Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

A Columbia student fell to her death from her dorm last night in what was originally reported as an accident but is now being treated as a possible suicide. Martha Corey-Ochoa, who was 18-years-old, fell from her 14th floor dorm around 11 p.m., reports Gothamist. The freshman’s dorm was on 114th Street in Manhattan. Columbia’s dean, Kevin Shollenberger, emailed students to offer his condolences, according to Gothamist.

A witness told the New York Post people filled W. 114th Street shortly after the incident, and CPR was performed, but Corey-Ochoa later died at the hospital.  The Daily News reported police were treating the death as a suicide, because of “a history of psychiatric problems.” At this time, reports of suicide are unconfirmed.

In an article published last fall on Patch.com, Corey-Ochoa was depicted as academically hard-working. Gothamist reports Columbia’s school year has not yet begun, but freshman orientation started yesterday.

—Alissa Fleck

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Two are dead and six were wounded in shootings in the Bronx and Queens this past Sunday. These primarily drug-related shootings follow a long streak of summer violence, including a 3-year-old being struck with a stray bullet.

The weekend following the Fourth of July saw seven deaths and 21 injuries from shootings and stabbing violence, reports Gothamist. Seventeen people were shot on the Fourth of July holiday. Between July 2 and July 8, a total of 77 were shot in the City.

Mayor Bloomberg said the Fourth of July traditionally sees a large number of shootings in the City, but this year is particularly out of control. Joe Coscarelli at New York Magazine called the recent shootings “at best a statistical anomaly and at worst a disturbing new trend.”

The Magazine reports the numbers have jumped from last year: “There have been 12 percent more shootings on the year so far, and murders are up to 21 from 18 at this point in 2011 — a jump of almost 17 percent.”

On the issue of whether there is a correlation between heat waves and shooting spikes, a police source recently told the New York Post: “Warm weather means shorter tempers, and the people know that police are doing less stop-and-frisks, so more people carry guns.”

It’s the perfect storm this steamy summer—cops do blame hotter temperatures for the rise in violence, though they also point to recent scrutiny aimed at stop-and-frisk procedures.

Until the recent heat wave, the murder rate was “on pace to be the lowest in years,” reported Business Insider.

—Alissa Fleck

As Buzzfeed reported, conservative Catholic League president Bill Donohue sent some intense emails recently to Shalom Center Director Rabbi Arthur Waskow, threatening the Rabbi over an article he wrote in the Huffington Post in which he criticized the Vatican and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Donohue backed up his arguments with what he said was an old Koch saying, writing, “Ed Koch, my friend, once said that Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them. Think about that the next time you feel compelled to attack my religion.”

This appears to be a very loose interpretation of remarks Koch made earlier this year that were reported by the New York Post’s David Seifman.

Speaking to public policy organization Beit Morasha of Jerusalem, Koch reportedly said,

“We’re 13 million Jews in the whole world — less than one-tenth of 1 percent. And we need allies. The best ally we can have is the Catholic Church. Oh, you can go back in history when they were not great allies. But they proved to be. It started with Pope John XXIII and Pope [John] Paul II. We have to reach out to them.”

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

The last contract between the MTA and its largest union, TWU Local 100, expired on January 15, Gothamist reports. Yet the two have failed to reach a deal in recent negotiations, and things may be getting a little hairy.

MTA Chairman Joe Lhota publicly pleaded with union members by way of a New York Post op-ed piece, saying it’s “time for labor to sacrifice.” Lhota asked for a three-year wage freeze, arguing everyone else has given their share and now it’s time for union workers to do the same.

Lhota pointed to fare and toll hikes for train riders, local business taxes and manager and non-union employee salaries, which have not changed in four years. He also pointed to MTA’s delicate financial situation, which has improved drastically but continues to be hindered by union demands.

The op-ed suggests a “growing rift,” says Capital New York’s Dana Rubinstein. Rubinstein refers to the fact that Lhota has been hesitant to publicly negotiate with union members in the past, maintaining a policy not to publicize such communications in the press. Clearly the two groups have reached an impasse.

“It’s time for labor to be part of the solution,” says Lhota.

TWU responds via its Twitter: “OUTRAGEOUS” and “#Fail.” When a Twitter war is brewing, we know things are serious.

