The FBI has made several new arrests of mob associates it says were involved in the 1978 Lufthansa heist at JFK airport. Everyone who's ever seen Goodfellas is way ahead of the Feds on this.

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View more daily cartoons, and visit newyorker.com for a new one each day.

Buy or license this cartoon.

Modern Farmer takes a look at how the average American’s intake of 33.3 pounds of cheese a year breaks down by type. This doesn’t reflect my consumption patterns, which are more like this: 50 percent whatever is unusual and interesting and stinky, 33 percent cheddar, 10 percent blue, 7 percent miscellaneous. And of course the average annual amount is way lower than mine.

What about you?

[Sjinkie Knegt of the Netherlands' team flips two birds at Victor An of Russia. Knegt lost the men's 5000m relay at the ISU European Short Track speed skating championships in on Sunday. Image via Robert Michael/Getty.]

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If you're broke, Chechen, and happened to give birth on Monday, you're in luck.

Well, at least as long as you named your newborn baby after Mohammed (or one of his close associates). Monday was the Prophet Mohammed's birthday in the Sunni tradition, and Chechnya's strongman president, Ramzan Kadyrov, decided to mark the occasion by awarding newborns named after the Prophet Mohammed with $1,000 each. Lest Chechnya be filled only with baby Mohammeds, the offer also applied to children named after any of the prophet's wives, children, or 10 companions to whom he promised paradise. So far, the government has dished out $126,000. Kadyrov announced the initiative in an Instagram post on Monday, writing that his mother's privately-sponsored charity would be giving out the money. In his Instagram post, Kadyrov wrote that Chechnya's minister of health had reported that 78 boys and 48 girls had been born on Monday -- most of them named Mohammed or Fatima.

The Chechen government, which oversees a region grappling with poverty and an unemployment rate as high as 80 percent, has been accused of misspending money before. One such project, one of the largest mosques in Russia, was built in the Chechen capital of Grozny and came with a $20 million price tag. It was also named after Kadyrov's father.

Kadyrov's Instagram account has been the public's primary glimpse into the bizarre life of Chechnya's mercurial president. He's previously posted photos of himself cradling a kitten, riding a golden statue of a stag, and getting his teeth checked at the dentist. He has reportedly even hired a particularly dedicated Instagram follower to oversee "cooperation between the republic's government and civil society." Of course, Kadyrov's obvious interest in social media is particularly amusing given the man's checkered past. In a New York Times profile in which he was called an "unpredictable warlord," he clapped his hands in front of him as if catching a fly when asked about a rival. "Shamil Basayev," he said. "My dream is to kill him."

• “Egret” (2013)
• “Sunflower” (2013)
• “Winter Tug” (2013)
• “Spring Tangle” (2013)
• “White Flowers” (2013)
• “Water Hole” (2013
• “Sailboat” (2013)
• “Snow Parrot” (2013)
• “Reflection” (2013)
• “Scrap Barge” (2013)
• “Pilot House” (2013)
• “Active Driveway” (2012)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the City of Brooklyn commissioned a canal to facilitate commerce between New York Harbor and the farms and mills operating in the interior of the future borough. The Gowanus Canal, which was completed in 1869, was a fast success, and helped to make the neighborhood that grew up around it into a hub for manufacturing and shipping in Brooklyn. But a century and a half of industrial waste and untreated drainage took its toll, and in 2010 the E.P.A. designated the highly polluted canal a Superfund site. Four years later, encouraged, perhaps, by the prospect of a half-billion-dollar cleanup plan, condominium developments have been popping up in the neighborhood (also called Gowanus), and in December Whole Foods opened its first Brooklyn location a block from the canal.

Miska Draskoczy, a thirty-eight-year-old designer and director, has lived in Gowanus since 2008. He began taking photographs for his series “Gowanus Wild” while walking around his neighborhood in the middle of the night. “The same alley could alternately contain an abandoned boat, exploded suitcases, huge piles of logs, or a sea of frozen mud on any given night,” he told me. “I like this idea of urban eddies, how the nooks and crannies of a city collect the residue of daily activity and trap it for a while, until it gets flushed onward.” Draskoczy said that, so far, the wildest thing he has seen near the Gowanus was a snow-white egret perched in a tree overlooking the canal: “It still amazes me this beautiful creature could survive in such a damaged environment. It’s these sorts of contradictions that encourage me to keep looking.”

