A class action lawsuit was filed in New York federal court yesterday, alleging that real estate firm "Brown Harris Stevens Brooklyn LLC (BHS) and its senior vice president and two real estate agents discriminate against families with children attempting to rent apartments in Brooklyn." Park Slope parents, and even soon-to-be stroller pushers, may be having a hard time finding the perfect brownstone. Seems Brown Harris Stevens, and other real estate agents (see: Craigslist), are discriminating......

The 61-year-old Stamford, CT man accused of sexually abusing three children in two different Brooklyn park bathrooms begged for mercy as he was being apprehended, but pleaded not guilty in front of a judge. Michael Martin was arrested after allegedly molesting three children at two Brooklyn parks. After the second incident, Martin was quickly caught by civilian patrol officers at the park and begged them not to call the police. He allegedly yelled, "I know......

A 61-year-old man from Stamford, CT, Michael Martin, was arrested Thursday afternoon after he allegedly abused three children at two separate restrooms in Brooklyn parks. The first incident occurred at a park in Gravesend, Brooklyn Thursday, when Martin is accused of following an 8-year-old girl and a 4-year boy into a public restroom where he sexually assaulted them. Later, he is accused of attacking another 8-year-old girl in the bathroom of a Kensington, Brooklyn park.......

Sure, politicians, pundits, psychiatrists, and anyone else who can string together two words have weighed in on Eliot Spitzer's disgrace. But it's just cuter when a little princess explains it all.......

Two separate incidents Brooklyn resulted in the death of a 27-year-old man on a Brownsville sidewalk, a nine-year-old girl wounded, and a 13-year-old boy clinging to life. Police are investigating whether the shot that struck the nine-year-old girl in the arm yesterday was related to the shooting that killed Robert Morgan two blocks away in Brownsville. The girl was apparently hit by an errant bullet that crashed through a window in a family's fifth-floor apartment.......

Image: The Bay Ridge Rover. Last week a group of concerned Bay Ridge parents and local officials held a rally and picket line outside a neighborhood Verizon Wireless retailer. The group was demanding the company remove the cell phone receivers installed on a rooftop near P.S. 185; they say the receivers emit dangerously high radiofrequency (RF) emissions and should not be placed near schools. They are also calling for legislation limiting where the receivers can......

In the wake of the deaths of three children on Saturday, apparently killed by their mother, the Nassau County Children's Protection Services supervisor was suspended today. Caseworkers had gone to Leatrice Brewer's apartment to investigate complaints, but she was not in. According to Newsday, Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi said CPS supervisor Eddie Arrendondo failed to send caseworkers on Saturday to follow up, "despite the warnings by relatives that the children were in mortal......

New York University's Child Study Center is pulling the plug on a controversial ad campaign publicizing childhood mental health problems that was considered stigmatizing. The campaign was meant to raise awareness of conditions like Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Asperger's Syndrome, autism, depression, and bulimia. Critics strongly objected to the style of the campaign, however, which took the form of realistic looking ransom notes addressed to parents that stressed kids with these conditions would be doomed......

Remember that cruel(la) couple from Long Island that enslaved two Indonesian women who worked in their mansion? After their million dollar bail plan was announced back in June we hadn't heard much about these two. Today, however, silence was broken after Varsha Mahender Sabhnani and her hubby Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani's trial has ended...and the latest is not good news for them! The terrible two-some "were each convicted of all charges in a 12-count federal indictment......

Some time ago the New Yorker ran an amusing “Talk of the Town” feature on nightlife crusader Roy Den Hollander, who, unlike most nightclub scolds, isn’t fighting against excessive noise and loose morals – he’s out to put a stop to the scourge that is Ladies’ Night. And not because he disdains the ladies or the night, but because Den Hollander, attorney at law and self-styled pick-up artist, sees it as yet another way The......

A nine-year-old girl remains in critical condition following surgery yesterday at Long Island Jewish Hospital after an unregistered van carrying school children was struck by a city bus. The accident occurred Friday morning allegedly after the passenger van cut off a Q46 bus in Fresh Meadows, Queens. The bus clipped the van, sending it into a spin, shattering its windows, and ejecting a bench seat into the street. The van was carrying seven children, six......

Earlier this morning, an MTA bus collided with a school van transporting children in Fresh Meadows, Queens. Details of the accident are thin, but initial reports say that up to 9 people are injured, most of which are children. The collision occurred just after 8 a.m. when the Q46 bus struck the van. The FDNY says that two critically injured children were sent to Long Island Jewish Hospital with one other child. Three other children......

Have you seen the copper-toned glow emanating from Rockefeller Center? It's not The Tree...it's a penny harvest field! The installation is the first phase of Penny Harvest, and the copious coins came from students in NYC who have collected $1 million in change. The pennies will later go to different charities and towards improving the students communities.New York first lady Silda Wall Spitzer joined hundreds of public school children on Monday to unveil a mass......

Caution: Half the bathrooms at the Tribeca venue currently hosting Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s No Dice are designed for children; the tiny toilets and sinks hover inches above the floor and may give adult users a disorienting sense of vertigo. The actors’ dressing room, which opens directly onto the performance space, is marked with a laminated sign that declares: “No Adults Are Allowed in the Bouncy Castle!” The company inherited these elements from this......

The two men who fell more than 40 stories, when the window washing rig they had just stepped onto collapsed, were brothers. Edgar and Alcides Moreno were Ecuadorians who had come to the U.S. and lived in Linden, NJ. They worked for City Wide Window Cleaning and were regular fixtures at the Solow Tower Apartments building on East 66th St. The brothers were just starting work yesterday morning when they may have stepped on to......

