From Jessica Chastain's tantalizingly low-cut Calvin Klein creation to Jennifer Lopez's curve-hugging Zuhair Murad gown, the stars definitely brought their fashion A-game to the 2013 Golden Globes.
Pics: Hit or Miss -- The 2013 Golden Globes!
Click the video for an in-depth look at the show-stopping ensembles of Hollywood's elite!
Andrea Peyser
He JUST wants justice for his son.
It may never come.
In the 2 1/2 years since Mordechai Jungreis’ boy revealed the awful truth — the mentally disabled teen was allegedly molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse — Jungreis (pictured) has turned from a respected member of the Hasidic community into a leper. A nobody.
Pond scum.
Jungreis, his wife and four children were kicked out of their apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and forced to move to the community’s outskirts. They found a new synagogue that would accept them.
His son, “badly damaged” by the alleged abuse, was targeted a second time, he said, expelled from two yeshivas. Summer camp, too.
Paul Martinka
People on the street crossed to the other side when Jungreis walked by. Words of abuse were hurled anonymously into the telephone. Or on the street.
As a Jew, I’m horrified that, in 2013, Jungreis, 38, could be punished, vilified and treated worse than a criminal. All for publicly accusing a fellow Jew of a heinous crime?
Finally, tomorrow, Meir Dascalowitz, 29, the man charged in 2010 with molesting the teen, is scheduled for a pretrial hearing in a crime that, Jungreis says, he discovered after finding blood on his boy’s underwear. Jungreis hopes this exercise in jurisprudence will put his nightmare to rest.
He expects nothing.
“I went through hell,” Jungreis, who once considered himself a member of the Bobov ultra-Orthodox community, told me.
“We used to pray in the park, because I wasn’t allowed in the synagogue. My son is not in school.’’
And now, Dascalowitz has the full support of Jungreis’ neighbors.
“Everyone is running away from my child,’’ said Jungreis, whose son is afflicted with learning disabilities and a low IQ. The boy, now 17, is tested regularly for HIV.
“What about my child? This is a disabled child. And they’re screaming at me in the street!”
The ugly cloak of secrecy that has long ruled the Jews of Williamsburg was ripped to shreds last month. A Brooklyn jury convicted Satmar Nechemya Weberman of 59 counts for sexually abusing a now-18-year-old woman from the time she was 12.
The parallels with Jungreis’ case are inescapable. Weberman’s victim contends she was maimed again by her fellow Jews after she came forward. As Weberman, 54, prepares to be sentenced next week, one question remains:
Have things changed?
“On the one hand, advocates and victims feel empowered” by Weberman’s conviction, said Ben Hirsch, spokesman for Survivors for Justice, which supports sex-abuse victims.
But “the courageous victim in the Weberman case has been publicly vilified by the grand rabbi of Satmar, and thousands of Hasidim have publicly supported Weberman.” Hirsch accused Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes of lacking the guts to fight Jewish leaders who intimidate victims.
The Miami Dolphins are reviving their failed bid to win tax dollars for a football stadium. But team executives want no comparisons to a successful bid to win tax dollars for a baseball stadium.
Dolphins owner Stephen Ross has called a press conference for Monday to unveil a plan for an improved Sun Life Stadium. Sources say the plan will include asking state and local governments to help pay for a $400 million renovation of the 1987 facility.
State lawmakers in recent years rebuffed the Dolphins when the team asked for help on a less-expensive renovation. And while the economy and state finances are more favorable this time around, Dolphin executives see a bigger challenge now from lingering backlash against the $639 million ballpark taxpayers built for the Miami Marlins in order to move the baseball team from their old home in Sun Life. .
“It can’t be anything close to what the Marlins did,’’ said state Sen. Oscar Braynon, a Democrat whose Miami Gardens district includes Sun Life Stadium and who sponsored a 2011 bill to raise hotel taxes to fund the Dolphins renovation plan. “Unless you do something totally counter to what the Marlins did, nobody is going to vote for it.”
Both the Marlins and the Dolphins declined to comment for this story. The Dolphins have not released details of how they want to pay for the renovation, or what they want to do the stadium. But sources close to the team describe an extensive renovation of Sun Life, including adding a partial roof, a redesign of the seating configuration to improve views of the field, and shifting capacity from the low-priced seats in the upper deck to the more expensive seating closer to the sidelines. Without the space demands of a baseball field, the front row will move 18 feet closer to the field, according to a person briefed on the plans.
Polls showed Miami and Miami-Dade’s 2009 votes to build the baseball stadium with 75 percent public money were never popular. But the Marlins’ recent stripping of star players from their payroll has made the new Little Havana park Topic A when it comes to plotting a Dolphins’ victory for winning tax dollars themselves.
