Posted on 13 April 2012.
Click here to listen to our full broadcast from Thursday, April 5, 2012:
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Posted on 13 April 2012.
Bo Xilai, one of China's highest-profile politicians interfered in an investigation involving a family member before he was fired last week. AP Photo/Andy Wong)
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George Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. (AP Photo/Gary W. Green, Orlando Sentinel, Pool)
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Last night in West Harlem locals told Uptown Radio they were relieved by the movement in the case.
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A sign warns against trespassing at Diego Beekman apartments in Mott Haven. Photo by Celia Llopis-Jepsen
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Queens District Attorney's Office. Photo: Mackenzie Issler.
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The New York State appellate court is now hearing three cases of people who say they were questioned without a lawyer by the Queens District Attorney.
The plaintiffs were all suspects in custody for various crimes and were waiting in the courthouse, expecting to go before a judge.
Instead, they were brought into an interrogation room, asked a series of questions about their cases, and given the opportunity to speak about their alleged crimes.
The New York Civil Liberties Union says this practice is both unconstitutional and unethical because it turns up evidence that could be used against suspects in court.
The NYCLU claims the Queens DA has compromised the rights of perhaps thousands of suspects since it started this practice in 2007.
Parties in the three cases now before the appellate court can’t talk to the press. But people whose cases are closed can.
Deonte Jones : I was just like real uncomfortable with the whole situation.
That’s Deonte Jones, who was cleared of robbery charges this week.
On July 12th of last year, he was taken out of a holding cell in the courthouse by Mary Picone. Jones thought she was his public defender.
She quickly explained she was an investigator from the district attorney’s office, and took him to a room, where an assistant DA joined them.
Door Sound have a seat in that chair … we are going to explain to you what you are doing here …
In the videotape of the interrogation the camera focuses mainly on Jones, who’s wearing a blue t-shirt and a worried look as Picone begins.
Investigator: … okay today is July 12th, 2011, it is 6:56 p.m. We are present in the interview room of the Queens County District Attorney’s Office Central Booking Room.
She’s working from a script, meant for all kinds of suspects. It includes a long list of options for defendants about what the DA’s office can do on their behalf, like investigating alibis and other information.
Investigator: If your version of what happened is different than what we have been told, this is an opportunity if you so choose, to tell us your story. If there something that you like us to investigate regarding this incident, if you tell me about, we will look into it.
Jones is read his rights and agrees to talk.
This week —with his lawyer present — Jones watched the nine minute video of his interrogation.
Deonte: I felt like they tried to ask me the same question over and over again to see if I would change my answer.
On the tape, Jones says he saw a fight and walked away and he sticks to this, even after several minutes of intense questioning.
But other defendants have run into trouble, says New York Civil Liberties Union attorney Taylor Pendergrass. He says once the suspects are brought into the interrogation room, they are asked questions they think could clear them.
Pendergrass says the opposite is true.
Pendergrass: The District Attorney is strategically and, I would say cynically, exploiting this window of time just before suspects are going to be appointed criminal defense attorneys in order to take this uncounseled interrogations.
Pendergrass says the questioning violates a suspect’s right to get in front of a judge quickly. He explains that’s part of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures. And Pendergrass says there’s something else.
Pendergrass: The assistant district attorney reads this very misleading script to suspects that makes it seems like it is in their best interests, the suspects best interests, completely violates the Fifth Amendment Right not to self incriminate.
A spokeswoman for the Queens County District Attorney’s office declined to comment for the story, saying the city doesn’t talk about pending litigation.
She also declined to speak generally about how the DA questions defendants.
Pendergrass maintains the Queen’s DA has said in court that it uses these interrogations to exonerate people and dismiss cases.
Deonte Jones’ lawyer, Michael Siff, says the questioning confuses suspects about who is prosecuting them and who is defending them.
Siffe: I think that there are major issues because you have a lawyer that is there saying that they are there to help the defendant so the defendant is putting their trust in attorney, who’s putting forth promises they may not be able to keep.
