Bloomberg Aims to Take NYC Green

'Lone wolf' Jose Pimentel was 'hour away' from finishing first bomb: Cops

(NEWSER) - A suspected lone wolf terrorist has been charged with plotting to kill US soldiers and police with bombs he was building in his Manhattan apartment, according to law enforcement authorities. Jose Pimentel, 27, who goes by the name Muhammad Yusuf, intended to test three bombs in mailboxes before using explosives on soldiers returning home from Afghanistan and Iraq, said New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly at a press conference yesterday. He also planned to target NYPD cruisers, postal facilities, and a New Jersey police station, said Kelly. Pimentel allegedly told an informant that the bombings would show the public “there was mujahedeen in the city ready to wage Jihad," reports the New York Daily News. More»

To replace the tunnel Chris Christie called off

(NEWSER) - Michael Bloomberg is hatching a plan to build a subway tunnel under the Hudson River linking Manhattan to Secaucus, NJ. The plan is designed to replace the long-planned tunnel from New Jersey that Chris Christie killed when he came into office, and according to a secret memorandum obtained by the New York Times , it would cost about half as much as that project, because the city is already extending a tunnel near the waterfront. More»

Polling guru gives a post-mortem on last night's elections

(NEWSER) - The numbers are in, now it's time to make sense of them. Nate Silver breaks down last night's election results:

• Don’t blame Obama; Creigh Deeds and Jon Corzine were probably just weak candidates. In New Jersey, 57% of voters approved of Obama, but 27% of those supporters voted Republican anyway. In Virginia 20% of those who approved of Obama voted GOP.
• Democrats had turnout problems in Virginia; the voters who came out last night supported McCain 51-43 in 2008, a mirror image of that year's margin.

Space-guzzling homeowners in countryside exact bigger toll

(NEWSER) - Vermont has been hailed as the greenest place in America but its residents need to look to Manhattan for some real low-impact living, argues David Owen. Vermonters might feel green with all that countryside around, but they lack the public transport and low energy use that makes New York City the greenest place in the US, Owen writes at Yale Environment 360. More»

(NEWSER) - New York City has quietly taken a new approach to combat homelessness—since 2007, the Bloomberg administration has bought more than 550 families one-way tickets out of town. Social workers help the homeless to find relatives who may take them in, and some have been flown as far as France or South Africa. The city spends $500,000 annually on the program, and none of the aided families have returned to shelters, reports the New York Times. More»