45% of computers bought at Princeton this year were Macs

Dude, you're getting a Dell! Well ... maybe not any more. According to the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at Princeton, 45 percent of computers purchased this year were Macs, more than in any previous year.

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ODD NEWS :Death-row prisoner gets pregnant in solitary

HANOI (Reuters) - A death-row inmate held in solitary confinement in Vietnam for almost a year is pregnant and is seeking a pardon to give birth, a newspaper reported on Thursday.
The Lao Dong (Labour) newspaper quoted a police doctor as saying tests in September confirmed that convicted heroin trafficker Nguyen Thi Oanh, 39, was then 11 weeks pregnant.

The report said it was the first time that a death-row prisoner had become pregnant in Vietnam and that police were investigating how it had happened.

Oanh's husband was serving a jail sentence at another prison in another province, the newspaper said.

Oanh was due to face a firing squad this year after losing her appeal against the death sentence she received last year for possession of a billion dong ($63,000) worth of heroin.

Trafficking more than 600 grams of heroin in Vietnam is punishable by death or life imprisonment.

Woman "kidnaps" son four times for ransom

A Spanish woman staged fake kidnappings of her son four times and got his father to pay her more than a million euros ($1.26 million) in ransom money, newspaper El Mundo reported Friday.

Police in the southern Spanish city of Seville arrested the woman and five accomplices, including the 15-year-old son who cooperated in the deception by calling his father on the telephone and begging him to pay up.

The father paid ransoms after the first three fake abductions without realizing the involvement of his son's mother, from whom he had separated. He became suspicious the fourth time and hired a private detective, El Mundo reported.

Teen faces litter charge for bra antenna

A teenager who put her bra on a car antenna before it flew off and led to a highway accident will be charged with littering, a prosecutor said. Emily Davis, 17, of Bowling Green, told investigators she took her bra off while her friend was driving on Interstate 75.

James Campbell, who was driving behind the girls, said he swerved to avoid the bra and his car flipped several times. Campbell, 37, broke a vertebra in his neck during the Sept. 26 accident. His passenger, Jeff Long, 40, broke several ribs.

A State Highway Patrol crash report, obtained by The Blade, said that the girls told investigators that before the accident the men were motioning to them to lift up their shirts. Both men denied making the gestures.

Davis will be charged next week with misdemeanor littering, said Tim Atkins, a juvenile prosecutor in Wood County. Atkins said he'll meet with troopers before filing the charge.

The girl's friend, Tabitha Adams, 17, of Bowling Green, said she told Davis not to hang her bra outside because she knew it would fly away, according to the report.

Atkins said no other charges were expected.

METS-Delgado blasts pair, but loss is one tough blow

Different night. Different Carlos. Same baseball leaving the park.

This time, Carlos Delgado had the big game, but the Mets came up on the losing end. The Mets first baseman crushed two home runs a night after Carlos Beltran helped win the NLCS opener with a two-run shot.

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Lidle's Insurance Benefits in Question

Cory Lidle's beneficiaries could lose out on a $1.5 million benefit from baseball's benefit plan if it's determined he was piloting his plane when it crashed into a Manhattan high-rise.

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A-Rod's Private Jet Overruns Runway

A private jet, carrying New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez and six others, overran a runway at Bob Hope Airport on Friday and was brought to a halt by an arresting system.

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Dell busts out 20" WIDESCREEN LCD for ONLY $289 and its beautiful (w/ pics)

Great monitor for great price. Even bests the 2007WFP with a 5ms response time, compared to the latter's 16ms, but the best news comes in the form of the spankin' $289 pricetag, which compares quite favorably to the 2007WFP's $529 MSRP, or even its $400-ish Froogle price.

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7 Predictions about Macworld 2007

There are some things we can predict based on what we know now about Apple. With that in mind, here are 7 predictions about what you can expect to see at Macworld 2007.

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New Red Logo for Apple's 5th Avenue Store

Apple's cube store has changed its traditional white Apple logo for a red one. Perhaps this is in anticipation of the oft-rumored Red iPod.

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Apple may have an early OS X Leopard Launch at Macworld Expo to beat Vista

EXCLUSIVE: New information coming to LoopRumors suggests that Apple is gearing up to launch and release Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, at MacWorld San Francisco. Steve Jobs will keynote the event and is apparently trying to beat Microsoft to the punch by delivering Leopard to the public sooner than planned.

