The Staten Island Advance has been following the turmoil brewing between a Wiccan family and their neighbors. The South Shore home at the center of the controversy is a duplex, half belonging to the Wiccan devotees, Ivy Colmer Vanderborgh, her husband and mother (the husband isn't Wiccan). Not hiding their practices, their property is decorated with a "witchy weather vane and cauldron out front," along with a massive stained-glass pentacle. Before the front yard cauldron......

The NY Times has an article this weekend that focuses on the overused and so over H word. Hipsters! They're still here, in all their b&w; print glory. This time they're settling down in Staten Island to make babies. The new slow-growing hipster mecca has been a nearly silent Siren for a few years, drawing the hipster crowd over from Brooklyn -- the Times even tells us that at least one resident there wears "black......

City trash inspectors have been checking out neighborhoods all around town and say that the South Shore of Staten Island has the cleanest streets. The dirtiest? Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, where residents tell the Daily News that drivers litter the streets. A church administrator said, "It seems every time we sweep, more trash comes." How do trash inspectors rate the streets? There's a scale, and according to the News, "3.0 is the dirtiest rating and 1.0 is......

Yesterday, the special election held for a City Council seat in Brooklyn's 40th District brought some history: Dr. Mathieu Eugene (pictured on the left) became the first Haitian-born member of the City Council - and he has been called the "Haitian Sensation" in the media. Eugene won an election with 10 candidates vying for the seat vacated by Yvette Clarke, who won a Congressional seat last fall. Armed with endorsements from Clarke, health care workers......

If you live in the 40th District, an area that covers parts of Crown Heights, Flatbush and East Flatbush, you can vote in tomorrow special election to the seat that used to belong to former City Councilwoman - now Congresswoman - Yvette Clarke. And there's another special election for a City Council seat in Staten Island as well, so South Shore voters, head to the polls. Clarke has given her support to Mathie Eugene, who......

The Department of Education will start to close five struggling high schools beginning next September. The schools are Urban Peace Academy and School for the Physical City in Manhattan and Samuel J. Tilden, South Shore, and the embattled Lafayette in Brooklyn. The DOE attributed the closings to, as the Daily News put it, "dismal graduation rates, consistently low test scores and lackluster demand." The NY Times notes that four of the high schools were "run......

Beware of that cute stray cat you see in Staten Island - the borough is facing a a "frightening" spread of rabies. The Staten Island Advance reports that City Councilman Michael McMahon wants to convene an emergency task force made up of the health department and NYPD, as "23 raccoons, three skunks and three cats have been found with rabies" since April. A West Brighton man who found a stray kitten and brought it to......

Two weeks ago, an diaper box of three abandoned kittens was found on the South Shore of Staten Island. And now it turns out that they probably had rabies, as one of the kittens positively tested for rabies. Vets tested a kitten that was put down after it became "lethargic, lost [its] appetite and developed blindness and paralysis"; its litter mate is being tested. The Staten Island Advance reports that the third kitten died after......

First the Staten Island Yankee's go on the block and then Bloomberg starts to get serious about cleaning up traffic on the fifth borough. We guess yesterday was just a SI news day, and the Advance seems to agree. Anyway, Bloomberg's "road map" for Staten Island is actually pretty standard fare politician. "Staten Island is our fastest-growing borough, and its infrastructure has not kept up with its phenomenal growth," said the Bloom (actual stats:......

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