CITYWIDE

Bloomberg Shies Away From Iraq Study

Mayor Bloomberg didn’t take a position on a new study from Johns Hopkins, which says that 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the beginning of the war. President Bush and others have said the study is not credible. Yesterday, a political consultant, Steven Moore, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal questioning the methodology of the study. “I wouldn’t survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points,” Mr. Moore wrote in outlining his case. The study was conducted by a group affiliated with the Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. The mayor graduated from Johns Hopkins and has donated millions of dollars to the public health school there. “I saw the study. I don’t know the researcher,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “I can tell you it is a very reputable school.”

— Staff Reporter of the Sun

LIRR Fills In The Deadly Gaps

Acting President of the Long Island Rail Road Ray Kenny presented the railroad’s Gap Action Plan at the request of the MTA board yesterday.The presentation was part of the response to the death of teenager Natalie Smead, who was killed at Woodside Station in August when she fell into the gap between the train and the platform. Smead’s death was the first fatality associated with the gap, which typically causes fewer than 100 minor injuries a year, according to LIRR spokeswoman Susan McGowan. Part public awareness campaign, part research and development strategy, and part physical improvement plan, the Gap Action Plan is the LIRR’s latest safety initiative. LIRR has recently installed 800 tons of stone ballast on tracks and realigned 200 feet of track in order to eliminate the vertical gap at the Shea Stadium station. They have also narrowed the horizontal gap there. LIRR is currently researching gap fillers that could deploy from platforms and fill the gap.

— Special to the Sun

Research Mice Headed For the Suburbs

Things are getting so expensive in Manhattan that even the rodents are moving to the suburbs. The rodents will still be living five to a cage and will still be injected, infected, inspected and genetically manipulated. These future residents of Westchester County are research mice, the type used in hopes of producing new drugs that can battle human diseases. A group of medical institutions in the New York area have decided to centralize their mouse-breeding and mouse-holding operations in a new building in Yonkers. The building could eventually hold up to 400,000 mice. “Research mice don’t have to live in prime Manhattan real estate. It’s like putting them up at the Pierre,” said said Maria Mitchell, president of the Academic Medicine Development Co. . Other hospitals and medical schools involved in the effort are Columbia University, Rockefeller University, and the New York University School of Medicine.

— Associated Press

POLICE BLOTTER

Bus Driver Charged After Leaving Boy on Bus

A Brooklyn school bus driver was arrested after police said he left a 4-year-old child unattended on a parked bus yesterday morning. Yefim Zelenyy of West Street in Brooklyn was charged with endangering the welfare of a child, police said. Authorities learned the child was on the bus around 9:30 a.m. when a passerby noticed the young boy alone in the vehicle, which was parked on Avenue Z in Coney Island. Police said that Mr. Zelenyy let the other children off the bus at Avenue I before he parked the bus and allegedly left without inspecting the vehicle.

— Special to the Sun

One Dead After Morning Accident

An early morning accident in Queens left one man dead and another in critical condition yesterday, police said. Police said the accident occurred on the westbound Grand Central Parkway around 4 a.m.,when a 2000 Nissan Maxima hit a guardrail and overturned. Nathaniel Germaine, 31, of Malverne, was pronounced dead at Queens General Hospital.The driver, also a 31-year-old man, was taken to Jamaica Hospital in critical condition.

— Special to the Sun

IN THE COURTS

City Must Defend Holding Diallo Protesters

The city will have to defend in court the Giuliani Administration’s alleged policy of detaining arrested protesters in the wake of the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, after a federal judge refused to dismiss two lawsuits recently.The lawsuits claim that the police department began holding arrested protesters for up to 24 hours instead of issuing them summonses following their arrests, as the department had previously done.The lawsuits allege that the new policy was unconstitutional and meant to punish and discourage protesters. In the 15-page decision, the judge, William Pauley III of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, wrote that a trial was needed to determine whether the policy was unconstitutional.

— Staff Reporter of the Sun

STATEWIDE

Sweeney Trip May Have Broken Ethics Rules

ALBANY — Republican Rep. John Sweeney may have failed to properly report a 2001 trip with a lobbyist and former Capitol Hill staffer now cooperating in a federal investigation of congressional corruption, but aides insisted yesterday he did not knowingly violate any rules. Mr. Sweeney, who is in a tough re-election fight against Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, said he thought he did not have to report the trip on financial disclosure forms because he believed it had been paid for by the island government. Mr. Sweeney traveled in January 2001 to the Northern Mariana Islands with Tony Rudy, a former lobbyist for Jack Abramoff. “He was informed this trip was paid for by the Marianas Island government — a U.S. territory,” a Sweeney spokeswoman, Melissa Carlson, said yesterday.

— Associated Press