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iPod Red Nano Site

Looks like all the rumors were true: here's the red nano. Apple will donate $10 for every one purchased to help fight AIDS

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Yonkers Raceway Settles Bronx River Pollution Probe

Yonkers Raceway will pay $9 million in penalties and costs to settle an investigation into the dumping of raw sewage into the Bronx River, state officials said Thursday.

Under the agreement announced by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Department of Environmental Conservation, the harness track will pay a $2 million fine, stop all discharges of human waste into the river and pay $6 million for projects to reduce pollution from storm runoff. Another $1 million will go to a local environmental education center.

An investigation found the raceway has for years flushed human waste from several buildings into a storm sewer that feeds into the river instead of the city's municipal sanitary sewer. Investigators also found that horse manure was routinely flushed into storm sewers when workers cleaned stalls.

Testing done where the storm sewers empty into the river showed E-coli levels reaching from 110,000 to 500,000 bacteria per 100 milliliters of water. The normal range is 100 to 1,000, Spitzer spokesman Marc Violette said.

The agreement is part of recent efforts by the attorney general's office to stop pollution into the Bronx River.

Previous settlements have been reached with the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Gardens. In 2004, Spitzer's office obtained a court order requiring the city of Yonkers to stop polluting the river with sewage.

The raceway reopened with much fanfare Wednesday following a 15-month, $240 million renovation that features 1,800 video lottery terminals.

Man Flying with Lidle Identified

Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle said flying relieved the stress of his pro baseball life. But for his instructor, Tyler Stanger, flying was life itself and had been since he was a boy.

Both were on an aerial tour of New York City when Lidle's plane, which took off from New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, slammed into a Manhattan high-rise Wednesday. It was not clear who was at the controls. Lidle had been licensed for less than a year while Stanger, 26, had been flying since he was a teen.

He trained Lidle at his tiny, two-plane flight school at Brackett Field in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. He was a common and popular visitor to the airport's coffee shop, Norm's Hangar, where he often took students for debriefing.

"He was such a sweet guy, a genuinely down-to-earth person,'' owner Kathy Touche said Thursday, wiping away a tear. "He seemed kind of shy to me at first. He was more quiet until you got to know him, and then he opened up.''

Dave Conriguez, the cook and a baseball fan, showed a laminated check with Lidle's autograph that he got when Stanger brought the ballplayer to the shop.

He last spoke to Stanger on Sunday. The instructor told him he was heading to New York, Conriguez said.

"They were going to fly back together. It was right after the loss to Detroit,'' he said. "Tyler's such a great flight instructor that I never gave it a second thought. It was just, 'See you in a week.'''

He had told Stanger "as soon as Cory gets back, I'm going to have my picture taken with him in a Yankee hat,'' Conriguez said.

Stanger earned his pilot's license by 17 and earned a degree in aviation management from Southern Illinois University, according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. In addition to his flight school, he worked for several years as an aircraft mechanic at Howard Aviation, also located at the airport about 40 miles east of Los Angeles.

NTSB Investigators Look for Answers

Investigators returned to a luxury Manhattan high-rise Thursday as they sought to answer questions about how a small airplane with New York Yankee Cory Lidle aboard slammed into the building, killing the pitcher and a flight instructor.

A partial sense of normalcy returned to the neighborhood as residents were allowed past checkpoints and into their scorched and battered building. The bodies had been removed, but pieces of fuselage, a plane door and crushed vehicles still littered the street in the frozen zone.

National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman said federal investigators arrived Wednesday evening and quickly found a crash scene with debris scattered everywhere. Aircraft parts and headsets were on the ground, and investigators discovered the pilot's log book in the wreckage. The propeller broke apart from the engine, which landed on the floor of an apartment. The bodies fell to the ground.

"We're continuing to review tapes,'' Hersman said Thursday. "We'll be looking to talk to other pilots who might have been in the vicinity. We have very exhaustive, comprehensive investigations. We're going to try to find anything we can to find out what happened.''

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly identified the instructor on Thursday as Tyler Stanger. He operated a flight school at Brackett field in La Verne, Calif., and lived with his wife and young child in Walnut, Calif.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a temporary restriction requiring all general aviation aircraft flying below
1,500 feet near the city to be authorized by air traffic control.

