Last week there were rumblings of the writers' strike coming to an end, over the weekend it was pretty much confirmed, and since then the TV-nation has been waiting with bated breath. Until last night, that is, when word came in that the WGA (trying to steal Obama's thunder?) announced that the strike has officially come to an end. Fin! In the last of what has seemed like an endless amount of WGA press releases......

Photograph of Michael Strahan, coach Tom Coughin (holding the Vince Lombardi trophy) and quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning by Tien Mao Gothamist was amazed after the Giants won the Super Bowl, the city went wild, and it witnessed a ticker-tape parade.Barack Obama drew 20,000+ ahead of Seattle’s Saturday caucus.Londonist had Super Tuesday too.Elusive guerrilla street artist Banksy revisits Los Angeles.After the Patriots lost the Super Bowl and came this close to making......

As we mentioned yesterday, the writers' strike may be coming to an end. Michael Eisner leaked that we'd be hearing news of it this weekend, and the former Disney CEO was right. Today Variety reports that "the WGA has finalized its tentative agreement with the majors and will present details of the pact to members today in meetings in Los Angeles and New York." The New York meeting is taking place at the Crowne Plaza......

Photograph of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at their Democratic debate in Los Angeles last week by Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Yesterday, the Daily News and Newsday offered editorials endorsing Hillary Clinton for Tuesday's NY State Democratic Primary. While the News calls both Clinton and Barack Obama are "compelling choices," disagrees with both candidates' strategies for ending the war in Iraq and finds Obama inspirational, the News ultimately finds Clinton to be the "stronger" of......

Photo by Benzadrine. New York City faced some stiff competition in the Forbes Top 10 “Misery Measure”, but ultimately moped away with a respectable fourth place, losing only to such perennial dystopias as Detroit (#1, forever); Flint, Michigan (#3) and… Stockton, California, in the #2 slot? Apparently, the Bay Area satellite has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country and a swelling population. To compile the list, Forbes compared 150 of America’s largest......

A study to be published later this year in the Journal of Food Safety proves that George Costanza’s cavalier method of double dipping his chip is, in fact, “like putting your whole mouth right in the dip.” For those who may have missed the Seinfeld episode or somehow not seen it reenacted at every party serving dip since it aired in 1993, we’ve posted the scene below. Suffice it to say that Costanza’s preferred dipping......

We know that Giants co-owner and movie producer Steve Tisch has been trying to ramp up the star power for the Giants sidelines. After Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and Cameron Diaz were seen at a game last fall, Tisch told the NY Times, he brings "the spices, the taste, the flavor" to the Giants (if the Giants experience were a soup; the other co-owners, the Maras, would bring the meat and potatoes). This past......

After intense speculation about why the masseuse who discovered Heath Ledger's body last Tuesday called actress Mary-Kate Olsen multiple times, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly spoke to reporters yesterday to clear the air. Kelly said, "We believe that of the three phone calls by the masseuse to Mary-Kate Olsen, only one got through. That call was 99 seconds long." Commissioner Kelly further emphasized, "There is absolutely no indication that investigators were going to speak to Mary-Kate......

Photograph of the memorial outside 421 Broome Street taken on Friday by vinnie 716 on Flickr Last night, the G'Day USA Australia Ball was held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, concluding Australia Week festivities. But the week held sadness, after Australian actor Heath Ledger was found dead in his Soho apartment on Tuesday. At the ball, Australian Counsel-General John Olsen read an unexpected letter from Ledger's father Kim:"Heath is, and always will be, an......

Photograph of the crowd outside the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home by David Karp/AP Yesterday, over a hundred people - made up of "fans, reporters and photographers" - waited outside the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, where the body of actor Heath Ledger had been kept since ME's autopsy. Ledger had been found dead in a SoHo apartment by his masseuse and housekeeper on Tuesday afternoon. The cause of death is inconclusive, but he......

Geez, the weather this winter has been uneventful. There's no letup of dull weather in sight, at least in New York. We took a gander at LAist this morning only to see that Los Angeles has more snow than Gotham City. The massive west coast storm has dropped up to eighteen inches of snow at higher elevations in Los Angeles County. Today is sunny, slightly cool and windy. Tomorrow: Clouds, slightly less cool and not......

Today the alternative weekly New York Press announced the resignation of their new sex columnist, Claudia Lonow, after her debut column – and the cover story, no less – was found to have used some questions from old Dan Savage advice columns. The answers were her own, but, as Jezebel discovered, not questions like the one seeking advice about [paraphrasing] ‘what to do when you walk in on your girlfriend canoodling with her noticeably......

Photograph of Mayor Bloomberg speaking, with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Governor Ed Rendell (not pictured), under Los Angeles freeways by Ann Johansson/AP It's Mike and Arnie, together again! The Time magazine co-cover pols, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, made a Los Angeles appearance with Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell to announce the creation of a "nonpartisan organization that will advocate for more, and smarter, federal spending on infrastructure." The Mayor and maybe......

Photograph of Mayor Bloomberg and Lance Armstrong by Harry Cabluck/AP The day after giving his State of the City address, Mayor Bloomberg headed out of town and to capital of the Lone Star State. Sure, Bloomberg did have a press conference with Lance Armstrong and former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, but more interesting was his meeting with Ross Perot's former campaign manager! The billionaire mayor had a "private" meeting with Clay Mulford, who is......

Johnny Podres died last night in a hospital in upstate New York at the age of 75. He'd been suffering from serious medical problems for some time. In 1955, Podres ensured himself a place in Brooklyn and baseball history as a young left-hander who pitched the Dodgers to their only World Series Championship while in Brooklyn, and he did it against the hated Yankees. Ask someone real quick, "Who was the World Series MVP in......

