MANHATTAN

APPEALS COURT HEARS ARGUMENTS IN TRADE CENTER INSURANCE CASE

Insurance companies asked a federal appeals court yesterday to reject a jury verdict that would enable developer Larry Silverstein to obtain an extra $1.1 billion to rebuild the World Trade Center complex. Meanwhile, Mr. Silverstein’s lawyers asked the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to order a new trial so he can try to recover more money from the largest insurers of the trade center, which was destroyed by terrorists on September 11, 2001. Lawyers on both sides asked the appeals panel to take a fresh look at the outcomes of two trials stemming from disagreements over nearly two dozen insurance policies.

– Associated Press

COLUMBIA STUDENTS TO PROTEST SPEECH BY PROFESSOR

Columbia University students, including the College Conservatives and campus Democrats, plan to protest a speech today by a professor who has written that Jewish organizations exploit the Holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel and to extort European banks and governments for compensation. Norman Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago, wrote in his 2000 book “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” that some Jews have used the Holocaust as an “extortion racket” to get compensation payments, and he has referred to Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel as the “resident clown” of the “Holocaust circus.”

– Associated Press

CITYWIDE

EDUCATION ADVOCATES FORM TASK FORCE TO EXAMINE SCHOOL SYSTEM

Education activists and school reform experts are forming a task force to study ways of redesigning the city’s mayor-run school system so that it is based on a “human rights framework,” organizers announced yesterday. The 15 members named so far to “Task Force 2009” include several academics as well as a former state education commissioner, Thomas Sobol.

– Associated Press

BLOOMBERG MEETS WITH LEAHY, THOMAS ON EMINENT DOMAIN

Mayor Bloomberg made his second trip to Washington in the last week yesterday, this time to meet with Senator Leahy and with Rep. Bill Thomas. Mr. Bloomberg said he talked to Mr. Leahy, a Democrat on the judiciary committee, about ensuring that Congress strikes the right balance when it considers legislation on the government’s right to seize private property through eminent domain. Mr. Bloomberg told reporters that eminent domain was an important tool for the city in reviving blighted neighborhoods by spurring economic development. “Times Square without eminent domain would have remained a cesspool that it was rather than the family place it became,” he said. He used the trip to try and convince the legislators to allow the city to use $2 billion in unused funding to help pay for the rail link connection between John F. Kennedy International Airport and Lower Manhattan. The visit to Washington was his second in a week and comes on the heels of a visit he had from Attorney General Gonzalez.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

REPORT: SCHOOL TUTORING PROGRAMS CHEATED TO GET CONTRACTS

Several tutoring programs operating in city schools engaged in questionable business practices to obtain lucrative contracts, according to a report released yesterday by the special schools investigator, Richard Condon. The report found that several companies were offering CD players, sporting event tickets, and other financial incentives to encourage children to participate because funding is linked to student attendance. Some companies also failed to conduct background and fingerprint checks on employees working with schoolchildren. The investigation focused on two companies, Platform Learning Incorporated and Newtown Learning, a division of Edison Schools. The Department of Education paid $80 million to the tutoring providers last school year as part of the $851 million in federal funds the city received in the 2004-05 school year under the No Child Left Behind Act to the tutoring providers, which makes tutoring available to low-income children in struggling schools. The tutoring programs, which can charge up to $2,181 a student depending on attendance, operate in more than 200 schools.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

ECONOMIC COMMISSION MEETS TO FORM PLAN TO COMBAT POVERTY

Mayor Bloomberg’s new Commission for Economic Development met yesterday at Gracie Mansion to get cracking on a plan to fight poverty in three of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. The 32-member commission is being headed by the chief executive officer of Time Warner Incorporated, Richard Parsons, and the president of the Harlem’s Children’s Zone, Geoffrey Canada. It includes high-powered leaders in the business, nonprofit, and academic worlds. The commission has until Labor Day to come up with a proposal. It will focus first on Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and Melrose in the Bronx, and could expand its plan to other parts of the city. Yesterday, Mr. Canada called it a “once in a lifetime” opportunity.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

POLICE BLOTTER

MAN DIES AFTER JUMPING IN FRONT OF SUBWAY TRAIN

A man was killed by a subway train on the no. 2 line in Brooklyn yesterday, police officials said. The man, who wasn’t identified last night because police were still notifying his family, was killed instantly after jumping in front of the train, officials said. Trains on the nos. 2 and 3 lines ran express both directions from Flatbush Avenue station to Franklin Street station from 12:12 p.m. until 1:48 p.m., transit officials said.

