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Sad news from the pages of this morning's New York Times: Behind the red-brick walls encircling the Convent of Mercy in Brooklyn, generations of nuns have taught the illiterate, sheltered the homeless and raised orphans. They are known as the Walking Sisters, ministering in the community as well as inside their convent. Now, after 146 years, it is time for the small band of sisters, most of them retired, to walk away from the convent. The leadership of their order, the Sisters of Mercy, decided to shutter the place and scatter the sisters to other homes and nursing facilities after...

  Jessica Mazzone is recovering from operation by Dr. John Boockvar.   Writhing in pain inside a dilapidated hospital in the Dominican Republic, Brooklyn native Jessica Mazzone didn't think she'd ever walk again.  The 28-year-old flight attendant had fallen three stories from a hotel balcony on the eastern tip of the island, snapping her spine and shattering her left leg.  Local doctors insisted they had to operate on her at the hospital. A journey to the U.S. would almost certainly leave her paralyzed, Mazzone was told. Her family feared the worst until a relative suggested they contact a famed surgeon who...

She went to a Brooklyn emergency room suffering from what she thought was just a kidney stone, but a medical nightmare left her partly blind and a quadruple amputee. Tabitha Mullings claims doctors at Brooklyn Hospital Center failed to diagnose an infection that has literally eaten her alive. RELATED: BOY WITH GIANT LIMB GIVEN $200G FIXUP "Sometimes I can't believe it's me laying here," the mother of three told the Daily News Wednesday from her bed in the very hospital she blames for her ravaged body.  Wiping tears with a bandaged stump, Mullings struggled to explain how in a...

The brutal murders of Brooklyn-raised Marine Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak and his wife had nothing to do with the fact that he was white and she was black, a top cop said Thursday."There's nothing to suggest what happened was a racial crime," Investigator Josh Button of the Riverside County Sheriff's Central Homicide unit said. "I've seen that reported, but it's just people looking at the case from the outside and making up their own minds."RELATED: MURDERED MARINE'S MOM WRITES OBAMA Button addressed the sensitive question of race after four Marines - all of them black - were charged last week...

Rabbi Nachum Rosenberg said he has received death threats from the Jewish community for opening a help line for victims of sexual abuser. He said the cut on his forehead is from being hit on Oct. 17th on Berry street in Williamsburg .   A Brooklyn Rabbi who has been outspoken about child molestation in the city's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community said yesterday he's been targeted with death threats.  Nuchem (Nathan) Rosenberg, 58, complained outside the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg that cops have ignored his pleas for help since the summer. The threats were so frightening, Rosenberg said, that he closed...

Rent control, anyone? A resident of Brooklyn, New York is facing eviction. It’s a fairly common, nondescript occurrence in a city of eight million residents. This particular resident, however - sixty-six year old Ella Taliercio - has been attracting some attention. She has been living in her place of residence - in a neighborhood called Park Slope - for half-a-century. She currently pays $147.08 a month – a rate that has remained steady for two decades or better – in a neighborhood where $2000-a-month rents for two-bedroom apartments are not unusual. (The rent was $33 a month when she first...

Authorities busting a suspected ID thief in Brooklyn stumbled upon a possible terrorist nest full of al Qaeda news clippings, chemical manuals and weapons literature, sources told The Post yesterday. Cops made the disturbing find Thursday evening after a landlord found the photocopied IDs inside the apartment of a former tenant on Classon Avenue in Prospect Heights and dialed 311.

Welcome to your Monday morning blood-boiler. The NY Post reports that a jihadi group in NYC planning on running a series of subway ads is led by a Muslim imam tied to the terror plot to bomb the city’s landmarks. Submission: Allah board!An Islamic group plans to blitz 1,000 subway cars with advertisements this September in a campaign being promoted by a Brooklyn imam whom federal officials have linked to a plot to blow up city landmarks.The group says its mission is to explain the true nature of Islam to non-Muslims who believe the religion is bent on acts of...

MUSLIM SUBWAY ADS LINKED TO TERROR PLOTS - New York Post Jul 21, 2008 ... An Islamic group plans to blitz 1000 subway cars with advertisements this September in a campaign being promoted by a Brooklyn imam whom ...

The Brooklyn district attorney says a minister has been convicted of repeatedly sexually abusing an 11-year-old girl. DA Charles Hynes on Thursday announced the conviction of Dieuvais Surin, a pastor in the Original Church of God of Prophesy. Surin could face up to 56 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 9. The child, who attended Surin's church, was abused in 1998 and 1999. Sometimes, he waited outside her school and then abused her in his van. Surin, who is 72, was convicted on 13 counts of criminal sex act and nine counts of sexual abuse.

