First, the only reason to declare the neighborhood "blighted" would be to hand it over to the school:

And second, shut up, Columbia:

[Full ruling via NYT]

A tipster forwarded us an e-mail that Time Inc. freelancers got this week from JPMorgan, which administers the company's invoicing. Under the cheery subject heading "Time Inc - Accelerate payments at year end!", it outlined the company's PayMeNow program, whereby you can speed up payment of your invoice for a fee, kind of like when you get a payday loan at the check cashing place down on the corner so you can afford to buy lottery tickets for the week. Here's how it works, according to the JPMorgan web site that handles the program:

Pay Me Now

Pay me now allows you to accelerate payments on approved invoices in exchange for a nominal discount. Click the Pay Me Now button next to an invoice to see a prompt with a confirmation page that presents you with an analysis of the early payment opportunity. Included in the analysis is the earliest possible payment date and the associated discount amount.

If you choose to actually get all the money Time Inc. owes you, our tipster says, you usually get it within a month. But if you want it faster, here is the payment schedule—on the left are the number of days you have to wait to get paid, on the right is the portion Time Warner will skim off the top for the service.

• 25 days - 0.5 percent
• 20 - 1 percent
• 15 - 1.5 percent
• 10 - 2 percent
• 5 - 3 percent
• 3 - 4 percent

No word yet on whether the payments are in dollars or "Time Incgots" redeemable at your nearest company store.

Given how desperate freelancers are to be PAID NOW, largely because companies like Time Inc. never pay them on time, this is a pretty genius idea. In fact, if you take it to its logical conclusion, Time could just pay its freelances nothing instantly, thereby significantly reducing its content costs.

Here's the full e-mail urging Time Warner's freelancers to take advantage of this amazing offer!

Happy Holidays!

If you are receiving this email, you are the JPMorgan Xign administrator and you, or someone from your organization, is submitting electronic invoices or receiving electronic payments via the JPMorgan Xign solution on behalf of Time Inc. I apologize for the blind distribution but I wanted to protect everyone's privacy while sharing this important information.

As year end approaches I wanted to ensure that you were aware of the PayMeNow functionality, which allows you to _accelerate payment for invoices that have already been approved_ by TIME. This is an excellent tool to help with your cash management at year end! This does not change your payment term on future invoices, it simply accelerates the payment on the ones you specifically request.

* If you are receiving this email, it means you have approved invoices that are pending payment and can be accelerated for payment this week or any day before year end. *

* *

This is a purely optional service that is available to you by following these easy steps:

1) Log into your JPMorgan Xign account at xign.net.

2) Look for the green $$ and click the link.

3) This will display all available invoices

4) Either select the fastest date to be paid, or select "Lower rates" to schedule payment later in the month, but still before your year end.

Thanks very much and please let me know if you have additional questions related to cash acceleration. For all other inquires, please contact our Support Team at 800 485 XXXX.

Sincerely,

Linda Piazza

JPMorgan

Vice President, Relationship Management

[Photo via Flickr by Taber Andrew Bain.]

The case of Al-Qaisi v. The American Military Forces in Iraq is a terrible window into just a few of the millions of lives our stupid and cruel adventure has wrecked in that country. We came across the lawsuit, which Al-Qaisi filed in October in a federal court in Virginia, randomly while searching the electronic docket system for another case. It is a quixotic, conspiratorial, and hopeless narrative, filed without the aid of lawyers by a man whose mind appears to have been ruined by the violence unleashed by the Shiite thugs that we handed his country to after turning it into shit. But Al-Qaisi's Kafka-esque odyssey, told in a humane and engaging voice, also offers a memorable glimpse of the brutal nightmare we conjured in his homeland. We've outlined his tale below, but we strongly urge you to read the entire document for yourself.

Firas Al-Qaisi is 38 years old (that's a photocopy of an American-issued ID granting him access to a training facility for Iraqi forces). A lawyer by training, he was a proud collaborator with the Americans he thought were capable of returning the rule of law to his country. He ran the risk of retribution from religious fanatics in his Baghdad neighborhood for wearing a western suit to work each day. U.S. forces saved his life after he was abducted by a Shiite faction of Iraq's American-backed Interior Ministry in 2007, and he was evacuated to the U.S. along with his pregnant wife and brother on a flight ordered by none other than Gen. David Petraeus two years ago, because staying in Iraq meant certain death. He landed in Northern Virginia, homeless, unable to speak English, living on charity. A September 2007 U.S. News & World Report story on his successful effort to seek asylum confirms some of these details. Two years later, the passage of time seems to have embittered him. His ordeal, he now believes, was an American-hatched plan to have him killed.