The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a friend of the court brief in the three cases now before the New York appellate court. It asks to suppress evidence gathered during the DA’s interrogations. But the organization’s main goal is to have the court call for the DA to stop the interrogations all together.
Pendergrass says there could a decision by the end of this year.
Mackenzie Issler, Columbia Radio News.
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Posted on 13 April 2012.
Squires_WaterRates_BNCDepartment of Environmental Protection in the Bronx. Photo: Acacia Squires.
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HOST INTRO: If you’re a tenant in New York City, you probably don’t pay the water bill. But there’s no such thing as a free shower. Your landlord’s footing that bill, and since 2007, it’s been growing: Water rates in the city have gone up by seventy-seven percent over the past five years.
Now, the city’s proposing another rate increase. It’s the lowest in five years, and that’s good news for landlords, sort of. Acacia Squires reports.
***
SQUIRES: Everyday more than one billion gallons of fresh water makes its way from upstate New York to the city’s five boroughs. Some of that water ends up here, in a backyard garden in the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn.
AMBI: Sounds of chickens
Katrina Mauro has co-owned this four-unit building since 2007.
Mauro: The garden definitely takes a lot of water, as you can see we have a lot of planters here.
She and her tenants share the vegetables, but not the bill. Like most landlords in New York, she pays the water for the entire property. She says she never really thought about her water bills — she just rolled them into the cost of owning a building. It wasn’t until she started really looking at the rate that she realized how much it’d gone up.
Mauro: You know, 200-300 when I first moved in. Then the next few years it was 300 to 350, and now I am looking at it and my last bill was 498 dollars, so that’s a major increase in five years.
The rising cost of water may not be obvious to landlords of properties this size, but big landlords say they’ve definitely noticed. Steven Lavelle works for Ventura Land Corp in Flushing Queens. The company owns nearly 1,000 units across the city.
Lavelle: I pulled out a bill here. 2008, here is a property. I paid for a three month bill almost forty-seven hundred dollars. Two years later, 10,683 dollars. So, I go from paying roughly 18,080 dollars a year, to 42,800 a year.
Every year the Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, which runs New York City’s water system, takes a look at it books. Then it proposes how much the cost of water will probably be. This year, it asked for an increase of just over seven percent – the lowest since before the price of water started to take off. But, Lavelle says with all of the year-on-year increases, inflation in energy isn’t the only thing that catches his attention anymore.
Lavelle: To me trying to combat the rising cost of oil was always more important than the rising cost of water. But, that’s not the case anymore. The numbers are staggering, the increases never cease and clearly they are not coming down.
The DEP says it needs to raise rates to pay off its debt. The Department issued a lot of bonds about five years ago in order to pay for improvements it needed to comply with federal environmental mandates. Now, landlords in New York are paying that bill, and a lot of them aren’t happy.
Jain: Landlords have a case to be made there.
Rahul Jain keeps track of the DEP at the nonpartisan watchdog group, the Citizen’s Budget Commission. He says the cost of water has shot up in part because, the department severely underestimated how much it would cost to fix its environmental problems, so it had to borrow more money than it originally intended.
Jain: Then the question is about, what has contributed to the cost overuns? And that’s kind of an argument about if they have been managed as well as they should have been or the expertise there weren’t able to surmise that these things were going to run over budget.
That means it’s likely water rates are going to continue to increase. Landlords say they have to pass that cost onto tenants. Steven Lavelle of Venutra Land Corp says if they can’t do that, for example, with those tenants protected by rent control, his company may have to get rid of those buildings.
Lavelle: Every dollar that is produced has to used to pay the bills of the building. If we don’t get a handle on the rates, it may make more sense for us to walk away from it.
Lavelle says that while his company has that option, smaller landlords like Katrina Mauro in Greenpoint will have no choice but to raise rents.
Lavelle: There are a lot of smaller property owners who, pardon the pun, are going to be soaked with these bills, and unless we are about to do something about it, we are going to see more properties distressed, and people might even lose their properties.