I was Brooklyn bound - or so I thought. I took the subway to see a fellow alumna of New York's High School of Music and Art (as today's LaGuardia High School for the Arts was then called). I looked forward to the nostalgic reunion. I hadn't been in NYC for ages, and catching up with an old classmate seemed an indispensable component of walking down memory lane. What's more, Kathy still lives at the same address in the cozy middle-class neighborhood where I sometimes visited her way back then. It was common for the house-proud Irish to keep property...

Brooklyn Conservatives have wasted no time, picking retired banker and former Marine Corps captain Paul Atanasio, 59, as their candidate for Congress. "He is my congressional candidate," said Brooklyn Conservative chairman Jerry Kassar. "I'm going forward with that." Atanasio, an attorney, will replace the late Frank Powers as the Brooklyn Conservative pick in the race. A formal party candidate has yet to be chosen because Brooklyn Conservatives and those on Staten Island disagree over the choice. Brooklyn wanted Powers, who was the GOP designee, while Island Conservatives prefer City Councilman Michael McMahon (D-North Shore). If the two sides can't come...

Supreme Court Denies Eminent Domain Petition From Owners & Tenants Facing Property Seizures for Atlantic Yards 11 Property Owners and Tenants Will Take Their Case to NY State Court To Challenge the Improper Use of Eminent Domain Under New York State Law BROOKLYN, NY--The United States Supreme Court denied the petition to grant a hearing (cert petition) to eleven property owners and tenants who asked the court to hear their appeal on the Second Circuit Court’s dismissal of their challenge to the use of eminent domain for Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development proposal in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The petition...

Brooklyn teen Quashon Burton thought bringing a laxative-laced cake to school would be "funny" - but he's not laughing now.   After two teachers were sickened and he was hit with an assault charge, the senior is worried his whole future is collapsing like a half-baked souffle. "I'm pretty scared," Burton told the Daily News Thursday outside his home in Brownsville.  "I didn't mean to have this whole thing blow out of proportion. I thought it would be a senior prank that everyone would think is funny." Burton, 17, and pals Tiara Peoples and Kenny Ramirez got the idea to...

Upswing In Recent Violence Has Communities At Odds Fears Of Riots Similar To 1991 Grip Residents NEW YORK (CBS) ― Police are mobilizing a massive presence in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in the wake of increased tension between black and Jewish communities. Leaders from both communities have come together recently to preach cooperation among residents of the neighborhood where blacks and Hassidic Jews live side by side. But recent violence has showed that religion and race don't always mix. "I definitely feel [like there's unrest] because I see it everyday. I'm around here a lot and that's what...

Don’t snap a photo of the Masjid At-Taqwa in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn unless you want to be hauled away by a group of angry Muslims in Islamic attire to the basement of the facility where a group of twenty “security guards” in karate suits will interrogate you. This might sound preposterous. But it happened on Saturday, April 24, at 3:00 in the afternoon. Ali Kareem, the head of security for Siraj Wahaj’s mosque, conducted the grilling. A small, muscular man with a wispy black beard that has been dyed red with henna, Kareem demanded to know the reason...

Nearly 17 years after riots tore Crown Heights apart, the recent beating of a black college student by Jewish assailants has exposed rising tensions between blacks and Jews in my neighborhood. Cops and city officials have quietly gone on high alert, worried that another riot could be in the works. The troubles began on April 14, when Andrew Charles, a 20-year-old sophomore at Kingsborough Community College, says he and a friend encountered a pair of young Jewish men while walking down Albany Ave. about 6 p.m. "One was on bike, one was on foot. They were staring at us, staring...

A group of Brooklyn judges is preparing to sue the city to preserve its parking privileges in a park next to Borough Hall, claiming that the removal of 20 or so spaces will endanger the judges’ safety because the nearest garage is two blocks away. The parking lot, at the corner of Joralemon and Adams streets, is within Columbus Park. The judges also park their cars on a public walkway next to the lot, but the Parks Department now says that the judges will lose those spaces this spring. The 20 or so judges who park their vehicles in that...

It sounds like a throwback to the heights of political correctness of the early 1990s, but it's actually happening here in New York City in 2008: The Prospect Park Alliance has renamed its annual, much loved "Family Day" event as "Members Spring Fest." To rub salt in the wounds of family-loving Brooklynites, a "save the date" postcard notes in small print that the event is "formerly known as Family Day." So much for family values in Brooklyn, is the apparent decision of the Prospect Park Alliance board. That group of eminent New Yorkers includes Mayor Bloomberg's daughter Emma; Mr. Bloomberg's...

