Photograph by steuben on Flickr Reader Daniel pointed our attention to this photograph of a military trailer, carrying Humvees and headed towards Manhattan on Flatbush. He noticed that the center one was "outfitted with the so-called non-lethal Active Denial System." What's the Active Denial System, you ask? Here's how the AP described ADS in 2007: "The military calls its new weapon an 'active denial system,' but that's an understatement. It's a ray gun that......

Photograph of soldiers in the 2nd Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment studying a map during a house search in Baghdad by Anja Niedringhaus/AP Five years ago today, the United States became involved with the Iraq War. While many Americans are unhappy with the war, per the Washington Post, "For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed." Today President Bush......

Some dogs traveling to the U.S. from Iraq weren't dogs of war or trained to sniff explosives. Instead, they provided a little comfort and unconditional love to soldiers stuck in a war zone. With the help of the International SPCA's Baghdad Pups program, two dogs named Liberty and K-Pot have been adopted by soldiers' families. Because the military doesn't allow units to take adopted dogs with them when they move, soldiers either had to turn......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a ceiling collapse at Franklin Ave. and Union St. in Brooklyn, a pedestrian was fatally struck on Queens Blvd. in Woodhaven, Queens, and an unusual rescue on the south bound tower of the Throgs Neck Bridge in Queens. An undercover cop forgot to turn off the wire he was wearing while discussing 11 bags of cocaine he seized in a Brooklyn bust that were never turned in. He was......

Come next year, when you're flying in and out of JFK, your flight may be slightly less delayed than it's been in the past. U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters announced a plan today to reduce the number of hourly flights at JFK International Airport to 82 or 83 flights, depending on the time of day. That would be down from 95 this past summer and what would have been 104 an hour next summer. Secretary......

Joseph Jirovec and Kimberly Babajko are two of ten people arrested in an attack that was initiated by a friendly greeting of "Happy Channukah!" aboard a Q train in Brooklyn last week. Both Jirovec and Babajko have criminal records for assaulting minorities and could face hate crime charges in their latest brush with justice. Both are scheduled to appear in Brooklyn Criminal Court today for the vicious beating they allegedly administered to Walter Adler, who......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: an armed robbery on Washington Ave. in the Bronx, a bank robbery on 18th Ave. in Brooklyn, and a pedestrian struck on 69th St. and Queens Blvd. in Queens. Amidst "barbs and accusations," talks between studios and the writers guild appear to have broken down. Repeats will continue, as will Seth Meyers' long circular picketing sojourn. Animals at the Queens City Zoo will be receiving special holiday culinary treats......

A deal with an undercover operative quickly turned deadly yesterday for a man looking to sell a hand grenade in the Bronx. Federal agents and an NYPD detective were monitoring a conversation being held in a car yesterday between the grenade seller and operative. It was not expected the seller would have the grenade on him at the time, so when he produced it, agents rushed the scene in the interest of public safety. The......

The Thanksgiving Day and Thanksgiving Day Eve have emerged as some of the busiest travel days of the year. While the media shows shots of crowded airports and train stations on the Wednesdays before Thanksgiving (like today), the Bureau of Transportation Statistics says that when personal vehicle travel is included into calculations, "Thanksgiving Day is actually a heavier long-distance travel day [to and from a destination more than 50 or more miles away] than......

Realizing that air traffic congestion is terrible and will be even worse next week during Thanksgiving holiday, President Bush announced that the FAA is working on new ideas, plus military airspace will be opened up for five days to civilian planes. If using military airspace (the "Thanksgiving Express Lane") works well this time around, it may reopened for the Christmas holidays. The other measures the President announced were: FAA will focus on preventing delays......

Democrats Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Dianne Feinstein joined nine Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee and approved the nomination of Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey to go to the full Senate. The vote was 11-8, the eight opposing votes from the remaining Democrats on the committee. His confirmation is expected next week. Mukasey - and his supporters - has faced criticism after not declaring waterboarding illegal. Schumer has an op-ed in today's NY Times......

Scotland’s Black Watch is an elite military regiment whose history stretches back almost three centuries. The regiment most recently saw action as part of the British Army’s deployment in Iraq, where seven members lost their lives – five of the men in the space of 11 days in 2004. The National Theatre of Scotland tracked down some of the Black Watch soldiers upon their return to Scotland and, over the course of several months......

Marko Perkovic (known as Thompson on stage, portrayed by Kitler at right) is coming to town, and the protesters are awaiting -- with good reason. The Croatian rock star is known for nostalgically warbling for the Ustaša regime and glorifying the Nazis in his songs, and we can't imagine his anti-Semitism sing-a-longs are going to be very popular here in New York. The musician isn't all about the controversial topics (though it does get him......

We recently visited Fox News Channel’s morning show Fox & Friends. Unlike most of the other morning shows it is a freewheeling kind of crazy romp that definitely has “Fox attitude”. We don’t know if that “Fox attitude” is what gives a different on-set vibe compared to other news sets, but it did seem like less of a precision military operation than their competition at the Today Show. It could be that the show......

Performance artist and activist Bill Talen, AKA Reverend Billy, has been raising hell in New York City for so long now it’s hard to imagine this town without him. Since first seizing his sidewalk pulpit in the late 90s to combat the Disneyfication of Times Square, the reverend has been consistently down with a host of local and international progressive causes. With the help of his raucous Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, he also puts on......

