a market and an opportunity for people who were going to want to continue to smoke in the facility and it has created a corruption hazard and a bit of a black market,” said Investigation Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn.

She said a single cigarette could fetch $10 to $20.

A bag a loose tobacco that stores sell for $2 might bring $40 to $50 in the illegal Rikers Island market.

While cigarettes are considered contraband for prisoners, they’re perfectly legal for correction officers and others who work in the jail system. But perhaps not for long.

“In light of these charges, [Correction] Commissioner [Martin] Horn and Commissioner Hearn are going to examine to what extent they will allow employees to carry personal amounts of tobacco,” said Deputy Correction Commissioner Richard White.

That brought an angry response from Peter Meringelo, president of the Correction Captains Association, who warned in 2003 that the smoking ban would cause major headaches.