Photographs courtesy of Tepper Takayama Fine Arts.

When director James Jones set out to make a film about life inside North Korea, he decided early on that it would be pointless to go there himself. "I knew if we went to North Korea we'd get what you've seen 100 times: the official tour, the military parades, the ski resort," he told Foreign Policy.

Instead, he hoped to capture stirrings of dissent or, better yet, overt signs of rebellion from an isolated populace long oppressed by a dictatorial regime -- the sorts of scenes "people are always desperate to see" but don't expect to find, he said. For that, he turned to Jiro Ishimaru, a Japanese journalist who operates an underground network of hidden camera reporters inside North Korea -- individuals who risk imprisonment and even execution to document life inside a country that has, for decades, been painstakingly hidden from view.

The resulting film, an hourlong Frontline documentary titled Secret State of North Korea, is a sweeping, disturbing peek into a misunderstood and rapidly changing society.

For those familiar (as much as one can be) with North Korea, much of the film will seem like a broad overview of what we already know about the heavily veiled country: Its citizens are rigidly controlled, its prison camps overflowing, and its government oppressive and volatile. But the undercover footage adds a deeper, sinister dimension to the usual narrative. We see, for example, the absurd extent of North Korea's propaganda machine -- in the form of a massive, fully stocked and staffed department store that seemingly only exists to be filmed by state media. When one of Ishimaru's undercover reporters attempts to purchase a beverage and, later, apparel from the store, he is told by employees that nothing is for sale, and never will be.

Jones's team follows several recent defectors who have emerged as "very quiet agents of social progress." More than 1,500 people defected from North Korea in 2013, bringing the number of defectors living in South Korea to 26,000. Some of these individuals, Jones reveals, are increasingly using popular culture to challenge the status quo across the border. There's 22-year-old Chanyang, who appears on a weekly South Korean television show that has gained a following north of the border. On the show, she and other defectors -- a uniformly young and attractive group -- discuss current affairs in North Korea in between song-and-dance numbers. Then there's Mr. Jeong, who smuggles foreign movies, television shows, and radios into the country because "the thing that changes people's minds is popular culture," he tells Jones. "It probably has the most important role in bringing about democracy in North Korea."

The signs of protest that Jones had hoped to capture never quite materialize, but the rumblings of dissent -- particularly against the young ruler Kim Jong Un, who has purged many of his father's closest confidants -- are everywhere, it seems. The footage reveals business leaders lamenting their lack of "basic rights," while a government official plainly states that Kim "can't do anything.… No matter how hard he tries, even if it kills him, he's hopeless." In the clip below, members of the military complain about being forced to build a railroad from the supreme leader's birthplace to Pyongyang in the dead of winter, to mark his ascension to power.

There are also other signals of change. In one scene, a woman pushes back against authorities who accost her for violating the country's dress code. In another, a woman running an illegal bus service hits a soldier who tries to cite her. Ordinary citizens listen to black market radios and watch illegal DVDs; even state officials, we are told, consume foreign media voraciously.

One overarching trend among the footage and interviews is that everyone, it seems, is skeptical of Kim's ability to lead. Jones told FP that North Koreans' lack of confidence in the young leader became particularly clear during an interview that wasn't included in the final cut of the film. Jones interviewed a woman who had reluctantly defected to South Korea because her husband hoped to improve their economic situation. "She was still kind of a true believer and spoke very reverently of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il," Jones said. "But even she didn't like Kim Jong Un. She called him a pumpkinhead."

Ultimately, the film portrays North Korea as a country approaching the brink of something monumental -- a military dictatorship trying brutally, but not altogether effectively, to contend with the threats posed by new technology, the inevitable flow of information, and an increasingly discontent populace.

Secret State of North Korea airs on PBS on Tuesday, Jan. 14. (Check your local listings or watch it online.)

Paddington, London. £40.00/week

"former storage space"

"Ideally it would suit someone less than 5’4 tall and with no history of claustrophobia"

"There is enough space to store a few pieces of garment"

"The location is amazing"

What if Hannah’s next real-life, twentysomething experience was working the grill at America’s diner?

Twitter: @DennysDiner

Twitter: @DennysDiner

Twitter: @DennysDiner

Twitter: @DennysDiner

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From Sina Weibo:

@姚健说: “Despicable Chinese People” – An American TV station filmed a group of Chinese people at a San Francisco church getting free food. After they get the food, they immediately opened [the bag of free food], hide the relatively more valuable food items in suitcases, directly throw away the worthless canned goods into the trash cans on the street, then go line up again to get more food that they will take to sell later. However, this food was intended for poor people who cannot afford them!

