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A 24-year-old woman says she was handcuffed and thrown into a police holding cell when she tried to use a valid gift card at a NoHo Best Buy. Llona Klaver wanted to buy a DVD player with American Express gift cards she received from her father and brother, but she claims a cashier told her one wasn't valid because it didn't have raised numbers, while another was deemed unacceptable because it was connected to a different person's credit card. Then the cashier accused her of credit card fraud.

To linguists our city is part of what’s known as the "R-less corridor,” because New Yawkas, like South Londonaws before them, drop their “R’s” (My Daughta’s a lawya). But, most language experts agree that the designation is quickly becoming irrelevant. “New Yorkers are more and more 'R'-ful, and the amount of R-dropping is decreasing," says Michael Newman, associate professor of linguistics at Queens College.

Believe it or not, Mayor Bloomberg is insisting that the NYPD's crime statistics are accurate—well, most of the time. "There's always going to be some fudging of the numbers, but it is tiny," the mayor said. "I have an enormous amount of confidence in the data." He also suggested that a study by two criminologists, which showed police precincts routinely fudge their data, may have been biased. According to Bloomberg, it was "paid for by one of the unions, so you've got to start wondering whether it was an independent study."

Two picturesque Bronx developments at the edge of the Long Island Sound are accused of barring blacks from purchasing homes in the quiet confines of their communities. The Fair Housing Justice Center is suing Edgewater Park and nearby Silver Beach Gardens for racial discrimination, as well as one its longtime residents, Realtor Amelia Lewis. Investigators sent fake couples to try to buy homes in the community: a white pair received a warm welcome, but when a black couple inquired they were immediately asked for references and then told by Lewis “there’s no way you’re going to get in there.” Stats revealed that though blacks account for 35 percent of homeowners in the Bronx, they own less than 1 percent of the 1,100 homes in Edgewater Park and Silver Beach Gardens. The prosecution says it was tipped off by the communities’ low profiles. “Any time anything’s hidden or secret,” the justice center’s lawyer told the NY Times, “you have to ask, ‘Why would you want to be hidden?’”

Sarah Palin rallied attendees at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville by attacking President Obama and Democratic policies, saying, "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?" and "America is ready for another revolution! ... This is about the people, and it’s bigger than any one king or queen of a tea party, and it’s a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter."

For years the NYPD has tried to send a clear message to the NYC student body that there is zero tolerance for defacing DOE property; in 2007 cops made an example of 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser by dragging her out in handcuffs after she wrote "okay" on a desk at her Dyker Heights school. It's NOT okay, Chelsea, but these punks just won't learn. On Monday 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez was "doodling" her little heart out on her desk in Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills when she got busted, handcuffed, and escorted to the police precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours.

While it would be nice to blame NBC's Black History Month Menu-tastrophe on Jeff Zucker, the dishes offered yesterday (fried chicken, collard greens and black-eyed peas) were actually chosen by Leslie Calhoun... NBC's black chef.

An NBC employee here in New York broadcasted the network's cafeteria menu from earlier today over the Twitter waves. To celebrate Black History Month, they were offering up a delicious selection of fried chicken, collard greens, corn bread, black eyed peas, etc. But then two hours later the sign was mysteriously removed, leaving diners with a grilled chicken option. It's unclear what could have possibly prompted NBC to change course (ahem, ?uestlove), but we hear employees are excited for St. Patrick's Day, when the commissary will serve Irish Car Bombs. [via Max Silvestri]

[UPDATE BELOW] The rumor mill is churning right now about a "big, damaging" New York Times "bombshell" story that supposedly features some ruinous dirt about the personal life of Governor David Paterson. Elizabeth Benjamin at the Daily News hears it "will be far worse than his acknowledged extramarital affair with a former state employee." Remember when you first heard about Eliot Spitzer's involvement with prostitutes, and everyone was like, "Okay, so who the hell is David Paterson?" Well, let's get to know current Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch! (We would link to his official New York State website, but, heh, that doesn't even exist.)