While landlords here think the situation is bad, the cost of water is actually half it is in Seattle and Atlanta. New York is ranked 12th among major US cities. DEP will hold public hearings over the next month in each borough. The New York City Water Board, which oversees rates, will vote on the proposed increase in May. If approved, the rate hike will go into effect in July.
Acacia Squires, Columbia Radio News.
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Posted on 13 April 2012.
(AP Photo/Robert Kradin)
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“I….LOVE…YOUR…EYEBROWS…” she said. I rolled my eyes, which as far as I’m concerned, is what you do when a total stranger starts talking about your eyebrows.
And this woman was serious about eyebrows. It turned out she worked for an upscale tweezer company. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in modeling for their infomercial. I mumbled something about modeling promoting the patriarchy. She didn’t pick up on that. She said I’d get free tweezers, plus a professional eyebrow stylist would pluck hair out of my face on the Home Shopping Network.
This sounded so lame. Obviously I was interested.
A few trips to the open bar later, and I’d completely forgotten about this conversation. So I was surprised to get a follow-up email a week later, with an address for a “brow studio” in SoHo.
On the day of, I barely thought about the shoot. I could just squeeze it in between work and band practice. So I showed up on very little sleep with my bass guitar on my back, in ripped jean shorts over black tights and a flannel shirt. Honestly, I don’t even think I showered that day.
I walked into the studio twenty minutes late. The place had obnoxious techno music blasting, wall-to-wall mirrors and skinny girls clicking around the room in heels.
When I plopped myself into the chair, I ignored a request to sit up straight and smile, opting instead to impatiently checked my phone and make fun of the music. One of the skinny girls murmured to another, “I thought someone said she looked like Anne Hathaway.”
I was informed that I’d be working with Lindsay Lohan’s brow stylist. Yes. famous for tweezing Lindsay’s Lohan’s eyebrows. And now mine.
Without acknowledging me, he called to his assistant “we’re going to need a lot under-eye concealer.”
This was not going well. As the stylist plucked away, he gossiped about Beyonce’s eyebrows being a “hot mess” and other celebrities he’d worked on. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to respond to that. I was barely aware of my own eyebrows before that week.
I was then told that there’d been a change of plans. They now planned to use me as the “before.” girl. You know, the one with defects who needs a makeover. I was livid. I was above this! They were the ones working in an industry designed to make women feel bad about themselves.
But, if I was being honest, I had to admit something. I had spent so much time making fun of the infomercial, and the whole idea of “brow styling” for that matter, it didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t doing them any favors. They just wanted a nice, smiling, normal-looking girl to put on TV. Maybe even one who’d bothered to wash her face that day. Maybe they wanted someone who was happy to be there.
I haven’t had any more ironic modeling gigs, and expect I won’t be getting a call back from the tweezer company. But there is hope for me yet! I’ve been getting email updates from my brow stylist with all the latest eyebrow tips and tricks, if I want them.
BACK ANNOUNCE: Annie Russell has been wearing bangs to hide her famous eyebrows ever since.
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Posted on 13 April 2012.
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Hristina Tisheva brings us the news at 4:30 p.m.
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Posted on 13 April 2012.
Job seekers attend a National Career Fair, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
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(AP Photo/Don Ryan)
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HOST INTRO:
Tuesday is Tax Day. A D.C. area holiday gives filers an extra two days this year.
If you haven’t filed yet, there’s still time. But don’t let the deadline rush get to you. Jason Slotkin reports;
Dennis Wang filed his tax return weeks ago.
But the college senior has spent his spring break filling out other people’s 1040 forms. He oversees a free student run tax service for low-income households. The service is at Baruch College library.
He’s been there for 50 hours this week, along with 175 other student volunteers tabulating deductions and credits, while other classmates are in Florida or Cancun. He says it rewarding.
Dennis Wang
To see a client smile or have a client thanks us is a similar experience. It’s probably a better experience than going to Cancun
Wang says, the students help between 50 to 100 people a day
Even more are coming this week. For those filing their taxes themselves… on deadline. Rushing can lead to errors, rejected applications and late fees.
