Vill Events

Atlantis lands.Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images When the 135th and last space shuttle flight landed safely this morning at 5:58, most of the country was asleep for the spectacle — an oddly fitting end for a program that started to much fanfare and has now ended, more than 30 years later, to relatively little notice. There was a small flurry of last-minute nostalgia for the high era of s... more.

Photo: Getty Images Jay Walder, the new chairman of the MTA, started work 15 days ago and he already has huge plans. The most significant: introducing a new computerized fare card to charge passengers different prices at different times of the day, including lower fares for riding late at night and on the weekends. Walder, who helped develop a similar plan in London, told the Times, “We h... more.

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images Jon Huntsman's campaign manager, Susan Wiles, has "resigned" — scare quotes because we really have no idea whether she left on her own or was told to leave — and will be replaced by Huntsman's communications director, according to The Fix. John Weaver, the veteran of the John McCain campaign who serves as one of Huntsman's top advisers, sough to stifl... more.

A nationwide ad campaign has been launched by the Newspaper Association of America that's designed to change the perception that newspapers are dying and uncool. Crafted by the Richmond-based Martin Agency, the ad shows a cartoon woman reading a newspaper and daydreaming about how she could be browsing the Internet on her phone, tablet, or laptop. (Okay, presumably it actually shows her thinking... more.

Photo: iStockphoto Earlier this week, the city announced that so many couples had expressed interest in getting married this Sunday — the first day that gay marriage is legal in the state of New York — that they would have to hold a lottery. Interested couples had until noon today to register, and now, Marc LaVorgna, deputy press secretary to Mayor Bloomberg, tells us that a total of ... more.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn.Photo: Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images This story just keeps getting more complicated: On Monday, we brought you news that Anne Mansouret confessed to having sex with Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2000, not too long before he allegedly tried to rape her daughter, French journalist Tristane Banon. Now DSK's second wife, Brigitte Guillemette — Tristane's godmother and often re... more.

Photo-illustration: iStockphoto; DJ Baskin and Mike Vilensky FBI agents may have been looking for a hipster hacker at large when they raided the homes of suspected "Anonymous" computer criminals earlier this week. We suspected that the agents were only busting down the doors of suburban 19-year-olds, but at least one of the hackers may have once lived in our very own backyard, at Brooklyn's not... more.

This is Barack Obama's "bad debt-ceiling news" face.Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images With the clock ticking ever closer to that fateful August 2 date when the federal government can no longer uphold all of its obligations and the markets tank and everyone starts cracking each other's heads open and feasting on the good inside, has President Obama, a.k.a. Sir Cave-a-lot of Cavenshire, decid... more.

Game recognize game.Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images That's not even the best quote from Larry Summers's description of his meeting with the Winkelvii twins. This is: One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interv... more.

David Leonhardt. The columnist was a bit of a wild-card choice for Jill Abramson to make for the job, historically a fast track to power at the paper: Leonhardt lacks a background in national security or political reporting and hasn't really taken on management roles to date. But — along with being a rising star at the paper — he is widely regarded as a smart and insightful economic... more.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. And no, we don't know which one is which.Photo: Jonathan Fickies/Bloomberg via Getty Images Earlier this week, Larry Summers fired a doucherocket across the bow of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss's pairs' shell. "If an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities," he noted at a Fortune conference, refer... more.

Maybe when people do that gesture men get some sort of *complex.* University of Helsinki's Tatu Westling got tired of all his academic cohorts focusing their inquiries into why some countries are wealthy while others are poor by "concentrating on economic, social and political factors" and abstaining from "sexual considerations." Penis size, he surmised, must play a factor in economic growth. B... more.

James Murdoch.Photo: David Moir/Reuters James Murdoch was aware of very little going on at News Corp. At least, that's the impression you'd have gotten by watching his testimony before Parliament earlier this week. Not quite, say two former News International executives, who allege that they told him information in 2008 that clearly suggested phone hacking at the News of the World was quite per... more.

Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, "a philanthropist who focuses on medical causes" and a member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family, had workmen carve his name into the United Arab Emirates island he owns in letters so big that they're visible from space, stretching two-miles wide. Previously, Hamad built the world's largest truck -- an operational Dodge Power Wagon 64 times larger than the original w... more.

That hostage should be pretty worried at this point.Photo-illustration: Mary-Louise Price; Photos: 20th Century Fox (Speed still), Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images (Boehner), Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images (Obama) It's Friday, July 22. The day that, not too long ago, the White House set as a deadline for reaching a debt-ceiling deal so Congress could have time to write and vote on legislation befo... more.

Levi Aron.Photo: Gary Miller/Splash News Gerard Marrone, previously one of two defense attorneys representing Levi Aron, the confessed murderer of Leiby Kletzky, has quit the case. "The allegations were too horrific, and it's not something I wanted to be involved in," he tells Eyewitness News. "I have three boys. One of my sons is seven. I looked at my own children, and there are no words. You ... more.

Photo: NY1 "I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" 32-year-old Jeffrey Ritter yelled as cops took him to a police car, in front of a phalanx of reporters. "Yeah, fuck you with all your cameras." The NYPD says that Ritter is the man caught on a surveillance camera Monday dragging an 85-year-old woman into a stairwell, where she says he sexually assaulted her and robbed her. Ritter was partially recogn... more.

Photo: Scott Shannon and Todd Pettengill. Name: Todd Pettengill and Scott Shannon Age: Unknown; not young Neighborhood: Midtown (both) Occupation: Radio/Television Hosts on 95.5 WPLJ and new entertainment news program Dish Nation premiering on WWOR My9 July 25 at 6 p.m. Who's your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional? Todd Pettengill: Al Pacino. ‘Cause nobody wear... more.

Back in the spring, Robert Moffat cried on the stand as he told prosecutors how he only gave Galleon accomplice Danielle Chiesi inside information because she was his "friend" and he was trying to help her. At the time, he had refused to help out with the case against her, out of loyalty. They'd had something special, he felt. Something real. "Everyone wants to make this about sex," he later tol... more.

Jay Walder.Photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images Well, that took what, two years? According to the MTA Twitter, the man who was supposed to come in from London to save our mangled public transport systems is resigning — effective three months from now. Jay Walder is set to take over a similar post in Hong Kong, the Times reports. No doubt he'll have more fun there — no one ever said run... more.