– Special to the Sun

STATEWIDE

REPORT OF BEDBUG ATTACK IN CATSKILLS RESORT HOTEL

A Chicago booking agent and her husband sued a Catskills resort yesterday for $20 million, saying her body and mind were scarred after she suffered some 500 bedbug bites while staying at the hotel last summer. Leslie Fox, 54, said she and husband Stephen Cohen never felt the bedbugs bite while sleeping at the 700-room Nevele Hotel in Ellenville, N.Y. She said she noticed the lesions when she got up after their third night there.

– Associated Press

FIRED PROSECUTOR SAYS HE DID NOTHING WRONG

A Southern Tier prosecutor fired for attending a meeting of “white preservationists” – labeled a hate group by some – said yesterday he had nothing to apologize for and no hard feelings toward his ex-boss. An assistant district attorney in Allegany County until he attended a Virginia meeting of the New Century Foundation on February 25, Michael Regan, said he is concerned that immigration will eventually make white Christians a minority in America.

– Associated Press

NYRA’S VIDEO SLOTS, REVENUE POSTPONED UNTIL ’07

Video slot machines pegged to be the financial savior of the New York Racing Association beginning in the fall now won’t be in place until 2007 – just months before NYRA’s state franchise is to expire. The NYRA president, Charles Hayward, said yesterday that video slot machines won’t be installed and running at Aqueduct race track until the first quarter of 2007.

– Associated Press

LAWSUITS IN EMINENT DOMAIN FIGHT OVER SUBURBAN GOLF CLUB

Lawsuits were filed yesterday aimed at stopping an affluent suburban village, North Hills in Long Island, from using the legal concept of eminent domain to take over a privately owned golf course. “This proposed condemnation may be the most extreme abuse of eminent domain in the country,” a Deepdale Golf Club member named as a plaintiff, John Wilson, said. The village’s mayor said the federal and state lawsuit were a “pre-emptive strike” and no decision has been made on whether to proceed with a takeover of Deepdale, considered one of the finest golf courses in the country.

– Associated Press

GRAND JURY HEARS EVIDENCE IN SLAYING OF STATE TROOPER

ELMIRA – A grand jury met yesterday to consider indicting a suspected bank robber on charges of killing a New York State trooper during a gun battle in rural western New York. Anthony Horton, 33, a career criminal prosecuted for a variety of weapons, drugs, and burglary charges dating back to the early 1980s, was identified by state police as the triggerman in a shootout last Wednesday that killed Trooper Andrew Sperr near the hamlet of Big Flats.

– Associated Press

IN THE COURTS

FRIEND WHO SAYS HE WAS AT SCENE OF AMMON MURDER GETS SIX MONTHS

A man who admitted he rode along with convicted murderer Daniel Pelosi on the night he fatally bludgeoned an East Hampton millionaire was sentenced yesterday to a six-month jail term. Christopher Parrino, 39, of Wading River, pleaded guilty in January to one count of hindering prosecution before a state Supreme Court justice, Robert Doyle, in Riverhead. As part of the plea agreement, Judge Doyle yesterday gave Parrino six months, closing what a Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas Spota, called “the final chapter of a brutal murder by a man consumed by greed.” Pelosi, 42, was convicted in December 2004 of second-degree murder in the death of Theodore Ammon, who ran the private equity firm Chancery Lane Capital and was chairman of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

– Associated Press