Articles labeled: New York

A boy and his dog found a 14-foot python while on a walk. The snake had been let loose from a nearby reptile rescue center.

A neighborhood boy found the 80-pound snake in the Erie Canal near the center Wednesday evening. MaxMan Reptile Rescue owner Diana Sleiertin (SLAY’-er-tin) says she and her son had to untangle [the python named] Dante from some limbs but he is now safely back in his cage.

Sleiertin, who uses the snake as an animal ambassador visiting schools and children’s birthday parties, says it doesn’t look like Dante ate anything during his road trip.

A sex shop has opened in the trendy Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, and they’re billing themselves as “kid-friendly”.

Unlike the older sex shops, which are dark and dingy, the Babeland store has upbeat music, well-dressed saleswomen and infant changing tables — marketing itself as a fun place for couples to shop. It’s part of a growing trend that has been spreading from Louisville to Los Angeles in an attempt to take the sleaze out of this part of the sex industry.

“If you walk into a mainstream sex store, you’ll probably be greeted with explicit imagery and a sort of artificial sexuality, like a woman with blonde hair with her head thrown back, something that’s meant to titillate in the moment,” said Babelands’s owner Claire Cavanah.

This store, which officially opens its doors Sunday, is the fifth Babeland for Cavanah, who opened the first store in Seattle, Wash., with friend and business partner Rachel Venning in 1993. Since then, the two have opened shops in New York City and one in Los Angeles, which closed this year.

A driver of a Mr. Ding-A-Ling ice cream truck has been arrested for raping a young teenager that he met on MySpace. Yeah, our kids are getting MySpace accounts like the day after never.

William Schenmeyer, 21, of East Greenbush whose ice cream route was in Rensselaer County, has been charged with second degree rape, sex abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. Police said that he had sexual contact with the girl on at least two occasions.

Schenmeyer was arraigned in the Poestenkill Town Court and remanded to the Rensselaer County Jail.

Check those references, people.

A Saratoga County woman has admitted she placed put a 2-year-old boy’s feet in scalding bath water last October.

Christian Cail suffered second- and third-degree burns on both his feet after police say his babysitter, Chastity Pasinello, left him standing in the water. The boy spent two weeks at Westchester Medical Center, where skin from his thighs was used to replace the burned skin on his feet.

In what surely is going to spark of a huge free speech debate, some of New York’s largest ISPs have agreed to block user groups, news groups and forums that disseminate child pornography.

With the agreement announced Tuesday, [New York Attorney General Andrew] Cuomo skipped over the untold number of individual users accessing child porn and went to the portals that, unwittingly they all say, provided the route to sharing the illegal obsession.

Cuomo said that the service providers blocked child pornography found in 88 newsgroups by his investigators. Newsgroups, a mainstay of the Internet from its early days, are essentially online message boards in which users can post text and files in any of thousands of categories.

The companies also agreed to eliminate the material from their servers and will pay $1.125 million to help fund efforts to remove child porn from the Internet.

The agreements follow a six- to eight-month undercover investigation of child porn newsgroups, and they will affect customers nationwide.

Wow, a lot of river rescue stories today. Is there something in the water? Ha, get it? Never mind…

Police say the babies’ 30-year-old mother mistakenly put the car into either neutral or drive before stepping out of the vehicle after she parked it Monday afternoon at Dowling College in Oakdale. The car then began rolling downhill toward the Connetquot River.

The babies’ mother, Coleen Charles, screamed for help as she chased the vehicle into the river. Charles pulled her 11-month-old babies through the windows of the car and passed them to a student and security guard who came to her aid.

Fortunately there are some teenagers out there that seem to have their wits about them. While driving in the early morning to catch his track team’s bus to go to a meet, Shane Biggs saw a little boy wandering in the middle of the road, a tragic accident waiting to happen.

“What? Is that a little boy? I thought I was seeing things,” said Biggs, who estimated the toddler’s age at 2 years old. “I go, ‘Are you lost?,’ and he was just crying, walking down the road. I took him by the shoulder and guided him over to the side of the road. Right when I did that, my sprinting coach was coming over the hill, and he probably wouldn’t have seen him.”

