• "I want his head chopped off" is normally a figure of speech. Not so for Rikers inmate David Brown Jr., who offered an undercover cop $15,000 to behead Commissioner Kelly and bomb the police HQ. All allegedly, of course. We don't want the guy after us. [NYP]
• Rudy Giuliani, still incomprehensibly a "front-runner," found himself in California defending new wife Judith from angry stepson Andrew. Just a short preview of what the primary season will look like. [NYDN]
• Immigrants protest squalid conditions in front of their freezing Lower East Side tenement: No, it's not 1914. It's 2007, and the new landlord's angling to evict rent-stabilized tenants. [MetroNY]
• Your forecast for the day: 30 mph winds with a chill of nine degrees below zero. This is the rare time we're actually proud of typing this at home. [amNY]
• And you know what the worst thing about kids' vocabulary contests is? It's seeing the newspaper ledes lunge for ten-dollar words ("Billy Dorminy was perspicuous, talking about poecilonyms") as a "funny" exception to our usual writing level. Oh, and felicitations, Billy. [NYT]