Comments from Sina Weibo:

陌上蝴：

They are clearly Japanese and Korean.

长相守是考验：

Disgusting! Former Red Guards.

锦衣卫988：

It only took 60 years for China’s 5000-year civilization to be destroyed.

izzy_x：

I’ve seen this before, Chinese people buying eggs in the supermarket and opening each carton to pick out the big ones to put in their own carton to buy. So wretched.

imxuetao：

After thousands of years of oppression and poverty, this is already ingrained in their bones. It will take time for it to change, and we can only hope it will not take too long.

王v晓v波：

Laowai also have people with bad character; it’s all the same. This is clearly American imperialists slandering us.

郑承晚：

Using modern civilized standards to judge Chinese people is an act of racial discrimination.

平渡山水：

When will Chinese people live with dignity?

Comments from Sina Weibo:

安省乡下人：

Can you verify these aunties are definitely Chinese?

心梦原乡_tp9：

Hearing the laowai saying “shame” over and over again, I feel ashamed for being the same ethnicity as this bunch of human scum. These son of bitches are losing face [for China/Chinese] even abroad. Dogs cannot change their habit of eating shit?

卢老顽童：

All the result of the Party’s education.

幻梦_丽：

How do we know they are Chinese?

还猪龙主：

There is no way to verify that they are definitely Chinese, but we can be certain that they are scum.

陋巷之春_abc：

None of these people are Christians.

龙哥love1218：

These seniors are those that emigrated over long ago, and if they abandoned their Chinese nationality, how can they still be considered Chinese?

四爷咋啦：

This scene was no longer news in mainland China long ago. It’s not that you are bad if you’re Chinese, but rather those people who were brought up by Chinese culture are certain to be very bad. “Hard-work”, “courage”, “compassion” in Chinese history were just concepts, and the Chinese people who truly took these ideas to heart are very few. As long as it is an authoritarian nation, as long as there is no faith, no matter what country, they will all be like this.

子雨渊：

I finally understand the origin of why that American kid’s “kill everyone in China” comment…

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12/25 or 4/20? The days of choosing are OVER.

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“I guess SFGate doesn’t know that Twitter now pre-shows images,” writes a Romenesko reader. The NSFW (one topless woman and the bride’s behind) tweet gets mixed reviews from @SFGate followers: “Unfortunately I can’t un-see this. Please make it go away”; “this is really cool”; and “that’s just plain disgusting.

* Check out the full NSFW wedding tweet (@SFGate)

Even if you’re totally artistically impaired, you can still become the Picasso of your generation.

Corgis.

Check out her other artwork here.

Gale Williams / Via kelvarin.deviantart.com

Swans.

Try to get that out of your head once it's stuck there, I DARE YOU.

howtodrawit.com

Lips.

MWAH.

idrawgirls.blogspot.com

Legs.

Peep her art here.

Yunyin / Via yunyin.tumblr.com

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Last month the city of New York raised more than $200 million by auctioning off 200 new taxi medallions — essentially, the right to operate a yellow cab in the city. Some 2,000 such medallions are likely to be sold in all, which means $2 billion of much-needed revenue for New York, if prices remain high. But will they? It’s surprisingly easy to justify a million-dollar price tag for a medallion — but in order to do so, you need to assume that medallion owners’ income will remain constant, in real terms, over time.

Historically, the impressive political power of the medallion owners has helped to keep their income steady. They’re good at keeping the total number of medallions relatively low, and they’re also good at pushing through periodic increases in metered fees. The combination of the two allows them to rent out their medallions to drivers for about $75,000 per year.

That’s a very good deal for the medallion owners, and a much less good deal for the taxi drivers, whose income, says taxi commissioner David Yassky, is “grindingly low” — something less than $150 per day, for a 12-hour shift.

Essentially, every time you take a cab, your money gets split roughly evenly between the driver and the medallion owner. Which means that when a company like Uber comes along, it can offer lower fares to riders and substantially higher income to drivers — a win for everybody except the medallion owners.

