Get ready to pay more when you use Port Authority bridges and tunnels between New York and New Jersey.
The third of five scheduled annual toll hikes is scheduled to go into effect on Sunday.
Cars bearing E-ZPass tags will pay 75 cents more when they cross the George Washington, Bayonne and Goethals bridges and Outerbridge Crossing, or enter the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.
That makes the E-ZPass peak round-trip toll $ 11, with the off-peak toll at $ 9.
Cars paying cash will continue to pay $ 13.
The heaviest burden will be borne by trucks or towing combinations with six or more axles. Their off-peak E-ZPass rate will rise from $ 66 to $ 78 and the peak E-ZPass rate will rise $ 12 to $ 84.
Long before David Beckham became an international sex symbol he had to perform a sex act on himself while looking at a photo of another soccer player as his teammates jeered him on.
They made him bend it like Beckham.
David Beckham had to perform a humiliating sex act in front his teammates upon joining Manchester United’s youth team as a teenager, the soccer superstar confessed in a new documentary.
As a young soccer player David Beckham, pictured above in 1990, had to perform an embarrassing sex act on himself in front of teammates.
The midfielder had to stare at a photo of Welsh soccer player Clayton Blackmore while performing the embarrassing deed on himself as his teammates jeered him on.
“Everyone had an initiation that you had to go through on the youth team, that was one of the most uncomfortable ones,” Beckham said according toMetro, which first reported the news.
David Beckham had to look at a photo of former Manchester United player Clayton Blackmore during the vile hazing ritual.
“The fact that I had to look at Clayton Blackmore’s calendar and do certain things, while looking at Clayton Blackmore. I mean it was embarrassing to talk about!”
Beckham came clean about the seedy ceremony in the upcoming “The Class of ’92″ documentary.
The Manchester United Youth Team on May 15, 1992. Back row, left to right: Ben Thornley, Nicky Butt, Gary Neville, Simon Davies, Chris Casper, Kevin Pilkington and Keith Gillespie. Front row, left to right: John O’Kane, Robbie Savage, George Switzer, Ryan Giggs, David Beckham and Colin McKee.
The movie details how Beckham and five others on Manchester United represented a new generation of soccer superstars who reflected the rapidly changing culture in England.
The hazing revelation didn’t seem to trouble the 38-year-old star who now spends more time on the red carpet with his wife Victoria than on the pitch.
David Beckham with former England international Bobby Charlton in the early 1990s.
“I was embarrassed when I was saying it on camera let alone talking about it more. But it’s something we all had to go through,” said Beckham. “It was definitely something I wouldn’t like to go through again!”
Following the stunning admissions another Manchester United player, Robbie Savage, tweeted Beckham “wasn’t (the) only one” who had to perform the bizarre ritual.
David Beckham is the latest professional athlete to reveal he endured a hazing ritual.
In the U.S., hazing has become a hotly debated subject after Jonathan Martin alleged that his fellow offensive lineman on the Miami Dolphins, Richie Incognito, bullied him to the point of a mental breakdown.
Hazing expert Dr. Susan Lipkins told the Daily News that while the lewd ritual might not have troubled Beckham, it’s entirely possible that the practice has evolved into something potentially more traumatic.
“The nature of hazing is such that you pass on tradition and you want to add your own mark, so it becomes more sexual, more violent, or more alcohol is added,” said Lipkins, who wrote “Preventing Hazing.” “So after 10, 20 years it becomes much worse.”
Gov. Cuomo announced Friday a $ 50 million project that aims to protect homes and businesses in Howard Beach, Queens, from future storms.
ALBANY — The feds have approved a $ 50 million project to protect Sandy-battered Howard Beach, Queens, from future storms.
The project announced Friday by Gov. Cuomo would develop sand dunes, salt marshes and other vegetation along a section of the Queens coastline in a bid to keep floodwaters from reaching businesses and homes.