Dianne Besunder is a spokeswoman for the IRS in New York.
She says most people make really simple mistakes including messing up on basic math.
Dianne Besunder
Be careful. Check those numbers. Do em twice. Make sure everything looks good….People will file a completely correct return and forget to sign it.
Besunder says most mistakes are made on the paper form which require filers to do the math themselves.
She suggest instead to file electronically. It checks the math for you will notify you immediately about whether or not your return has been accepted. Besunder says electronic applications has a less than one percent rate of error.
David Sands is a CPA, whose been working nearly 70 hours this past week.
There are potential deductions, you can miss out on. Some mistakes can warrant a letter from the IRS. Sands says take your time, however long you may need.
David Sands
If you don’t want to spend the time there’s plenty of professionals out there.
Jason Slotkin
Also, filing your taxes…There’s an app for that.
I caught up with Anthony Rivera on the Upper West Side. He filed his taxes with an iPhone app.
AMBI BRIDGE
SOUNDS OF STREET
All he did was fill out the form and snap a picture of it with his phone. Of course, Rivera filed his return months ago. He doesn’t recommend filing your taxes at the last minute
Anthony Rivera
I wouldn’t wait until the last minute. It’s like cramming for a test,. I’d try and get a head start on it.
In summation, best way to to file your taxes. Start Immediately. Jason Slotkin. Columbia Radio News.
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Richard Prince's appropriation of Robert Cariou's photo.
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HOST INTRO: When does someone else’s photo suddenly become your own? One artist takes images from a photography book, changes them and integrates them into his own painting. It’s called appropriation art. So when does this violate copyright? It’s a big issue in the world of high-priced art, and, as Andrew Parsons reports, an upcoming court case could have an effect on how art galleries do business.
***
There are photographs all around Penelope Umbrico’s Brooklyn art studio–on the walls, strewn on tables. She sorts through hundreds of prints of sunsets.
SOUND: Umbico showing reporter her photos –
Umbrico: Often there’s piles of 4 by 6 snapshots that are left over from installations Reporter: These are other people’s photos?
Umbrico: Well, they’re all from other people’s photos, yeah
Umbrico is an appropriation artist. She gets her photographs from Flikr. The images are copyrighted and she uses them without permission to makes collages. But Umbrico takes everything but the sun out of the pictures – the people, the beaches, the ocean, everything. The result looks like a colorful, patchwork quilt.
ACT Umbrico 2 (:08)
You would not be able to tell if these are your suns because these are very small fragments of larger sunset images. I’m just taking the sun.
This is a legal principle called ‘fair use,’ Under certain conditions, it allows you to alter someone else’s copyrighted property so it becomes yours. Because Umbrico alters her material so much she’s safe from any lawsuits. However, in a case before the courts, the issues aren’t as clear cut. Richard Prince is a famous appropriation artist who sells his work for millions of dollars. A court ruled last year that his use of a photographer’s image of a rastafarian community violated copyright. The photographer, Patrick Cariou, claims that in one case Prince altered his photograph very little. His lawyer is Daniel Brooks.
ACT Daniels (:16)
He sent it to a commerical lab to have it enlarged and scanned onto a canvas, added blue paint over the man’s eyes and mouth and inserted into his hands a guitar. And that’s what he did.
In fair use, you must transform the meaning of an art piece by commenting on or satirizing it. Prince admitted that he didn’t want to do that, he was just using the photos as objects. Daniels claims that in addition to using material without permission, Prince also undercut an opportunity for Cariou to make money.
ACT Daniels (:15)
There was going to be an exhibition of Mr. Cairou’s photographs at an art gallery. When the gallery owner found out these paintings were being shown she decided to cancel or not go forward with the show.
Others disagree. Attorney Michael Rips, who represents artists in copyright cases, thinks that the court was wrong in the Prince case. He says Prince shouldn’t have to engage with Cariou’s work. Prince used the photos as objects – something many artists do. Rips and many in the art world worry that the ruling could set a dangerous precedent.