The key datapoint came in October, when Uber said in a blog post that when it lowered fares for its UberX product, its drivers’ income actually went up rather than down: in Boston, it rose by 22% per hour, which is a lot of money. The result has been that UberX is now priced near or below prevailing taxi rates in most cities: in Washington DC, for instance, UberX costs 18% less than a taxi. And the drivers of those cars are making significantly more money than they would make if they were driving a cab.

Details on driver income are a bit sketchy, but at least one driver seems to be grossing over $1,000 per day, on good days, while Uber’s own advertising talks about an income of $70,000 per year. If you’re tactically smart as an UberX driver — driving towards hotels when empty, or waiting for a while after dropping a passenger off at the airport in the hope of picking up a fare back — then a six-figure income does not seem to be uncommon. And demand for UberX cars continue to exceed supply: the only reason they’re not even cheaper than they are, in cities like New York, is just that the cheaper they get, the more people want to use them, and Uber just doesn’t have enough cars and drivers right now to meet such demand.

We’ve already reached the point, then, at which it makes sense for almost any taxi driver who doesn’t own his own medallion to give up the rickety old yellow cab, with all of its onerous regulations, and just drive an UberX instead. I’m sure that many have already done so, and that more will follow suit over the course of 2014. And while for the time being there’s probably a big enough pool of cab drivers that new ones can be found to replace the people who have started driving for Uber instead, eventually the medallion owners are going to have to start cutting their drivers a sweeter deal, to prevent them from defecting to the competition.

Back in 1999, Jim Surowiecki proposed that we should deregulate cab fares in New York. That was a bonkers suggestion back then, because in an era of street hails, you need to know how much a cab costs before you hail it. But with the arrival of apps like Uber, we’re getting much the same effect. When you e-hail an Uber, you have just as much of an idea how much it’s going to cost as you do when you hail a cab. And so then the various services can effectively start competing with each other on price and service.

Intuitively, that sounds like a bad thing for drivers, and I understand why cabbies in San Francisco might consider Uber and its ilk to be the enemy. After all, more competition means lower prices, right? And if passenger start using taxi alternatives rather than taxis, that means less income, overall, for the taxi industry.

But in this case, the cab drivers — at least the ones who lease their cabs on a per-shift basis — should think of themselves less as small business owners, selling their services to passengers, and more as valuable employees, selling their services to either taxi-fleet owners or to companies like Uber. Looked at that way, more competition means higher wages, not lower income.

Precisely because taxi fares are highly regulated, cab drivers have historically had almost no bargaining power when it comes to their own income. The fares are set, and even if fares rise, the fleet owners will waste no time in taking advantage of that rise in fares to simply raise the cost of leasing a cab. Especially in New York, where there’s a limited number of medallions, anybody who wants to drive a taxi basically has to just accept whatever deal is offered.

But now they have a choice, which is excellent news — for them, and also for the public as a whole, which clearly loves the ability to easily order cabs from indoors, rather than having to take their chances on the street or on the phone with a dispatch service of dubious reliability and punctuality.

On the other hand, it’s not good news for the owners of the fleets. If they have to pay more to retain their drivers, that’s going to eat into their profits. And in turn, that will mean that they’re in turn willing to pay less for medallions.

That’s fine by me. So long as the price of a medallion stays above zero, the number of taxis on the street will remain constant, and the arguments against Uber — which are based on the idea that taxis will become scarcer — won’t apply. What’s more, the continued existence of all those taxis will ensure that Uber will find it difficult to raise its rates. After all, it has already discovered that demand is much greater when prices are taxi-like than when they’re significantly more expensive than taxis.

But I do think that as UberX catches on, along with its various competitors, the price of a taxi medallion is sure to fall. And that’s especially true in a world of rising interest rates, where medallions are valued on a discounted cash-flow basis. So while both drivers and passengers should embrace the arrival of UberX, if I was a medallion owner, I’d be worried. And I certainly wouldn’t be looking to buy new medallions, at a million bucks a pop.

Back in 2009, when Paul Rudd and Jason Segel were promoting "I Love You Man," they gave a highlariously random interview to Rotten Tomatoes. Over the seven-minute interview, which is really more of an improv routine, Segel invents an imaginary friend named Gideon who "rides a unicorn" and "visits you in your dreams."

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John Judy, 1969-2013

Some of what we learn about John Judy from his death notice:

He went off to college in Ashland where he formalized his education in ancient aliens and lover to all women. After college, he set off on his sailboat for a journey to be forever known as “Noah’s Ark in reverse” where he endeavored to eat one of every animal. His only regret in life is that he was not able to complete this task.