—Alissa Fleck

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Is there a better target for robbery than a shady van filled with thousands of cellphones? That’s just one complication that arises when considering the city’s perplexing cell phone storage procedure for high school students.

Cell phones are banned in city schools—probably with good reason—but students who attend schools with metal detectors, and want cellphones for the commute, must store these phones in trucks or nearby bodegas for a $1 fee. The bodegas and trucks store the phones for the day like a coat check service. That adds up to about $22,800 a day for all New York City high school students.

The New York Post reports these companies make up to $4.2 million a year, while the accumulated “phone check” fees can be a financial stretch for some students. As Gothamist points out, schools with permanent metal detectors often have the most financially challenged students (88 of 1,200 schools have detectors). For many students, money now going toward cellphone storage may have been put toward basic sustenance.

WNYC reports Mayor Bloomberg told students to “leave [their] cellphones at home,” but we’ve all seen enough Law and Order to know kids should not be wandering city streets without some means of communication.

—Alissa Fleck

Everybody knows you can’t run for president without writing a book. As my mom used to say, “They’re all doing it now.” Many of the new political books are about Andrew Cuomo. In fact, Cuomo himself is writing a book, and a New York Post columnist and a writer for Vanity Fair are each writing a book about Cuomo.

The Vanity Fair version has the best chance of being the real thing. For their part, Team Cuomo has been saying they will “cooperate” with the guy from the Post who has been very, very nice to the governor. Team Cuomo has been hinting they might cooperate with the Vanity Fair guy, who is closest to real critical journalism.

It sounds to me like the price of such gubernatorial cooperation might be an “understanding” about how tough the book will be. These things are never put in words, and I would be the last person in the world to suggest that a quid pro quo might be at work here.

If I wrote a book about Cuomo, it would not be about Cuomo. There’s just too much competition. I don’t think Team Cuomo likes me and I am quite sure they wouldn’t cooperate. I once wrote a very complimentary book about Mario Cuomo; very few people read it.

Nope, the way to do it is to write a thinly disguised novel. You could begin with the usual Law & Order-type disclosure making it quite clear that “this book has absolutely nothing to do with any governor living or dead.” The main character’s name might be Anthony. It would have lots of sex and tales of old and new lovers. It would chronicle a huge political divorce that rips two of the dynastic families in the country asunder.

It would show Gov. Anthony to be a loving father who does anything he can for his three lovely daughters. It would show Anthony on the phone daily with his dad, the family patriarch and former governor to whom he was so devoted to he would do anything to further his father’s place in history. A familiar line from the older Cuomo to the younger might be, “Now Anthony, you’ve got to get that guy before he gets you.”

Obviously there would have to be side plots. There would be the U.S. senator who incurred the governor’s wrath because she didn’t fall in line. There would be the former senator, now secretary of state, who had the best chance to put a stop to Anthony’s chance to be president. She would make the ambitious governor crazy.

The novel would chronicle the governor’s chief strategist who went around threatening those who would not go along. He would be heard saying, “We have two speeds: go along or death.” Obviously, you’d have to include at least three of the top legislative leaders. These would include the wily, brilliant Democratic speaker; the silver-haired Republican who owed everything to Anthony, a Democrat who had saved his hash; and a bitter black Democratic Senate minority leader who, but for Anthony’s intervention on behalf of the Republicans, would have been the leader of the Senate.

Of course, there would be the back-room real estate moguls who funded a political action committee to do the young governor’s bidding. They would chuckle that they had a Democrat who was really a closet Republican and they would throw obscene amounts of money into keeping the young governor in power. They would spend more money than any other influence-peddling group.

Naturally, there would have to a beautiful heroine, probably a television anchor who desperately loved our hero and who ended up, after living with him for years, marrying him just before he ran for president so the voters in Kansas would go along. In the background would be a former president who hugged young Anthony when he saw him but kept putting his wife, now the secretary of state, into the catbird seat and urging her to run for president—with her numbers, she couldn’t lose. There would be lots of telephone dialogue between the white-haired ex-president and young Anthony.
That’s just for starters! Once the book comes out, a movie would be inevitable. If you’re an agent out there and like this idea, give me a call.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

