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Two studies have slammed assumptions about stop-and-frisk's effectiveness this week. On Wednesday, an NYCLU report showed that black New Yorkers have been disproportionally stopped for suspected possession of marijuana, with cops wrong about that suspicion 91.5 percent of the time. Another report put out by the public advocate this week shows that white New Yorkers, when stopped, are actually far more likely to possess a weapon than African Americans.

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Two weeks ago, the federal government gave New York City's Hurricane Sandy recovery plan the green light. With some $1.77 billion of federal funds, the city would spend more than a third on housing, invest in small businesses in areas destroyed by the storm, and rebuild infrastructure. One teensy foreseeable problem: Disaster relief funds have a tendency to go rogue.

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@freecooperunion

In pure Cooper Union fashion, on Thursday night the students occupying president Jamshed Bharucha's office held a performative reading of the 41-page board of trustee transcript leaked by the Voice that same day. While students played the roles of trustees, president Bharucha's lines were programmed using a computerized text-to-speech tool. Students also recorded excerpts from the show via Vine, which you can check out after the jump.

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As to the question of whether Ray Kelly is running for mayor, only silence emanated from One Police Plaza yesterday. But one of our spies in Brooklyn got an extremely telling call last night from a pollster who asked a series of questions clearly targeted at taking the pulse of the electorate about a Kelly campaign.

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Fast-Food Workers Demonstrated outside the Wendy's shareholder meeting in midtown today.

While shareholders gathering inside the Sofitel for their annual meeting yesterday, multiple protests mobbed the sidewalks outside on West 44th Street.

Outside the hotel lobby, a crowd of Fast-food workers organized by the Fast Food Forward campaign packed the sidewalk, chanting their central demand: "$15 and a Union!"

Many of the employees speaking to the crowd referred to the wage theft they experienced at the hands of their employer, adding momentum to the announcement last week that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating the prevalence of wage-theft in the fast-food industry.

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Laura Jayne Martin

Tig Notaro is busy. You wouldn't think 2013 would feel very busy for the comedian after the year she had in 2012. Notaro's last year seemed as though it contained a lifetime's worth of tragedy in a few short months. Her year included contracting pneumonia, then a life-threatening intestinal disease, her mother's death in a freak accident, breaking up with her girlfriend, and, just when it seemed like the bad news was over, last August she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

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Could Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly be considering a dramatic late entry into the mayoral race? With 19 days to go before the campaign finance certification deadline, the chatter that the 71-year-old commissioner will run to replace Mayor Bloomberg reached a renewed crescendo yesterday, insiders tell the Voice.

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CS Muncy

At night, you can see it clearly--the corner windows of the Cooper Union's seventh floor, flooded in red light. It's a signal from the students who have been occupying the president's office for two weeks. They're there because they've lost faith in university leadership that voted to start charging tuition after 111 years of free education. They're there because the board of trustees denied responsibility for a series of bad financial decisions made behind closed doors. They're there because they'd like to know what the hell is going on.

Unreported until now is the fact that trustees considered shuttering the school altogether. According to a transcript and audio recording of a September 2012 board meeting provided to the Voice and confirmed by sources close to the deliberations, the board debated closing the school, partially or completely, over the next five years.

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Photo courtesy of Mercy for Animals

One of the nearly 3,000 pigs at Country View Family Farms in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania. The far mis a supplier for Hatfield Quality Meats, which is sold in twelve Northeastern states.

This week's story, "The Ag Gag War," goes behind the scenes of the guerilla fight between animal rights groups and Big Agriculture.

For years organizations like the Humane Society and Mercy for Animals have being going undercover at America's largest farms, using hidden cameras to show exactly how our food is produced. The footage hasn't been pretty.

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The NYPD's stop and frisk campaign led directly to the surge in low-level marijuana arrests, figures released today by the New York Civil Liberties Union show.

For context, marijuana arrests are the top arrest category in the entire stop and frisk program. Last year, five percent--or 26,000--of all stops were for suspected possession of marijuana. Despite the fact that whites use marijuana at a higher rate, blacks by far bore the brunt of those stops--61 percent, in all. Incredibly, just 9 percent of marijuana-based stop involved white folks.

Here's the kicker: misdemeanor law requires that the pot be in plain view, and cops can only stop people they actually see with marijuana, and yet, the drug was seized in just 8.5 percent of the stops, which means cops were either wrong or willfully wrong in the other 91.5 percent.

The numbers, the NYCLU says, "strongly suggest that officers are stopping people for alleged marijuana offenses without any justification."

Out of those 26,000 stops, just over 5,300 resulted in marijuana arrests.

"Despite the NYPD's repeated claim that its stop-and-frisk program is valuable because it targets guns, the facts show that it is much more a marijuana arrest program," the NYCLU says.

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Come 2014-2015, New Yorkers are going to be able to meet Miss Piggy in the ... felt. On Monday, the Museum of the Moving Image and Mayor Bloomberg announced the creation of a new gallery that will house 400 puppets, costumes, props, and miscellany donated by the family of Jim Henson, the visionary behind Sesame Street.

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Here's a little bit of Upper East Side intrigue: a fancy dealer took it upon herself to double down and sharply increase her profit margin by selling phony paintings and duping the Internal Revenue Service out of millions, federal prosecutors tell us.

The wily Glafira Rosales allegedly hid $12.5 million earned from the sales of "work" by abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning by hiding the cash in secret bank accounts in Spain, the U.S Attorney's office in Manhattan says. If only the IRS was so aggressive with large corporations: See Apple computer's many feathered tax shelters.