Dolphins executives plan to pursue two funding sources from state and local government, according to several people familiar with the team’s plans. For the first funding stream, the Dolphins plan to ask Miami-Dade to raise taxes charged mainland hotels from 6 percent to 7 percent and earmark the extra money for the stadium. The Dolphins also plan to ask Florida for an additional $2 million rebate on sales taxes on top of the $2 million the stadium already receives from the state each year under a special subsidy for professional sports teams.
Ross is expected to pledge a significant amount of the renovation money himself. Sources who have been briefed on the Dolphins’ proposal say the total pricetag for the project is $400 million. That’s almost double the renovation budget the Dolphins proposed when the team last went to the Legislature for money in 2011.
Staying competitive
At the time, the Dolphins unveiled a $225 million redo of Sun Life with expanded sideline seating, high-definition lighting and a partial roof that would both shade seats during hot games and shield spectators from the kind of downpour that drenched the stands during the 2007 Super Bowl in Miami Gardens. The Dolphins, top executives at the NFL and some community leaders have warned that without upgrades to Sun Life, South Florida risks losing its standing as one of the nation’s top venues for the Super Bowl and college football championships.
Olivia Wilde, 28, and Saturday Night Live star Jason Sudeikis, 38, are engaged, ET can confirm.
The pair, who went public in December of 2011, moved in together last year and have been seemingly inseparable since.
Related: Olivia Wilde Divorces Italian Royal
According to People, Sudeikis proposed to the Tron: Legacy star shortly after the holidays.
"They are so excited," says a source. "And very, very happy."
No word yet on a wedding date.
Video: Olivia Wilde Steams Up the Screen
This will be the second wedding for Wilde, whose divorce to Italian royal Tao Ruspoli was finalized in late September of 2011.
Size does matter!
The 400-pound Queens pedestrian who crashed through an Upper East Side sidewalk said yesterday that a thinner woman might have died from that fall.
“Thank God, they said that my size was the only thing that saved me,” Ulanda Williams, 32, told The Post as she was discharged from NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Williams, of Springfield Gardens, was waiting for a bus at about 9:10 p.m. Friday when she tried to hide from the rain under an awning.
The ground suddenly disappeared beneath her — and she was swallowed whole by the cavernous space adjacent to the cellar of The Blue Room on Second Avenue.
Warzer Jaff
STUFFED: Ulanda Williams (above) leaves New York-Presbyterian Hospital yesterday after falling through, and getting stuck in, a city sidewalk (below).
“It was horrible, absolutely horrible,” said Williams, who broke her arm in two places in the 6-foot fall.
The social worker, who wore an arm brace as she left the hospital, had bruises and cuts all over her face and neck from the fall.
She said there were no warning signs indicating that any possible sidewalk danger.
“Nothing, nothing,” she said. “It happened so instantly that I didn’t even recognize anything. Cement was all over me, debris. They had a bed frame down there, broken pipes and wood pieces. It was a hollow place.”
“I was standing there approximately 10 seconds and when that occurred, I just fell right through,” said Williams, who stands about 6-foot-5.
The FDNY had to use a crane and cargo net to get her out.
City Department of Buildings inspectors found that a 4-by-6-foot section of sidewalk had collapsed into a vault cellar in front of the building.
Further investigation revealed defective steel doors leading to the vault, and a first-floor staircase was loose.
The building at 301 E. 60th St., at the corner of Second Avenue near a ramp to the 59th Street Bridge, has several open violations, according to the DOB Web site, including a 2011 complaint that the facade was coming loose.
After the collapse, DOB issued another violation to building owner Forward Realty, for failing to maintain the building.
Forward owner Remo Salta, 52, of Ridgewood, NJ, said his property has no violations.
“I didn’t hear anything about this,” he said of Williams’ fall.
Salta, who bought the residential and commercial building in 1995 as an investment, said he has a management company taking care of the property.
“The city, I know, is constantly doing work in that area. I don’t know if they excavated anything next to my property,” he said. “I know they’re always working on Second Avenue.”
Neighborhood resident Bobby Robertson, 56, said the building could use some work.
“When I’m standing here waiting for the bus, I take a look around once in a while and notice how decrepit the street and buildings look,” he said. “You can see cracks in the walls and in the concrete, too. The owners don’t do any upkeep.”
Frank Lupo, 47, a maintenance worker who lives in the building next door to the sidewalk collapse, said the fall could easily have been fatal.
“It doesn’t look it from street level, but that’s one hell of a drop,” he said. “I’m glad she’s alive.”
As rain began to fall on a June evening, Miami Police Sgt. Raul Iglesias told an undercover detective in his drug-fighting squad to turn off his cell phone and take out the battery as both officers stood outside the boss’s home.