ACT Rips (:12)
It’s real precedent because this question hasn’t been addressed and there’s lots of artists who are using other people’s work as raw material as a opposed to engaging.
What also makes this case different is how it affects art galleries. In the ruling last spring, the gallery which sold Prince’s series was found to be an accomplice to Prince’s crime.
ACT Rips 1 (:09)
The district court is imposing upon galleries and museums a duty to inquire as to the source the imagery that artists use.
Museums would have to employ extra staff to determine if all works are within copyright law. In practice, it means they would avoid displaying works from those artists. That is the argument that a dozen museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenhiem made in an amicus brief to the second court of appeals. The court takes up the appeal in late May. Attorney Michael Rips hopes the appeals court rules in Prince’s favor, but he admits Prince should have been more careful.
ACT Rips (:14)
If you’re just using another artist’s work because it’s aesthetically effective, I think you need to be and probably should be very careful about doing that.
The art world will be watching to see just how careful it’ll have to be.
Andrew Parsons, Columbia Radio News
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Nat: Today is the first day of the Soho International Film Festival in New York City, where 60 independent filmmakers are screening their movies in the hope of getting them distributed.
The festival is in its third year and had 650 entries to choose from.
Jackie Mader is live at the Sunshine Theater on Houston street where the red carpet is starting to fill up.
Jackie, why did the founders see a need for another film festival here in New York City, especially just a week before Tribeca begins? (23)
Jackie: Well this festival is really for people on the fringe, or the edge of filmmaking. It can be really hard to get into bigger festivals like Tribeca, so the SOHO festival is trying to attract minority filmmakers, women filmmakers, even student filmmakers. There’s a lot of diversity in the films. They have a puerto rican showcase. And they have a good amount of New York City filmmakers who have made films about the city. I spoke to Sibyl Santiago, she’s the executive director of the festival, and she said that a lot of filmmakers don’t get the attention they deserve, so the festival tries to be a solution.
SLUG: Mader_Bite1_BNC
SANTIAGO: There’s a little bit of frustration with some of the festivals in the city- they’re not giving them the audience they need or not giving them a chance to put their films out. We are trying to give them a medium to have a place to bring indie films. (0:12)
Nat: Ok so which of these indie films are getting the biggest buzz at the festival this year?
Jackie: Octavia Spencer is involved in two films that are getting a lot of buzz. Remember, she just won the Academy Award for her role in “The Help,” and she was relatively unknown before that. She is acting in a film, but she also directed a short film called “The Unforgiving Minute.” It’s a film about a young boy growing up in a broken home.
Nat: So the festival is attracting some pretty big names.
Jackie: Yes, but mainly celebrities who are still into Indie films. So, Octavia Spencer is popular and could probably go to a bigger festival, but she’s still really involved in the independent market, and is very passionate about these types of festivals. Also, Michael Rymer, who directed Battlestar Gallactica, he has a film here that he shot in Australia. It won several awards over there, but not so much over here. So these are very successful people who but also have side projects that they feel strongly about.
Nat: So who are the filmmakers we should be excited about who we haven’t really heard about yet?
Jackie: Right so Leslie Manning, she’s a name to keep in mind. She directed a film called “Leila” that was shot in the UK. That film has already won awards at other festivals. Also, Nate Taylor, he directed a film called “Forgetting the Girl” and that film sold out in the first three hours when the festival put up tickets to the films. So I would say both of those directors are ones to watch and the films should be pretty good too.
Nat: Sounds like it should be an interesting festival. Thanks Jackie. Jackie Mader was live from Sunshine Theater on the lower east side.
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Posted on 13 April 2012.
Pier 40, a potential location for a new soccer stadium in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
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–
Pier 40 on the Hudson River at the West end of Houston Street is already a popular soccer venue. Youth teams train here. Vincent Grady is the coach of the Downtown United soccer club. His young players work out here a lot.
GRADY:
I practice three times a week. And with my girls’ team I practice three times a week.
The New York Metro area already has a professional soccer team. It’s called the New York Red Bulls and plays in Harrison, New Jersey.
But Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber is focusing on New York as a location for the 20th team in the league because of the city’s soccer history.
In the 1970’s, the New York Cosmos were the biggest name in the sport with German great Franz Beckenbauer and Brazilian soccer legend Pele.
SOUND:
“Pele scored. The New York Cosmos have just scored…” Crowd cheering.
Time: 0:05
Daily News reporter Filip Bondy covered the team during its heyday in the early 1980’s. He says before the Cosmos and the North American Soccer League it played in folded, the team frequently filled up Giants stadium.
BONDY:
You would go there and there would be 77,000 fans screaming in the seats at Giants stadium. So, it was an amazing time for them. It really was this amazing sense of ‘This is our chance to see real soccer,’ so it was quiet an event.
TIME: 0:17
Bondy says it was an event that helped raise the visibility of soccer and attracted many younger players. He thinks the Cosmos helped to make the United States a more competitive national team.
BONDY:
There is no doubt about it, in my mind, the the U.S. national team would not be where it is right now, and certainly would not have qualified for the World Cup in 1990 because it was really a New York – New Jersey team.
TIME: 0:17
Ever since then, soccer has been getting more popular across the country. Last year, attendance at M.L.S games went up about 6 percent. Here in the New York Metro area, the Red Bulls drew a little over 18,000 fans to home games. That’s about 2,000 more than the season before.
Dennis Coates teaches sports economics at the University of Maryland. He sees no reason why the greater New York area can’t support a second team.
COATES:
If the Red Bulls playing in New Jersey draw lots of fans from New Jersey and Staten Island and so on, and nobody from out on Long Island, nobody from Brooklyn and the Bronx and so on, then it’s very possible that if you put a team in downtown New York, it will attract a completely different set of fans than the team in New Jersey.
TIME: 0:22
A new Cosmos club might be that team.
A group of investors revived the old name in 2010. The team made Pele the honorary president, put former French superstar Eric Cantona in charge of development and made the late Italian player and Cosmos legend Georgio Chinaglia the team’s ambassador.
Chairman and CEO Paul Kemsley said that he was confident the Cosmos would become the 20th team in Major League Soccer.
But new owners took over the team last fall and Kemsley resigned. All that’s known about the new owners is that they are from Saudi Arabia. Whoever starts a new team in New York, is going to need a lot of money. MLS has said the new franchise will cost 100 million dollars.
Meanwhile, New York soccer fans know no more about what’s going to happen than they did before.
There is going to be a new stadium and it will probably be at Pier 40. But Daily News reporter Filip Bondy says the rumors have been going on for too long,
BONDY: Show me the stadium and then I’ll believe.
TIME: 0:03
The amateur soccer players who were playing there on a recent afternoon, see putting a field at Pier 40 as a mixed blessing.
CASTRO:
Can I ask you something? Will we be able to play in the professional stadium?
TIME: 0:03
That is Kevin Castro. He goes to high school in Queens and plays for Downtown United. He and about 10 of his friends, dressed in Barcelona and Manchester United t-shirts and shorts, pick one goal and start passing to each other. They come to Pier 40 five times a week. Castro says building a stadium at the location would mean they would lose their practice ground.
CASTRO:
To be honest with you, I don’t really think it’s…It’s nice to have a stadium around, close, to come and watch the games. But it will take everybody’s playtime. This is a field where everybody’s been coming here for a really long time. It wouldn’t be a good thing.
TIME: 0:14
There are still a lot of questions about Pier 40 as a stadium venue. Within a month, The Hudson River Trust, which operates Pier 40, expects a report compiled by consultants suggesting what commercial opportunities may be possible at the field.
Meanwhile, the new Cosmos organization says it is continuing to meet with M.L.S officials.
Hristina Tisheva, Columbia Radio News.
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A huntsman spider. Photo by John Tann on Flickr.
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(AP Photo/ Kirk Mastin)
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Stay out from underneath ladders, and watch out for black cats – it’s Friday the 13th. Sarah Laing set out to test her luck – and find out why this day is considered the unluckiest in the year.
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