Animal control officers set a trap at Rochdale Village after a coyote or similar creature was spotted prowling around a parking lot in the sprawling south Queens cooperative housing complex.

The cabbie beat up by thugs dressed as Super Mario Brothers spoke out about his ordeal Sunday and demanded tougher laws against assaults on taxi drivers.

“I was really scared. . . . At the time, I really think I’m going to die,” said Ndiaye Serigne, 48, of Harlem, who was robbed and pummeled by four men dressed as Mario, Luigi and other characters at a gas station.

The pricetag for a state plan to replace the crumbling Kosciuszko Bridge by 2017 has ballooned to more than a billion bucks to accommodate the eight-year inflation expected during the long-awaited and long-needed replacement.

For that price, we might get something truly stunning — a concrete cable-stayed straight out of a science fiction movie (or the downtowns of many other cities). In layman’s terms, the futuristic bridge resembles two space-turkey wishbones standing upright with diagonal connection cables.

Last month, the Kosciuszko Bridge Stakeholders Advisory Council — a Department of Transportation-appointed panel of local activists — chose three final designs for the new 1.1-mile span.

In addition to the front-runner [. . .] were a simple box girder design and a crescent arch similar to the Bayonne Bridge.

They would all cost a lot, but Adam Levine, spokesman of the state Department of Transportation, said the cost was expected.

“For a bridge that is a mile long in New York City, $1 billion is the going rate,” he said.

Former mayor Rudy Giuliani warned Sunday that crime rates could soar to 1990s levels and the city could again be a victim of terrorism if Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t win reelection.

Giuliani’s dire predictions came during a tag-team campaign swing – the first time Bloomberg has tapped the one-time GOP star for help on the stump this election season.

“This city could very easily be taken back in a very different direction,” Giuliani told a crowd of ultra-Orthodox Jews at a breakfast sponsored by Brooklyn’s Borough Park Jewish Community Council. “It could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership. Politics is important. It’s important toour safety. It’s important to our security.”

Bloomberg said that New York could become another Detroit.

“We all know that cities have gone through great boom times and then turned around and collapsed. Take a look at Detroit,” he said. “It went from a great city with lots of good-paying jobs to a city that’s basically holding on for dear life. All of our gains are always in danger of being turned around.”

*(”The former mayor said he believed that Mr. Bush was in the better position to protect the country from further terrorist attacks. ”One of the reasons the world is safer now is that we are going out and trying to find our enemies and demobilizing them,” he said. ”I was sitting there in Congress the night Bush announced the Bush doctrine. And I remember leaving that night feeling better that the president of the United States had reversed 20 or 30 years playing defense” against potential enemies, he said.”)

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

On Friday afternoon, when much of the political world was transfixed by President Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was asked a seemingly throwaway question about the New York City mayor’s race, the last inquiry of a busy news briefing.

“Can you say who, exactly, the president supports in the mayoral race up in the city?” asked a reporter from The Daily News.

Mr. Gibbs at first seemed to mock the question. “New York-centric over there,” he said. “There’s more than one city.”

After a few moments of playful banter, he offered this: “The president is the leader of the Democratic Party, and as that would support the Democratic nominee.”

Who would that be? Mr. Gibbs did not say. But he did manage to invoke another name — Mr. Bloomberg’s.

“The president,” Mr. Gibbs said, “obviously has had a chance to, throughout campaigning and in his time both as a candidate and as a president, to meet, know and work with Mayor Bloomberg, and obviously has a tremendous amount of respect for what he’s done as well.”

When asked later to confirm that the president had, in fact, endorsed Mr. Thompson, a White House spokesman said that he had.

As word of the quasi endorsement reached Mr. Thompson, his campaign scrambled to issue a statement.

It read, “Yes we can in New York City: President Barack Obama supports Bill Thompson for mayor.”

Mr. Thompson rushed to his campaign office in Midtown Manhattan to hold a press conference. He stood at a lectern in a cramped room, beaming. “Let me just say how proud and honored I am to have been endorsed by the president of the United States today,” he said. “Obviously, he thinks I’m going to be the next mayor of the city of New York.”

*As in.

Seventeen months out of Rutgers University, they live in an unwelcome continuum of mass rejection. Between them, Kristy and Katie Barry, identical twins who grew up in Ohio, have applied for some 150 jobs: a magazine for diabetics, a Web site about board games and a commercial for green tea-flavored gum; fact-checking at Scholastic Books, copy editing for the celebrity baby section of People.com, road-tripping for College Sports Television.

They did not get any of these. More than a year has lapsed without so much as an interview. Apparently, even a canned response was impossible in New York.

Three weeks ago, suspects with ties to terrorist groups abroad were arrested here and in Denver, Colorado. The investigation that led to the arrests continues as we speak. Those arrests and the ongoing investigation that continues to ensure New York City’s ranking as the safest big city in America are due in large part to the efforts of the man the Gazette endorses for a third term as the city’s chief executive. Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office on Jan. 1, 2002, and for the last seven years has made the counter-terrorism measures of the New York City Police Department at home and abroad of equally high priority to police street and index crime eradication efforts.

Maybe it’s meant to be an ironic endorsement.

The museum being built at the site of ground zero will display photos of the 19 men who hijacked the four airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, and may also include printed quotations from the so-called martyr videos they made before the attacks, in an effort to “create an accurate historical record,” the museum’s president said Friday.

The images of each hijacker will be roughly 4 inches wide and 6 inches tall, and mounted on a wall of the underground museum’s primary exhibition. The museum is exploring the idea of displaying some quotations next to the pictures, but no final decision has been made, and no text has been selected, said Joseph C. Daniels, president and chief executive of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center.

“We will not, and we do not, want to hide the truth of what happened, and identifying those who did it is core to that,” Mr. Daniels said. He added: “It answers the question of who did this. Let’s show the world the 19 individuals who boarded planes and murdered so many. To not do that would be a major disservice to the public.”

We really do live in the greatest country in the world.

Robert R. Hammond, 39, an artist and entrepreneur who had no experience in the world of public parks, has been paid about $1.2 million over the years of the High Line’s development — the vast majority of it since 2005. And his salary of $250,000 a year as president and executive director of the nonprofit he helped found, Friends of High Line, makes him one of the most generously compensated leaders of the 10 major park conservancies in the city.

. . .

Mr. Hammond’s salary, found in the organization’s tax filings, falls short of that of Douglas Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy and administrator of the park. He earns a salary of $364,000 a year. But Mr. Hammond’s salary is considerably greater than his counterpart at the 526-acre Prospect Park in Brooklyn and about $45,000 better than the city’s parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, who oversees approximately 1,700 parks, playgrounds and other recreation facilities.

. . .

The High Line said that Mr. Hammond’s compensation stems from the challenges of operating a park perched roughly 30 feet in the air with a fire code capacity, managing major fund-raising campaigns and working with the city to oversee the design and construction of the High Line, among other duties.

Wow, 30 whole feet in the air . . . maybe if you divide that by 15 feet, which seems to be how wide the thing is, and multiply that by 20 blocks long, you get some sort of formula that comes out to $250,000 a year . . . good thing they decided not to tax everyone within a mile of the place. But then again, you can’t get a peep show as easily in any other park in the city.

“Mike Bloomberg doesn’t take a dime in special interest money,” Wolfson said. “No one will ever have to wonder whether contributions influence his decisions….He works only for the taxpayers.”