Iglesias, already relieved of duty on suspicions of being a dirty cop, feared Roberto Asanza’s phone could be recording him. And his instincts were right, because Asanza was wired — though not through his phone.
“No one has done anything illegal or broke the law,” Iglesias told Asanza in the recorded conversation, played for jurors Friday at the sergeant’s corruption trial in Miami federal court. “... If they got, they got [it], but I [have] never seen anyone in my unit do anything wrong.”
Later in their chat, Asanza — who was cooperating with authorities and trying to bait his boss into incriminating statements — expressed fears about lying on the witness stand if he was asked to testify. Iglesias agreed that committing perjury would be a bad idea.
“Yeah, of course, you don’t wanna, you don’t wanna f---ing lie,’’ Iglesias responded.
The secret tape recording from June 2010 was the last piece of evidence that prosecutors presented before resting their corruption case Friday against Iglesias, 40, who has been on the force for 18 years.
Iglesias, an ex-Marine and Iraq War veteran who was shot in the leg during a 2004 drug bust, is standing trial on charges of planting cocaine on a suspect, stealing drugs and money from dope dealers, and lying to investigators about a box of money left in an abandoned car as part of an FBI sting.
Asanza, 33, also an ex-Marine, pleaded guilty last year to a misdemeanor charge of possessing cocaine and marijuana. The deal helped him avoid a felony conviction; in exchange, he testified Thursday that Iglesias told him it was “okay” to pay off confidential informants with drugs.
The secret tape recording could cut both ways for jurors. On it, Iglesias did not say anything to Asanza to implicate himself in connection with charges in the nine-count indictment, his defense attorney, Rick Diaz, pointed out Friday. The charges encompass the police sergeant’s brief stint as head of the Crime Supression Unit from January to May 2010.
Miami Internal Affairs Sgt. Ron Luquis, a government witness, agreed with Diaz’s general assessment during his testimony Friday, though the witness also sided with many of prosecutor Ricardo Del Toro’s critical views of the same evidence.
Asanza, despite agreeing to cooperate, discreetly gave his supervisor a heads-up that he was facing a potential criminal investigation when they met for the recorded conversation, according to sources familiar with probe.
The recording was made two months after other members of Iglesias’ Crime Suppression Unit wrote an anonymous letter to internal affairs, alleging that he was “stealing drugs and money” from dealers “2-3 times per 4-day work week.” Five CSU members, including Asanza, testified against Iglesias over the past week.
Asanza’s recording of Iglesias was less intelligible when both went inside the police sergeant’s home. Asanza’s wire picked up the sound of a barking dog, a blaring TV and the rustling of paper. Investigators believe Iglesias wrote down information on sheets of paper and later burned them, but that evidence was not presented to jurors.
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s Softbank Corp is in final talks to sell its stake in eAccess Ltd, representing around 67 percent of voting rights, to Samsung Electronics Co and 10 others, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
The sale would ease concerns that Softbank could hold a monopoly on spectrum allocation designated by Japan’s Communications Ministry, the source said.
Softbank, which is awaiting regulatory approval to buy a 70 percent stake in No. 3 U.S. mobile carrier Sprint Nextel Corp , bought Japanese rival eAccess last October as it stepped up competition with its nearest competitor KDDI Corp .
Softbank turned eAccess into a wholly owned subsidiary on January 1 after a share exchange, using 220 billion yen ($ 2.47 billion) worth of its own shares.
After dividing eAccess shares into voting and non-voting shares, Softbank is considering reducing its ownership of eAccess voting rights to less than one-third, the source said.
Non-voting shares make up around 1 percent of overall shares. The sale of eAccess’ voting rights would total several billion yen.
Other than Samsung, likely buyers include Sweden’s LM Ericsson , Orix Corp , the source said, adding that the eAccess voting shares would be divided between companies into hundreds of millions of yen each.
Softbank said on Saturday the news was not announced by the company and that it continued to mull options regarding its share holdings.
The Nikkei business newspaper reported earlier on Saturday that Softbank was also considering selling the eAccess stake to Finland’s Nokia Siemens Networks and five Japanese leasing companies.
Softbank cutting its eAccess stake would allow the company to work around the Communications Ministry’s policy on spectrum allocation to telecom service providers and avoid suggestions of any monopoly, but still allow Softbank or eAccess to seek spectrum.
Under the policy, either a parent company, or one of its units in which it owns more than 33 percent, can apply for an allocation of spectrum.
Softbank will remain the top shareholder in eAccess but lose veto power after the sale, which is expected to close by end January and raise several billion yen, the Nikkei daily said.
