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After a juror fell ill and said she could not continue deliberating, a judge in Brooklyn declared a mistrial on Monday in the case of Lee Woods, one of three men charged with the killing of Officer Russel Timoshenko during a traffic stop last year. The juror, a woman in her 20s, complained of heart trouble last week, and visited a cardiologist over the weekend, according to Samuel J. Karliner, a lawyer for Mr. Woods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A jury in Brooklyn on Wednesday night acquitted one of three men charged in the fatal shooting of Police Officer Russel Timoshenko of murder charges, but convicted him on lesser counts of weapons possession. The verdict was a stunning setback for prosecutors, who had argued that the defendant, Robert Ellis, was one of two men who fired their weapons at Officer Timoshenko and his partner, Officer Herman Yan, during a traffic stop in the early-morning hours of July 9, 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Paterson administration's proposal for an 18 percent tax on sugary sodas and juice drinks -- an effort that state officials said would reduce obesity while raising more than $400 million a year for health programs -- has already touched off a vigorous debate among New Yorkers, nutrition experts and officials from the beverage industry, which vowed to fight the proposal. The 18 percent ''obesity tax,'' as it has been called, is part of a broader budget proposal announced on Tuesday, would be on top of existing sales taxes and would apply to nondiet sodas and fruit drinks containing less than 70 percent natural fruit juice, including ''-ades, punches and certain fruit nectars,'' as the budget proposal put it. The tax, one of few of its kind in the nation, would not apply to bottled water, diet sodas, coffee, tea or milk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A woman was injured in an elevator accident at a public housing complex in Manhattan early Thursday, officials said. The woman, Jolanda Joyce, 28, lives at the East River Houses in East Harlem. She told the NY1 cable news channel that when she opened an elevator door on the ground floor of 404 East 105th Street and stepped in, she fell in the shaft because the elevator was not there. The old-fashioned elevator has a door that is opened with a handle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If no good deed is allowed to go unpunished, Kathryn Martinez should have seen two punishments coming. To reduce their reliance on commercial food sources, she and her fiance planted a vegetable garden in the backyard of their home in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Hesitant to pick their lettuce too soon, they left it in the ground. When they finally pulled it up, the lettuce had gone bad. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority's experiment to introduce 35 ''green'' escalators in four subway stations started with a lurch on Monday. In some places, it didn't start at all. Escalators at the 34th Street-Herald Square and Roosevelt Island stations in Manhattan and the Jamaica-Van Wyck and Jamaica Center-Parsons/Archer stations in Queens were to begin operating at variable speed, as part of a pilot program to save energy and reduce wear and tear. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The large white bandage covering Enois Malbranche's right eye hid the hole left by a young woman in his taxi who had demanded his money, pointed a gun at his face and pulled the trigger. ''When you get shot, it's hot and you see the flash,'' Mr. Malbranche, 62, a yellow-cab driver for nine years, said from his bed at Kings County Hospital Center on Sunday, three days after he was attacked. ''Then I saw blood.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The star quarterback was unhappy. So was his team, the Green Bay Packers. Phone calls were made, a deal was struck, and voila: Paul Sheirer was walking out of a Modell's on Friday with three Brett Favre New York Jets jerseys. He bought two green jerseys, which the Jets wear at home, and one white, their usual road jerseys. They were replicas, and cost $80 each. He vowed to return in a week to the Times Square store when the authentic Favre Jet jerseys, which cost about $250 and are identical in material and stitching to game shirts, would appear. ''As soon as it comes out, it's going in my closet,'' said Mr. Sheirer, 19. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Brooklyn man who was being questioned in his apartment by police detectives about a forged check was fatally shot on Saturday morning by one of the detectives after he threatened them with a knife, the police said. The man, Darryl Battle, 20, was suspected of trying to cash a forged check for $1,003.50 last month at a Chase bank branch on East 79th Street in Manhattan and left his identification behind, according to the police. Based on a complaint from the bank, the two detectives went to 650 Decatur Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant about 9 a.m. to talk to Mr. Battle, the police said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Call it congestion parking. In what amounts to congestion pricing for parking spaces, parking meter rates would double during heavy traffic periods in portions of Manhattan and Brooklyn as part of an experimental city program beginning this fall, officials said Wednesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nadia Gavrylchenko, 30, was born in Russia and moved to New York with her family when she was 10. Ten years later, she fell in love with her Ukrainian husband, Andrey, and the couple now have a 6-year-old son. Ms. Gavrylchenko commutes from Brooklyn on the Q train each weekday morning to her job as an office manager. Though she returns to Russia often, and her son spends every summer with relatives in Ukraine, New York City ''is definitely my home,'' she said. ''I've tried living in other places.