When we called Al-Qaisi's home in Virginia, his wife answered the phone and expressed surprise that the complaint was publicly available. We wrote an e-mail to Al-Qaisi, who wrote back that he doesn't speak English well enough to communicate via e-mail and that he couldn't talk anyway: "I cannot give you answers for them since I submitted the case to the court and in the light of that, any answers in that concern should be given to the court only due to the fact that this matter is of a very sensitive nature. Till now I do not understand how you, as a reporter, could have access to this case which is still in its early stages."

'Sacrifices and favors'

Al-Qaisi was an Iraqi prosecutor before the war, and quickly aligned himself with the Americans after the invasion. In 2004, he served as an attorney representing Margaret Hassan, the Irish aide worker who was kidnapped and murdered by insurgents in 2004, and quickly became a sort of liaison between the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi legal system. He also provided valuable intelligence on the activities of Al-Qaeda in his neighborhood.

In his court filing, Al-Qaisi included two affidavits from Americans he worked with in Baghdad to confirm his assistance to the cause in Iraq. Initially drafted in support of his asylum application, they were written by Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Warren Eric Barrus and State Department staffer Jennifer Fox. In 2005, according to Barrus' affidavit, Al-Qaisi was instrumental in helping U.S. forces locate and shut down a torture chamber, called "the Bunker," run by the Shiite "Wolf Brigade" faction of the country's Interior Ministry. After that, the men worked closely together. Al-Qaisi was, according to Barrus, a committed idealist.

Fox concurred in her affidavit, writing that Al-Qaisi's actions "rival that of any patriot" and that he had aided in counterterrorism operations.

'All of you are responsible for killing that soldier'

In March 2007, Al-Qaisi learned from one of his contacts that Al-Qaeda had planted three roadside bombs in front of a salt factory near Camp Falcon outside Baghdad. He traveled to the Green Zone—a journey that was itself extremely dangerous owing to what he calls the roaming Shiite "Groups of Death"—to meet with a military intelligence officer he knew as "Captain Jim" to warn him.

The intelligence was ignored, Al-Qaisi says, and a week later an American convoy hit a bomb in front of the salt factory, killing one soldier.

Al-Qaisi was enraged: He had risked his own life to help the Americans, and they failed to act on his intelligence, resulting in one of their own being killed needlessly. He went to the Green Zone again to vent.

He continued to help American military intelligence, arranging for a fake kidnapping of a local sheik he knew who wanted to provide information to American forces but couldn't risk being seen voluntarily talking to them or going to the Green Zone.

'This is the person. Arrest him now.'

On April 5, 2007, two months after the IED debacle, two bombs hit Al-Qaisi's house, striking through the window of his bedroom on the second floor. Two others hit the street in front of the home. He wasn't there at the time, but his mother and pregnant wife were both injured by broken glass from the explosions. His neighbors told him that the bombs appeared to be American, but Al-Qaisi wrote that he "put aside that possibility from my mind because I was an old and honest friend of them, and because they always needed me."

A month later, in May, Al-Qaisi was at home when joint U.S.-Iraqi forces quarantined his neighborhood for three days, searching local houses. An American officer entered Al-Qaisi's home to interrogate him accompanied by a lieutenant colonel from the Iraqi National Police. In the presence of the Iraqi officer, Al-Qaisi told the Americans that he worked with the U.S. embassy, and provided them with ID cards issued by American forces. The Americans left, but two weeks later the Iraqi officer returned.

Al-Qaisi had been abducted by the Wolf Brigade (he calls them "NPs," for members of the Iraqi National Police, in the complaint). In the country's tortured post-invasion ethnic and political maelstrom, they hated Al-Qaisi because he was a Sunni and because he collaborated with Americans in their efforts to kill Sunni insurgents. They also took Al-Qaisi's brother Hussein, who was a teenager at the time. The Iraqis loaded them into a truck with six other prisoners and took them to a base where other Wolf Brigade members were waiting.

'Tomorrow we will cut off your heads and throw your bodies in the street'

He passed out from the beating, and when he awoke, three American officers arrived at the station. Not to rescue him, but to process the prisoners. While Al-Qaisi was being fingerprinted and having his retina scanned by American officers, his Iraqi captors hissed death threats into his ear. He was too terrified to announce his status as a collaborator in front of the Iraqis, so the Americans took his information down, along with that of his fellow detainees, and left.

