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http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-03-29/moscow-metro-blast-casualties.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8592190.stm

How Do You Train a Dragon?

MTA Cost Cuts: $93M Down, $307M To Go

NYT: The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted 11 to 2 on Wednesday afternoon to implement a package of severe cuts to transit service, including the elimination of two subway lines and dozens of bus routes.

The service reductions, to be phased in starting in June, will save $93 million a year, part of an effort by the strapped authority to dig itself out of a $400 million budget shortfall.

Plus, NYT: The city’s official unemployment rate was 10.2 percent last month, down from 10.4 percent in January, the state Labor Department reported on Thursday. That was still significantly higher than the national unemployment rate, which was 9.7 percent in February.

The number of private-sector jobs in the city rose by 8,100 last month...

Report Roundup

BP: ...the city unveiled plans for a bike-friendly facelift for Smith Street, turning the much-used approach to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges much less harrowing.

The improvements will work as a complement to the bike lane on the parallel, one-way southbound Hoyt Street.

“The bike lanes on Smith and Hoyt streets will work as a pair,” said Preston Johnson, an official with the Department of Transportation. “They’ll enhance access to the bridges and also to destinations on Smith Street.”

BP: Marc Elliot just took over the kitchen of the Irish pub Ceol on Smith — and created a menu so exquisite that his customers have no reason to move on for dinner after a few drinks.

“All we used to have was shepherd’s pie and bangers — but we had about three customers coming in for those,” Elliot said. “So I took note of that and all the items on other Smith Street menus, and put none of them on mine. Everyone has fried f—king calamari. I don’t.”

BP: An effort to preserve the history of Carroll Gardens is being criticized for actually hastening the neighborhood’s gentrification, said opponents of a controversial city initiative to widen the area’s historic district.

“They just want to re-gentrify and force out whatever elements from the past are left,” said lifelong area resident and businessman John Esposito, who helped form Citizens Against Landmarks to thwart the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s nascent effort to extend historic protections to a larger segment of the brownstone neighborhood.

BP: On Monday, Brooklyn finally gets a chance to park it on the stoop.

...the first phase of Brooklyn Bridge Park — featuring a vast green lawn and a granite front-stoop sitting area located on Pier 1 — will open to the public.

High: 68 Degrees

Fast forward to Saturday, March 22, 2010:


Rewind to Thursday, November 24, 2009: 178 Smith Street: Burned

Rainy Days

MW: Lehman autopsy shows evidence of problems: Examiner says legal claims possible against CEO Fuld, J.P. Morgan, Citi, others

Nasdaq: Mar. 10, '00-Mar. 10, '10

Reuters via Yahoo: A decade later, lessons in the Nasdaq collapse

WSJ: When Bubble Burst: Companies Won, Investors Lost

MW: Commentary: Some are drawing wrong lessons from this week's anniversaries

MW: Internet stocks still well below their bubble-era highs

Mar. 9, '09-Mar. 9, '10: Now What?

AP via Yahoo: Stocks have lost some of the momentum that propelled the Dow Jones industrial average up 61.4 percent from its close of 6,547 on March 9, 2009... investors are waiting for signs that the economy is ready to put up some solid, sustainable growth numbers.

The most likely trigger: job growth. Investors need to see a Labor Department report that says employers are creating more jobs than they're cutting.

NPR: Walker, the CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, is the author of Comeback America, a book detailing his belief that if significant fiscal reforms aren't immediately enacted in the United States, interest rates on the national debt will rise, and federal taxes could easily double from current levels by 2030...

"Structural deficits represent a fundamental imbalance between projected revenues and projected expenditures even when the economy is growing, even when the wars are over, even when unemployment is down. And in that circumstance, we face — because of known demographic trends — the retirement of the baby-boom generation primarily and rising health care cost — large, known and growing structural deficits that could swamp our ship of state."

Walker says that unless spending is controlled, the country will enter an "economic abyss."

I.O.U.S.A.: I.O.U.S.A.: Byte-Sized - The 30 Minute Version

NPR: Cost Of Medical School Rises

NPR: States Weigh Four-Day School Week To Cut Costs

WNYC: Harry Markopolos talks about his years spent investigating Bernie Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme:

April Is Just Around the Corner

High: 61 Degrees

High: 60 Degrees

Gowanus Canal Superfunded

BP: EPA says yes to Superfund
BP: The Gowanus: A really messy 400 years!
BP: The Gowanus stinks — for Toll Brothers

Plus...

BP: No bull! Ridge woman is drinking milk straight from the cow!
BP: Fork this! Foodies are now leading the gentrification of Brooklyn

NY Gov. Gone Wild