* Obituary for “dragon slayer” and “world’s greatest man” John Judy (oregonlive.com)

Earlier death notices on jimromenesko.com:
* “There isn’t enough space here to list all of the women from Freddie’s past”
* Don’t even think about wearing black to her memorial!
* Minnesota woman taught her family many lessons, including to never pay retail
* The family urges everyone to wear Cleveland Browns garb to the funeral

If Everyone Still Wrote Like They Did in College

Transport for London are making enormous changes to the way the tube works. We’re up all night to get home in a more efficent manner.

Transport for London is going to run five tube lines all through the night from 2015.

Trains won't stop running on the Victoria and Jubilee lines from Friday morning until Sunday night. The same schedule will apply to almost all of the Central line, almost all of the Piccadilly line and everything but the Bank branch of the Northern Line.

There will be at least four trains an hour through the night. And if it turns out to be a success then the timetable could be expanded to other lines.

If you live on one of these routes you'll never need to get a night bus again.

This is what the 24 hour tube map will look like.

Oyster is on the way out. From next year you'll be able to pay for tube travel with a contactless debit card.

Paying by contactless debit or credit card is already available on most bus journeys. Boris Johnson has previously indicated that he doesn't want TfL keep running its own payment system for much longer.

The transport authority is already preparing to introduce daily and weekly price caps for contactless bank cards and it is expected this system will eventually replace travelcards.

For example, rather than buying a weekly Zones 1-2 travelcard at the start of the week for £30.40 you just start travelling. And when your travel bill hits £30.40 during a seven day period then you won't pay anything extra until the next week begins.

As a result, all ticket offices are going to be closed.

Top up elsewhere or use your debit card. Most of the 5,750 ticket hall staff will get jobs elsewhere on the network, although 950 of them will be left without a job.

But starting all-night operation will mean an extra 200 tube drivers need to be hired.

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So I was just promoted at the @denverpost. And as the paper's first #Marijuana Editor, I am open to your pitches and ideas! (Srsly.)

— Ricardo B. (@bruvs) November 27, 2013

Veteran Denver Post entertainment editor and music critic Ricardo Baca has been named the paper’s marijuana editor. A memo to staff calls him “the perfect person to lead this charge.”

Ricardo Baca

So does that mean he’s quite familiar with the drug he’ll be covering?

“The short answer: I’ve covered concerts for a living over the last 15 years,” says Baca. “That means hanging out with musicians, working with people in the industry, attending music festivals in Austin and the Coachella valley and New York and L.A. So yes. And though I’ve never been a full-on stoner, I’ve shared concerts and conversations and late-night sessions at the bar, and had Twitter wars with thousands of them.”

Baca will be hiring a freelance pot critic and a freelance pot advice columnist. Email him at rbaca@denverpost.com if you’re interested.

The Post’s drug and alcohol policy applies to this position, but that doesn’t mean the pot editor and his staff have to abstain.

“As with alcohol, you are not allowed to ingest (either via cigarettes or food) marijuana in the office or come to the office ‘reeking’ of marijuana,” says the human resources senior vice president. “If you do imbibe marijuana in the course of covering it for your job, we expect you to take necessary steps to ensure you do not drive while impaired or put anyone at risk.”

* Q&A with the Denver Post’s new marijuana editor (denverpost.com)
* Earlier: Denver Post seeks a marijuana editor (jimromenesko.com)
* Earlier: “Saturday Night Live” has fun with the pot editor job posting (jimromenesko.com)

Here’s one for my British friends:

Via Micah.

It just takes one easy step . Courtesy of Damien Greenhalgh.

Twitter: @Damientg

The resemblance is uncanny.

LINK: Everything You Need To Know About Make-A-Wish Foundation’s Adorable, Crime-Fighting Batkid

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[Photo]
The second location of noodle hot spot Totto Ramen opened quietly on Monday in Hell's Kitchen. The new place is just one block west of the original, and serves the same roster of ramens like chicken paitan, miso, and spicy ramen. And while the original is still consistently packed, the second location is still flying under the radar of the noodle-loving masses. Those empty tables shouldn't last long, but with Ippudo's new location also smack in between the two Tottos, maybe all the lines will thin out a little.

For now the second location is open for dinner-only, while the original serves both lunch and dinner. No word yet on when, or if, that will change.
· All Coverage of Totto Ramen [~ENY~]