What followed was two weeks of torture and beatings, recalled in excruciating detail, at the hands of the Iraqis that our invasion empowered. He was beaten, burned, hung from the ceiling by his arms, dragged around the floor, subjected to extremes of heat and cold, denied food and water for days, and suffered from fever and chills. His shoulder and nose were broken. Aware that the Americans might try to seek Al-Qaisi's release once they realized who he was, his captors shuffled him from station to station in an effort to stay one step ahead of them.

Still, there were repeated run-ins with American troops who routinely visited Interior Ministry facilities where Al-Qaisi and others were being tortured. On more than one occasion, Al-Qaisi was literally in the same room with American officers empowered to help him, but they didn't know who he was and he didn't dare tell them in front of Iraqis. And all around them, men were being beaten and murdered.

Al-Qaisi's wife called the U.S. embassy on the day he was abducted and asked for help in seeking his release. It took the embassy four days to locate him, and when they did, they sent a military team to assess his condition. For reasons that aren't clear, they didn't rescue him immediately. They reported back that he had been "roughed up," according to the affidavit of State Department employee Jennifer Fox, who participated in the operation to rescue Al-Qaisi. Concerned that the visit from American soldiers had tipped off the Wolf Brigade that they wanted Al-Qaisi released, the embassy asked the Ministry of the Interior to see to it that he not be moved. They were told that the Interior Minister had called the detention facility to personally issue the order, but the next day, Al-Qaisi was shuffled to another facility, where he witnessed his captors beat a man to death.

On June 7, 2007—twelve days after his abduction—an embassy team finally tracked down Al-Qaisi and brought an Iraqi investigative judge to order his release. The Iraqis tried to delay and threatened to kill him even as Americans soldiers watched over him.

When he was finally released and brought to safety in the Green Zone, Al-Qaisi's American friends were waiting for him. Concerned about his foul smell and appearance after nearly two weeks of hell, he tried to keep them from hugging him, but they insisted. Everyone was immediately aware that Al-Qaisi could no longer safely live in his homeland, and when he was asked if he wanted to seek asylum, he answered, "Yes and now."

That night, Al-Qaisi couldn't sleep. He lists the reasons in his complaint.

Al-Qaisi, his wife, and his brother were moved to a safe house and kept under 24-hour-a-day armed guard until August 2007, when they were flown to the U.S. Because his wife was 8 months pregnant and unable to fly commercially, they were transported to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on a medical flight that was personally approved by Gen. David Petraeus. They lived initially in Alexandria, Va., with John Stinson, a retired Special Forces colonel whom Al-Qaisi knew, and now live in Falls Church.

A preposterous ending

Al-Qaisi's tale is heartbreaking enough without the sorry coda of his lawsuit. He has become convinced that the bombing of his home and his kidnapping were orchestrated in order to silence him about the failure of U.S. forces to heed his IED warning. Al-Qaisi claims that U.S. forces bombed his house in April 2007 in an attempt to kill him, and, when that failed, delivered him into the awaiting arms of the Wolf Brigade. The first visit to his home from the American officer, he says, was planned to out him as a collaborator to the Iraqi lieutenant colonel who later returned to abduct him. That claim is preposterous to our eyes: He provides some evidence that the bomb that hit his home was American, but none that it was deliberately targeted. And his assertion that the Americans handed him over to Shiite militias is undermined by the fact that it was Americans who rescued him from those same militias and brought him to the U.S. to protect him. But the details of his ordeal are compelling and horrifying nonetheless, especially when the accusations come from someone who suffered so awfully for the country that he's suing.

The complaint, which he wrote himself with the help of his wife, who taught English at an Iraqi university, doesn't remotely conform to American legal standards, and is more a confused howl of woe than a bona fide attempt to seek damages. It lacks evidence, is logically incoherent, and will not succeed. But it's a powerfully written document of just how sorry this pointless war really was, and is.

We asked the Department of Defense for a comment on Al-Qaisi's charges, and received no response. We also tried to contact Jennifer Fox, the State Department employee who supplied an affidavit for the Al-Qaisis' asylum petition, through the public affairs office of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, but got no response. We could not locate Warren Eric Barrus, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent who also filed an affidavit. In fact, we couldn't independently verify any of the claims in Al-Qaisi's complaint, though a source who spent two years working with the U.S. military in Baghdad told us the details ring true.

