.| UrbanNerd |.

NEW YORK – A restaurateur who admitted he exposed himself to a woman in a subway car, an act the woman captured with her cellular telephone camera, was sentenced Tuesday to two years probation and ordered to undergo counseling.

Daniel Hoyt, 43, was sentenced in Manhattan Criminal Court on his guilty plea to public lewdness, a misdemeanor. He admitted he exposed himself while on the R train on Aug. 24, 2005.

Hoyt and Tolentin Chan founded the popular Quintessence raw-food restaurants on East 10th Street in the East Village and on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side.

Judge Alexander Jeong rejected a request by Assistant District Attorney Andrew Zakrocki to follow a Probation Department recommendation and send Hoyt to jail.

“I will impose the sentence promised,” Jeong said. He added that Hoyt has to continue once-weekly psychiatric counseling for the entire two-year probation period. The judge warned that a probation violation could get Hoyt 90 days in jail.

As Hoyt left court, he said, I apologize for my actions and I’m sorry for anyone I may have offended.”

A court complaint says Hoyt committed four similar acts of public lewdness – one on a No. 1 or No. 9 train on Oct. 19, 2004, near West 72nd Street, and three others on R trains in the East Village on July 13, Aug. 19 and Aug. 24, 2005.

While Hoyt was in court, about a half-dozen women marched with signs outside the courthouse, denouncing the defendant. Their demonstration was in response to his alleged comments in a magazine interview, that some women liked what he had been doing and probably would want to date him.

One marcher was Thao Nguyen, 23, the woman who caught Hoyt “in flagrante” with her cell phone camera. She carried a sign that said, “Actually, if I met you in a bar I wouldn’t date you.”

NEW YORK – Weeks after Hal the coyote attracted national attention with his adventures in Central Park, another one of the animals was spotted in a Bronx park on Tuesday and was given a much more formal name: Jacob Van Cortlandt.

The Department of Parks & Recreation said two golfers reported seeing the coyote at about 3 p.m. by hole No. 5 on Van Cortlandt Golf Course, a municipal course inside the park that stretches more than 1,100 acres at the northern end of the Bronx.

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said Jacob the coyote was named after Jacobus Van Cortlandt, who served as mayor in the early 1700s and had a hand in the land transactions for the park.

Hal, the Central Park coyote, died late last month as he was being tagged for release upstate. He had been captured several days earlier after leading police on a wild chase through New York City’s largest park.

Hal was caught near 79th Street and Central Park West, shot by a police officer with a tranquilizer gun. The coyote, about a year old and weighing 35 pounds, could have crossed the Hudson River from New Jersey or wandered into the city from Westchester County, which borders Van Cortlandt Park.

Benepe said parks officials had confirmed the Jacob sighting on Tuesday but had no plans to pursue him because he posed no immediate danger to humans or small pets.

“Central Park is an area frequented by thousands of people on a daily basis,” Benepe said. “We’re not going to seek out this coyote – it’s not a cause for alarm unless we get reports of them frequenting heavily used areas.”

WASHINGTON — An analyst at Goldman Sachs (GS), a banker at Merrill Lynch (MER) and a printing plant worker were arrested on Tuesday, charged with participating in an international insider trading ring that netted $6.7 million and involved more than a dozen people.

Authorities said the schemes involved stealing pre-publication copies of BusinessWeek magazine to gain advance knowledge of share tips and persuading an investment banker to pass on details about upcoming mergers.

The U.S. Attorney said those under arrest were Eugene Plotkin, a bond analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Stanislav Shpigelman, a junior-level investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.

A third man, Juan Renteria, an employee at a plant that printed BusinessWeek magazine, was arrested in Milwaukee. All three face insider trading and securities fraud charges.

“These defendants developed their sources of information in the hopes of running that insider trading business as a money-making machine, and for a little while it worked, netting millions of dollars,” said Michael Garcia, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Read more here

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – There won’t be a fairway or a green in sight, and it’s a far cry from Augusta National, but the international space station could be turned into a driving range this summer.

Cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov, who took over command of the space station last week, hopes to hit a gold-plated golf ball during an August spacewalk.

Because of zero gravity, Vinogradov’s drive will make golf’s long-distance hitters like John Daly look positively feeble. The ball, equipped with a tracking device, is expected to remain in orbit for several years.

The low drive from the space station – which travels at 17,000 mph, 250 miles above Earth – is a publicity stunt for Element 21 Golf Co., a Canadian-based golf club manufacturer.

NASA officials met on Tuesday to review the safety of the stunt, which already has been approved by the Russian space agency. NASA is expected to make a decision at a later date.

“Being a golfer, I’m interested in it, too,” Kirk Shireman, NASA’s space station deputy program manager, said recently. “But we’re absolutely going to make sure it’s a safe thing to do before we execute it.”

NASA officials want to make sure a bad slice or hook won’t send the golf ball careening into the spacecraft, or that a bad backswing or follow-through won’t cause Vinogradov to strike the station with his six-iron.

Read the rest here

Nasa Website

Microsoft on Tuesday released a “critical” Internet Explorer update that fixes 10 vulnerabilities in the Web browser, including a high-profile bug that is already being used in cyberattacks.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant sent out the IE megafix as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday cycle of bulletins. In addition, Microsoft delivered two bulletins for “critical” Windows flaws, one for an “important” vulnerability in Outlook Express and one for a “moderate” bug in a component of FrontPage and SharePoint.

“This patch release is a big one with lots of aftershocks,” said Jonathan Bitle, a product manager at security company Qualys. “Three of the five updates, the IE and Windows updates, are especially critical as they take advantage of inexperienced users…Although a worm epidemic is unlikely, users can be easily enticed to visit malicious Web pages.”

Eight of the 10 vulnerabilities repaired by the IE update could be abused to gain complete control over a Windows computer running vulnerable versions of the Web browser. In all instances, an attacker would have to create a malicious Web site and trick people into visiting that site to hook into a PC, Microsoft said in its Security Bulletin MS06-013.

Microsoft rates its browser update “critical” for IE 5 and IE 6, the most-used versions of the popular software. IE is vulnerable on all current versions of the Windows operating system–Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003–as well as on the older Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition, the company said.

“An attacker who successfully exploited the most severe of these vulnerabilities could take complete control of an affected system,” Microsoft said in its alert. “We recommend that customers apply the update immediately.” Windows users who have automatic updates enabled for the operating system will have the fixes delivered to them.

Microsoft had been under pressure to rush the IE patch out before Tuesday because miscreants were already exploiting one of the flaws. Third parties had even provided temporary fixes for this “CreateTextRange” bug, which experts said was being used by malicious Web sites to try to drop code such as spyware on vulnerable PCs.

According to Microsoft’s bulletin, three of the 10 vulnerabilities fixed by the update had been publicly disclosed. Only the CreateTextRange flaw was being exploited in attacks, the software maker said.

But Symantec has information that three of the flaws were already being exploited in attacks prior to Microsoft’s patch release. More attacks are likely to follow, Oliver Friedrichs, a director at Symantec Security Response, said in a statement. “According to the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, the average time between the release of a security patch and the development of an exploit is six days,” he said.

LONDON – A 300-year-old book that appears to be bound in human skin has been found in northern England, police said Saturday.

The macabre discovery was made on a central street in Leeds, and officers said the ledger may have been dumped following a burglary.

Detectives were trying to trace its rightful owner and believe it may have been taken from a dwelling in the area.

Much of the text is in French, and it was not uncommon around the time of the French Revolution for books to be covered in human skin.

The practice, known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, was sometimes used in the 18th and 19th centuries when accounts of murder trials were bound in the killer’s skin.

Anatomy books also were sometimes bound in the skin of a dissected cadaver. In World War II, Nazis were accused of using the skin from Holocaust victims to bind books.

In a brief statement, West Yorkshire police said the ledger, which contained handwriting in black ink, appears to date back to the 1700s, and they appealed to anyone who may be able to help identify the owners of the item to contact authorities.