Four Killed in NYC Plane Crash

A single-engine plane crashed into an Upper East Side high-rise Wednesday, killing two people, raining debris on the sidewalks below and rattling New Yorkers' nerves exactly one month after the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

The two deaths were confirmed by Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office. There was no word yet on injuries linked to the crash on an overcast October afternoon, which sent thick black smoke soaring above the city skyline and flames shooting out of apartments above the tony neighborhood.

Fire officials tell 1010 WINS that two bodies were found on the street after the crash.

A law enforcement official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle was on the plane. And Federal Aviation Administration records showed the plane was registered to the athlete.

On Sunday, the day after the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs, Lidle cleaned out his locker at Yankee Stadium and talked about his interest in flying. He explained to reporters the process of getting a pilot's license, and said he intended to fly back to California in several days and planned to make a few stops.

Large crowds gathered at the crash scene, with many people in tears and others trying to reach loved ones by cell phone. Rain started pouring at the scene at around 4 p.m., and people gazed up at the smoke and fire as they covered their heads with plastic bags. Mayor Michael Bloomberg went to the site, where parts of the plane fell to the ground.

"I just saw something come across the sky and crash into that building,'' said Young May Cha, 23, a Cornell University medical student who was walking along 72nd Street. "There was fire, debris... The explosion was very small.''

Christine Monaco, a New York spokeswoman for the FBI, said there was no indication of terrorism.

Cha said it appeared the plane was "flying erractically'' before it slammed into The Belaire Condo, where apartments sell for more than $1 million. Residents of the condo and the building next door were evacuated as thick black smoke wafted above the city skyline, and flames shot from the apartments where the plane crashed.

"I was worried the building would explode, so I got out of there fast,'' said Lori Claymont, who fled the adjoining building in sweat pants.

The aircraft struck the 40th floor of the building on East 72nd Street, igniting a five-alarm fire in the building.

The small private aircraft, with four seats, took off from New Jersey's Teterboro Airport around 2:30 p.m. A federal aviation official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing, said the plane was a Cirrus SR20 -- an aircraft equipped with a parachute designed to let it float to earth in case of a mishap.

The plane had flown around the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, then headed up the East River corridor before it slammed in the building, authorities said.

"It's a mob scene with police and helicopters circling,'' said Sandy Teller, watching from his apartment a block away. "There's a dozen ambulances and lots of firefighters waiting on 72nd, on the corner. There's lots of stretchers ready, gurneys.''

Fighter planes were scrambled over an several cities across the country in the aftermath of the crash, despite the quick assurances that it was nothing more than an accident. ``We see this as a prudent measure at this time,'' said Sgt. Claudette Hutchinson, a spokeswoman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo.

AROUND THE HORN: More N.Y. players defending Torre

NEW YORK -- While owner George Steinbrenner decides whether to keep Joe Torre, Yankees players are supporting their manager.

Steinbrenner left New York and returned to Tampa on Monday, spokesman Howard Rubenstein told the Associated Press. Rubenstein said he was not able to speak with Steinbrenner to relay questions.

It was unclear whether Steinbrenner and Torre have spoken since the Yankees were eliminated Saturday by the Tigers in the American League Division Series, but the pair apparently did not meet before the Boss left town.

"I have not made up my mind yet," Steinbrenner told a reporter from Bloomberg News while leaving New York's Regency Hotel under police escort en route to Florida. He refused to answer further questions.

Since talking over after the 1995 season, Torre has managed the Yankees to nine consecutive AL East titles and 11 straight playoff appearances.

"He gave us every opportunity," left-hander Ron Villone said Monday, when a few more players came to Yankee Stadium to clean out their lockers. "He put us on the field at the right times. I mean we came through in a lot of different ways. We had some injuries.

"He put the right lineups out there for us to jell and do the right things to win enough games to make it to the playoffs. You can't point the finger at him. Point it at us."

There was no sign of Torre at Yankee Stadium on Monday, and the team's media-relations staff was unsure when he would give his annual summation.

IT'S 'PEDI'-MONIUM OUT THERE

">LAWLESS BIKE-CABS SPARKING STRIFE IN THE STREETS
But the city expects to bring some order to the industry by the new year.

As things stand now:

* Anyone can buy a pedicab for $5,000 or rent one for $200 a week and go into business.

* The operator does not need a driver's license. There isn't even an age limit.

* They can charge anything the traffic will bear.