Anyway, this is how stupid wars end these days. With pathetic and desperate lawsuits from the good men whose lives we destroyed. On to Afghanistan.

According to City Room, NYPD Chief James P. Hall told City Council today that sexual harassment was the "No. 1 quality of life offense on the subway." (That 587 number, he also added, was likely highly under-reported. New Yorkers would be too busy to file a complaint against someone who sexually harassed them.)

The average perpetrator is a 39-year-old male, while the vast majority of victims are females over 17 years old. "It's a crime that goes more to a middle-aged individual," Chief Hall said. In contrast, other crimes in the subway generally involve younger men, from 17 to 25 years old, he said.

We also learn this helpful commuting tip: the 4/5/6 lines between Grand Central Terminal and Union Square is the gropiest part of New York's disturbingly grope-y transit system. (A bit of good news: All the complaints occurred in Manhattan. G Train represent!)

Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. has a funny/good(?) idea for preventing the groping. Writes Gothamist:

Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. said, "I'd like to see a wall of shame. Posting pictures of people convicted, especially with 20 percent recidivism ... would be a useful deterrent." Hall said that women shouldn't be discouraged if they don't have a cellphone picture, "At a minimum, a report alone allows us to deploy more effectively."

Honestly? There should not only be Wall of Shame, but some sort of annual festival where these creeps are paraded down Fifth Ave. and all New Yorkers can throw rotten produce at them, like a Puerto Rican Day Parade of Justice. Gross crimes demand gross punishment.

Andrea today issues her sentencing recommendations in the case of liberal lawyer Lynne Stewart: Let the fat bitch rot. That is an accurate summary!

Let her rot.

Charismatic terror monger Lynne Stewart is no beauty. But she is a great actress.

The lady ex-lawyer who loves terrorists too much lumbered into the Manhattan federal courtroom in 2006, all 200-plus pounds of fire-breathing radical.

What a terrible, fat lady. She should have gotten more time, just to do those prison workouts! Eh?

Her lawyers said — are you ready? — Stewart was too fat for the lockup.

Lawyer Elizabeth Fink said her obese client's breast cancer was sure to return in a place where women are denied the dignity of wearing bras.

"If you send her to prison, she is going to die," Fink intoned.

We should be so lucky.

You can write to Andrea at andrea.peyser@nypost.com.

The contretemps began back in June after Molina punched Hilton outside the MuchMusic Video Awards in Toronto. Hilton had been a persistent annoyed of the band and apparently bugged them one step too many. Hilton immediately followed up his punching by twittering about it, asking his fans to call the Toronto police, ("I was assaulted by Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas and his security guards. I am bleeding. Please, I need to file a police report. No joke") and then posting a sobbing video telling of his punching online.

The assault provoked a flood of non-sympathy towards Hilton from the world's celebrity community.

Well, today the court case reached its conclusion, going out with as whiny a note as it began. Outside the courthouse in Toronto Molina's lawyer read his legally mandated statement of contrition saying, " 'I apologize for what I did on June 22 of 2009, even though you engaged in highly offensive comments, including a homophobic slur to my clients, I acknowledge that these kinds of issues should not be resolved through a physical response,"'

Hilton then responsed through his attorney quibbling with the apology before grudgingly accepting it. "Although accepting the fact that he shouldn't resort to violence, he attempted to say that there was a precipitating cause," Hilton's lawyer, Brian Greenspan, said afterwards. "A sincere apology is a sincere apology."

And so all live on to annoy another day, while the record stands that in Canada apparently you can punch Perez Hilton and perhaps not go to prison.

While locked away for the first time on the still pending child rape charge, the state Corrections department, we've learned today, gave the celebrated auteur a chance to play God in the manner to which he had grown accustomed, giving him the reins to direct a training film for prison guards.

In recent days, the world has been stunned and mildly amused to learn that celebrated autuer/accused child rapist Roman Polanski has been spending his time in jail while awaiting extradition hearings finishing his film.

When arrested in Zurich a few weeks back, Polanski was nearly done with production on The Ghost, a political thriller starring Pierce Brosnan, based on a novel by Robert Harris. Observers had speculated about the fate of the unfinished film until Harris revealed in an interview with The Guardian yesterday that the director has been hard at work on the film from behind bars (or behind chalet as the case may be.)

