FDNY is discriminatory, court says, but it hasn't yet been proven that it's intentional.

The Fire Department of New York has a discrimination problem: In a city where, in 2002, 25 percent of the population was black and 27 percent was Hispanic, the fire department was 2.6 percent black and 3.7 percent Hispanic. Other city agencies don't have this problem, and neither do fire departments in other major cities.

As Steven Thrasher extensively documented for the Voice in 2010, the overwhelming and disproportionate whiteness of the FDNY has been the subject of a roiling legal struggle for nearly half a century. The current lawsuit, brought by the Justice Department over an Equal Employment complaint by the Vulcan Society, a group of black firefighters, has been ricocheting around the federal court system since 2007.

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All legal avenues exahusted, Bloomberg must make public emails concerning the hiring of Cathie Black.

Mayor Bloomberg's fight to keep emails concerning the hiring Cathie Black, whose catastrophic career as school chancellor lasted all of 100 days, has finally ended, and Bloomberg has lost.

The story stretches back to 2010, when Sergio Hernandez, then a Village Voice intern, filed a Freedom of Information Law request for emails related to Black's hiring. The city first delayed, then refused. Hernandez appealed, and the city refused again. So he sued, represented pro bono by Schlam Stone & Dolan, and he won.

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Anthony Bologna won't face any charges for pepper-spraying kettled protesters.

Late on a Friday afternoon is widely agreed to be the best time for sheepish newsmakers to announce the things they really really hope the media doesn't report on too much. Last Friday afternoon, coming at the end of the most exhausting and depressing news-week in recent memory, was a full-moon-high-tide-converging-low-pressure-systems super-storm of Friday news-dump oblivion.

In short, it was a great time for the Manhattan District Attorney's office to announce that it won't be bringing any charges at all against Anthony Bologna, the NYPD commander caught on video gratuitously pepper-spraying a bunch of helpless, immobilized, unarmed and nonviolent women in September of 2011.

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When New York's prosecutors play dirty, they almost never suffer consequences.

When New York City prosecutors break the rules, the consequences can be serious: Murderers can go free, and innocent people can lose years of their life in jail. But as a new ProPublica investigation released today makes clear, prosecutorial misconduct almost always goes unpunished.

Combing through the records, ProPublica's reporters found a single case in which a prosecutor, Claude Stuart, then a Queens Assistant District Attorney, lost his job for abusing his power, but that only happened after Stuart had been caught witholding and manipulating evidence in multiple cases and lying to a judge. But the fact that Stuart faced any consequences at all for his misconduct makes him an exception.

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This officer may be pointing a video-camera at the scene of Michael Premo's arrest, but police say they didn't shoot anything that night.

Many of the readers who commented on last week's story about Michael Premo, the Occupy Wall Street protester who beat his criminal charges last week thanks to video evidence, wanted to know: Would the police officer whose testimony was contradicted by the video face any consequences? Would he be charged with perjury?

The short answer is: Don't hold your breath.

But that's not to say that a closer look at Premo's trial doesn't reinforce the impression that the police testimony against him looks a lot like perjury.

In the initial complaint, Premo's arresting officer, Ron Vincent, described a version of events recounted to him by a second officer -- the one who actually handled Premo's physical arrest -- who he referred to as the "informant:"

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Michael Premo was found not guilty of assaulting an officer after video evidence contradicted police testimony.

In the first jury trial stemming from an Occupy Wall Street protest, Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges yesterday after his lawyers presented video evidence directly contradicting the version of events offered by police and prosecutors.

Premo, an activist and community organizer who has in recent months been a central figure in the efforts of Occupy Sandy, was one of many hundred people who took part in a demonstration in Lower Manhattan on December 17 of 2011, when some protesters broke into a vacant lot in Duarte Square in an attempt to start a new occupation.

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U.S. Army

Pfc. Bradley Manning pleaded guilty to some charges in military court this morning.

After 1,007 days in jail, Private First Class Bradley Manning, the 25-year-old soldier accused of leaking classified material to Wikileaks, appeared in military court at Fort Meade today to plead guilty to modified versions of some of the more minor charges against him.

Specifically, Manning admitted to leaking State Department cables, video that appears to show the killing of civilians by a helicopter gunship in Iraq, and the secret assessment files of Guantanamo detainees.

But Manning maintained his not-guilty plea to the most significant charges, including "aiding the enemy." He told the court he chose the leaked material because he believed that while it would be embarrassing for the United States government and might provoke policy changes, he "was absolutely sure [they] wouldn't cause harm to the United States"

Manning was allowed to read a 35-page statement to the court, in which he said that nobody from Wikileaks pressured him to leak the materials. In fact, before he turned to Wikileaks, he tried to interest press outlets including the New York Times, Reuters, the Washington Post, and Politico.

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In addition to faculty resistance, NYU's expansion plan is facing a legal challenge.

We wrote in last week's cover story about the brewing faculty rebellion at NYU driven in part by the school's ambitious plans to expand its footprint in Greenwich Village. But the fight against the 2031 plan, as it's known, extends beyond the no-confidence vote scheduled for next month. It's also being fought out in the courts, in a case that had its first hearing before a judge this morning.

The lawsuit alleges that City government acted illegally when it signed off on the NYU plan, and it's comprised of several different arguments. But this morning's hearing focused only on one of them: the question of whether four parks that would be subsumed in the construction project, are, in fact, properly parks. By state law that encodes the Public Trust Doctrine, towns and cities can't just give away public parks to private developers without first getting permission from the state legislature. The city never sought or received that permission.

The 11 organizations suing to stop the expansion say that means the approval is illegal. But lawyers for the city and for NYU say not at all -- those parks were never technically parks.

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Jeremy Hammond is facing 30 years to life in the Stratfor hacking case.

Jeremy Hammond loped into a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan this morning with an awkward gait, his wrists handcuffed before him and his ankles shackled tightly together. Dressed in a navy blue prison jumpsuit, Hammond, the 27-year-old activist and hacker, is facing 30-years-to-life on charges related to the hacking of corporate spy agency Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor. He has been held without bail in the Metropolitan Correction Center for more than a year, and has spent much of the past month in solitary confinement.

Hammond's trial is still many months away, but he was in court today for a hearing on whether Chief District Judge Loretta Preska should recuse herself from hearing his case. Preska is married to Thomas Kavaler, a lawyer and former client of Stratfor, whose email and encrypted password were leaked in the Stratfor hack of which Hammond is accused. Kavaler is a partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindell LLP -- where Preska was also a partner before becoming a judge -- a firm that has represented more than 20 victims of the hack.

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Trinity Wall Street's leadership is the subject of a lawsuit alleging that it propped itself up with unlawful voting protocols.

Trinity Wall Street, the venerable Episcopal church that has anchored lower Manhattan since 1697, has been roiled by internal turmoil for a while, and the hits just keep coming.

As we wrote in our December cover story, Trinity's congregation has been rocked by tumultuous disagreements over the church's controversial rector, James Cooper. A year and a half ago, some members of Trinity's vestry -- a vestry is something like a board of directors -- sought to persuade Cooper to leave. Instead, Cooper stayed, and managed to force out all the vestry members who didn't support him, using his control over the vestry-selection process. Now that control is the subject of a lawsuit.

The suit, filed Monday by Jeremy Bates, who has attended Trinity since 2004, alleges that the mechanism Cooper used to stack the vestry with his supporters is actually contrary to the church's own charter.

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