(Additional reporting by Sagarika Jaisinghani in Bangalore, Writing by Mari Saito; Editing by Michael Perry)
Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News
After more than three years together, Britney Spears and her fiance Jason Trawick have split, her rep confirmed to People.
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"Jason and I have decided to call off our engagement," Spears says in the statement. "I'll always adore him and we will remain great friends." Trawick adds, "As this chapter ends for us a new one begins. I love and cherish her and her boys and we will be close forever."
Spears, who got engaged to Trawick on his 40th birthday in December of 2011, previously said of her now-ex, "We're really normal. We just like to watch movies. We work out a lot. We love to work out. We do stuff together like that. We take walks."
VIDEO - More Shocking Celebrity Splits
Today has been a big day for sad Spears news as it was previously announced she wouldn't be returning for another season of The X Factor.
"I've made the very difficult decision not to return for another season," Spears told ETonline in a statement. "I had an incredible time doing the show and I love the other judges and I am so proud of my teens but it's time for me to get back in the studio."
Stand clear of the closing platform doors.
The MTA is considering adding sliding doors at L-train stations to stop riders from falling on the tracks following the deaths of two straphangers pushed in front of trains last month.
The L would be the ideal test spot because it doesn’t share track with other lines and is used by only one type of train, said Thomas Prendergast, the agency’s acting executive director.
That means the doors in the pilot program would only have to fit one kind of subway train.
It would likely be at just one station to start and spread to others if successful, he said.
Adding platform doors system-wide could cost over $1 billion, he said.
But it’s possible the agency will get funding from private companies, who could take a share of the ad revenue on the doors, he said.
In addition, the agency is planning an “aggressive passenger information campaign” to warn riders to stand away from the platform edge.
And they also are considering expanding the “see something, say something” campaign to ask riders to look out for the mentally ill.
Both suspects in the subway shoving deaths last month — Naeem Davis and Erika Menendez — have a history of mental-health issues, cops said.
jennifer.fermino@nypost.com
This week brought three big developments to the nation’s beleaguered mortgage landscape. For consumers, the complex moves have been mostly mystifying, but experts say they all aim at turning the page.
“There is a strong desire to put behind us all this period of time — the aftermath of the darkest period in American finance. All these things [announced this week] are intended to do that,” said John Taylor, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based community advocacy group. “There are good and bad things in it for consumers.’’
A new rule issued Thursday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau aims to prevent lenders from making the sort of toxic mortgages that forced many unsuspecting borrowers into ruin. Yet the new “qualified mortgage” rule, according to some lenders, also could perpetuate the nation’s tight credit problem and keep many would-be homebuyers on the sidelines.
Meanwhile, two settlements unveiled Monday with big banks should resolve some lingering issues from the mortgage meltdown that have kept banks focused on past errors instead of getting back to the business of lending.
Here is a quick primer on the week’s developments and some likely implications for consumers.
OCC Settlement
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates nationally chartered banks, Monday unveiled an $8.5 billion settlement with 10 giant banks that service mortgages.
As part of the controversial settlement, the OCC is scrapping its Independent Foreclosure Review, which was aimed at identifying victims of robo-signing and other improper foreclosure tactics by banks, but soon proved to be a badly flawed effort.
Instead, under the OCC’s new approach — which will be spelled out in enforcement actions in a couple of weeks — more than 3.8 million borrowers who faced foreclosure between Jan. 1, 2009 and Dec. 31, 2010 stand to get some payment regardless of whether they actually suffered any harm.
The mortgage servicing banks covered are Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, SunTrust, PNC, Sovereign, U.S. Bank, MetLife Bank and Aurora.
The agreement provides for $3.3 billion to go directly to borrowers. Another $5.2 billion is earmarked for loan modifications and the forgiveness of deficiency judgments.
The OCC said the amount that eligible borrowers get will range from a few hundred dollars up to $125,000, depending on the type of error that possibly occurred in their mortgage servicing.
“If a borrower went through foreclosure with one of those 10 lenders, they should receive a couple hundred bucks, whether they deserve it or not,” said Guy Cecala, publisher and CEO of Inside Mortgage Finance Publications in Bethesda, Md., which tracks news and statistics in the residential mortgage industry. “The odds of getting $125,000 is the odds of winning the lottery. It would have to be a false foreclosure or where they were thrown out of their house illegally.”
The OCC will look to 13 broad categories of errors outlined in the Independent Foreclosure Review launched in April 2011.
Those include a litany of bumblings and misdeeds by the mortgage servicers, ranging from foreclosing on a homeowner who was following the rules during a trial period of a loan modification, to failing to offer a loan modification as mandated under a government program, to failing to follow up with a borrower to obtain needed documents under a government program.
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