During his weekly radio address yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg proposed that Governors Island be turned into the site of a sprawling public health institute that he would bankroll with funds from his own private foundation. After the city bought the island for $1 from the federal government several years ago, the former military site and Coast Guard station has been relatively underutilized. Bloomberg's plan envisions an institute that would draw health experts from around the world......

Historical ecologists and research cartographers are using historical pre-Revolution military maps produced by the British to create a 21st Century digital rendering of the topography of Manhattan in the 17th Century, before the arrival of European colonists. The New Yorker has a slideshow of a number of images that are attempts to show Manhattan as it was occupied solely by Lenape Indians. The basis for the topographical model was drawn from this 1782 map*......

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad headed to New York today, but not telling Iranian state-run TV, "The United States is a big and important country with a population of 300 million. Due to certain issues, the American people in the past years have been denied correct and clear information about global developments and are eager to hear different opinions." He added that the U.N. General Assembly was an "important podium" for Iran's views to be......

People planning weddings - or people wondering why they've seen so many weddings outside lately: Theres a nice article about the trend towards weddings in parks and other public spaces in the city in today's NY Times Style section. With parks - complete with dazzling views - getting cleaner and safer, couples are getting married in Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn and Gantry Plaza in Queens. The most important thing to investigate is......

If The New York Times needs a rationale for allegedly discounting the ad rate it offered the advocacy group MoveOn for its ad alleging that General Petraeus was betraying his country my misrepresenting the true state of Iraq, we suggest characterizing it as a loss leader, because a lot of ink is being spilled and paid for in response to it. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani hasn't even won the Republican nomination yet,......

The prominent Democratic party donor and California fugitive Norman Hsu's connection to New York City's New School is examined in the NY Times today. Hsu donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to national Democrats like Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to governors like Eliot Spitzer of NY and Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, and NYC politicians like City Council members Christine Quinn and John Liu and City Comptroller William Thompson. Hsu, who had been wanted......

From 1910 until 1963, when New York actually had a Pennsylvania Station instead of a dingy 1960s subterranean rat warren beneath a hockey rink and office towers, twenty-two stone eagles stood guard over the McKim, Mead, and White masterpiece. The eagles themselves, along with almost all the other stone artwork on the station were the work of artist Adolph A. Weinman, who among other things created Civic Fame atop the Municipal Building and the......

Movie blogger Jeffrey Wells counts 12 films about America’s entanglements in the Middle East coming down the pipe this year. It’ll be some feat if even one of them matches the urgency, power and electricity of Iphigenia 2.0, Charle’s Mee’s self-described “sampling” of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. You may know the essential storyline: Agamemnon’s army is left stranded en route to the Trojan War when the goddess Artemis stifles the wind to punish him for......

Reader Dan got this notice from his Madison Square Park-area building:THE FAA HAS ADVISED THAT TWO (2) MILITARY F-15 AIRCRAFT WILL BE PERFORMING A FLYOVER OVER NEW YORK CITY AT 1330 HOURS ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 17TH, 2007. THE AIRCRAFT WILL FLY ALONG THE EAST RIVER AND THEN VEER OUT TO THE EAST. THIS NOTIFICATION IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND IS INTENDED TO ALLAY ANY CONCERNS OR FEARS OF POTENTIAL MILITARY ACTIVITY OVER NEW......

Karl Rove, the political mastermind who maneuvered George W. Bush to the White house twice, will be stepping down from his role as President Bush's political adviser at the end of the month. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Rove explained, "I just think it's time. There's always something that can keep you here, and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of......

Local news stations are reporting late this evening that an unverified radiological threat was made against New York City sometime Friday. The city's alert level remains at the long-standing orange level though. WNBC passes along a statement from the NYPD: "While the threat remains unverified, our counterterrorism posture, which is reconfigured daily based on intelligence from around the world, has been modified to include increased deployment of radiological sensors, including vehicle, marine and helicopter-mounted, as......

We're less than a week away from the Times Square Kiss-In! Every year on the anniversary marking the end of World War II, the Times Square Alliance invites couples (though strangers would be more appropriate) to come make out in the same spot this nameless couple did just 62 years ago. The nurse eventually outed herself in the '80s, once she was a safe distance from the more "dignified" times. That day there were 750,000......

Rome: Season 2 As another season of Emmy nominations show, those folks over at HBO original programming know what they're doing. Complex shows filled with meaty characters, lavish spectacle and quite a few racy scenes make those premium cable fees seem well worth the expense. However, if you missed out on the two seasons of Rome, the epic struggle of life during the time of Julius Caesar that's a bit of The Sopranos in togas,......

Yesterday, the odd news about the NYPD's arrest of three men involved with an egg-shaped submarine near the Queen Mary 2, off the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, revealed that a Brooklyn artist was behind the whole benign operation. Police Commissioner called artist Duke Riley's stunt "marine mischief," adding that the "creative craft of three adventuresome individuals" did "not pose any terrorist threat." The NY Times describes Riley's intentions:Mr. Riley’s plan was also military, in a......

Representatives Anthony Weiner and Jerrold Nadler announced that they are introducing legislation to block a $20 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The Sun reports the pair stood in front of the Saudi Consulate, questioning the logic of the Bush administration's plan. Nadler said, "The folly of this arms deal is beyond belief. Saudi Arabia is the no. 1 exporter of terrorism in the world today." Supporters of the deal, which includes advanced weaponry, "say......