The Dark Knight has officially opened, and the figures are in: the NY Times reports that the movie took in "$18.5 million in gross revenue at its 12 a.m. opening screenings early Friday morning at 3,040 screens, the most ever for midnight shows." Gawker laments about the movie taking the title from 2005's Star Wars, Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith, which previously held it for racking up $16.9 million at 2,915 screens. Meanwhile,......

Unsurprisingly, the Humane Society has issued a statement saying they strongly approve of Leona Helmsley's posthumous wish to put her entire trust towards the welfare of dogs. The group asks that the trustees to honor her wish, creating a better world for the pups--and people--of the planet. Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society, noted that "While there are 10,000 or so humane organizations in this country, many are poorly funded and overwhelmed......

The NY Sun reports 26 out of the 51 City Council members support an Assembly bill that would require hedge fund and private equity managers to pay more in taxes. The City Council is looking for ways to raise money (like implementing a hotel room tax) rather than slashing programs, noting, "With New York City facing tight budget projections in the years to come, it is incumbent on all of us to make sure everyone......

Photograph by Mao Says What on Flickr In the first State of the MTA Address, MTA CEO and Executive Director Elliot Sander mentioned the agency would invest an additional $30 million in more subway service, new and extend bus service in the city and additional commuter trains for LIRR and Metro-North. Now the Daily News finds out the MTA probably won't be able to do so, thanks to the faltering economy. The MTA said,......

Aw, it's time for that classic Rudy Giuliani chutzpah! According to the NY Times, the former NYC mayor and former Republican presidential candidate is offering to help raise money for various Republicans running for election or re-election this fall: "But there is a catch: He wants some cash out of the deal." Giuliani ended his presidential campaign with about $3.6 million in debt, including a $500,000 personal loan. His people have been talking with......

The Sex and the City movie is causing more trouble today, officially making it as controversial as "a Taliban recruitment video," at least according to Jeffrey Wells's scathing review. Following the premiere's overbooking incident, both New Line Cinema and Radio City Music Hall are pointing the finger of blame at each other. With thousands of ticket-holders turned away, The NY Post wants to know who's got the blood, sweat and tears of Sex fanatics on......

Though firefighter Kevin Prior died over six years ago when responding to the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Center in 2001, a struggle over his FDNY pension has gone to court. Prior's parents do not think his then-fiancee Doreen Noone should be entitled to half the $75,000 annual pension. They tell the Post it's not really about money, but have the "truth" "acknowledged:The Priors concede that the young couple was engaged, with a......

The image below isn’t a rejected Rage Against the Machine album cover, but rather an ad campaign for a leading Brazilian business newspaper, Gazeta Mercantil. Designed by illustrator Pedro Izique for the São Paulo office of ad agency JWT, the print ad redesigns the Dollar, Euro and Yen with images of “some of the most important events of the last century.” For the U.S., that means 9/11, pot, oil, war and Arlington Cemetery. The slogan?......

Marc Jacobs, who is no angel himself, had a questionable employee managing one of his three stores in the Village. The NY Post reports that 24-year-old Kyle Avila stole approximately $62K from the designer in just 18 months. Gawker notes that the Kansas boy also once posed nude for a Jacobs t-shirt (pictured), so maybe he just felt he was due. It appears no one was the wiser at the 385 Bleecker Street shop, as......

In her successful attempt to appeal to working class primary voters, Senator Hillary Clinton has been catching heat from Wall Street. The Sun notes that yesterday, her camp dawdled for 24 hours before correcting reports that she had asked an audience in Indiana: “Why don’t we hold these Wall Street money-grubbers responsible for their role in this recession?” The quote angered some in the financial industry; after all they're not money-grubbers, they're money-hoarders. Clinton's team......

Charitable food banks are also suffering from the recent increases in the cost of food. Last year food banks were being squeezed by the increased demand from the city's hungry, who were finding that rising rents, fuel costs, and transportation costs were limiting the income they had to devote to food. More and more people were turning to New York's charitable food organizations to make ends meet. As the cost of living continues to increase,......

Last year Mayor Bloomberg announced a $3 billion plan to seize 61 acres of the Willets Point district next to the forthcoming Citi Field in Queens through eminent domain, raze it, and construct 5,500 units of housing, a hotel, convention center and over 2 million square feet of office space, restaurants and retail shops. But business owners in the target zone have been fighting it, saying their ‘hood, dubbed the Iron Triangle for its chop......

Surprise, surprise: Eliot Spitzer is being linked to Kristin "Billie" Davis's prostitution ring, which got busted earlier this week. Wicked Models, the East Side Madam's operation, toppled on Tuesday, and it looks like it's going to bring down some clients with it (rumor is the list is 10,000 strong). While Police commissioner Ray Kelly says the case has no relation to Spitzer, The NY Post is reporting that the ex-Governor "regularly patronized" her company and......

Following the announcement of a $100 million donation for the New York Public Library, The Whitney has just announced their own sugar daddy: Leonard A. Lauder. Lauder is the chairman of Estée Lauder cosmetics, and through his American Contemporary Art Foundation he'll be donating $131 million (the largest donation the museum has received in 77 years, and one of the largest ever to a New York museum’s endowment). Endowment donations are notoriously difficult to solicit,......

Columbia University has a new financial aid plan for undergraduate students whose families make between $60,000-100,000. Following in the footsteps of other Ivy League schools, they will significantly expand the aid currently offered to lower and middle income students. The VP of Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks said, “Our new financial aid policies reflect a more realistic view of the challenges that lower- and middle-income families face in paying for college.” The new plan will......

