They Waterboarded Christopher HitchensFinally, right? Plus, David Brooks thinks Goldman Sachs may be on the cusp of a coup, and the “summer of legal vindication” kicks off in our hump-day roundup of media, finance, law, and real-estate news.
Small Explosion Hits Military Recruiting Center in Times SquareLet’s begin this post by saying there’s no reason to worry, everybody is fine. (We’ve always wanted to write that — because let’s be honest, when we start conversations with our mom that way she goes bananas.) See, there was a small explosion in Times Square early this morning, but nobody was hurt. Apparently somebody tossed an explosive device at a U.S. military recruiting center just before 4 a.m. today. The office’s window was smashed, and a door was damaged. Traffic was interrupted for a while, but now it appears to be back to normal. The Department of Homeland Security says it’s investigating whether it was terrorism-related, but according to NY1, there wasn’t a sense of panic in the area this morning. Explained droll host Pat Kiernan: “It seemed people were annoyed by the nuisance as much as anything.”
Small explosion hits New York’s Times Square [Reuters]
Update: Mayor Bloomberg just held a press conference about this. It turns out that it was a bomb in an ammunition box. Bloomberg called the attack on the recruitment office an insult to our troops and added that “New York City is back and open for business.” NYPD chief Ray Kelly said the device was not “particularly sophisticated” and explained that there is one witness who saw a suspicious hooded man on a bicycle passing the recruiting station just before the explosion.
intel
Oh NY1, Where Are Thy Stars?Even though it’s celebrating its fifteenth year on local cable, NY1, the city’s 24-hour news station, still has such a lovably, reliably dorky, do-it-yourself feel. But this weekend, it caused a small ripple when the News, then the Times, reported that longtime weekend anchor Gary Anthony Ramsay had left the station. It leaked that he’d phoned into the station’s talk show “The Call” under an assumed name (“Dalton, from the Upper East Side”) and mouthed off his own opinion on the current Bernard Kerik flap. “He did a really stupid thing,” said a former NY1 reporter, now with a local network affiliate. “His judgment was just horrendous.” No argument there — even Ramsey admitted as much in the Times. He was planning to leave the station soon, anyway. Which got us wondering: Just where do NY1ers go when they leave? The channel isn’t known as a star maker for anchors and reporters (why wasn’t Pat Kiernan in the running for Dan Rathers’s job, hmmmmm?). After the jump, a little list of where people have been going after they leave the 1 mother ship.
21 questions
Pat Kiernan Is Saving Up for a Slurpee MachineName: Pat Kiernan
Age: 38
Job: Morning anchor, NY1 News and (as of July 9) host of VH1’s World Series of Pop Culture.
Neighborhood: Upper West Side
Who’s your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional?
Peter Jennings. He made it seem so easy.