* Pedal pushers do not need any insurance - and a luckless passenger involved in a crash could be left out in the cold.

Two bills to rein in the drivers have been submitted - one by Mayor Bloomberg and one by the council. The last of three hearings will be held in December, and officials hope a new law will be on the books by early next year.

Meanwhile, independent operators and owners of pedicab fleets continue to trash each other - while licensed cabs complain pedicabs are stealing their business.

Independent pedicab drivers accuse fleet owners of importing foreign pedalers - who flout traffic rules and give pedicabs a bad name. "It's like the Wild West out there. It's completely out of control," said Jordan Kinzler, who's been pedaling for two years.

Gregg Zukowsi, of the New York City Pedicab Owners Association, agreed that there is "sort of a summer surge of drivers from all over the world."

He agreed that some regulation is needed.ont-weight:bold;

9/11 COPS AWARDED $1M FOR EXTRA DUTY

October 10, 2006 -- The NYPD has shelled out more than $1 million in back pay to about three dozen officers who were forced to work six- and seven-day weeks for nearly two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, The Post has learned.

The city's entire police force was taken off its regular schedule, or "duty chart," following the terror attacks, then quickly restored to normal duty in October 2001.

But about 35 officers assigned to the security detail at police headquarters in lower Manhattan were kept on the backbreaking "emergency" schedule until May 2003.

The city paid those officers overtime for the extra time they worked, but the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association went to arbitration seeking more. They wanted payment for off-days they received on the emergency schedule that they normally would have worked on the pre-existing duty chart.

The PBA general counsel's office scored a victory in January when arbitrator John Sands ruled in the officers' favor, rejecting the argument that the new situation represented a "de facto" chart.

"The New York City Police Department does not work on 'de facto' orders or compliance," Sands wrote in the decision.

"It is a paramilitary organization with detailed procedures and rules for imposing, changing and suspending duty charts and schedules. In this case the Department followed none of those procedures."

PBA President Pat Lynch said the scheduling disaster was a symptom of a general manpower crisis afflicting the department.

"This arbitration award makes clear that the department violated our contract to address its staffing shortages," said Lynch. "The NYPD staffing problems are a direct result of the city's refusal to pay its police officers competitive salaries."

Because the decision was issued in January and the officers did not receive their checks - about $30,000 to $50,000 each - until late summer, the union also plans to demand interest.

The NYPD declined to comment on the ruling.

HE GOT GOOGLED

WEB-VID WHIZ'S JOURNEOctober 10, 2006 -- YouGenius.

Chad Hurley, 29, the brains behind the wildly successful video-sharing Web site YouTube, became a multimillionaire yesterday when he sold his company to Google for a cool $1.65 billion.

Incredibly, his success story began after a casual dinner party with friends in San Francisco in January 2005.

Hurley had been a guest along with former co-worker Steve Chen, a 27-year-old math whiz. They had known each other since working together for the online-payment service PayPal.

The two had been taping videos at the party and wanted to send them on to other friends.

But "when we tried to share the videos and then we tried to e-mail them back to one another, they kept bouncing back," Hurley recalled in an ABC-TV interview on Aug 9.

"And so we thought, a lot of people were gonna have the same problem. And so we started working on a solution for this problem right away."

And in classic Silicon Valley tradition, the duo found a garage - under Hurley's apartment - to set up shop.

The pair got YouTube up and running within four weeks - and it was only a matter of months before it exploded on the pop-culture scene.

For Hurley - a handsome, laid-back, blond-haired surfer dude - embarking on a new business adventure wouldn't have been out of the norm.

He'd been a promising entrepreneur since age 5, when he first peddled paintings on his parents' lawn in rural Berks County, Pa.

Hurley eventually graduated with a degree in fine arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, an education that would later guide him in creating YouTube's now-famous logo.

Like many new college grads, Hurley found himself gravitating to the 'Net.

He wound up working for PayPal along with Chen.

In 2002, when that company was sold to eBay, Hurley began doing design-consulting work for clients, including the producers of the indie hit "Thank You for Smoking," a satire on the tobacco industry.

Meanwhile, he and Chen - himself a renegade known for sporting two gold ear hoops - had remained good friends. When they talked after the party that fateful night in 2005, it seemed only natural that they would go into business together.Y FROM GARAGE GEEK TO $1.65 BIL MAN