Word on Heath Ledger's will has hit the newswire, and according to documents filed in Manhattan Surrogate's Court, he had less than $145,000 in New York assets when he died on January 22nd. The figure includes about $100,000 in bank accounts, a $25,000 Toyota Prius and $20,000 in furniture and fixtures. Those numbers, however, do not reflect the size of Ledger's estate. There may be some property holdings in Australia and money tucked in trusts.......

Yesterday Forbes magazine, in their annual ranking of the rich, declared New York City is no longer the billionaire capital of the world. Where have all the dollar signs gone? To Moscow, of course, who beat us out by 3 billionaires (they have 74 to our 71). Most of the big buck city dwellers are familiar names: Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($11.5 billion), publishing powerhouses Samuel Newhouse Jr. and Rupert Murdoch ($8.5 billion and $8.3 billion),......

After his $500,000 donation to NY State Republicans was revealed, Mayor Bloomberg explained why he did it to reporters while attending a Mayors Against Illegal Guns conference, "I've said repeatedly, I will help those who help us. They have stood up for the city a number of times — when we needed to have a voice in Albany and we didn't have that voice from the Assembly or from the governor, whether it was the......

Bronx-born writer Richard Price, famous for his gritty urban novels Clockers and Freedomland, as well screenplays like The Color of Money and award-winning episodes of The Wire, has now turned his eye for detail on the turbo-gentrifying Lower East Side. Lush Life, his first novel in five years, was described by Times critic Michiko Kakutani as “a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City... no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price.” The story concerns......

Twenty-six-year-old Lauren Cleari, the slatternly wife of cuckolded New York cop Frank Cleri, has become infamous overnight after humiliating her husband of two years on the Fox reality show “Moment of Truth.” Before going on air, contestants answer intimate questions while hooked up to a lie detector machine; later they answer some of the same questions before a raucous studio mob and their significant others, which in this case included her spouse, parents and a......

If a bank teller told you had an unknown bank account with $5.8 million in it and the bank insisted it's yours, wouldn't you spend it? That's what Brooklyn resident Benjamin Lovell did - and now he's paying. Lovell shares the same name as an employee at Delaware company Woodlawn Trustees. Woodlawn asked that their Lovell be added to a Commerce Bank account with $5.8 million in it, but Commerce somehow mixed up the Social......

Some new details from the ME's office about slain realtor to the stars Linda Stein. Toxicology tests on Stein, who was brutally bludgeoned to death in her Fifth Avenue apartment in October, show that there were "no traces of marijuana in her system," according to the NY Post. Stein's assistant, Natavia Lowery, has been accused of murdering her employer. At the time of her arrest, police had said Lowery snapped after Stein verbally abused her......

CNBC reported last night that the WGA strike may be over! Their source is former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who now hosts a show on the network. When asked on the show Fast Money where the WGA strike stands he replied, “It’s over. They’ve made a deal, they shook hands on a deal. The deal is going on Saturday to the constituents (for a vote)… I think it’s impossible that they turn it down. A......

In a sign of these struggling economic times, more than a few New York businesses are making it clear that money is money, whatever the currency. Reuters spoke to a few business owners who explained why they are open to moneys from foreign lands. East Village Wines' Robert Chu said, "We had decided that money is money and we'll take it and just do the exchange whenever we can with our bank...[S]ome days, you'd be......

Mayor Bloomberg traveled to Albany yesterday with a delicately phrased but succinct query: Where is our cash you deadbeats? Bloomberg recently explained all city agencies had to undergo belt-tightening in preparation of a downturn of the city's economy. He wasn't prepared to be short-shrifted by Albany, from where the city depends on a certain level of budgetary support. "We are not asking for anything other than our fair share. But our fair share is what......

Some of the really reassuring quotes about today's bad Thursday on Wall Street: "The problems seem to be intensifying. I can't remember a worse start to a year. We're in for some rough months.'' - John Carey, who helps oversee about $13 billion at Pioneer Investment Management in Boston, to Bloomberg “Basically every day now, you have more and more investors leaning toward the camp that yes, this is going to be a recession, and......

Photo of new and old Yankee Stadium by WNBC; photo of the new Yankee Stadium sign by the AP It may be the off-season, but Yankees fans can look forward to something other than February 14th (that's pitchers and catchers reporting, not Valentine's Day). With the installation of an etched sign at the new stadium for the Yankees that says "Yankee Stadium," Opening Day, 2009 seems a little closer. The sign, etched in gold-leafed......

The violent mugging that turned fatal last week prompted the NY Times to compare people's attitude towards crime safety today versus those of two decades ago, when people would carry mugger money around. (When you Google "mugger money," the first thing that comes up is a 1989 NY Times article, "Even the Nun Have to Carry Mugger Money.") While many people mentioned how safe the city is these days, last week we did hear about......

Last November, Natavia Lowery's friends and family were screaming her innocence, but recently some pretty damning evidence came out about her relationship with Linda Stein, the woman she is accused of (and confessed to) murdering. Not surprisingly, the ex-Ramones manager and "realtor to the stars" had plenty of cash, but she would have had more if her trusty assistant Ms. Lowery wasn't siphoning funds. The NY Post reports that Lowery was systematically taking money from......

When Harold Pinter’s masterpiece The Homecoming first premiered on Broadway some four decades ago, the dramatized hostility was met with equal hostility from the bourgeois audience, as witnessed by the playwright himself: One of the greatest theatrical nights of my life was the opening of The Homecoming in New York. There was the audience. It was 1967. I'm not sure they've changed very much, but it really was your mink coats and suits. Money. And......