CITYWIDE

COUNCIL WANTS TO FORCE JENNINGS TO PAY FINE

The City Council has asked the city’s law department to force council member Allan Jennings to pay a $5,000 fine meted out after a months long investigation determined Mr. Jennings had sexually harassed two of his female employees. The City Council, in a letter sent by speaker Gifford Miller and the chairwoman on the committee on standards and ethics, Helen Sears, suggested that wages could be garnished to force Mr. Jennings to pay the fine.

In April, the council also stripped Mr. Jennings of his five committee assignments and forced him to attend anger-management therapy as part of the censure against him, which was approved on a 42-2 vote with four abstentions. Mr. Jennings has not paid the fine nor attended the classes. The attorney who represented Mr. Jennings during the proceedings against him, Robert Ellis, said the City Council was premature in its request since Mr. Jennings can still appeal the decision, though Mr. Ellis would not say whether that would happen. “It seems to me to be a little premature and fast with the gun to ask them to do anything prior to the end of the appeal timeline,” Mr. Ellis said.

– Special to the Sun

KLEIN WELCOMES 94 ASPIRING PRINCIPALS TO LEADERSHIP ACADEMY

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein welcomed this year’s class of 94 aspiring principals to the New York City Leadership Academy at a Queens high school yesterday.

Chosen from an application pool of more than 1,400 educators, the Leadership Academy’s third class will complete a 14-month training program that consists of two summer sessions and an in-school residency under the tutelage of a mentor principal.

“We are thrilled to have so many educators interested in our rigorous, standards-based principal training program,” Sandra Stein, chief executive officer of the New York City Leadership Academy, said.

– Special to the Sun

ALBANY

FIRST GOP CANDIDATE DROPS OUT OF SENATE RACE

Adam Brecht, a former Wall Street public relations executive, has become the first candidate to drop out of the race for the Republican nomination to challenge Senator Clinton’s re-election bid next year. Mr. Brecht said yesterday that other potential GOP candidates – he singled out Manhattan lawyer Edward Cox, a son-in-law of President Nixon, and Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro – were simply too well-known for him to be competitive. Openly gay, Mr. Brecht had crisscrossed the state in the past year, meeting GOP leaders and rank-and-file voters. He called himself a liberal Republican in the mold of the late Nelson Rockefeller.

Also seeking the Senate GOP nomination are John Spencer, the former mayor of Yonkers, and William Brenner, a tax lawyer from Sullivan County.

– Associated Press

QUEENS

TEAMSTERS STRIKE AGAINST JFK FUEL SUPPLIER OVER HEALTH CARE

Union workers who fuel airplanes at John F. Kennedy International Airport are on strike against the airport’s fuel supplier, Allied Aviation Services. About 300 members of the Teamsters Local 553 walked off the job when their contract expired July 1. Allied has replaced the refuelers and mechanics with temporary, non-union workers as well as company managers. A spokesman for JFK, Pasquale DiFulco, said there have been no mishaps since the beginning of the strike and that Allied would be held responsible for fulfilling the terms of their contract with the airport.

The union is protesting Allied’s request that members pay a portion of their healthcare coverage. A union spokesman said the Teamsters would not negotiate a contract unless Allied gives up its demand for workers to pay part of their health insurance.

– Special to the Sun

SHOVING MATCH ENSUES AT HOWARD BEACH PROTEST IN KEW GARDENS

Push came to shove yesterday in Kew Gardens, where a pastor who was part of a group calling for the prosecution of a third man in last week’s racially-motivated attack in Howard Beach got in a shoving match with an attorney representing one of the men charged in the assault.

Members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People gathered yesterday in front of the Queens Supreme Court in Kew Gardens in the wake of a high-profile march and vigil led by the Reverend Alford Sharpton in Howard Beach on Monday. Police and prosecutors have said that a white man, Nicholas Minucci, 19, beat Glenn Moore, 22, with an aluminum baseball bat in an early-morning altercation last Wednesday. Mr. Moore, who is black, suffered from a fractured skull. Minucci and his alleged accomplice, Anthony Ench, 22, have been charged with robbery and assault as a hate crime. A third man allegedly present at the time of the encounter, Frank Agostini, 20, was not arrested and has been described as a witness to the crime. The 10 sympathizers present in Kew Gardens yesterday called on Queens District Attorney Richard Brown to prosecute Mr. Agostini, who some say has been treated lightly because his father is a police detective.

Mr. Ench’s lawyer, Vincent Siccardi, walked by the protesters yesterday and the pastor of Bethesda Missionary Baptist Church in Jamaica, the Reverend Charles Norris, asked why he was there. According to Hazel Dukes, the president of New York state’s NAACP, Mr. Siccardi then became “highly defensive.”

– Special to the Sun

WESTCHESTER

BLACK SUSPECT IN MALL KILLING SAYS WHITE WOMAN VICTIM ‘HAD TO DIE’

WHITE PLAINS – A homeless black man told police on videotape that he was fighting a race war and killed a 56-year-old woman at a Westchester County mall last week because she was white.

The man, Phillip Grant, 43, appeared in shackles and a bulletproof vest in a White Plains courtroom for a felony hearing yesterday. In the 45-minute videotape played during the hearing, Grant told police “all I knew was she had blond hair and blue eyes and she had to die.”

He claimed Connie Russo Carriero “was not an innocent victim – because she was white.”

Carriero, a legal secretary and mother of two grown children, was stabbed to death while walking to her car at the Galleria Mall parking garage. She was buried yesterday. Grant, a convicted rapist, was charged with second-degree murder and weapon possession in the knife attack. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 25 years to life in prison.

On the tape, Grant said he was sick of being harassed on the street for being a registered high-level sex offender. He said he wanted to draw attention to the fact that Westchester County never helped him with his mental problems. He also told police he was not remorseful for the killing and would hurt white people again if he could.

– Associated Press