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ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS 10) – New York State Police say multiple police departments are on scene at Crossgates Mall currently sweeping inside the mall after reports of shots fired. Witnesses on scene say the mall is on lockdown. Police are currently evacuating the stores inside the mall. No reports of injuries or arrests made. We have multiple crews on scene.

Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election: In his pre-election forecast, he gave 278 seats to Conservatives and 267 to Labour. Shortly after midnight, he was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labour. But when the sun rose in London on Friday, Conservatives had an expected 329 seats, against Labour's 233. The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling: "It’s becoming increasingly clear that pre-election polls underestimated how well Conservatives would do and overestimated Labour’s result," the statistician guru wrote in the wee hours of the morning. (He also overestimated the Liberal Democrats' result by roughly 20...

Hopefully Sarah Palin realizes she's been invited to Hong Kong as a practical joke. CLSA, the Asia-focused broker who invited Mrs. Palin as keynote speaker for an Asian investment conference, is well known for their cheeky takes on investment research. In the past, they've polled Asian fortune tellers for index targets, hired anime cartoonists to draw Japanese research, and generally love to push the boundaries between entertainment and analysis. They are a real research firm, it's just that they love to sprinkle in some hilarity every now and then as a smart marketing gimmick. Sarah Palin is this year's big...

Death Penalty: The Supreme Court this week heard arguments that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. Euthanasia advocates consider it a blessing for the deathly ill. Yet it's cruel for the just plain deadly.<.font> The Supreme Court heard arguments last Monday not on the constitutionality of the death penalty itself but on whether the possibility that a murderer might experience pain if the three-chemical cocktail administered to death row inmates takes too long to do its job. In their brief to the court, lawyers for convicted murderers Ralph Baze and Thomas Bowling say the three-part death cocktail and the...

I don't know James Carroll, but if I were a friend or family member I might truly be concerned. His Boston Globe column of this morning, American Disconnection, is a disjointed lament about the state of the world and his feeling of disconnectedness, invoking the anomie of his youth. What makes it interesting for present purposes is the way in which Carroll, the prototypical MSM liberal, looks at the world, sees a litany of wrongs, and naturally concludes . . . It's All America's Fault. Carroll seeks to reassure us, and no doubt himself, that "my adult connections are strong,...

Psychologist: Ohio recount relieves traumatized Kerry supporters Hypnotherapist says recount has put a stop to his post-election therapy sessions Published Tuesday, November 23, 2004 at 1:00 am by Sean Salai A licensed Florida psychologist who treated 20 John Kerry supporters for “post-election trauma” after their candidate’s loss to President Bush said Monday that the Ohio recount had cheered up Democrats and left him without any patients. Douglas Schooler, a Boca Raton psychologist who treated the Kerry partisans with intense hypnotherapy after they proved unable to handle the reality of losing to Bush, said last week’s Ohio recount announcement and reshuffling...

There was a dose of commiseration and some quiet lamenting about a presidential election lost, but the focus of the people crowded into a Beacon Hill home last night was what they can do now. Or, as Seattle lawyer Randy Gordon put it: "How to take the positive energy of engagement and enragement and move forward." The "house party" was one of dozens in the Seattle area and thousands held simultaneously across the country that were organized by MoveOn, a fast-growing political-action group aimed at getting "moderate to progressive" candidates into office. Key issues, from the Iraq war to same-sex...

To the Editor: Reading "A Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America" (news article, Nov. 4) left me feeling an unexpected kinship with the people of New York. I live in rural Maine, as culturally and aesthetically distant from Midtown Manhattan as I can be. I go weeks without hearing a foreign language, or even an accent; no one would mistakenly call my corner of the world "cosmopolitan." But I, and a majority of Mainers, share New Yorkers' feelings of disbelief over President Bush's re-election. It is inconceivable to us that millions of Americans would trivialize or deny...

Criticism of the media often hijacks the Diversity Coalition meetings at the Minority Museum. David Shapiro brings people together to discuss ways that people in this multicultural community can better get along. But the news media have drawn a lot of fire since the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy. People's disappointment in the fourth estate escalated this month when one person played her copy of “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.” We'll watch the rest of it when the group reconvenes at 7 p.m. Sept. 7 at 89th Street and Wornall Road. The film adds to the mea culpa in May...

Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center was the scene Sunday for anchormen to lament the lack of network coverage for this week's convention. The parties "have to think about how to reconstruct the conventions," said NBC Brokaw. "They've been drained of all their vitality." ABC Jennings claimed that "under the current circumstances, there isn't great reason for us to show up," for more than an hour or two a night. But PBS Lehrer rebuked the big three, according to Monday's BOSTON GLOBE. "I think that starting tomorrow, we're going to have four of the eight most important days we can have as...

NEW YORK -- Influential Democrats, worried that their party has been outgunned in the political propaganda wars by conservative radio and television personalities, are scouring the nation for a liberal answer to Rush Limbaugh and the many others on the deep bench of Republican friends. For years, Democrats have groused about their inability to balance what they see as the increasing influence over the electorate by advocates of Republican policies. But they say their concerns have taken on a new urgency because of the rise to the top of the cable news ratings by the Fox News Channel, considered by...

It's been almost 20 years since the last time I heard Jeff Christie on a Pittsburgh Top 40 radio station. He was one of KQV-AM's "Top Pop 5," which is how the station referred to its first-string disc jockeys. At the time, KQV was losing ratings to competitor 13Q, so KQV brought in a new program director named Joey Reynolds. Commercial radio stations, then as now, were tightly formatted. In a bid to shake things up, Reynolds tossed the format notebook into the Dumpster. The DJs responded in a number of ways to their new-found freedom. They began spinning a...