Courtesy of Ben Lazar

As 25-year-old Deborah Feldman slides into a booth at an Upper East Side restaurant, wearing a trendy leather jacket and knitted blue sweater, it is difficult to imagine the path she took to get to this exact point in her life, a journey she details in her debut memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. In the memoir, Feldman describes how she was raised mainly by her grandparents in the Satmar community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Feldman writes about sneaking off to a library as a girl to consume illicit books such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda. When she was 17, she was married to a man preselected by her family, with whom she had only spent 30 minutes before the ceremony. At 19, Feldman gave birth to a son. Hoping for a different life, she started secretly attending classes at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied a variety of fields including literature and feminism, and started an anonymous blog detailing her experiences. Through her blog, Feldman was connected with a literary agent and then, while still attending Sarah Lawrence, she finished her memoir and left her community with her son. The book, however, has experienced a fair share of criticism and sparked several conversations about Feldman’s portrayal of her upbringing.

On Thursday, May 17, Feldman will present the work in the Lower East Side at the Tenement Museum, but we sat down with her beforehand to learn more about her work and the community she comes from.

You have said you were surprised by the reaction to—or success of—the book. What do you think people are responding to?

I am surprised the book did well, because with a book like this [the subject] is niche and you expect the book to do at best mid-list. And then something very weird happened. My publicist set me up [with an interview] with the New York Post and I met this woman, [the writer] Sara Stewart, who I loved and adored. We had this great lunch together and I gave a lot to the interview. … Then the article came out and it was nothing like what I thought this person would write … but the Post I guess edited it so that it sounded like these shallow sound bites … but then the Post piece got picked up by three newspapers. Then someone at The View saw it and called me and booked me for the show. But the Post is what got the [people from my community] angry.

Is that a publication that your community reads?

A younger Feldman. Courtesy of Simon and Schuster.

They read whatever is written about them. They are obsessed with how they are portrayed in the media. They want to control everything that is said about them.

They took issue with a lot of things in the [Post] interview that are the truth, but the Post misconstrued it—but it is not misconstrued to a point where you can completely deny it.

So they picked the article apart. From there, the more publicity I got, the more they wanted to knock me down, [but] had the Post not published that article, the dominoes would not have fallen into place.

But then I went on The View and I talked about marital purity, which is a big secret. Nobody talks about it in public ever. It is like we all agree that it is the one thing you cannot talk about because if the rest of the world knows we do this they will never look at us the same. … That’s why their excuse is “they can never understand because it’s so beautiful.” … It all boils down to [one] view and everything is built on that view that women are unpure because they menstruate.

[On The View] I was talking from my experiences and trying to be as simple and clear as possible because a lot of these things are really hard to explain. The funny thing is that I could have said way worse things about the laws of sex and marital purity … I didn’t bring up all the details. I just gave them the basics … and some people can argue that that is beautiful, but it wasn’t beautiful for me.

Feldman poses for her wedding. Courtesy of Simon and Schuster.

You have spoken about going through these marriage rituals and finding them shocking. You couldn’t believe that the women in your community were all doing this. Do women not speak about this?

No one ever talks about it in public. You never discuss it with anyone.

Even among only women?

Well … first of all, people are so bored and have so little to do besides work and take care of babies … so gossip is rolled into a million times its natural size. [Gossip] is the only thing that is safe. You never talk about you. You never confide, so you talk about someone else. It’s how people bond … the women will get together with their babies and have play dates … and gossip about their own families, about their friends, about their neighbors … when you have that kind of attitude obviously everything you do everyone will know.

There is this attitude—it’s almost like communism—of “don’t ever show people how you really feel because everyone will know.” There is no privacy and I think that is why women don’t communicate because they don’t trust each other.

What do they gossip about?

People gossip about everything: Is someone having trouble in his or her marriage? Is someone’s child ill? They will gossip about whatever they can find. They will gossip about someone wearing a brightly colored turban.

You have said that things are changing in the community that you come from, that the girls in your community no longer have to sneak away to the library to find out about a book like yours.

A few things happened that really changed the community drastically. One of those things was Williamsburg becoming cool and cool people moving in, which filled the neighborhood with bars. The rabbis were terrified of this because they knew that it was very tempting for a man to leave his family on a Friday night, walk a couple blocks and go to a bar.

The second thing that happened was the Internet. The Internet arrived and then there were cellphones and smartphones. What happened was there was no longer an effective way to build a wall around the community, because before if you wanted information, you had to go get it and you didn’t want to be seen getting it.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster

You are working on a second book about people who leave religious groups both in America and abroad. What parallels do you find between your own story and theirs?