The wackiness surrounding this weekend’s G Train service (no it won’t run, yes it will) is sure to make for lots of memorable moments, none better than this one we were tipped off to via Twitter. It’s audio someone recorded of the station stop announcements, performed (and I do mean performed) by one very classy motorman on the green snail line. “My 4am G Train voyage from Smith/9th to Metro was made beautiful thanks to this,” wrote the audio engineer on Poorly Washed Silverware. Listen here.

With the MTA facing a $400 million budget gap—even if it implements "Doomsday" service cuts and a 7.5 percent fare hike—Mayor Bloomberg warned straphangers yesterday that commuting will likely become more tedious, more expensive, or both. According to the Post, the Mayor said state legislators must "come up with some ways to fund the MTA, or the MTA is either going to have to raise rates dramatically or cut back service dramatically—or, what's more likely, some combination of the two,"

After endearing herself to the Tea Party faithful—and landing herself a lot of media attention—at the Tea Party Convention this past weekend, former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told her Fox News colleague Chris Wallace that of course she'd think about running for president in 2012. Palin said, "I would. I would if I believed that that is the right thing to do for our country and for the Palin family. Certainly, I would do so... I think that it would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country."

Snow noes, the teenagers are going to be running amok tonight! The Mayor's office has preemptively announced that all NYC public schools are going to be closed tomorrow out of panic that this time the impending snowmageddon will actually happen, as our venerable seers portend. Over a foot of snow is expected starting early tomorrow morning, but throughout tonight, expect adolescents to run (more) wild in the streets (than usual). Then they'll sleep half the day away tomorrow, rising for The Price is Right, followed by a mass high-jacking of snow plows to make sure roads remain impassable through the weekend. Rules were made to be frozen!

Thanks to plummeting tax revenues, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is expected to face a $400 million budget shortfall—even if it implements drastic service cuts that would terminate bus lines and subway routes and nix free Metrocards for students. So what, if anything, could be worse than the already-proposed "Doomsday" cuts?

There are plenty of downsides to being a lifer for the MTA—like spending your youth vole-like in the city’s subterranean passages—but unlimited cards for life have always been a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe not for much longer though, since Mayor Bloomberg said recently that if free student cards go, so should MetroCards for agency retirees.

To be honest, the photo of the bald eagle we posted last week near Fairway was just kind of depressing. There he was, pondering existence over icy waters, looking lonely, and actually balding. But the blogger who spotted that one, spotted two more this week on an ice flow in Harlem; "a huge female adult eagle finishing up a fish as another adult and juvenile begged for scraps!" If you want to see one of these in real life, they're being spotted up and down Riverside Park... just watch out for the packs of coyotes.

A surprising report in the March issue of Men's Health asserts that Boston is the "least drunk" city in all the land. You really don't need to read much further to realize this news is wicked retarded, but what makes it even more ridonkulous is that the Irish and college capital of America ranks even higher on the sobriety scale than Salt Lake City, which is fourth "least drunk." And ranking #2 for least drunk is Yonkers, which is such a dreary place you need a drink just to get through it on Metro North.

Maybe you’ve seen this PSA around in the subway—well its turns out NYPD doesn’t know which one is real either. Early this morning Bushwick cops fired two round at a 61-year-old BB gunman, whose weapon they mistook for a real firearm. Should have turned it in for cash.

Fed up with name-calling and increased restrictions from the Obama administration, bankers are shifting financial support to Democratic opponents in the Republican party. Bank officials say Wall Street is sending a message: “The expectation in Washington is that ‘We can kick you around, and you are still going to give us money,’ ” one top official at a major Wall Street firm tells the Times. “We are not going to play that game anymore.”

You can't get much more New York than Suzanne Vega. A lifelong resident of the Upper West Side, she's an alum not only of Barnard, but the High School for the Performing Arts and P.S. 163. She's been New York's ambassador to the world of folk music since her self-titled debut album twenty-five years ago. She immortalized Morningside Heights with the unbearably catchy "Tom's Diner" (which will still take you back to 1990 if you let it). She has relatives in Queens. She learned to drive at age 43. Starting at the Songwriters' Exchange in the Village in the early 80s, she had her Lincoln Center debut two weeks ago, as part of the American Songbook series, whose podcast series she hosts. She's still covering the New York map with songs: her last studio album, "Beauty and Crime," included songs set on the Upper West Side, Central Park South, Ludlow Street, and Ground Zero.