How the classified military documents from Iraq, which named the coordinates of where the Army suspected weapons of mass destruction to be hidden, ended up in an Arabic translator's apartment on Hoyt Street in Brooklyn, is clear. Not likely to be known anytime soon is what, if anything, the army contractor did with the documents.

Asian-American groups don't like the increased public scrutiny that Hillary Clinton's mysterious Chinese dishwasher donors are getting. To which I say, in words that should be universally understood: Boo-hoo. In the wake of eye-opening investigations by the New York Post and Los Angeles Times of more dubious foreign funny money flowing into Hillary's coffers, ethnic grievance organizations are stepping forward to condemn these stories as examples of "negligent journalism." Yep. The newspapers are guilty of "negligence" because they actually broke news instead of covering it up. Both papers uncovered dishwashers, cooks and other suspect Hillary campaign contributors in New York's...

Though they have a hard time recognizing it or even admitting it, liberals in America, are sowing the seeds for the future annihilation of America as we know it... The liberals in my city - New York - are at it again, but what you do not realize is that this time, they are forcing us to not only tolerate the scheme but forcing you to cough open your wallet to help fund it. How? By using federal as well as municipal tax-dollars to open, operate, and secure an Islamic Madrassa in Brooklyn cleverly disguised as a public school... The...

The embattled principal of an Arabic-themed public school in New York resigned Friday after coming under fire for failing to condemn the use of the highly charged word "intifada" on T-shirts. Debbie Almontaser was supposed to oversee the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn. The city's Department of Education says it remains committed to launching the school in September. Almontaser's departure comes on the heels of an editorial flaying in the New York Post and an article this week that connected Almontaser to Arab Women Active in Art and Media. That group is selling shirts imprinted with the words "Intifada...

CBS) NEW YORK What was thought to be a violently windy thunderstorm that plowed through Brooklyn Wednesday morning turned out to be a weather event of historical proportions. The National Weather Service confirmed that the storm brought with it Brooklyn's first ever tornado since such weather events were recorded. Officials measured it to be an EF2 twister, characterized by winds of anywhere from 111 to 135 miles per hour.

Transit officials are urging New Yorkers to delay their morning commute after severe weather flooded numerous subway stations and roads throughout the area early this morning, leading to massive mass transit delays during the morning rush. NYC Transit says the subway system cannot handle the morning rush, and that it will take some time to pump enough water out of the system to get service back up and running normally. "No subway line right now that is running at full normal of its route, so if people are at home, they're about to leave their house, advice to you is...

A Muslim school is opening in Brooklyn next month and guess who's paying for it. Well, that didn't take you very long, did it? You're right. The taxpayers. The very people whom so many radical Muslims want to kill are going to pay for a nice little Muslim school in New York. Try that with a Christian school and see how far you get. Wait! There's more! It seems that the principal (taxpayer paid, or course) of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, Dhabah "Debbie" Almontaser, is under more heat ... as if she wasn't already. A group called Arab Women...

What are we to make of a story in the New York Post about the ties between the principal of New York City's new "Arabic-themed" public school, which opens this fall in Brooklyn for grades 6-12, and an organization called Arab Women Active in Art and Media, which is selling t-shirts emblazoned with the message "Intifada NYC"?

An off-duty Brooklyn cop - who had left her gun at work - was caught defenseless when a masked intruder ambushed her as she arrived home and raped her at knifepoint, cops said yesterday. The attacker brazenly broke into her third-floor apartment, located on a busy stretch of Bay Ridge, in broad daylight and lay in wait for the officer before she arrived home at about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, police said. The 25-year-old domestic-violence officer, who works at a precinct in Brooklyn, told cops her attacker had pushed aside an air conditioner to get into the apartment, Police Commissioner Ray...

<p>Look out, ABC -- NBC wants Rosie O'Donnell in a bad way. New programming chief Ben Silverman is telling friends he will do anything to get O'Donnell onto the network, and not just in daytime. Silverman is talking to O'Donnell about hosting a prime-time game show he has up his sleeve as well as a daytime hour a la "The View." O'Donnell, meanwhile, is sitting pretty. Her final ratings on "The View" skyrocketed the show to unprecedented success. Barbara Walters will have quite a gap to fill over the summer as she looks for replacements. It's not like O'Donnell is going into semi-retirement while Silverman prepares his offer. On Monday, Rosie will give friends a sneak peek "hard hat" look at the new arts center she's building on West 45th Street named for a teacher who inspired her love of Broadway. The building, bought for her For All Kids and Rosie's Broadway Kids foundations, will open officially this fall. The facility is set to contain two dance studios, a music studio, practice rooms, a library, study café, changing rooms, administrative offices and a rooftop terrace. The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs will assist in the funding. Circle your calendars for Nov. 19. That's the day Rosie and Kelli Carpenter will host a 10th anniversary gala for O'Donnell's charities and the completion of the building. Who knows? If Silverman has anything to say about it, Rosie may already be back on the air by then.</p>

