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The NYPD’s roughly 34,500 officers serve a population of 8.2 million people, but multiple interviews with reporters who cover the police department, as well as organizations dedicated to transparency, reveal a police department stunning in its disregard for the information requests of citizens, advocacy groups and news organizations.

The city's Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who is running for mayor, recently released a report asserting that a third of all Freedom of Information records requests to the police department were ignored. The numbers are no surprise to journalists who cover the department, such as Leonard Levitt, a veteran cops reporter who now writes at NYPD Confidential.

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When Gillibrand -- a hot topic in political circles this week, as a potential liberal presidential candidate and a champion for addressing sexual assault in the military -- was appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat in 2009, Nate Silver wrote, "This is not a terrific outcome for progressive Democrats," because "Gillibrand, statistically speaking, has been one of the more conservative Democrats in the House. Moreover, she is a somewhat proud conservative, being a member of the Blue Dog caucus. In a state like New York, which is capable of electing and re-electing a very liberal senator, that’s a somewhat underachieving result for the Democrats."

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“High on the Job,” Center for Investigative Reporting

Ever had one of those days at work when one little mistake sends things spiraling out of control? This happened to Michael Montgomery, a reporter for KQED (the public TV station in San Francisco) and the Center for Investigative Reporting, when he inadvertently got a little too close to the story he was covering.

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We’ve all had the feeling:  You fall into conversation with some stranger on the subway or bus.  Or perhaps you are seated beside him at a concert or some other event.  Whatever the venue or circumstance, the conversation goes pleasantly for a while.  Your interlocutor makes various interesting observations about this subject or that.  He shows himself to experience the world much as do you and most others you’ve known.  He might even say something arrestingly perceptive or thoughtful at some juncture during your chat.  Then, without warning, it happens:  In the middle of a perfectly good sentence he throws in, as a sort of throwaway line or aside, some such observation as, ‘like that time the Venusians performed those experiments on me up on Telos Nine, before taking me back to the Bryant Park carousel and then flying home.  (They still call me, you know.)’

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At this point it's apparent that every Democrat seeking the presidency in 2016 will be pro-same-sex marriage. If trends hold, a large majority of the country will be with them as well. But it's impossible to say whether and which Republicans running over the next few election cycles will be vocally opposed, supportive or totally noncommittal.

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Reporters Michael Grynbaum and David Chen provide a few lines in the front-page story to explain that Rudy Giuliani was also a political hothead and that Republican mayoral candidate Joseph J. Lhota once challenged a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor to “be a man.” The rest of the piece includes passages like this:

A session of the New York City Council had descended into chaos, and lawmakers were openly questioning her leadership. Ms. Quinn, the Council speaker, decided there was one person to blame: Betsy Gotbaum, then the city’s public advocate, who had been presiding.

The response was sudden and fierce. Ms. Quinn summoned Ms. Gotbaum to an office nearby and, with little warning, began shouting at her in increasingly angry tones about appearing weak in front of other lawmakers.

“You were like Bambi in there!” Ms. Quinn exclaimed, slamming her hand on a table for emphasis, according to Ms. Gotbaum, who was on crutches at the time.

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This interview with the New York Times’ Dealbook (sponsored today by the financial firm Allianz) is no different. As a prelude, he gets a commendation from former Attorney General and current corporate lawyer Michael Mukasey (always good to have the lawyer from the other side of the table, defending those you could have but chose not to prosecute, praising your work). He gets phantom criticism from unnamed members of “the Occupy Wall Street crowd” and “Rolling Stone magazine,” a reference to Matt Taibbi. There’s no easier way to marginalize critics than to refuse to name them.

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"The announcement is part of the company’s larger plan to focus on its core brand and build its international presence, the Times spokeswoman said," reports the New York Times.

One might wonder how something can simultaneously be called "International" and "New York" but the ugliness of the new title shouldn't distract from the logic of the rebranding. The Times has recently been jettisoning anything and everything that doesn't have the flagship brand name attached (the Boston Globe, About.com, et cetera).  The bean counters are probably right, this time. We're not talking Maker's Mark announcing it is about to start watering down its bourbon. There will be no social media outrage that reverses this slap at history. When all media are available everywhere all the time, your brand is what sets you apart. Double down, New York Times, double down.

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As the Times explains, Goldfarb has made a career out of controversy:

"Often working with money from major Republican donors, most of whom have preferred anonymity, Mr. Goldfarb has been in the middle of nearly every major partisan dispute of Mr. Obama’s presidency — over Iran, Israel, terrorism policy and now Mr. Hagel and guns. For a time, Mr. Goldfarb worked as a communications strategist to the leading bêtes noires of liberals, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch."