Founded in 1987 by the investment banker Arthur L. Carter, The Observer, in the words of its website, observer.com, seeks to report on “finance, media, real estate, politics, society, tech and culture with an insider’s perspective, a keen sense of curiosity and a sharp wit.” Published weekly on pinkish paper that in its smoked-salmon hue trumpets Gotham, it reaches a primarily high-income readership.
Though its circulation has long been small — about 50,000 in Mr. Kaplan’s day and only slightly higher now — the newspaper became, under his stewardship, required reading for the very demographic it skewered.
Appointed in 1994, Mr. Kaplan served the longest term of any Observer editor. During his tenure the paper featured the work of journalists renowned for a cutting-edge sensibility, among them Joe Conason, now the editor in chief of the political website The National Memo; Nikki Finke, who went on to found the entertainment-industry site now known as Deadline.com; and Choire Sicha, who later helped found The Awl, the current-events site.
The vigorously reported, tart-tongued coverage of New York’s power elites that Mr. Kaplan helped bring to The Observer prefigured the work of many websites devoted to politics, culture and the press.
“It’s hard to find a major publication right now, in print or online, that’s not in some way flavored by the old Observer,” The New Republic wrote in a profile of Mr. Kaplan last year. “Subtract Kaplan from the media landscape of the past 20 years and you lose The Awl, much of Gawker and a good bit of Politico, too.”
When The Observer began, it was intended to be a hyperlocal Manhattan affair. In light of what it later became, its early tone and purview — community board meetings loomed somewhat large in its coverage — seem almost bucolic.
Esteemed as a mentor to writers, Mr. Kaplan, by all accounts, helped usher in a delectable dose of snark. Writing about The Observer in The New York Times in 2006, David Carr called him “the man who turned it into a maypole of Manhattan gossip and intrigue.”
Among Mr. Kaplan’s greatest coups was hiring a little-known freelance writer named Candace Bushnell to write a column about the hunt for love, or something approximately like it, in the urban jungle. Ms. Bushnell’s column, “Sex and the City,” which appeared in The Observer from 1994 to 1996, became the basis for the hit HBO series starring Sarah Jessica Parker.
“The more cancellations we got for her column,” Mr. Kaplan wrote in an essay in New York magazine in 2011, “the more the paper knew we had hit the jackpot.”
Though he went on to help carry The Observer across the digital threshold, overseeing the creation of its website, Mr. Kaplan was regarded by those who knew him as a throwback to an earlier age — to the New York of the Stork Club, the Automat and the Algonquin. He revered the stuff of that era, from classic black-and-white films that portrayed the city at its noirish finest (he knew the credits of nearly all of them by heart) to newspapers as they were originally conceived: damp, sweet-smelling and black and white, or, in his case, black and pink.
Mr. Kaplan remained with The Observer after it passed into the hands of a new owner — Jared Kushner, then 25 — in 2006, and through its transformation from a broadsheet into a tabloid the next year. When he left the newspaper in 2009, amid a retrenchment that entailed staff cuts and shorter articles, his departure appeared to many in the industry to herald the last heady days of a certain brand of old-school print journalism.
Peter Wennik Kaplan was born in Manhattan on Feb. 10, 1954, and reared primarily in northern New Jersey. At Harvard, where he received a bachelor’s degree in American studies, he was a stringer for Time magazine; he also ran a campus film society, named for the Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, that specialized in showing the most obscure movies possible.
Before joining The Observer, Mr. Kaplan was a reporter at The Times, for which he covered the television industry in the mid-1980s; the executive editor of the business magazine Manhattan,inc.; and the executive producer of Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show.
At Fairchild, Mr. Kaplan oversaw the relaunch last year of M magazine, a glossy quarterly aimed at affluent men.
Mr. Kaplan’s marriage to Audrey Walker ended in divorce. Besides his brother James, a novelist and biographer, survivors include his second wife, Lisa Chase, whom he married last year; their son, David; three children from his marriage to Ms. Walker, Caroline Kaplan, Charles Kaplan and Peter Walker Kaplan; and another brother, Robert.