NEW HAVEN, CONN. - Kevin J. O'Connor, United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, announced that Leib Kohn, age 68, of Brooklyn, New York, was sentenced today by United States District Judge Christopher F. Droney in Hartford to 30 days of imprisonment, followed by two years of supervised release. On December 15, 2004, Kohn and his now-defunct companies, L & M Manufacturing and NESCO NY Inc., pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Arms Export Control Act by sending military components out of the United States without the required authorization from the U.S. Government. Kohn and his companies have...

When 10-year-old Tyler Pawlukiewicz wrote President Bush telling him he was all wrong on Iraq, the last thing the Brooklyn fifth-grader expected was a response...In his letter to the president, written for a social studies assignment, Tyler said that the plan to deploy 30,000 more troops to Iraq was "not fair" and that the money to send them would be better spent on education

A bookseller was sentenced yesterday in Federal District Court to 13 years in prison for plotting to buy arms for Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. Prosecutors say that the bookseller, Abdulrahman Farhane, 53, met with an undercover federal informant in his bookstore in late 2001 to discuss ways to send money overseas to buy weapons for the fighters.

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS. A controversial plan to open an Arabic-language middle school on the top floor of a Park Slope elementary school will go ahead, despite the protests of parents and residents, said Community Education Council 13 President Diane Nathaniel at a meeting here last week.

New gripe against Barclays By Gersh Kuntzman The Brooklyn Paper Barclays Bank’s partnership with Bruce Ratner is under fire again — but this time not because of the bank’s slavery- and apartheid-linked past. The New York Libertarian Party is now calling for a nationwide boycott of the British banking behemoth on the grounds that its participation in the Atlantic Yards project is a tacit endorsement of the state’s use of eminent domain to condemn private property and turn it over to a private developer, Ratner. “Barclays’ participation in eminent domain is an outrage as a private enterprise disrespecting property rights,”...

Judge Deborah A. Robinson imposed a stiffer penalty in the case than the Justice Department sought, fining Berger a total of $56,905, canceling his security clearance, and requiring monthly reporting to a probation officer for two years. Breuer said Berger has also picked up trash in Virginia parks for 100 hours to fulfill a community service requirement, and he criticized the renewed attention to Berger's case. "It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . . . for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake," Breuer said.

City To Open Arabic Public School In Brooklyn The Department of Education says that it will open a public school next fall dedicated to Arabic language and culture. The Khalil Gibran International Academy is one of 40 new schools that will their debut in the city next September. Education officials say that although half the classes at the school will be taught in Arabic, they want to enroll a diverse student body. The school is set to open in Brooklyn.

BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y., December 20, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Village of Briarcliff Manor officials have decided to remove their entire holiday display, including a 9-foot-tall menorah, from a public park rather than allow a resident to add a crèche after Alliance Defense Fund attorneys and allied attorneys won a temporary restraining order Friday from a federal judge. The lawsuit and TRO motion were filed Dec. 11 after the Briarcliff Manor Village's Board of Trustees refused to permit the display. "The village's constitutional violations regarding religious expression in public make them look like the grinches who stole Christmas and Chanukah from the...

Controversial Project Would Bring N.J. Nets To Brooklyn (CBS/AP) NEW YORK -- The massive, much-debated Atlantic Yards development project in Brooklyn was approved Friday by the Empire State Development Corp. -- passing a major hurdle toward "the resurgence of downtown Brooklyn," a deputy mayor said. The $4 billion project -- which would reshape Brooklyn with a basketball arena, office towers and thousands of apartments -- was approved by EDC in a decision that was hailed by Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The next step is a final review by the state Public Authorities Control Board. The project, designed...

Arrests of Pakistanis in US criticised By Our Correspondent NEW YORK, Nov 19: Pakistani community and religious leaders based in Brooklyn (New York) on Saturday protested arrests of scores of Pakistanis in immigration raids since last Wednesday claiming that many were held without charges, as lawyers scrambled to get them released. Some 33 Pakistanis were rounded in seven states this week on charges of entering the United States by posing as religious workers, part of a crackdown on a visa programme considered to be rife with fraud. But one report, which could not be corroborated, put the figure at 200....