But we have learned that this is not the first time Polanski has put his hard time to good use for the cinema, according to the Daily Bulletin of California's Inland Empire — home of the Chino State Correctional Facility where Polanski was first incarcerated for the rape charges from December 1977 - January 1978.

The article discloses that while Polanski was serving his time he directed a training film about prison gangs for the Corrections Department. The Bulletin's writer describes the circumstances of the shoot:

Cameras rolled in the prison's East facility, the same one trashed in the recent riot. It was a lockup for high-security and protective-custody inmates. "Roman was a very diminutive and overwhelmed-by-prison inmate, but over in the East Facility cellblocks, with camera and lights rolling, he would `forget himself' and DIRECT, BABY, DIRECT!" cracks my source.

"He would shout out orders to some really heavy-duty gang characters - allowed out of cells only one at a time - to `stand this way' or `suck in that gut,' and all sorts of personal comments and commands. And the gang members, clearly starstruck by being on camera, meekly complied!

After spending a few hours a day working on the shoot, the Bulletin says "the film was suppressed and never used for departmental training."

It's good to know that even incarcerated for terrible crimes, auteurs never have to stop playing God. And exciting to imagine that somewhere out there, in a dark government archive, the Rosemary's Baby of prison guard training films sits waiting for its day in the sun.

After a case that has featured five months of testimony from celebrities and the occasional crazy knife lady, Anthony Marshall, the 85 year-old son of famous high society lady Brooke Astor, has been found guilty of swindling her out of lots of money as she grew old and incapacitated with dementia. What a jerk.

Mr. Marshall was found guilty of one of two first-degree grand larceny charges, the most serious he faced. Jurors convicted him of giving himself an unauthorized raise of about $1 million for managing his mother's finances.

He could be sentenced to anywhere from one to 25 years in jail. Thank god this trial is finally over because it went on since April. Justice served cold.
[Pic: AP]

The movie, a thriller that stars Pierce Brosnan as someone who isn't Tony Blair, was recently completed, but lacks a score and some final editing. But, never fear, cinephiles, because maybe pedophile Polanski's team vows to keep the dream alive:

Timothy Burrill, a co-producer, said: "The film will continue. I honestly don't want to say any more but we're very close to finishing it now." However, the final post-production steps are not a formality and Polanski is known for wanting to control every aspect of his films.

If Polanski is, in fact, extradited to the United States, he can always work remotely, says Variety's international editor, Ali Jaafar.

Regardless of what happens to Polanski, there's no doubt that the film will have no problem tackling another one of its problems: it has no distributor. This could be the director's final work, so someone, somewhere will definitely take the reins to release a film with massive amounts of pre-publicity, however bad.

Q: Who is this old dude anyway?
A: Roman Polanski's is one of most colorful lives of the 20th Century. A young Jewish boy when the Nazis invaded Poland, he managed to survive the war, hiding out while his parents were deported to concentration camps. Becoming an internationally celebrated filmmaker in his 20's, Polanski defected from his native Poland to seek artistic freedom in the west. In France and later in the US, he became a noted international playboy and directed a run of still classics that included Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown. After settling down and marrying actress Sharon Tate however, his long-denied domestic bliss was interrupted when Charles Manson's apostles murdered his very pregnant young wife. Polanski's post-Tate period witnessed a return to his international playboy ways, an epoch ended by his arrest for rape in 1977.

Q: What was he accused of?
A: The LA District Attorney charged Polanski with luring a thirteen year old aspiring actress/model to Jack Nicholson's home, drugging and anally raping her.

Q: Was the girl Justine Bateman?
A: No! But this was an urban legend for many years. The victim's name is in fact Samantha Geimer who has since spoken to the press about her experience, including today expressing her wishes that Polanski be punished no further.

Q: What happened with his trial?
A: As detailed in a recent documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the trial was a circus that makes the OJ case look like a model of jurisprudence. A judge in love with the spotlight ran the case in circles while seemingly allowing every day's headlines to dictate his rulings. Ultimately, Polanski allowed himself to be jailed for 90 days to undergo psychiatric evaluation on the understanding that this time served would constitute the bulk of his punishment. When it appeared, however, that the judge was on the brink of reneging on this promise and Polanski was facing a much longer imprisonment, he fled the country.

