[Officials tested the lights adorning the beacon and spire atop 1 World Trade Center for the first time this evening, just in time for the holidays. The red, white, and blue glow can be seen up to 50 miles away. Image via AP]

Outgoing NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly is requesting a taxpayer-funded, $720,000-per-year security detail for him and his family when he leaves office, reports DNAinfo. Only one other commissioner has asked for taxpayer-supported security upon stepping down, but Kelly seems to have accumulated more enemies than most.

Late last month, the NYPD was embarrassed when cops allegedly threw a man in jail for a day after mistaking his Jolly Ranchers for meth. But not every innocent interaction with the NYPD has to end in a cell. According to a new lawsuit, sometimes New York City cops are willing to let people who have committed no crimes go in exchange for an impromptu rap performance.

One year ago today, Superstorm Sandy devastated large swaths of New York and New Jersey, killing hundreds and doing billions of dollars of damage. Here, AP photographers who were on the scene during the storm and its aftermath return to the subjects of their 2012 photographs to see how reconstruction has progressed.

Homeless people and Marilyn Monroe will have to find a new source of gusts of warm air, the New York Times reports, as the Second Avenue subway is being built without sidewalk grates.

General David Petraeus' rocky first days as a lecturer at the City University of New York only got rockier this week. Six CUNY student were arrested on Tuesday while protesting outside Macaulay Honors College, where Petraeus holds his classes. Now their supporters are saying that police unnecessarily roughed the students up during their arrest, and video footage seems to support that claim.

Subway kittens! The subway shark! All truly important news items come in threes, so we're due for one more animal to make headlines on New York mass transit. What's it going to be? Llama? Tiger (yes, please)? Peacock? Red-tailed hawk? Platypus? (Rats don't count; rats are part of the normal subway ecosystem.) Share your picks, hopes, and personal nature tales in the discussion below.

In 2006, Robert Miles walked into a Syracuse convenience store with a winning scratch-off ticket worth $5 million. Seven years and one criminal trial later, Miles will finally be able to cash in his prize.

In April 2012, researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute mined the "emotional content" of 600,000 tweets—collected over a two-week period—to figure out the happiest places in New York. According to the map above, some of the worst places in the city include JFK, Penn Station, and basically any cemetery, while the best (or happiest) are Central Park, the Botanical Garden and surprisingly, Times Square. (Don't Tweet from cemeteries, ever.)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire stop-and-frisk advocate who systemically faked riding the subway, plans to install a $13,300 copper bathtub in his Upper East Side townhouse. Agence France-Presse recently spoke with the coppersmith in northwest France whom Bloomberg personally commissioned to fabricate the metal vessel:

This morning, perennial candidate Jimmy McMillan—best known for his formidable facial hair and trademark catch phrase-cum-political party—announced his endorsement for beleaguered mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner after a chance encounter at an IHOP in Harlem.

Rats and obnoxious parties are two iconic big-city problems, but these irritants, like income, are not evenly distributed across New York City. The map above—inspired by this similar project from The Furman Center—examines two-and-a-half years of complaints to the city's 311 phone line, focusing on the calls classified as either "vermin" or "loud party/music." That's over 260,000 complaints in total, split by ZIP code.

Animal NY has found Carlos Danger's first campaign ad.

Does anyone want Carlos Danger, né Anthony Weiner, to stay in the New York City mayoral race? Bill DeBlasio doesn't (duh). The Daily News doesn't. The Times doesn't. Since Weiner admitted to sending sex messages to women even after he told everyone he'd stopped, the only people who still want him in the race are himself, and his wife.

The mass adoption of gasoline-powered cars over the last century or so probably represents the single greatest threat to public health in the long term (and a fairly large threat to public health in the short term, too), but that's not the only reason that we should stop driving.

Two weeks ago, Gawker contributor JK Trotter published evidence that the City University of New York was offering General David Petraeus a $200,000 salary for conducting a seminar on "developments that could position the United States...to lead the world out of the current global economic slowdown." Faced with only three hours a week of real work, the disgraced former CIA chief was set to be paid about eight times the salary of a first-time adjunct professor at CUNY, and all without having to teach a full course load. Today, it looks as if that deal has been scrapped.

A police investigation into the beating of a man outside a Hudson Valley bar revealed that the victim was assaulted by three women for refusing to buy them a drink.

A Manhattan jury today found 27-year-old Nicholas Brooks guilty of murdering his former girlfriend, the swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay. The prosecution said Brooks had strangled and drowned Cachay in a bathtub at New York's tony Soho House after Cachay dumped him in 2010.

A Roman Catholic nun is going to jail for stealing almost $130,000 from a pair of New York parishes in order to feed her gambling habit.

It starts with a nosebleed and ends with a dead guy. Three dead guys, actually, and one of them is Ed Koch.