And So My Truth Is That I Am A Gay Defendant

And you thought no one could out-McGreevey the former New Jersey governor:

By the time Anthony Fortunato took the witness stand yesterday, facing charges of murder as a hate crime in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, his whole life was at stake. The rest of it could be spent in prison. To save himself, he offered his last, deepest secrets.

Through two weeks of trial, jurors heard from the police, from forensic scientists and from his own friends. They had sifted through his electronic mail. They had even heard from Mr. Fortunato’s lawyer, Gerald J. Di Chiara, who during opening arguments on Sept. 17 said that his client would not have made a gay man a target because he himself was gay.

Yesterday, dressed in a dark blazer and khaki slacks, Mr. Fortunato took the stand in his own defense. When Mr. Di Chiara asked him his sexual orientation, he responded, “I don’t know.” Asked what he meant, he said: “I could be homosexual. A homosexual. Bisexual.”

. . .

Before his client’s testimony, Mr. Di Chiara yesterday called witnesses to try to bolster Mr. Fortunato’s defense.

His first witness was a brokerage firm worker wearing a bright blue tie and a golden hoop ring in his left ear.

“I’m a gay man,” said the witness, Michael Roberto, who had been ordered to testify by subpoena. Under questioning from Mr. Di Chiara, he recounted meeting Mr. Fortunato online, then inviting him to his apartment for sex. Mr. Fortunato arrived, he said, wearing panties and a bra. Two more witnesses gave similar accounts.

The Public Advocate Calls For An Investigation

Just not what you’d expect:

Saying it appeared that her stepdaughter-in-law had been “manhandled” by police officers before her death in police custody in Phoenix on Friday, New York City’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, called yesterday for an investigation into the circumstances of the death.

New York — The Town So Nice They Gave It Its Own Domain Name

He perhaps overstates the power of the Internet:

Is it time for the big city to start cornering a piece of the Internet?

A growing grassroots movement says yes, and is trying to create a “.nyc” domain name to go alongside the dot coms and dot orgs of the World Wide Web.

“When Ford introduced their first car 100 years ago, no one thoughtto start building roads for it,” said Tom Lowenhaupt, an interactive marketing consultant who heads Connecting.nyc, a group he formed to lead the effort.

“So we ended up having to tear down miles of the Bronx to build freeways to start accommodating them all. It’s the same thing now. We have the opportunity now to plan for the future and start organizing ourselves and our resources in a responsible way.”

Backers say that a dot NYC Web address will allow the city’s small businesses to distinguish themselves in the crowded online marketplace and foster better community cohesion and social activism.

“The Internet is great at global things but it isn’t very good at local things,” Lowenhaupt said. “There are 60 million dot com names out there. When all six billion of us are on the Internet New York is going to be forgotten.”

Like Cronkite’s Pronouncements About Tet, Heath Ledger’s Departure Portends Trouble For Second-Tier Celebrity Mascots Across Brooklyn . . .

Because once you’ve lost Heath, mass foreclosures can’t be far off . . . Heath Ledger as leading economic indicator:

It wasn’t supposed to matter to Brooklyn. Heath Ledger, the crown prince of the borough’s celebrity aristocracy, apparently fled his fiefdom in Boerum Hill for Manhattan after splitting up with his girlfriend, the actress Michelle Williams.

“To each his own,” said Jay Wilkinson, 29, an actor who lives in the neighborhood, speaking just blocks from the house on Dean Street where Mr. Ledger had lived since 2005 with Ms. Williams and their daughter, Matilda. He echoed a theme expressed by many on blogs and in the streets after the breakup. We barely notice the stars among us. If we lose one, no big deal.

In that, though, lies a tale of arriviste anxiety. What if Brooklyn’s recent cachet as the locus for what’s next is little more than a thin and fragile crust of chic, hiding the insecurity of people who constantly measure the social currency of their ZIP code by Manhattan standards?

The number of trendy boutiques, bistros and music clubs in Brooklyn may have spiked in the last five years, but its infrastructure of cool still represents only a fraction of that found in Manhattan. Its new identity is moored to a finite number of shops, restaurants, luxury condominiums and, yes, celebrities. If even one leaves, a void is created. Could the borough’s new status vanish as quickly as it ascended?

In recent years, Brooklyn’s pool of second-tier celebrity mascots (John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Norman Mailer, Steve Buscemi) has swollen and taken on a level of movie-star glamour, thanks to recent home buyers like Jennifer Connelly and her husband, Paul Bettany, Adrian Grenier and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard.

These famous names, functioning as both symbols and selling points for the new Brooklyn, helped drive up property values, provided a focus for gossip in coffeehouses and dog runs, and instilled pride among the tide of newcomers who arrived — sort of by choice — from Manhattan and beyond.

With Glowing Hearts We See Thee Rise, The Loonie Hits Parity!

Is NYC & Company behind the weak dollar? They don’t seem to be doing much to discourage it:

New Yorkers, like most Americans, pay precious little attention to what happens in Canada, that large, sparsely populated region with the chronically inferior currency.

. . .

Check that last part. Now that the Canadian dollar, known as the loonie, has flapped its way to parity with the American dollar (formerly known as the almighty), Canada suddenly looks like a proud nation of 33 million people whose cross-border purchasing power has grown by more than half in five years.

Tourism officials in New York have taken notice. They acknowledge that they took Canadian visitors for granted in the past, but now they are drawing up plans to lure more of them to the state and New York City.

The state is running ads in Toronto newspapers and on Canadian Web sites, inviting Canadians to spend fall weekends in northern and western New York. The city’s tourism agency, NYC & Company, is rushing to open an office in Toronto, which would be its first in Canada. “This seems like sort of a psychological opportunity,” said George A. Fertitta, the chief executive of NYC & Company, referring to the parity of the two currencies.

The Canadian dollar, nicknamed for the image of a loon that it bears, passed its American counterpart on Friday, when it hit a new 31-year high of almost $1.01. In early 2002, it was worth about 62 cents.

Back then, the flow of visitors from Canada to New York City was in a post-9/11 swoon. The number of visitors dropped to 693,000 in 2003, from 920,000 in 2000, a decline of almost 25 percent. By last year, it had rebounded to 840,000, making Canada the No. 2 foreign source of visitors, behind Britain, according to NYC & Company.

Now, with Canadians brandishing their reinvigorated loonies, tourism officials have stopped ignoring them and started encouraging them to join the parade of bargain-hunting foreigners flooding into New York. When it comes to shopping, little prodding seems to be required.

“Friends will be coming to town and they’ll say, ‘We need one day to shop,'” said Jeff Breithaupt, an Ontario native who coordinates cultural activities for the Canadian Consulate in Manhattan and is an editor of a newsletter titled The Upper North Side. For Canadians, said Mr. Breithaupt, the advent of parity between the currencies has become both a point of pride and a spur to travel. His own parents had been “on the fence” about a trip to the city later this year, he said, but they told him last week that they would come, citing the exchange rate as a deciding factor.

Thankfully, America can still invoke its hegemony in certain ways:

For Canadian visitors, the cold shower on their newfound pride comes on the way out. At the border bridges operated by the Niagara Falls Bridge Commission, the fare can be paid with $3 American or $3.50 Canadian — a far cry from parity.

Drivers are complaining to toll takers, “Gee, our dollars are about at par, why is the toll so different?” said Tom Garlock, the commission’s general manager.

Lately, he said, more of them have been holding on to their loonies and paying in United States currency. The commission, which raised the toll last spring from $2.50 American (the Canadian rate did not change), is considering another adjustment to account for the exchange-rate shift, Mr. Garlock said, but first it wants more evidence that parity is here to stay.