Q: What has he done since fleeing the U.S.?
A: Since fleeing in 1978, Polanski has lived in France where he has continued to work as a director, making big budget films—such as Frantic, staring Harrison Ford—in cooperation with American film companies. His career went through a rough patch in the '80s and '90s after a series of tepid misfires (eg. Pirates). He recently, however, has had a bit of a comeback winning from afar the Academy Award for The Pianist, a film inspired by his own adventures hiding out from the Nazis.

Q: Why haven't we brought him back before?
A: Since defecting from Poland, Polanski has held French citizenship and France's extradition treaty with the US forbids sending us their own citizens. Since fleeing, he has been careful not to venture to countries which might send him back. According to the LA Times, U.S. Marshals have come close to nabbing Polanski half a dozen times when he traveled in recent years, but "for one reason or another, it just didn't work out."

Q: Why are the Europeans making such a fuss over this now?
A: In France in particular, Polanski symbolizes much of the cultural war between the U.S. and Europe, with the director cast in the role of urbane free-spirited intellectual, hunted down and persecuted by the bigoted, close-minded xenophobic Americans. There is certainly truth on both sides. Prejudice played a big role in how Polanski was viewed during his trial and even after the murder of his wife, he was shamefully portrayed in many press accounts as bizarre outsider figure who was somehow responsible for the slayings. However, be that as it may, drugging and raping a 13 year old girl ain't tiddlywinks.

Q: Isn't it kinda weird that this is happening the week after the first of his wife's murderers dies?
A: Yes, it is, but such is the roller-coaster ride of the life of Roman Polanski.

Speaking to Gawker today, Dooda says, "I'm shocked that there's not anything illegal about what he did."

Dooda was allegedly dragged for four city blocks on the hood of Fox Newser Don Broderick's car—which had New York Press license plates, owing to his status as a Fox News employee—two months ago after the two got into a traffic altercation. Multiple witnesses saw Dooda begging for his life on the car's hood before Dooda managed to climb off and Broderick fled the scene. The police were called, Dooda filed a complaint, and the NYPD arrested Broderick and charged him with leaving the scene of an accident with a personal injury on June 12. And then yesterday, for mystifying reasons, the Manahttan district attorney's office told us that it was declining to prosecute Broderick.

Dooda says he never heard from the DA assigned to his case until last week, when she told him that his case was getting tossed. "I said, 'I have so many eyewitnesses saying that this guy was trying to run me over—doesn't that count for something?' She said, 'No.'" The DA's explanation is that it can't prove that Dooda, whose elbow was scratched and bleeding after the incident, was injured. "She said she couldn't charge him criminally with anything unless I was injured, and that a scuffed elbow wasn't enough."

To hear Dooda tell it, the NYPD and the Manhattan DA never took the incident very seriously. Dooda heard from an NYPD detective not long after the attack—he took photos of the scratches on Dooda's elbow and took down a statement. "I don't think he ever investigated any of it," Dooda says.

Even though Broderick was arrested and charged not long after that, Dooda says he didn't hear from the detective again until two weeks ago, and it seemed like he hadn't done much investigating in the intervening months. "He didn't know that Gawker had talked to Broderick and admitted that there had been an altercation," Dooda says. (We tracked Broderick down in June, and he told us that Dooda had attacked him.) The detective wouldn't even confirm to Dooda that Broderick had been arrested—something that the NYPD told Gawker two months ago. "He was being very secretive," Dooda says.

Indeed, Broderick's case has been handled strangely from the beginning: After his arrest, he was given a court date in July. Gawker attended what was supposed to be Broderick's appearance before a judge, but Broderick was called out of the courtroom by a bailiff before his appearance and never returned. When we asked the bailiff where Broderick went, we were told that the case had been delayed and his appearance needed to be rescheduled. On an almost daily basis since then, we called the Manhattan DA's office for updates on the case, and were told variously that the case was still being investigated or that the DA handling the case was on vacation. Our first firm word on it came yesterday, when the DA's office told us that the case would not be prosecuted.

A spokeswoman for DA's office told us yesterday that she would try to get back to us with an explanation for why Broderick wasn't charged with any other potential crimes that didn't require proof that Dooda had sustained an injury—like leaving the scene of an accident with property damage, or reckless driving. She hasn't done so, and the detective who investigated the case hasn't returned our phone calls.

Broderick, who has been accused by former co-workers of having anger-management issues in the past, told Gawker yesterday that "the DA's action speaks for itself." Dooda, for his part, is not happy to continue sharing the road with a guy who, on top of previous reports of threatening behavior unearthed by Gawker, is apparently willing to drag people around on the hood of his car when he's angry at them. "It's pretty frightening," he says.

