the morning line

Cabs, Gays, and Celeb Car Thefts

• The tabs are aghast at yesterday’s taxicab rate hike, with the Post using words like “adding insult to injury” and the Daily News predicting a ruined Christmas. Completely buried in populist outrage: The TLC will also cease requiring cabbies to be legal U.S. residents. [NYDN, NYP]
• The Times gets a take on New Jersey’s new gay-rights situation from the Gay American himself, the state’s former governor, Jim McGreevey. Would he tie the knot with his partner Mark O’Donnell? Yes! [NYT]
• In celebrity-crime-victim news, Jesse L. Martin’s SUV was broken into and burgled in his hometown of Buffalo — just as the police made a second arrest in the violent theft of Mayor Bloomberg’s car in New Jersey. [WNBC]
• The MTA says that free hand-distributed newspapers are a major cause of flooding on subways. (They clog the drains.) Earlier in the year, the same papers were blamed for the uptick of underground fires. amNew York to add twelve extra pages for the story’s comprehensive coverage. [amNY]
• Speaking of flooding: NASA has rigged a computer model to demonstrate how a 2050s New York City would deal with a major storm. Not very well, it turns out. Flooded areas include “the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, lower Manhattan, and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano Bridge.” Oh, no! Even Williamsburg, too! [Mongabay]

Cabs, Gays, and Celeb Car Thefts