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According to the Times, the attacks were likely in response to stories published last year by the paper's Shangai bureau chief David Barboza, which reported the vast personal wealth of Chinese PM Wen Jiabao. Following the publication of these stories the Times site  was blocked in China and its reporters there suddenly faced visa problems.

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Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Daily News tweeted about a survey the Times is conducting about changing the digital subscription package, and charging more for it:

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The Times' response to Gray was noncommittal:

We are simply revisiting concepts for how to package our core digital subscription bundles and/or potentially introduce new paid products as we close in on two years after the digital subscription launch. Like always, we rely on consumer research.

It's unclear if retooling the digital subscription has anything to do with recent buyouts and other cost-cutting measures at the paper, but we'll keep you posted as the story develops.

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Before the Internet, superficiality did not exist. We all lived lives of profound and deep connection.

Before the Internet, Manti Te'o's girlfriend would have been constructed out of flesh and blood. And when she died, she'd really be dead.

All these important truths can be gleaned from "The Hoax of Digital Life," an opinion column by Timothy Egan published in the New York Times on Friday.

Egan's not down with the virtual life: The whole bizarre fake dead girlfriend saga that engulfed star Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o? It's the Internet's fault!

The Internet is the cause of much of today’s commitment-free, surface-only living; it’s also the explanation for why someone could tumble head-over-heels for a pixelated cipher. Online dating was only the start of what led us down this road."

Te’o called himself a victim of an elaborate hoax. If he’s telling the truth, he’s right in one sense, but wrong in his conclusion. He’s a victim of his age, people who are more willing to embrace fake life through a screen than the real world beyond their smartphone.

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Silver admitted he is sometimes tempted by, but wouldn't act on, the desire to use his prediction methods to profit from election betting markets (which are heavily influenced by his predictions):

Tempted, yes, but sometimes resisting temptation is a good thing.

He explained that he would like to make his methodology more open to readers of his FiveThirtyEight NYT blog:

I’d certainly like to aim to increase the level of disclosure at 538 going forward. Sometimes what happens is that I have best intentions to write a super detailed, 5000-word methodology post, and then some senate candidate does or says something stupid, and I get caught up in the news cycle and it gets forgotten about. Which is a pretty lame excuse, I know.

He told questioners that his statistical analysis is particularly well suited to certain aspects of politics -- notably presidential elections -- but cannot be used to predict the outcome of many political debates, such as gun control. When asked if he could predict whether gun control would make America safer or not, he answered:

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For several years now, militant enforcers have scoured the tribal belt in search of informers who help the C.I.A. find and kill the spy agency’s jihadist quarry. The militants’ technique — often more witch hunt than investigation — follows a well-established pattern. Accused tribesmen are abducted from homes and workplaces at gunpoint and tortured. A sham religious court hears their case, usually declaring them guilty. Then they are forced to speak into a video camera.

The taped confessions, which are later distributed on CD, vary in style and content. But their endings are the same: execution by hanging, beheading or firing squad.

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While the Times' Washington Bureau chief David Leonhardt defended the decision to simply republish an AP wire on the proceedings, Sullivan took the Grey Lady to task. "The testimony is dramatic and the overarching issues are important," she wrote.

Leonhardt told the public editor via email:

As with any other legal case, we won’t cover every single proceeding. In this case, doing so would have involved multiple days of a reporter’s time, for a relatively straightforward story. The A.P. article recounting the main points of Mr. Manning’s testimony about his conditions of confinement that ran on page A3 of The Times conveyed fundamentally the same material as a staff story would have.

However, as Times reader David Morf noted in a reprinted letter, using AP wire copy "let the story bury itself." Following Sullivan's piece, a number of commentators have taken issue with Leonhardt's reference to "any other legal case," since for many Manning's treatment by the U.S. military and his role as a whistle-blower make  his case exceptional.

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The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.

More than a year after the overthrow of Gaddafi, Libyan authorities have failed to establish full control over Libya’s disparate armed factions. According to the Times, "The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government."

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Guy Fieri responded this morning to the New York Times' negative review of his new Times Square restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar. (The review was so mean-spirited that it went viral yesterday). On the "Today" show Fieri said, "There's good and there's bad in the restaurant business, but that to me went so overboard, it really seemed like there was another agenda."

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"A worrisomely large number of senior officers have been investigated and even fired for poor judgment, malfeasance and sexual improprieties or sexual violence — and that is just in the last year," Shaker noted Monday, giving a host of examples:

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