West Yorkshire Police put two photographs of the book on their Web site, but officers were unable on Saturday to answer any questions about it, including the book’s subject matter.

On the net

Sudoku! Sudoku! Every where I go I see people with their morning papers folded in half and staring, almost mezmorized by this, what looks to be a tiny crossword puzzle of numbers game. So what is Sudoku? Well,for those of you who don’t know, like myself, I looked it up!

Sudoku (数独, sūdoku?), also known as Number Place, is a logic-based placement puzzle. The aim of the puzzle is to enter a numerical digit from 1 through 9 in each cell of a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids (called “regions”), starting with various digits given in some cells (the “givens”). Each row, column, and region must contain only one instance of each numeral. Completing the puzzle requires patience and logical ability. Although first published in a U.S. puzzle magazine in 1979, Sudoku initially caught on in Japan in 1986 and attained international popularity in 2005.

How to play

I google searched this and the rules are listed below, but unfortunatly, it really doesn’t seem to have a clear cut answer, or atleast not clear cut to me. The puzzle is most frequently a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 regions. Some cells already contain numbers, known as “givens”. The goal is to fill in the empty cells, one number in each, so that each column, row, and region contains the numbers 1-9 exactly once. Each number in the solution therefore occurs only once in each of three “directions”, hence the “single numbers” implied by the puzzle’s name.

Free Sudoku sites

Brainypuzzle
Bin-co
PJ Let’s Play
Said What?
Sudoku

SAN FRANCISCO - In Atlanta, an online ad offers a room in exchange for “sex and light office duty.” In Los Angeles, a one-bedroom pool house is free “to a girl that is skilled and willing.” And in New York City, a $700-a.m.onth room is available at a discount to a fit female willing to provide sex.

On the widely used Web site Craigslist.org, some landlords and apartment dwellers looking for roommates are offering to accept sex in lieu of rent.

“They have to be attractive. I don’t let just anybody come into my house,” said Mike, a man who answered the phone at the New York City listing but declined to give his last name – and refused to say whether he has, in fact, collected the rent under the sheets.

The offering of shelter for sex is older than, well, real estate itself.

But the online come-ons are franker than anything you might see in the newspaper classifieds, because they are not edited by Craigslist, and perhaps also because the anonymity of the Internet often causes people to shed their inhibitions.

Trading housing for sex is a form of prostitution. But the police aren’t kicking down doors.

Read the rest here

Craigslist

NEW DELHI - A textbook used in western India compares housewives to donkeys – and concludes that the pack animals make more loyal companions, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

“A donkey is like a housewife,” declares the Hindi language primer approved by the state of Rajasthan, according to The Times of India newspaper. “It has to toil all day and, like her, may even have to give up food and water.”

“In fact, the donkey is a shade better,” continues the text meant for 14-year-olds, “for while the housewife may sometimes complain and walk off to her parents’ home, you’ll never catch the donkey being disloyal to his master.”

The book, reportedly used in Rajasthani schools, has sparked protests from the women’s wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which controls the state government and approved the text, the Times reported.

Rajasthan is known to be one of India’s most traditional states, where conservative attitudes toward women predominate, and state education officials said the comparison was meant to be funny, nothing more.

“The comparison was made in good humor,” state education official A.R. Khan was quoted as saying.

He added, however, that “protests have been taken note of and the board is in the process of removing” the reference.

I have always liked going to Broadway plays. Not just for the glitz and glamour, but for the experience. Many of the plays I have seen, I have already either read the book or saw the movie. I feel this could help you understand what is going on, and what to expect, or kill the experience for you entirely.

There are some plays that I am looking forward to, within the next few months and thought I would share my selections with you all. Some may have never heard of them, and others are, like mewaiting to sit and be amazed.

LESTAT
AVENUE Q
WICKED ALSO CHECK THIS OUT
THE THREEPENNY OPERA
THREE DAYS OF RAIN
FAITH HEALER