We almost thought that the NY Post website was offering a game of "Which one of these things is not like the other?" But it turns out that celebrities Christina Aguilera, Nicole Richie, Courtney Thorne-Smith and David Alan Grier all had babies. The four babies - two boys (from Aguilera and Thorne-Smith) and two girls (Richie's and Grier's) - were born at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai, the hospital where Britney Spears was recently hospitalized and......

NBC News to Cover Golden Globes To plug the giant hole in the network’s schedule this Sunday, caused by the WGA not giving a waiver to Dick Clark Productions for the Golden Globe Awards, NBC has handed the whole thing over to its news division. First at 7 p.m., there will be a two hour Dateline NBC filled with interviews of those actors will ignore the Screen Actors Guild’s request to boycott the show (to......

LAist listed a top ten list of sorts: things they hope not to see in Los Angeles in 2008. (one example, pictured above). Shanghaiist was surprised to learn that "godless," "atheist," and "commie" China is soon going to be the world's largest supplier of Bibles! Torontoist picked some of their favorite photos of 2007. Londonist was relieved to hear the fire at the Royal Marsden hospital didn't harm any of the patients even though......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a power outage on Beach Channel Dr. in Queens, a shooting on Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn, and a car in the water at Rockaway and Brookville Blvds. in Queens. If you think you're buying a super-cheap iPod at a Mom and Pop electronics store, you're probably buying a fake. Some Queens residents will be relieved to know that LIRR trains will no longer blast their horns for 15 to......

The NY Post has another story in the ongoing ogling at Theresa Duncan's death. The East Village artist apparently "fell into suicidal depression after telling friends that oddball rocker Beck backed out of her movie project." So now we have yet another baffling peek into the paranoid mindset Duncan and her long time boyfriend Jeremy Blake were in when they committed suicide, just one week apart from each other. In the January issue of Vanity......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on Franklin Ave. and 169th St. in the Bronx, a missing child on West 54th St. in Manhattan, and a stabbing on Fulton St. and Red Hook Lane in Brooklyn. Walter O'Malley was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame recently. The former owner of the Dodgers, he infamously moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles because the city wouldn't build him a new stadium. Times......

Okay, so we've heard about how Rudy Giuliani's mayoral administration billed his police security detail expenses - accrued during trips to the Hamptons, possibly visiting then-mistress Judi Nathan - to various obscure city agencies. And then there are reports that Nathan, now married to the former mayor, used her NYPD security detail to chauffeur friends and family. Naturally, now there's talk of the police security expenses of Giuliani's then-wife Donna Hanover. The Post's David Seifman......

Stars 3, Rangers 2: What good is outshooting the opponent 41-18 if it doesn't lead to a win? That's what the Rangers have to ask themselves after Sunday's disappointing loss to the Stars. No matter how this game is measured -- except for the score that is -- the Rangers appeared to outplay the Stars. Mike Smith repeatedly stifled the Blueshirts' attack, however, and goals from Jaromir Jagr and Brendan Shanahan didn't end up as......

In Los Angeles, LAist most definitely celebrated Thanksgiving like no other. After all, one has to keep up all the energy to keep on walking the line at the Writers Strike and fighting the unfortunate return of the wildfires in Malibu, which single handedly destroyed over fifty homes within the first 24 hours. National outlets may be covering the fires, but CNN also found it is easier to buy a gun than fruit and......

SFist witnessed a new apartment building tszuj the skyline with spectacular, gaudy turquoise aplomb, the (informal) renaming of the Mission/SOMA neighborhood border, the return of the Maltese Falcon, the Mayor Gavin Newsom mea culpa-ing over his Hawaiian getaway during the oil spill, and double-decker buses hitting the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and some baseball player named Barry Bonds is a liar whose pants, it seems, are totally on fire. LAist continues to cover the......

"O Stephon, Stephon, wherefore art thou Stephon?" Those are the words that Isiah Thomas might be saying. At least if what one media outlet is reporting is true. Not because the Knicks seem like they their star point guard after last night, or because Stephon Marbury is AWOL, but because the Knicks star point guard may have the dish on his head coach. While on the flight to Phoenix, Marbury learned that he wasn't going......

Members of the Writers Guild of America have been striking in Los Angeles and New York this past week over details of a basic contract between writers and producers - one of the biggest sticking points is the amount of residuals writers get from DVD and new media distribution. The NY Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd asked Seth Meyers (who we spoke to on Tuesday) to give her a weekend update about the strike:......

More Rescue Me for Next Season Cable network FX has picked up the Denis Leary FDNY dramedy Rescue Me for a fifth season. The show which films in the city and all over the tri-state area will not be getting the standard cable 13 episode season as it has for the past four seasons, but instead will be getting a 22 episode run split into two runs. Bolaris is Officially Heading South After months of......

Well, it didn't take long for Joe Torre to find a new job (not that it should have). He's trading The Bronx for Chavez Ravine and "fans" like Rudy Giuliani for Posh Spice. The Post is reporting that the former Yankees manager has agreed in principle to a three-year $14.5 million deal (hopefully there are no performance incentives) to be the next manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He would be replacing Grady Little, who......

Stating that “this is about being a New York Yankee again today,” and proclaiming, “I expect to be in the Fall Classic next October,” Joe Girardi met the media as the next manager of the New York Yankees today. Girardi sought to differentiate himself from his predecessor saying, “I am going to be myself. There are expectations on me and my coaching staff, the same that were on Joe Torre when he came in......