​Here's some bad news for 'Rat Czar' Joseph Lhota -- besides being known as the 'Rat Czar,' that is.

Lhota, the newish MTA chairman -- has a BIG rat problem.

Straphanger advocates and the MTA workers union have recently come down hard on Lhota for not doing more to eradicate rodents from subway platforms, 20 percent of which are said to be infested by man's worst enemy. Gross.

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​The NYPD has quietly revised its Patrol Guide to add a clause that gives officers more leeway in the use of deadly force, despite currently dealing with fallout from a police shooting that left an unarmed teen dead in the Bronx. The revision is based on a 2010 New York Court of Appeals ruling which stated that the decision to fire a gun should be left to an individual officer's discretion.

The ruling threw out a lawsuit by Tammy Johnson, who was hit by a stray bullet when police began shooting at an armed robber in Harlem. Johnson had her 18-month-old daughter with her at the time.

However, in that case, the court ruled that officers violated no NYPD guidelines. In response, NYPD has revised the Patrol Guide to reflect the court's decision. Officers are now instructed that they shouldn't fire their weapons if, "in their professional judgment," innocent bystanders run the risk of being hurt.

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​Brace yourselves -- MTA plans at least 59 more nights of subway closures this year under its new FasTrack program. In total, that adds up to 413 hours of limited service on certain subway lines. Every month this year (except August and December) will see at least one major line shut down for repairs overnight during the work week.

Carmen Bianco, the MTA's senior vice president of subways, told the NY Daily News:

"We know it's an inconvenience to our customers and we apologize for the inconvenience. Hopefully, our customers will only have to walk a block, or two blocks at the most, to get alternate service."

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​Looks like the hip thing to do is to make non-profits even less profitable.

For the third time in a week, a New Yorker has been accused of illegally pocketing megabucks from a non-profit.

The Manhattan District Attorney says that Jeffrey Bernstein swindled more than $2,500,000 from the Albert Ellis Institute, a psychotherapy charity, between January 2010 and February 2011.

Bernstein, 62, worked as director of administration at the org, which offered affordable therapy to the public.

The D.A. indicted Bernstein today, claiming that he conned the group out of money by sending some 80 unauthorized wire transfers to his own business accounts.

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​Today in "Thank you, Captain Obvious," a transit advocacy group has found that many subway platforms are unsightly, unsanitary, rat-infested blights. You don't say!

The Straphangers Campaign released the results of its first ever "State of the Station Platforms" survey today, and the news is (mostly) ugly.

In one bright spot, the Straphangers Campaign found that all of the 250 randomly-selected station platforms they checked had trash cans, which appeared to be emptied regularly so they weren't overflowing.

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​Mayor Bloomberg is expected to take a break from scrapping with the teacher's union today to unveil his preliminary plan for next year's city budget. The city currently faces a $2 billion budget shortfall, thanks to unexpected costs incurred from October's freak blizzard and Hurricane Irene, and increasing pension needs.

So far, the city has made up the difference by selling an additional 2,000 taxi medallions, and cashing out $1 billion from a rainy-day health care trust fund that will likely be bankrupt by the time Bloomberg leaves office.

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​Someone needs to give the U.S. Customs Department a lesson in Humour 101.

Last Monday, two British tourists were denied entry into Los Angeles after one of them said on Twitter that he was going to "dig up Marilyn Monroe" and "destroy America" in two separate tweets. (The latter tweet was apparently British slang for partying.)

The pair, Leigh Van Bryan and his friend Emily Bunting, told the Daily Mail that agents from the Department of Homeland Security searched their luggage for spades and shovels on the assumption that Bryan was serious about digging up the body of our famed, white-clad starlet. Customs then held them in a detention facility overnight before sending them back to the U.K.

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​Here's some good news for the giant rats galavanting through our fair city (and bad news for the rest of us who want to avoid disease): Stats show that a decent amount New Yorkers are complete dirtbags who really like to dump their trash in public.

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via @J_Brukman

​File this under "good to know." Should you be wandering about Williamsburg on your way to your appointment to pee in a cup and get approval for your new job with the CIA, or for your court appointed biweekly drug test, and experiencing qualms that you may not pass it, you can stop by the Duane Reade on Bedford Avenue and N. 3rd Street (the one with the growler bar) and purchase a handy Quickscreen At Home Drug Test, "the most sensitive test on the market today"! It is 99.9 percent accurate! Why would you purchase anything less?

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​Ah, how jaded we have become in this last month of 2011. As we speed into January and the year 2012 we can reflect back on how young and innocent we once were -- how excitable and naive, how easy to enthrall -- as evidenced primarily by the public's reaction to escaped zoo animals and their Twitter accounts. As the New York Times puts it, while once we were fascinated, now we are bored: "They swooned over the Egyptian cobra, gone rogue inside the Bronx Zoo's Reptile House last March. They cheered the peacock from the Central Park Zoo, who crossed Fifth Avenue to spend an August day on the ledge of an Upper East Side apartment building, only to return, on his own, the following morning." But the eastern box turtle missing from the Inwood Hill Nature Center, still on the lam since Thursday? Meh. Has the turtle jumped the shark?

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