NEW YORK, Mar 06, 2003 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- Allegations linking al-Qaida to money raised through a Brooklyn mosque have devastated New York Muslims and will hurt legitimate fund raising that was already crippled after the Sept. 11 attacks, Islamic groups said. U.S. officials have charged a Yemeni cleric with providing material support to a terrorist network and say much of the multimillions of dollars he raised came from contributors in the United States, including worshippers at the Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. Muslim leaders said Wednesday that the announcement is another setback for mosques and groups already...

A creepy handyman who secretly made hundreds of videotapes in restrooms at two Brooklyn High Schools won't have to do a day in prison a judge said yesterday. Michael Conte, the admitted voyeur, got a no-jail deal that gives him probation and community service. The twisted taper won't even have to register as a sex offender because the crimes he was charged with aren't serious enough - even though he made over 800 sicko videos. Tomei offered the deal to Conte, 47, over the objections of prosecutors. They earlier had made him an offer of one to three years in...

There's your shot of the day. Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn became the first of the McCarrick bishops to spread the Ted's episcopal lineage earlier today when he ordained three new auxiliaries in a ceremony at one of the mega-diocese's spacious parish churches, Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge. In keeping with the traditions of Brooklyn Catholicism, the choice of venue was a practical one -- while the Cathedral-Basilica of St James is too small, the traditional fallback site of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where DiMarzio was installed in 2003, isn't air-conditioned. As many of you know...

ICE & FBI agents arrest 31Korean nationals throughout the Northeastern United States in federal human trafficking case Korean women were smuggled to U.S. work as prostitutes in brothels NEW YORK, NY -- Michael J. Garcia, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Julie L. Myers, Assistant Secretary, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Mark J. Mehrson, Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office, today announced that 31 individuals were arrested yesterday and charged in a wide-ranging human trafficking ring...

WASHINGTON -- New York lawmakers led a boycott Wednesday of the Iraqi prime minister's speech to Congress, furious that he still has not condemned Hezbollah's actions against Israel. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton did attend the speech, but her hopes to hear him take such a stand were dashed.

WINDIES XI MAKE CLEAN SWEEP OF US PROMOTIONAL SERIES by CMC 10 July 2006 20:38 BROOKLYN, New York - A star-studded West Indies XI made a clean sweep of their two-match series against the United States with contrasting wins over the weekend at the Floyd Bennett Cricket Field. While they snatched a narrow five-run win in the first game on Saturday, they powered their way to an emphatic six-wicket victory on Sunday, with captain Brian Lara and Chris Gayle hammering half centuries. Batting first in the opening 40-overs game, West Indies made 214 for six which was due largely to...

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Before Assem Hammoud and his associates decided to try to bomb New York's PATH trains, they had considered several other targets: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge and the forests of California, where they would set a huge fire, Lebanese security officials told Newsday.

At a time when the United States is forced to deal with complicated international issues, the New York Post on Monday chose to publish on its front page the picture of 24-year-old Joel Witriol, an ultra-Orthodox man from Brooklyn, under the title: "NYPD Jew."

Wednesday, July 05, 2006 PLO gang Freed after Burning Flags, Desecrating Homes in Brooklyn I bet you were wondering what followed the incidents in Bay Ridge Brooklyn where American flags were burned (one at a  9/11 slain hero's home no less) and homes portraying the American flag desecrated with spray painted letters "PLO," Well read this and weep - Matthew Lysiak reported; The police have claimed that the kids have no idea what the letters PLO stand for...and they were released without further questioning. Lysiak  has since discovered that there is a gang of kids, some of whom marched in...

NY Times, June 12, 2006 by Jonathan P. Hicks "A group of black and Hispanic elected officials from Brooklyn are scheduled to meet this morning to devise strategies to keep a white candidate from winning a Congressional seat of historical significance in black politics. It is not the first such meeting of these officials, nor is it likely to be the last. That there are talks so steeped in ethnicity indicates that race is not just one of the issues in determining who will succeed Representative Major R. Owens. It seems to be the dominant one. Mr. Owens, a veteran...

Benedict XVI has named three new auxiliaries to the massive diocese of Brooklyn. If you were looking for something else today, sorry -- seems that it just ain't your day. Bishops-elect Octavio Cisneros, 60; Guy Sansaricq, 71, and 47 year-old Frank Caggiano will assist Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio in the administration of the 1.8-million member diocese, where every language under the sun is spoken. The Cuban-born Cisneros currently serves as rector of the diocese's Cathedral Seminary Residence and Secretary for Priestly Formation in the Brooklyn Curia. Bishop-elect Sansaricq -- the first American bishop of Haitian birth -- is the national director...