Tipster Julia sends in this picture of a raging fire at 12th Ave. And 57th St: "A bunch of cars were on fire." NY1 says this is a "Department of Sanitation Pier". Check back for more details.

The Hollywood scion and Law & Order: SVU star recently purchased a $7.3M, 7,000 sq.ft, 11 bedroom vacation home in East Hampton. It was built in 1890, has "6.6" bathrooms (!), and hopefully no horrible sex felonies.

The owner of the car that cushioned Thomas Magill's 39-story fall from an Upper West Side apartment building is pissed off that her vehicle is totalled, and wants to know if Magill now feels stupid for trying to commit suicide.

Legendary train thief Darius McCollum was arrested yesterday for stealing a Trailways passenger bus from Hoboken, New Jersey, and driving it to Queens, saying afterward, "I'll bet they won't leave the keys in the ignition." It was his 27th arrest.

A group of German filmmakers were in town shooting a commercial and spent their downtime making this killer short film about life in New York. It's like the best home movie of a New York visit you'll ever see.

Is your NYC landlord a total scumbag? Maybe he/she is on the "Worst Landlords Watchlist"!

Now that we've all been shocked by the cabbie stabber, let's find out about his victim, Ahmed Sharif . Damn: He can't work because of his wounds, and fund-raising efforts barely raised enough to pay for his kids' baby formula.

In the past decades, smokers have been increasingly hemmed-in, physically, culturally, financially. Now, you can basically only find them huddled between two skyscrapers in Midtown Manhattan. The Times takes a look at these curiosities: New York's last smokers.

The US Ambassador to Thailand's teenage daughter fell 22 stories to her death early this morning, in what was apparently an accident during a party in Manhattan.

Manhattan criminal judge James Gibbons resigned on Thursday after officials found porn on his work computer. But wait! What kind of porn?

According to today's New York Times, an increasingly important factor in real estate dealmaking is feng shui, the ancient Chinese rules governing energy flow and really picky interior design.

Report finds NY governor David Paterson misled ethics investigators about receiving free World Series tickets.

Power walker Matt Green yesterday finished his 3,000-plus mile walk from Rockaway Beach, New York to Rockaway Beach, Oregon.

Voice-of-a-generation Allen Ginsberg's former one bedroom E. 12th St. apartment can now be yours for $1700/month. Imagine watching Franco's Howl movie in there! The unit has been newly renovated, but the walls may still reverberate with all those howls. Sigh.

"Ground Zero mosque" mania reaches exciting new heights. Last night a cabbie picked up a man at 24th and Second. The passenger asked "Are you Muslim?" The driver answered yes, and was promptly stabbed. He survived, thank god(s).

An 81-year-old TV producer, Sandy Frank, and his 57-year-old former model wife, Brenda, were arrested for throwing glasses at each other over an insurance bill beef and accusations that the old man is sleeping around (gross).

Woody Allen is griping that New York is too expensive to film in and that he prefers working in Europe anyway. Maybe that's because the only way he can get a movie made is by using European funding?

There are plenty of believable excuses for missing work, but pulling out the not-actually-dead dead relative story is always a bad idea. It worked at first for one Bronx school staffer, until she was spotted bowling with her "dead" mom.

Blasting "Born in the USA" over loudspeakers, opponents of the Not At Ground Zero Park51 Community Center took to the streets of Lower Manhattan today to yell at people and wave stupid signs: "Obama, your middle-name is Hussain, we understand."

There have been a lot of wild marijuana plants spotted growing on the streets of New York this summer. Today we learn about hallucinogenic plants turning up in Brooklyn alleys. Why pay for drugs when you can pick them yourself?