The feds busted her in Sands Point, N.Y. (aka F. Scott Fitzgerald's "East Egg" in "The Great Gatsby), early yesterday, and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, ever the man with a pithy quote, called her an "artful dodger" (see Dickens, Charles.)

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The better-than-rumor rumors are true: We have a Weiner in the mayoral race, and he has 64 reasons why, according to the debut campaign ad.

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Mark Carson's aunt, Florine Bumpars, spoke about her murdered nephew in the West Village yesterday.

More than 1,500 people marched through the West Village yesterday evening in response to the death of Mark Carson, who was killed Friday night by a man who, according to the police, said "look at these faggots" before shooting Carson in the face on the corner of 8th Street and Sixth Avenue.

Florine Bumpars, Carson's aunt, thanked the crowd for its show of support, and described her nephew as "a loving and caring person." She that his family wants "justice to be served, so that Mark's death is not in vain."

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Photo courtesy Sal Albanese 2013

You've never heard of Sal Albanese? It's his third time running for mayor, but the 63-year-old candidate, who is no stranger to calling out politicians on their bullshit, has generally maintained a lower profile than his fellow candidates in this race. Part of it's because Albanese is one oddly principled guy--the former city councilman from Bay Ridge refuses to take contributions from "special interests," regularly stands apart from party lines, and dropped out of the 2000 race because he didn't raise enough funds. He's also a progressive's progressive, having sponsored New York City's original living wage bill, and putting LGBT rights on his agenda long before it became acceptable to "evolve" on the issue.

In 2013, it seems Albanese's re-entry to politics has cast him as the mayoral race's internal auditor. On Monday, Albanese accused Christine Quinn, John Liu, and Bill de Blasio of using taxpayer funds to hire political operatives for their respective campaigns in the last 18 months--a total he says comes to $1.7 million.

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The wave of faculty dissatisfaction at New York University continues to roll on. After the School of Arts and Sciences voted in favor of a statement of no confidence in President John Sexton and his administration back in March, similar resolutions were passed by NYU's Gallatin School, its Steinhardt School, and its Tisch Asia program.

Today, add another big NYU division to the list: NYU's Tisch School of the Arts just finished tallying the votes on their own no-confidence resolution, and the results, while hardly overwhelming, are clear: Of the 169 professors who voted, 93, or 55 percent, voted in favor of the statement of no confidence; 76 cast votes disagreeing; 16 abstained.

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Forget self-deportation: It appears the feds have stumbled across a case of secret self-outsourcing at New York University. On Monday, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara and the FBI announced charges against three NYU researchers who had been funded by the National Institutes of Health to work on super-specialized MRI technology--then gave away that research to an institute supported by the Chinese government and another competitor, according to the complaint.

"As alleged, this is a case of inviting and paying for foxes in the henhouse," Bharara said in a statement. While the researchers were toiling away with the multimillion-dollar grant, the charges allege that the defendants communicated with United Imaging, a Chinese medical imaging company, and the Shenzen Institute of Advanced Technology, a project established by the Chinese Academy of Science, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Shenzhen municipal government.

A university investigation into researchers' NYU e-mail accounts found that the researchers had been sending NIH-funded project updates to United Imaging, while the feds discovered that an executive there paid one of the researcher's grad school tuition fees and another's rent. Guess SeekingArrangement.com just wasn't good enough this time around.

Send your story tips to sbrownstone@villagevoice.com. Follow her on Twitter here.

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A new study from the Brookings Institution shows that poverty in American suburbs increased by 64 percent over the last decade, more than twice the rate of poverty growth in cities. In the New York/tristate metro area alone, the number of suburban poor grew 28 percent since 2000, while the number of poor in the city grew 2 percent.

Alan Berube, one of the authors of the report, says that while the city becomes more expensive and popular, low wage economies are increasingly found outside them. The recession coupled with population growth in the suburbs contributed to the explosion of poverty there. "And in the end," he adds, "Where poverty is--is where affordable housing is."

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Willie Davis

The 58th Annual Village Voice Obie Awards, celebrating achievement in the Off-Broadway and off-off Broadway theater, were given out at a ceremony tonight at Webster Hall. The awards ceremony was co-hosted by Jessica Hecht and Jeremy Shamos. The awards were presented by Bobby Cannavale, Tracee Chimo, Cyndi Lauper, Judith Light, Krysta Rodriguez, Duncan Sheik, Meryl Streep and Courtney B. Vance.

See Also: The Village Voice's Theater Coverage

A medley from the highly acclaimed new Off-Broadway musical, Here Lies Love, was performed by the cast. The Brazilian jazz-pop group Banda Magda also performed.

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Expressing the LGBTQ community's grief and outrage following the murder of Mark Carson in the West Village on Friday, several LGBTQ groups are co-sponsoring a rally held at the LGBT Community Center tonight. Speaker Christine Quinn jumped on the rally as well--and the Facebook page for the event lists Quinn as the only politician involved.

Still, not all of New York City's queer community feel that Quinn has her heart in a sincere place. That's why they'll be taking their vigil for Carson outside what was St. Vincent's hospital at 5:30 p.m., when activists and mourners will ask whether Carson could have been saved if the hospital hadn't been shuttered.

"A lot of people are agreeing that Christine Quinn is trying to politicize today's march," says Louis Flores, an organizer with Queers Against Quinn and a St. Vincent's activist group. Flores also wonders whether Carson, who was shot through the cheek, would have survived had he been taken two blocks away from the scene of the crime to St. Vincent's, rather than Beth Israel, which is located across town from where Carson was shot and lacks a Level 1 trauma center.

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