The rumors about a forthcoming New York Times expose on Governor Paterson have intensified. Commenters on a recent Daily News story, and a number of users on Twitter, have mentioned the same thing: that the story concerns drug fueled wife-swapping parties at the Governors Mansion. That sounds too insane to be true, but we'll keep our ears to the ground until something definitive comes out.

Last weekend's snow storm missed us, but meteorologists say the NYC region will get walloped tomorrow with a big snowfall, prompting city officials to call it a snow day in advance. AccuWeather says, "The nor'easter is destined to be the biggest storm of the new year so far for New York City to Boston. Unlike the last storm, this one will 'not' miss these areas... The blowing snow will create near-zero visibility at times."

21-year-old Prada model Nick Snider was named the world's fifth most successful male model by Forbes magazine a couple years ago. Because he's at the top of an industry in which people do all sorts of depraved things to get ahead, he probably wasn't sweating it when cops came to arrest him for causing a disturbance at a friend's house near Little Rock Monday morning. Surely a little trip downtown would spare him a trip...downtown. Well, things sure are backwards down South, because the arresting officer says he completely blew off Snider's gracious offer to "suck your dick and balls if you let me go."

In December 1976, Paul Pitts was with a group of men who shot and killed a customer during a Harlem supermarket robbery. He was convicted of murder and did a 14 year bid upstate, getting paroled in 1993. (A prior sex assault charge against him was dismissed before the murder case.) During his time in prison, Pitts found religion, and subsequently changed his name to Zulqarnain Abdu-Shahid. For the past few years he's been paid $49,471 a year to serve as a Muslim chaplain for the Department of Correction, but yesterday he was arrested once again, this time for trying to bring three metal blades and a pair of scissors into the Manhattan Detention Complex at 125 White Street.

Under Gov. Paterson's plan to rescue the MTA from a $400 million budget shortfall, New York City businesses would see a payroll tax increase by 59 percent, surging from .34 percent for every $100 of payroll to .54 percent. Meanwhile, the payroll tax in suburban areas would be cut in half.

A boozy brawl between more than two dozen firefighters and four unlucky civilians early Saturday morning left one man with a broken eye orbit bone, a broken collarbone and broken shoulder. The city's Department of Investigation and the NYPD are investigating the fight, which broke out at the Salty Dog in Bay Ridge after one of the civilians, a 21-year-old, reached for his shot glass and spilled a little booze on one of the firefighters. "It looked like he was saying ‘I’m sorry’ and the firefighter started yelling and screaming, and one of his buddies came around and punched him the face," witness Larry Johnson tells the Post. Pandemonium ensued, and judging from Johnson's account, the only thing missing was a ragtime piano player dodging pint glasses.

Days after a Brooklyn cop and a Queens politician accused the police of cooking its crime statistics, a survey of more than one hundred retired NYPD higher-ups showed that cops—who are under constant pressure to produce happy-looking stats—have routinely fabricated or manipulated their data, since the crime analysis system was put into place in 1995. And the statistics they produce are the very same that Bloomberg quotes when he says the city is safe, and getting safer every year. “Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics,” said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a former NYPD captain.

The speculation about a supposed "bombshell" NY Times story about Governor David Paterson has been percolating since last week. Now, the Business Insider offers, "We've now heard from a single source familiar with the goings on at the Governor's office that the story will likely drop on Monday, and that the governor's resignation will follow."

[UPDATE BELOW] Here we go again! Bruce Springsteen, barstool musician and voice of the working class, is suing a bar. The Daily News reports that he's the face behind the latest copyright infringement lawsuit.

What, no sexy Snuffleupagus? A costume shop has announced their new line of Sesame Street costumes featuring Big Bird, Cookie Monster and Elmo—all available in teen and women sizes. They call them "super cute," but... we're conflicted! While sexualizing Sesame Street characters just seems wrong, that flapper Big Bird costume is sort of amazing. And it's not like the hemlines are that short. Anyway, if there's a Sesame Street-specific Furry fetish group out there... they are so psyched right now.