CITYWIDE

WSJ MANAGING EDITOR STEIGER NAMED CHAIRMAN OF PULITZER BOARD

The managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and a vice president at Dow Jones & Company, Paul Steiger, has been named chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Mr. Steiger, who has been on the board since 1998, succeeds Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard, Columbia University announced Monday. Columbia awards the annual prizes for excellence in journalism, literature, music, and drama based on the board’s recommendation.

– Associated Press

BROADWAY ALLOWS BRONX YOUNGSTERS TO STAGE ‘CHICAGO’

Disappointment turned into unadulterated joy yesterday as Bronx high school students were told that they would be able to stage the musical “Chicago” after all. The teenagers at Herbert H. Lehman High School had been rehearsing for the last four months when they were ordered to stop because their school is too close to the Great White Way. But yesterday, as they gathered in the school’s main office, the situation suddenly brightened. The principal told them that their drama teacher had received word from the Broadway producer of “Chicago” – there’d been a misunderstanding and the show could go on after all.

– Associated Press

MUSLIM MOSQUE LEADERS CLAIM POLICE PROFILING ON TRIBOROUGH BRIDGE

Six leaders of a mosque said yesterday that city transit officials handcuffed and detained them following a traffic stop on a bridge because they are Muslims. The officials of the Dar Ul Islah Mosque, in Teaneck, N.J., said they were made to line up along a Triborough Bridge roadway and handcuffed behind their backs while passing motorists gawked. The men demanded at a news conference that the agency that runs the bridge, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Bridges and Tunnels Division, provide religious sensitivity training to its police officers. They also said they planned to file a civil rights lawsuit for what their attorney Devereauz Cannick called “Muslim profiling.”

– Associated Press

COUNCIL CLASHES WITH ADMINISTRATION OVER PLAN TO LIMIT CARS IN PARKS

City Council members clashed with administration officials yesterday over the mayor’s plan to limit driving in Central and Prospect parks, but they say they aren’t sure if they will try to push through their proposal for a full ban on cars this summer. The city’s transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, said at a City Hall hearing that the council’s bill “goes too far” and would increase congestion on surrounding streets if enacted.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

MANHATTAN

TRAINER: BLAINE HAD CONVULSIONS, WAS UNCONSCIOUS WHEN RESCUED

David Blaine was having convulsions and was unconscious when he was rescued from his 8-foot aquarium during a breath-holding stunt, his trainer and doctor said yesterday. “I wasn’t focused on records; I was thinking of a rescue,” his trainer, Kirk Krack, a free-diving expert, said. A day after the televised stunt, Mr. Blaine, defying doctors’ recommendations, checked himself out of Roosevelt Hospital. Friends took him out in a wheelchair then helped him walk to a waiting car.

-Associated Press

SIX PUBLICATIONS GARNER TWO NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARDS

The Virginia Quarterly Review was the surprise winner of the evening, garnering two awards at the National Magazine Awards, sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors. The ceremony, held last night at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center brought out more than 1,000 editors, publishers, and writers in magazine industry. Other magazines who won two awards were Harpers, New York Magazine, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Time.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

POLICE BLOTTER

ALLEGED SUBWAY FLASHER CAPTURED ON CAMERA – AGAIN

Police are looking for a man wanted in two separate incidents of public lewdness on the subway, after a second victim captured the man’s likeness on her cell phone this week. The man allegedly exposed himself to a 22-year-old woman on the no. 7 train on May 5, two months after a teenage victim – also riding the no. 7 train – came forward with her own pictures of him, police said. In that incident, on March 3, the 15-year-old victim reportedly snapped the man’s pictures after reading in the newspaper that police were able to catch a subway flasher last summer by publicizing a photo taken by his victim with a cell phone camera.

– Special to the Sun

IN THE COURTS

COURT UPHOLDS CONVICTION OF MAN IN BRICK ATTACK

ALBANY – The state’s highest court yesterday upheld the conviction of a crack-addicted street hustler who left a woman with a severe head injury when he hit her with a 6-pound brick in Midtown Manhattan in 1999. The Court of Appeals rejected Paris Drake’s argument that the trial judge’s instructions to the jury denied him a fair hearing. Drake, an admitted crack user with a lengthy criminal record, was convicted in November 2000 of first-degree assault and criminal possession of a weapon for the attack on Nicole Barrett as she walked along 42nd Street in New York City in November 1999.

– Associated Press

COURT DECLINES TO HEAR DIDDY SUPPORT PAYMENT APPEAL

ALBANY – The state’s highest court yesterday declined to hear music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs’s appeal of a lower court decision ordering him to pay more than $19,000 a month in child support payments. The hip-hop star was ordered last year to pay ex-girlfriend Misa Hylton-Brim for the care of their 12-year-old son Justin. The order issued by the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division in 2005 came after Mr. Combs appealed a Westchester Family Court ruling that he should pay $35,000 a month.

– Associated Press

FORMER BEAUTY SALON OWNER CONVICTED IN MOB RACKETEERING CASE

A former beauty salon owner known as Vinny Gorgeous – portrayed by authorities as the ruthless acting boss of the Bonanno crime family – was convicted yesterday of racketeering charges despite a jury deadlock over some of the most serious allegations. The anonymous jurors in federal court in Brooklyn deliberated six days before finding Vincent Basciano guilty of murder conspiracy, attempted murder, and illegal gambling. However, the jury told the judge in a note it could not agree on whether the government had proved that the defendant committed one gangland hit and ordered another.

– Associated Press

JURY SELECTION BEGINS FOR 74-YEAR-OLD’S MOB TRIAL

Jury selection began yesterday in the racketeering trial of a 74-year-old reputed Mafiosi who prosecutors say cozied up to an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the Gambino crime family. Lawyers for Gregory DePalma said their ailing client had a rough first day in court after a U.S. district judge, Alvin Hellerstein, decided last week he could not sit in a wheelchair or rest in a gurney during the trial.

– Associated Pres

HOME HEALTH AIDE PLEADS NOT GUILTY TO MURDER OF 89-YEAR-OLD

A home health care aide pleaded not guilty yesterday to charges she stole from and killed an 89-year-old woman who was found dead in a stairwell inside her apartment building. Tanya Campbell, 29, entered the plea at her arraignment in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court on second-degree murder and third-degree grand larceny charges related to the death of Phyllis Weiner.

– Associated Press

ALBANY

MALONEY TELL RIVALS ‘GET TOUGH OR GO HOME’

A Democratic attorney general candidate, Sean Patrick Maloney, is calling on three of his rivals to either “get tough or go home” and stop asking the party to ease their rules for getting onto the September primary ballot.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun

TRISTATE

NEWARK ELECTS FIRST NEW MAYOR IN TWO DECADES

NEWARK, N.J. – A 37-year-old former Rhodes scholar, became Newark’s first new mayor in two decades by a landslide yesterday, ushering in a new era for the struggling city. With 89% of precincts reporting, Mr. Booker had 72% of the total, compared with 24% for his nearest challenger, a state senator, Ronald Rice. Mr. Booker’s victory marks a generational change of black leadership in a city trying to turn around decades of urban decay. “Cory has been handed the awesome responsibility of fulfilling Newark’s potential,” a former political director for the New Jersey NAACP, Walter Fields, said. Mayor Sharpe James, 70, announced in March that he would not seek a sixth term.

– Associated Press