It’s funny that you say that, because when I wrote the proposal for my second book I didn’t think about it as anything more than a memoir, but when I wrote the memoir it was about other people’s stories, because I was meeting people and their stories where intersecting mine. When the publisher that I work with now, Penguin, read it, they said we see this as a much broader book than just a memoir. [They saw] this as a book about people who leave religion all over the world and what they have in common. Now this is a book about religious refugees.

by Mike Vidafar

Len Levitt, a reporter who wrote the column “One Police Plaza” for Newsday from 1995-2005, was cleared of defamation charges on Mar. 22, 2012. The allegations, brought on by Port Authority Police Officer Francis Pisano, began in 2009, when a book by Levitt, NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country’s Greatest Police Force was reviewed in the New York Post.

A NY Post review of Levitt's s 2009 "NYPD Confidential" sparked legal action

According to an April 4, 2012 press release by The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), who agreed to take on Levitt’s case, the New York Post included a picture of a police officer alongside a review the book, written by freelance journalist T.J. English. Levitt then re-posted the review on his personal website, NYPDConfidential.com.

In Dec. 2009, Officer Pisano brought charges against Levitt, T.J. English, several other members of New York Post and News Corp. (the parent company of the New York Post), maintaining that because Levitt’s book details police corruption, readers would associate the officer photographed with the acts detailed in Levitt’s book, according to the April 4 press release by The NYCLU.

News Corp.’s umbrella (including T.J. English) tied to the New York Post book review were able to reach a settlement outside of court with Pisano in Aug. 2010, according to the verdict issued by Nassau County Supreme Court’s Hon. Thomas A. Adams. However, Levitt was not absolved of litigation alongside his co-defendants. Facing libel and slander charges that totaled $5 mil., according to the NYCLU Press Release, and unable to pay for sustained legal council in his defense, Levitt then found himself allied with NYCLU and attorney Ken Norwick, who acting cooperatively, agreed to take on the charges in Levitt’s defense.

“For any ordinary person who did nothing wrong, being sued for $5 million is disquieting to say the least,” Levitt said. “I am relieved a grateful to the NYCLU for taking my case.”

In establishing Levitt’s right to re-post the review on his website, Norwick established a familiar defense: Levitt’s first amendment rights, which famously establish and protects the freedom of speech, and the rights of the press.

Citing the verdict rendered by Hon. Thomas A. Adams, The NYCLU’s Communications Director, Jennifer Carnig, paraphrased the main reasoning behind the decision. “A ‘re-publisher’ of any work may rely on the research of the original publisher, unless there is reason to question the accuracy of the article, or the good faith of the reporter.”

“In this day and age it’s critically important that we stand up for our First Amendment rights online. No one should be afraid to re-post a story from a reputable source on his or her blog or website,” said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn.

No information, beyond the statement released by the NYCLU’s Jennifer Caring, and the verdict judgment by Hon. Thomas A. Adams concerning the case, particularly Mr. Pisano’s allegations were discovered by reporting staff. However, the NYCLU and Mr. Levitt have a cooperative relationship dating back to Oct. 2011, when the NYCLU agreed to file suit against The NYPD on Levitt’s behalf. That decision was in response to the NYPD’s refusal to make Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s schedule from 2002 to 2010 public under a request filed by Levitt under the Freedom of Information Law in May 2011.

The record-setting townhouse purchased by Henry Silverman (inset left) and wife, Karen Hader (inset right). Patrick mcmullan/evan joseph images, New York Post.

The buyers are Henry Silverman and his wife, Karen Hader, who will have to sit tight in their $4,000-a-month rental at 15 Central Park West until they can move into their new manse, according to the Post.

Keil reports that the townhouse has a garden, two roof terraces, six bedrooms, seven baths, three powder rooms (isn’t “powder room” just a euphemism for “bathroom”? We’re confused, but then again, we only have one bathroom in our apartment).

Silverman, a billionaire, is the former owner of Avis Rent-a-Car and budget hotel chain Days Inn. Coincidentally, not far from Silverman’s new home is the Days Inn on Broadway and West 94th Street, Gov. David Paterson’s motel of choice for extramarital trysts.
But we digress. The point is, if your West Side apartment has a few terraces and powder rooms to spare, you, too, could have a cool $20 million coming your way.