Though he had long made his home in suburban Larchmont, N.Y., Mr. Kaplan never stopped regarding New York City as a shimmering object of desire. Decades afterward, looking back on boyhood car trips into town, he recalled his father’s words on seeing the Manhattan skyline rear up on the horizon:
Drivers who thought Friday was a parking holiday woke up to tickets by traffic agents working under quotas — and with full knowledge that parking regulations are confusing travelers, an NYPD traffic-enforcement agent told the Post.
“Some supervisors do give [quotas]. For those who do have them, they will meet their quotas in no time at all . . . This is our busiest day,” crowed the traffic agent, who was working Friday on the Upper East Side.
“Residents think alternate-side parking is suspended. It’s not. And lots of tourists are driving in to shop . . . They think this is a weekend. There will be a lot of tickets given today.”
Cladine Jean found a $ 45 ticket on her white Nissan after she parked near the Navy Yard in Brooklyn.Photo: Paul Martinka
Hungover and pie-stuffed New Yorkers found nasty surprises.
“I thought since yesterday was Thanksgiving, a national holiday, I thought it was OK to park,” wailed pharmacy technician Cladine Jean, 29, who found a $ 45 ticket on her white Nissan after she parked near the Navy Yard in Brooklyn.
“I hate New York because of things like this. I mean, come on, this is Thanksgiving. They should extend [the parking rules] through the holiday weekend.”
Jean’s friend Niyia Brewington, 28. agreed, arguing the city should post signs notifying drivers that Friday wasn’t a holiday.
“This is just another way New York sucks the money out of your pocket,” said Brewington.
Other city drivers shared Jean’s anger, while helpful New Yorkers tried to spread word of the danger.
“Thought today was Saturday & got a $ 65 parking ticket overnight. F–k you, NYC,” tweeted a real-estate salesman.
“A friendly reminder to all of those visiting NYC: Don’t get a ticket! All of the parking and meter rules are in effect on Friday, 11/29,” tweeted mohel Phil Sherman.
“The city is going to make a lot of money today,” said the traffic agent who described the ticket quota system to the Post.
The NYPD has denied agents are given quotas.
“Tickets are issued based on what traffic agents observe. The number of parking tickets has consistently gone down over the last five years,” said NYPD spokesman John McCarthy. “Ideally, no one would break the law and there would be no violations or summonses.”
Ann Morofsky has seen a lot of changes in Brooklyn in her 101 years.
She’s one tough birthday girl.
Fiery Brooklynite Ann Morofsky turned 101 on Wednesday, but she’s not going to tell just any idiot what that’s like.
“Use your imagination,” Morofsky said.
The cantankerous centenarian has lived for four decades in the same Kensington apartment building, since returning to her native borough after a 17-year stint in the Bronx.
Brooklyn has changed for the better since the trolley car days of her Williamsburg childhood, Morofsky said. Fewer slums. Safer streets. Even the buses seem fast and quiet compared to the old streetcars.
The moon landing? It was “expected.” The first days of television? “Amateurish.” Republicans? They’re simply “crooks.”
Oh, you want to put her picture in the paper?
“Big deal,” Morofsky says.
She’s survived repeated hospital stays, a hip replacement and multiple bouts of life-threatening pneumonia since the age of 92. Her stories don’t always hew to the facts, but she tells them with as much fire as ever.
You don’t live 101 years by growing soft and doubting yourself.
Behind this gruff, tough-talking exterior, Morofsky has lived a generous, if plain-spoken life, relatives said.
Niece Mindy Schonberg, 63, of Staten Island said Morofsky and sister Millie Tepper used to take her on trips to Radio City Music Hall.
Marriage eventually pried Morofsky out of Brooklyn, if only temporarily.
This is how she describes meeting her future husband: “It was a blind date. I was blind, and he saw me.”
They lived in the Bronx after wedding in 1955. She stayed on after his death in 1963, but couldn’t live away from her hometown forever and moved back in 1972.
“She’s a Brooklyn girl,” Schonberg said.
And for all her Brooklyn wisecracks, she was so excited about her birthday she woke her home health care aide, Marisa Greig, at midnight to sing “Happy Birthday.”