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More than a dozen people were injured, one of them critically, in an apartment fire in Brooklyn early Tuesday in which firefighters rescued six people, and two small children were dropped to safety from a second-floor apartment, according to fire officials and witnesses. The fire, at the corner of Newkirk and Ocean Avenues in Flatbush, broke out around 2 a.m. and sent eight members of one family to the hospital. Six people remained hospitalized last night. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation agreed on Tuesday to increase the monitoring of patients at a public psychiatric ward in Brooklyn. The agreement came after a videotape surfaced showing a patient collapsing onto a floor after waiting nearly 24 hours to be seen, and lying there for about an hour while hospital workers did nothing for her. The patient soon died. The agency agreed to the stepped-up monitoring to settle a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others. The lawsuit, filed a year ago in federal court in Brooklyn, accuses the public hospital, Kings County Hospital Center, of keeping psychiatric patients in filthy conditions, systematically neglecting them and drugging them into submission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Amid all the hoopla over Olafur Eliasson's ''New York City Waterfalls,'' which opened on Thursday along the East River, one might think the city was in for a windfall. When asked whether the public art installation was worth the $15.5 million it cost to erect it, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other ''Waterfalls'' enthusiasts have said the exhibit is expected to generate $55 million in economic activity during its run, which ends in October. That amounts to about 0.09 percent of the $59.1 billion budget city officials agreed upon hours after the water began to cascade under the Brooklyn Bridge on Thursday -- roughly the amount generated by a single World Series game during the Subway Series in 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tavern on the Green, the landmark restaurant in Central Park, agreed on Monday to pay $2.2 million to settle a lawsuit in which the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had accused it of severe sexual and racial discrimination. The commission said that the restaurant had ''engaged in severe and pervasive'' sexual and racial harassment of female, black and Hispanic employees. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After 52 years as one of the most heavily used branches of the New York Public Library system, the Donnell Library Center, on West 53rd Street, will all but close at the end of this week. A small circulating collection will remain open, in the basement, through the end of August. Then the building will be razed to make way for an 11-story hotel. When the $220 million hotel opens, sometime in 2011, a new Donnell library will occupy part of the first floor and an underground area, coexisting with hotel guests paying $750 to $2,000 per night for a room. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Harold Wenning, 69, remembers what he called ''the one-for-five trick'' from his days running a news kiosk in Midtown Manhattan. ''They'll say it's a five and give you a one,'' he said. ''I had a guy say it was a 20 once and he gave me a one. I had a guy buy a roll of quarters from me and he gave me a dollar. That happens.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When her husband became too sick five years ago to tend to the family dry-cleaning business, Kyung-Sook Woo did not hesitate to take over the job, sometimes rising so early to open the shop that customers would find her with a curling iron in her hand and her long hair half-curled. They knew Mrs. Woo, 52, as their determined but lovable dry cleaner, as much a charming mainstay of Windsor Terrace as the porch-fronted houses that line the Brooklyn neighborhood's narrow streets. She had been robbed at least twice, her customers said, but she remained undeterred. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With gasoline prices hitting new records daily, oil companies are not the only ones raking it in. New York City is profiting, too. The city's 4 percent sales tax on motor fuel sold brought in $26.4 million in December, January and February, or 8.6 percent more than the same period the year before. (Figures for March and April, when gas prices rose even higher, are not yet available.) In all of 2007, the city collected $105 million, a 7 percent increase from $98 million in 2006, which was 25 percent more than the $79 million in gas taxes from 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the largest public protest against the acquittal of three detectives in the shooting death of Sean Bell, 216 people were arrested on Wednesday in carefully orchestrated demonstrations that halted traffic at busy intersections in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the police said. The demonstrations, described by the Rev. Al. Sharpton as ''pray-ins,'' played out on a bright spring afternoon as boisterous displays of civil disobedience in which people signed up to be arrested, assuring organizers and lawyers that they were carrying proper identification to show to the police. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New York City's antiquated voting system buckled, groaned and occasionally even gave way on Tuesday as millions of people thronged the polls to cast votes in the presidential election. Persistent problems from past elections -- broken machines, long waits and confusion among poll workers -- were made even worse, voters and election observers said, by an exceptionally heavy turnout. The city's mechanical-lever voting machines, in use since 1962, broke down in neighborhoods from Washington Heights, Harlem and the Upper West Side in Manhattan to Cobble Hill and Crown Heights in Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens. While the Board of Elections dispatched teams of technicians around the city, voters who had already waited for hours had to wait even longer to fill out emergency paper ballots. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A 5-year-old Brooklyn boy fell 10 stories down an elevator shaft to his death on Tuesday in a public housing complex where residents had complained of recurring problems with the elevators and renovations had been delayed because of federal cutbacks. The police said the boy, Jacob Neuman, 5, was in an elevator with his 8-year-old brother at 70 Clymer Street in South Williamsburg just before 9:00 a.m. when the elevator became lodged between the 10th and 11th floors. Jacob, a student at a Talmudic academy, was on his way to classes when he tried to escape through the opened elevator door by jumping to the 10th floor, the police said, but lost his footing and fell to the bottom of the shaft. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the Olympic Games opened in Beijing, protesters around the world sought to capture a bit of the spotlight for human rights issues. In Ankara, the Turkish capital, a member of China's Uighur minority drenched himself in gasoline and set himself on fire before fellow demonstrators rushed to extinguish the flames and took him to a hospital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At precisely 7:59 p.m. on Friday in New York, a momentous celestial event, one that has been celebrated around the planet for thousands of years, officially arrived. Summer began, or in astronomical terms, the sun reached its highest point in the sky, marking the summer solstice and the longest day of the year, which means more sunlight. In ancient times, Egyptians heralded the event as the start of the New Year. Native Indians held elaborate ceremonies. And the Celts, always up for a party, danced and lighted bonfires to add to the sun's energy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kerry Leishman's boss did not bother to say, ''You're fired,'' face to face. He sent her the news in a text message. ''He wrote, 'I wanted to do this in person, but I'm sick,' '' she said, recalling how she lost her bartending job at a financial district restaurant. '' 'Don't come in, but drop off the keys.' '' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A man and a woman were arrested in Brooklyn on assault charges in the killing of a 3-year-old boy who lived with them, the police said, and more charges were possible after the medical examiner's office determined that the boy had been beaten to death. The woman, Nymeen Cheatham, 30, and the man, Lemar Martin, 25, who lived together at 129 Patchen Avenue, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, were also charged with acting in a manner to injure the child, Kyle Smith, the police said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dustin Vye could not believe what he was hearing: off-color language that cannot be printed here, sputtered by another man struggling to do squats at Mr. Vye's favorite gym. ''Oh, my legs,'' the man huffed, but with a vulgar adjective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Now the firefighters want their retroactive raise of nearly 10 percent, too. One day after an arbitration panel awarded New York City's police officers a raise amounting to 9.7 percent over two years, the Uniformed Firefighters Association said on Tuesday that it would exercise its option to reopen its contract covering the same two years -- 2004 to 2006. The firefighters received raises of less than 3 percent the first year and 3.15 percent the second year in that now-expired contract. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A New York City bus driver was fatally stabbed in Brooklyn on Monday after refusing to give a transfer to his assailant, who had not paid his fare, the police said. Witnesses said the killer jumped off the bus, slipped the hood of his black sweatshirt over his head and ran away. New York City Transit officials said it was the first slaying of a city bus driver in more than 27 years, although from time to time subway token-booth attendants have been attacked, some viciously. It was also the 476th homicide of the year in New York, 29 more than at this time last year. In 1981, there were more then 1,820 killings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]