CITYWIDE

COUNCIL TO VOTE FOR MORE INFORMATION ON VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS

The City Council is planning to override a mayoral veto today in a move that would give parents more information about violence in schools. The bill requires the Department of Education to post violent incidents on the Internet. The chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, Peter Vallone Jr., said, “You can find out on the web what the school menu is…but you cannot find out the amount of crime in any individual schools.”

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

MANHATTAN

SPANISH ANTI-TERROR JUDGE TO TEACH AT NYU

Spain’s leading anti-terrorism magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, will take temporary leave from the National Court to teach at New York University Law School, Spanish media reported yesterday. Mr. Garzon will teach classes on terrorism between March 1 and December 1, the private Cadena SER radio reported. He also will teach classes at New York’s King Juan Carlos of Spain Center. Mr. Garzon has led many of Spain’s major investigations into terrorism and drug trafficking in recent years. He made international headlines in 1998, when he issued a warrant that led to the arrest in London of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and later unsuccessfully sought his extradition to Spain for trial on charges of genocide. In September 2003, Mr. Garzon indicted Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks along with 34 other alleged Al Qaeda members. He later added five more people to the indictment. That case is due to go to trial early in 2005, although many of the indicted are still fugitives.

– Associated Press

LAWYER ACCUSES PROSECUTORS OF USING ‘GUILT BY ASSOCIATION’

Prosecutors frightened jurors by making them think of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden, and the war on terror, a lawyer for a U.S. postal worker accused of joining a terror conspiracy said in closing arguments yesterday. The lawyer, Kenneth Paul, warned jurors that the government was trying to convict his client, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, of conspiring to kill and kidnap people overseas with a “guilt through association” prosecution. The evidence against Mr. Sattar has been a centerpiece of the government’s case against civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart and an Arabic translator, Mohamed Yousry, at the first major terrorism trial in New York since the World Trade Center fell.

– Associated Press

ALBANY

OFFICIALS CONFIRM DOCUMENTS WERE HEAVILY CENSORED

Thruway Authority officials confirmed yesterday that they provided more heavily censored records to an Assembly committee investigating a state canal development scandal than the authority gave to criminal investigators. But a Thruway Authority spokesman, Dan Gilbert, said the redacted materials will mostly be restored in a new set of documents to be provided to the Assembly committee as soon as today.

Personal data including Social Security, credit card, and home telephone numbers will still be withheld under what Mr. Gilbert called a “reasonable” confidentiality standard. Mr. Gilbert said the authority believes that will protect personal data covered under a disclosure agreement struck with the committee’s chairman, Assemblyman Richard Brodsky. Mr. Brodsky said that will be enough for him, if he can be sure only that the data are redacted. Those records will reveal the names of political officials, authority officials, and others who attended meetings leading to the state Canal Corp. awarding a Buffalo businessman residential development rights along the state canal system for $30,000.

– Associated Press

NEW GOP CHAIRMAN TO OVERHAUL PARTY OPERATIONS

The newly elected state GOP chairman, Steven Minarik, less than two months into the job, said yesterday he is overhauling operations at the Republican State Committee with the intention of being “a little more aggressive.” Mr. Minarik, a hard-charging political operative out of Rochester where he was Monroe County GOP chairman, was elected November 15 to replace the more laid-back Alexander Treadwell as state party leader. While Mr. Treadwell and Governor Pataki, a Republican, said the chairmanship change was long-planned, it came in the wake of serious GOP setbacks in the November elections.

– Associated Press

POLICE BLOTTER

MAN ARRESTED IN RAPES A man accused of committing a string of violent rapes in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx over the last several weeks was arrested early yesterday morning after officers from the Special Victims Squad found him hiding underneath a friend’s bed, police said. Hector Rosario, 21, of Valentine Avenue in the Bronx, was arrested and charged with the rape and assault of two victims in December. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges. The arrest followed a weeklong hunt for a serial rapist in Bedford Park, a neighborhood that borders Fordham University.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

ECONOMIST OFFICE RECEIVES SUSPICIOUS ENVELOPE

Emergency service vans were parked for hours outside the Economist’s Midtown office yesterday afternoon, while investigators from the Police Department inspected the magazine’s offices for strains of anthrax and other potential warning signs of terrorist activity. A suspicious envelope covered with a white powdery substance was found in the accounting department’s morning mail, said a spokesman for the magazine, Martin Giles, prompting the inspection of three employees’ clothing for precautionary measures. The magazine’s staff was then given the day off, while police searched the office. The envelope was taken to the city’s Department of Health for further evaluation, police said.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

DOG BITES WOMAN

After a minor dog fight in Chelsea yesterday afternoon, a woman was sent to the hospital carrying the tip of her finger in a coffee cup full of ice, and witnesses said her own dog is the chief suspect.

The injured woman, who was not identified by police, tried to grab her misbehaving pooch from a scuffle at the dog-run. Instead, when she pulled her hand back, the tip of her index finger was missing. The woman was sent to Bellevue Hospital where surgeons attempted to reattach the severed digit. As for her dog, it was taken back to the woman’s apartment by a neighbor.

– Special to the Sun

POLICE SEARCH FOR TATTOOED SUSPECT

A distinctive tear-shaped tattoo has led police detectives to believe that a 19-year-old who escaped from a Nassau County hospital bed with a gunshot wound earlier this week is responsible for two unsolved murders, among other crimes.

Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, Brad Washington was admitted to Long Island Jewish Hospital with a bullet wound in his left leg and a broken leg, apparently from jumping from a window, police said. He gave fake names to hospital administrators, police said, and before detectives could question him in his hospital room, he was missing. A search is on.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

FATHER SHOT IN HEAD IN FRONT OF 8-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER

An evening visit to a Brooklyn deli turned tragic when a customer was shot in the head by a stray bullet in front of his 8-year-old daughter, police said. Kenneth Frazer, 38, who lives around the corner from the East New York market, was in critical condition at Brookdale Hospital last night from a bullet wound to the head, according to a source. Mr. Frazer and his daughter were making a purchase at the Star Deli at 2718 Pitkin Ave. at about 6 p.m. when a 22-year-old man walked into the store, followed by two other men. The three men got into a heated argument, which escalated into a shoving match. Then, one of the men pulled out a gun and shot the 22-year-old victim in the arm. Police said the bullet passed through his shoulder and hit Mr. Frazer in the head.

The man with the wounded shoulder, who was not identified by police, was taken to Brookdale Hospital. The gunman and his accomplice fled the scene, and the gun was not recovered. Police said the three men had been in a dispute earlier in the day, and that Mr. Frazer had no involvement with them.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

WIFE ARRESTED IN FATAL STABBING OF HUSBAND

A Brooklyn woman was arrested and charged with murdering her husband yesterday after police officers found his body on Coney Island Avenue with a kitchen knife lodged in his back, police said. The motive surrounding the domestic slaying is still unclear, police said, but shortly before midnight on Monday, Frank Marinaro, 62, and his wife, Angela Marinaro, 52, were arguing in their Boro Park apartment.

According to law enforcement sources, Mrs. Marinaro stabbed her husband once in the back with a kitchen knife, inside their apartment. Wounded, he tried to escape, and went down the stairs of the building and out into the street, where he collapsed. When paramedics arrived, they found Mrs. Marinaro standing near her husband’s body, police said.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun