Staten Island woman with heart defect dies trapped in elevator inches from floor when power failed

A Staten Island woman with a congenital heart defect died after she was trapped in an elevator  during a power failure in her apartment building Friday.

Trapped in the darkness and just inches from her floor, Danielle Goldberg panicked - and suffered a fatal heart attack, her devastated family said.
"She lived her life to the fullest until the elevator took her away from us," said her father Arthur Goldberg, 57.
"She was just two seconds away (from home)," he said. "She was in the pitch dark and she probably was scared out of her mind with nobody around to help her."
Danielle Goldberg was born with pulmonary stenosis, which impacts blood flow within the heart, and returned from a doctor's appointment Friday morning to her home in the Tysens Park Apartments, her family said.
She was riding the elevator to the apartment she shares with her parents and brother when the power in her building went out at 11:35 a.m., officials confirmed.
As the small elevator plunged into darkness, a terrified Danielle Goldberg called her mother, who tried to calm the scared woman before calling 911.
Steven Goldberg, Danielle's brother, then ran from the family apartment to the sealed elevator and desperately dialed her sister trapped inside.
"She said 'Steven, I'm scared," Steven Goldberg remembered his sister saying before the cell connection was lost. "It was terrifying."
Steven Goldberg, 29, dashed down five flights of stairs to a neighboring building in the complex to flag down a maintenance worker to help.
The men ran back upstairs and used a crowbar to pry open the elevator doors - only to find a Danielle Goldberg sprawled lifelessly inside.
"I went in there, and I was trying to give her CPR," said neighbor Patricia Sanchez, 49. "I checked for a pulse and there wasn't one."
"I cried and I cried," said Sanchez.
Paramedics arrived at 12:13 p.m., five minutes after receiving the 911 call, and began treating her. They rushed her down the stairs and raced her to Staten Island University Hospital, but she could not be revived.
"Everybody in my family is very saddened by this ordeal," said Steven Goldberg. "Hopefully nothing like this will happen again."
ConEd officials confirmed that 1,800 customers in the New Dorp section of Staten Island lost their power at 11:35 a.m. Friday when a cable went down. For most people, including those in the Tysens Park Apartments, power was restored at 1 p.m.
The failure is under investigation, ConEd said. Management at the private apartment complex could not immediately be reached.

David Mikael Taclino
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Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say

With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.
Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.
Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential future employer.
The Labor Department says it is cracking down on firms that fail to pay interns properly and expanding efforts to educate companies, colleges and students on the law regarding internships.
“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division.
Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities — in other words, it’s largely a benevolent contribution to the intern.
No one keeps official count of how many paid and unpaid internships there are, but Lance Choy, director of the Career Development Center at Stanford University, sees definitive evidence that the number of unpaid internships is mushrooming — fueled by employers’ desire to hold down costs and students’ eagerness to gain experience for their résumés. Employers posted 643 unpaid internships on Stanford’s job board this academic year, more than triple the 174 posted two years ago.
In 2008, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 83 percent of graduating students had held internships, up from 9 percent in 1992. This means hundreds of thousands of students hold internships each year; some experts estimate that one-fourth to one-half are unpaid.
In California, officials have issued guidance letters advising employers whether they are breaking the law, while Oregon regulators have unearthed numerous abuses.
“We’ve had cases where unpaid interns really were displacing workers and where they weren’t being supervised in an educational capacity,” said Bob Estabrook, spokesman for Oregon’s labor department. His department recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.
Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.
One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.
At Little Airplane, a Manhattan children’s film company, an N.Y.U. student who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship said she was instead assigned to the facilities department and ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.
Tone Thyne, a senior producer at Little Airplane, said its internships were usually highly educational and often led to good jobs.
Concerned about the effect on their future job prospects, some unpaid interns declined to give their names or to name their employers when they described their experiences in interviews.
While many colleges are accepting more moderate- and low-income students to increase economic mobility, many students and administrators complain that the growth in unpaid internships undercuts that effort by favoring well-to-do and well-connected students, speeding their climb up the career ladder.


David Mikael Taclino
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Plane Crash in NJ 1 killed, 1 injured

One man was killed and another seriously injured when a small plane crashed Saturday in northern New Jersey.

The two were the only people aboard the Cessna 172, a four-seat, fixed-wing propeller plane, said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Holly Baker.

According to West Milford police, the single-engine plane plane went down around 12:04 p.m. It ended up near a residential, wooded area in the Passaic County community of West Milford. One man was pronounced dead there a short time later, while the other was flown via helicopter to a nearby trauma center.

Their names were not disclosed, pending notification of relatives.

It was not clear what caused the crash, which occurred near the Greenwood Lake Airport in West Milford. Authorities did not immediately know if the plane had taken off from the airport or was trying to land at the site.

The National Transportation Safety Board will investigate.

It was unknown if the plane was taking off or landing at Greenwood Lake Airport, or if the plane was even at the airport at any point Saturday.

David Mikael Taclino
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Need a Cab? New Analysis Shows Where to Find One

 It is a question that taxi-seekers in New York often ponder: Is there some kind of secret formula for where to find a cab in this town?
Turns out, there is.
The most popular corners to catch a yellow cab in Manhattan can now be pinpointed, at any hour of any day of the week, thanks to a record of 90 million actual taxi trips that have been silently tracked by the city.
On a Saturday at 11 p.m., it is easier to hail a cab on the nightclub-and-bar-filled Lower East Side than at Grand Central Terminal. Columbus Circle gets more passenger pickups than the Port Authority bus station. And make sure you are in the right neighborhood: taxi rides are 25 times as likely to start in the West Village as in Washington Heights.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission hopes the information, collected by GPS, can be used to create helpful tie-ins for customers, like a new smartphone program that lets mobile users locate the ideal nearby corner to hail a cab.
But the data also present a grand urban portrait, the first detailed record of a fast-moving, yellow-hued transit network that offers a curbside view of how New Yorkers move around and where they do it.
Take the morning rush. Topping the list for 9 a.m. Monday cab hails are, not surprisingly, Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central, the great commuter gateways to the city’s major business district.
But not far behind are two Manhattan intersections seemingly far from the hubbub: York Avenue at 72nd Street, and Tenth Avenue at 43rd.
Each can get as many morning taxi hails as a spot on Vanderbilt Avenue, directly adjacent to Grand Central.
The numbers, tabulated from a six-month period, tell a tale of a changing city.
A thicket of high-rise condominiums has grown up along 10th and 11th Avenues in Midtown, creating a pocket of marooned commuters who may hop a cab rather than trek to the train.
And residents of Yorkville, long starved for subway access, commonly commute by taxi to Midtown or the financial district.
Late-night and weekend patterns are distinctly different. At 3 a.m. on a Sunday, passengers stumble into more cabs at 10th Avenue and 27th Street in Chelsea than anywhere else in the city. About as many taxi trips begin there at that hour on average as at 9 a.m. on a weekday at the Seventh Avenue entrance to Penn Station.
Taxi trips may also offer a more objective guide to night-life trends than Zagat: late-night pickups in the meatpacking district dominate other popular areas like Sheridan Square and St. Marks Place. The East Village barely cracks the top 10 on early Sunday mornings, but if you need a cab, try Third Avenue and 11th Street.
Using the city’s GPS data, Sense Networks, a SoHo software analytics firm, examined the pickup point of every New York City cab ride taken in the first six months of 2009. The result was a free mobile application called CabSense, which was released this week for iPhones and Android phones.
The program lets would-be taxi riders see a map of nearby street corners, ranked by the number of taxi hails they attract at that hour, on that day of the week. The company says it developed an algorithm to take into account parades, street construction and other factors that could skew the numbers.
“You always argue with your friends about it — I think you should stand on Sixth, I think you should stand on Seventh,” said Blake Shaw, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who oversaw the data analysis for CabSense. “To be able to say you’re 50 percent more likely to get a cab on Seventh, that’s unique.”
Over all, the No. 1 place to get a cab in the five boroughs, according to statistics compiled by Sense Networks for The New York Times, is Penn Station, one of the busiest train stations in the world. (The airports were not included in the data.)
Columbus Circle, with its popular shopping mall, its jumbo Whole Foods store and its entrance to Central Park, ranks second. Next are the Port Authority and Grand Central.
Less obvious spots also show up in the top 10, including Lexington Avenue at 86th Street (near an express subway stop) and Avenue of the Americas at 23rd (at the PATH train), along with the southeast corner of Central Park by the Apple Store and F. A. O. Schwarz.
Based on the statistics, the Upper East Side has a more cab-dependent culture than its neighbors across Central Park: more than two million trips started on the Upper East Side last May, nearly twice as many as on the Upper West Side.
On Tuesdays at 5 p.m., Lexington Avenue at 60th Street is the most common corner for cab hails after Penn Station.
But that poses a puzzle: Why is that corner far more popular than the corner just one block north, at 61st Street, which at that hour gets about one-third as many hails?
“It’s called Bloomingdale’s,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a traffic consultant. “Bloomingdale’s probably leads the pack of large-department-store customers who use taxis.”
And what about one block south, which also has a Bloomingdale’s exit but has fewer cab pickups? Mr. Schwartz, a former cabbie himself, pointed out that 59th Street, at that hour, “is a bear,” choked by motorists bound for the Queensborough Bridge.
“This is like the rats in the maze — they learn quickly how to get the food,” Mr. Schwartz said.
A neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown confirms what most New Yorkers already know: it is easier to get a cab below 96th Street in Manhattan, and much harder anywhere else.
Still, the numbers can be eye-opening.
Last May, in the entire month, about 554,000 yellow taxis picked up passengers in the East Village; in Inwood at the northern end of Manhattan, pickups numbered only 860, according to the data compiled by Sense Networks.
Taxis on the Upper West Side picked up nearly 90 times as many rides as cabs farther uptown in Washington Heights, which picked up about 14,000 rides during that month. “Oh wow,” Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat, who represents Washington Heights, said when informed of those numbers. “You caught me by surprise. That’s very, very low. I thought it was higher than that.”
Muhammad Ayub, a cabbie for two years, said Friday that he preferred Penn Station and the Port Authority in the morning rush. Asked if he ever picks up rides in Washington Heights, Mr. Ayub grinned. “Where is that?” he asked with a smile.
David Mikael Taclino
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Rabbits' Disappearance From Central Park A Mystery

Though abandoned pet rabbits perennially turn up after each Easter in what's affectionately called New York's backyard, a wild cottontail hasn't been spotted in the park for about four years.

"I've been here for 17 years, and there were not many when I got here," Regina Alvarez, director of horticulture for the Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit that manages the huge Manhattan park for the city, said in an e-mail. "But I would see them once in a while."

Only time will tell if they are gone for good, said Sarah Aucoin, director of Urban Park Rangers for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.

Cottontails seek habitats with lots of food sources and thick brush for protection, so it's possible there are still some hiding out. Rabbits have lived on the land since before the park was established 161 years ago.

Because bunnies "mate like rabbits," if there are still a few, "we'll see an increase, definitely," Aucoin said.

Jeffrey Croft, of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates, said at least two other New York City parks have seen rabbits disappear in recent years.

The Eastern Cottontail used to be plentiful on Randall's Island, between the Harlem and East rivers, but Croft said the population there vanished as its parkland was rehabilitated and redeveloped, and some natural fields were replaced with artificial turf.

Rabbits have also disappeared from Calvert Vaux Park in Brooklyn near Coney Island, he said.

Bunnies are vulnerable to a number of hazards, including weather, predators and automobiles — all features of urban parks, said state wildlife biologist Alan Hicks.

A recent storm took out large trees throughout Central Park, and several city streets cut through it. Hawks and falcons are a common sight there, and a random coyote is not out of the question. One was spotted in the park in 2006.

But Aucoin said she didn't think an increase in predators was to blame, because they generally don't decimate their own food source, she said.

"That's not smart, evolutionarily speaking," she said. "That predator population would die off if they didn't have anything to eat."

So since no one has the answer, officials are doing what they can to encourage repopulation. The city has been working to remove invasive plants and planting others to make the park more livable for small animals, including rabbits, Aucoin said.

"When people see a wild animal, even if it's just a bunny, it helps people connect to the environment in a more tangible way," she said. "That's a really important relationship we're trying to encourage here in the city."

But if you're dying to see a bunny in the park, visit on Monday.

Some people give them to their children as pets, discover they require feeding and cleaning, and set them free in the park, Aucoin said. When that happens, park rangers rescue the domesticated bunnies and take them to a shelter.

"It's a horrific problem," said Mary Cotter, who teaches veterinary technology at LaGuardia Community College in Queens and has founded a rabbit rescue group in the city.

Her group put up posters around the city reading, "Setting Your Pet Rabbit Loose Doesn't Make Her 'Free.' It Makes Her 'Food.'"

"Domestic rabbits do not survive in the park," she said. "The ones that are caught and are taken to a shelter are the lucky ones."

Central Park has been a national landmark since 1963.

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
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