A neighbor snapped this photo of Gates in handcuffs during the arrest. Interestingly, one of the officers on the scene was black.

UPDATE: It's official. The charge has been dropped, and the city of Cambridge released a statement calling Gates' arrest "regrettable and unfortunate." That should have been clear on Thursday of last week. Why it took until today, a full four days after the arrest, for Cambridge to do the right thing remains a mystery to us. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the press picked up on it yesterday?

Gates had been spotted by a white neighbor forcing his front door open on Thursday because the lock was broken. She called 911 assuming that he was breaking in. When the cops arrived, Gates understandably raised a fuss about racism, and was inexplicably jailed for four hours.

The Cambridge Police Department refused to confirm or deny the report.

Malakoff pleaded guilty to downloading and watching videos of children being raped. According to court documents, "at least 150 images of child pornography" were found on his computer last year by an NPR tech support worker after Malakoff complained that his laptop had been infected with a virus.

Yesterday, according to the Washington Examiner, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle—ignoring federal sentencing guidelines that recommended six to eight years in prison for his offense—sentenced Malakoff to five years' probation, a $5,000 fine, and 600 hours of community service. He must also register as a sex offender.

Huvelle's reasoning, as reported by the Examiner, was that Malakoff had already suffered enough:

In explaining the exceptional step of sentencing below the guidelines, the judge said Malakoff had already thrown away a successful career and has to live with the stigma of being a sex offender for most of the rest of his life. But the strongest argument for the lesser sentence, Huvelle said, was that Malakoff had been raped as a 9-year-old boy and he had looked at the child pornography over five hours last year to relive his own rape.

How ugly and painful and sad. The victim-becomes-victimizer dynamic of sexual abuse is complicated and horrible to contemplate, but—the justice or lack thereof of Huvelle's mercy notwithstanding—we're confident that O'Reilly will gloss over the nuance when he goes batshit over the confluence of NPR, child pornography, and a lenient judge.

Hisham Talaat Mustafa was a billionaire developer who served in Parliament. Now he may hang:

Mustafa was found guilty of paying $2 million to a former policeman in 2008 to kill Suzanne Tamim, a diva whose professional slide led her into an affair with one of the Egypt's richest men...
Mustafa hired hotel security guard and former policeman Mohsen Sukkari to kill Tamim, 31, after the singer broke off their relationship when she became involved with an Iraqi kick-boxing champion, investigators found.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.They caught Mustafa talking about the killing on "state security eavesdropping tapes." Egypt can show us quite a bit about how a horrible authoritarian power structure's invasions of privacy can be used for good. America just wastes its wiretaps listening to phone sex!
[LAT]

Thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts—who never met an argument for unchecked executive power that he didn't like—and the conservative 5/9ths of the court, FBI director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft are safe from the frivolous lawsuit filed by a guy who was arrested for a non-violent, non-terrorism-related crime and then beaten and locked up in solitary for six months because and only because he was a Muslim, with a really Muslim-y name.

It's fun to remember that inhumane treatment of random prisoners happens right here at home, all the time. (This happened, for example, in Brooklyn—fugheddaboudit!) It is also fun to remember that John Roberts, who'll be the Chief Justice for another half-century or so, is an asshole. Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, yes, but he is a befuddled 72-year-old who decides whether to side with Scalia or Stevens based on which one brought him better candy that day.

She told Bucky Turco that she'd turned herself in, and whattaya know, that was in fact what happened. The Salt Lake City PD has promised to extradite her to face charges there, so presumably that will be the next step in this case.

Update: And it is. Det. Matthew Evans of the Salt Lake City PD's financial crimes unit says his department is working to bring Ferrell back to Utah. She's wanted there on six warrants alleging $60,000 in fraud, but he says additional charges are pending from people who have come forward since her story attracted blog-saturating coverage. Evans emails, "We have been working on it since Philly sent us the notification. Our fugitive squad will make contact with that law enforcement agency and arrange everything. She will be brought back here as soon as possible to face the charges she had already and some new ones from people who have come forward."

We've asked for a booking photo but we may or may not be able to get it. In the meantime, here is a Hipster Grifter Paper Foldable (courtesy of FreeWilliamsburg.com) and a dramatic new video slideshow of three Kari pictures. The legend lives!