Moving can take a real toll on the environment. Think of all the cardboard boxes, the truck(s), the frequent opening of doors to climate-controlled rooms and the products and solutions you use to clean the whole place down for the next tenants because you're an awesome person bucking for canonization. Step one on reducing your impact -- the easiest step -- is recycling. And it's not too hard to find earth-friendly cleaning products. But......

A 65-year-old man was killed during his bicycle ride to work when he was struck by an open car door in the bike lane at 6th Avenue and 36th Street. David Smith was then pushed off his bike and into the path of a box truck, which hit him. Smith lived on West 9th Street and worked as an engineer at Town Hall in midtown. His partner of 36 years John Moody said that he......

A "rising star" in the Fire Department was found with three gunshot to the head in his Staten Island home Sunday morning. The ME's office said that Douglas J. Mercereau's death was a homicide. It's believed that his 38-year-old wife, Janet Redmond-Mercereau, is a suspect (the Daily News calls her the "prime suspect"). She called 911 around 8:25AM on Sunday, saying she found her husband's body. The Staten Island Advance says the couple had "started......

The fatal shooting outside Radio Perfecto restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue between 118th and 119th Streets was prompted by a bar fight. Twenty-three year-old Delquan Kearns was shot in the head while his brother Stephan Jones, 27, was shot in the arm after they argued with another group of men over a drink around 3AM on Sunday. Their mother told the Post, "My sons said they were at the bar and that some guy grabbed one......

Today we have illusionists like David Blaine performing "stunts" in the city, but back in the day there was the real deal stuntman, Evel Knievel. Just after making news by making nice with Kanye West (after suing him over this video), he died yesterday in Clearwater, Florida at the age of 69. The NY Times reports he had "failing health for years with diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung condition. In 1999, he......

The Hershey candy company is under fire for producing a breath mint candy that police say is hard to distinguish from an illegal drug. Philadelphia cops are complaining that a new iteration of Hershey's Ice Breakers product looks a lot like crack cocaine. When we initially read a quote from a local Philadelphia news station––"Even veteran narcotics officers acknowledged that they could not tell the difference between a package of crack cocaine and the breath......

An Upper East Side lingerie shop was robbed yesterday by a man posing as a vacuum cleaner salesman. In what the New York Post describes as a "Panty Raid," a black man in his 40s or 50s was let into Lingerie & Company on 3rd Ave. and 71st St., where he bound the 77-year-old clerk in the back room and robbed the store of cash and merchandise. The Daily News writes that the "Park Ave.......

We're sure that one Long Island father thought to himself, "If I can't use my for a urine test, I'll use my child's urine..." when he decided to take his 9-year-old out of school. The problem is, Suffolk police officers happened to be passing by the deli where the 36-year-old father and son were and became suspicious when they saw "the child fixing his pants and watched as the father poured something from a coffee......

Alice Waters is considered by many to be a revolutionary. She opened Chez Panisse in 1971 and began awakening America to the benefits of local, sustainable agriculture by changing her menu according to what was available seasonally. She has taken this charge beyond her restaurant through her books as well as through her Edible Schoolyard program, which enables public school children to explore the connection between what they eat and where it comes from through......

Last week, the Daily News trumpeted the plight of Amarjit Singh. Singh was injured after a mentally disturbed man's stabbing rampage on Second Avenue in October, and hasn't worked since the incident. Lee Coleman stormed into the kitchen of the Texas BBQ Smokehouse, where Singh worked as a chef, and grabbed a bunch of knives. Singh tried to stop him, but Coleman ended up slashing his left side, almost taking off his ear. In spite......

"With Spitzer, it seems like he’s walked into buzz saws of his own devising." - Richard Norton Smith, biographer of former Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, to the NY Times Today, Governor Spitzer dropped in on the State Assembly Democrats' annual meeting, which has been characterized as being "almost like a pre-game show to the session," held at the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn. According to video from Elizabeth Benjamin at the Daily Politics, an almost warm-and-......

The family of late Detective Dillon Stewart was joined by Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other city officials in the dedication of a Prospect Park playground in Stewart's honor. The Parade Ground Playground, at the corner of Caton Avenue and Parade Place, near East 16th, was renamed the Dillon Stewart Playground. Stewart was killed on November 28, 2005, when he and his partner stopped a car for a traffic violation. Someone......

A state disciplinary board fined Dr. Mark Nesselson $10,000 and ruled that the pediatrician could only work under supervision from now on. Nesselson filled out fake paperwork for parents who did not want their children to receive required immunizations before attending school, which is required by law. The doctor was caught when he moved to Hawaii and handed off patient records indicating that he had never actually immunized some children to another doctor, who reported......

On November 25, 2006, groom-to-be Sean Bell and his friends were leaving the Kalua nightclub in Queens when undercover police confronted them. In the confusion that ensued (the police thinking the men were armed or were going to the car to retrieve a gun, uncertainty over whether the police identified themselves leading Bell and his friends to think they were being carjacked) five undercover cops fired 50 times at Bell's car. His friends Joseph......

A 25-year-old man was stabbed to death inside the Flatiron club Duvet early Friday morning. Shamel McKinsey stumbled outside and collapsed outside on West 21st street, "blood gushing from his wounds, just after 3:30 a.m.," according to the Daily News. McKinsey, who had an arrest record for drug possession with intent to sell, was pronounced dead at St. Vincent's Hospital. Police suspect that McKinsey may have been partying with the rapper Fabolous at Duvet,......