Biggs stayed with the toddler, who said his name was Matthew, until police arrived. They searched nearby homes. Several other cars had stopped by this time, and those drivers helped with the search. One of those volunteers eventually located the boy’s home less than a mile away.

A man was arrested for driving while intoxicated, and to add insult to injury, he had his infant child in the back seat at the time.

The driver, Noe L. Sarmiento of Montauk, was charged with misdemeanor driving while intoxicated, police said, after he refused a breathalyzer test.

Police said Sarmiento was charged with a misdemeanor because it was his first offense. Sarmiento also was charged with misdemeanor endangering the welfare of a child.

Police said they stopped Sarmiento at 11:19 p.m. Sunday on Montauk Highway and Windmill Lane in Water Mill. They said his infant son was in the rear seat of the car.

In the continued march toward logic and reason, New York Governor David Paterson has instructed state agencies to recognize same-sex couples who were married in states or counties where it was legal. Given the proximity of New York to Massachusetts — where gay marriage is legal — this is a pretty big deal.

The governor’s legal counsel told state agencies in a May 14 memo to revise policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed in California and Massachusetts as well as Canada and other countries that allow gays and lesbians to marry, said Erin Duggan, the governor’s spokeswoman.

The memo informed state agencies that failing to recognize gay marriages would violate the New York’s human rights law, Duggan said.

The directive follows a February ruling from a New York state appeals court. That decision says that legal same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions are entitled to recognition in New York.

At least 8 people were shot, of which 6 were teenagers, in a park in Harlem in the aftermath of what police believe was an escalated fight.

The ages of the teenagers range from 13 years old to 18 years old; all are boys except for one girl.

Investigators say the six teens fled Marcus Garvey Park with a crowd when gunfire erupted about 10:15 p.m. Police say the teens were found wounded along Lenox Avenue across several blocks. It was not immediately clear whether they had been shot along the way or at the park.

The car was said to be going 90 mph and didn’t even bother to stop…

NEW YORK - A woman and a man holding her baby while walking on the side of a New York highway have been run over by a driver who didn’t bother to stop.

The baby flew out of the man’s hands but wasn’t struck by the car and suffered only minor injuries. The man was killed.

A woman in East Harlem, New York, has been arrested after the girl that was living in her home was found unconscious and later died.

Police officers found the girl, Taylor Webster, at a 1345 5th Ave. apartment at 3 p.m. Sunday, and she was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital where she was pronounced dead at 5:10 p.m., police said.

In a Monday police report, officials said both the suspect, Joanne Alvarez, 54, and the girl both lived at the same 1345 Fifth Ave. address, but they did not say whether the two are related.

A month old infant wrapped in a blanket was found by woman on the doorstep outside her home in Queens, New York.

A black handbag was left next to the baby; the police did not say what, if anything, was in the bag.

It was about 10 p.m. when the Holly Avenue resident, a 24-year-old woman, found the baby and called the police. Officers and an ambulance responded, and the baby was taken to Flushing Hospital where she was admitted in stable condition.

Some asshats decided to go all Fast and the Furious on a residential street, and now a young boy is dead because of it.

What neighbors said was a drag race along a residential street in Queens turned deadly early yesterday when one of the speeding cars hit a sport utility vehicle, throwing a 5-year-old boy from the backseat and killing him one block from his home, police said.

Police last night were looking for two men who fled on foot after crashing a blue BMW at 164th Place and 109th Avenue in Jamaica. Police said the BMW 540 was bought under the name of Hendry James. Police said James is not a suspect and has reported his identity stolen.

The BMW was speeding east on 109th Avenue when the car struck the SUV carrying the boy, Jordan McLean, his mother, Marcia McEachron, 44, and his aunt, Claris Edwards, 50, of Far Rockaway, shortly after midnight, police said. Jordan was in the back passenger seat, and was not strapped into a car seat or wearing a seat belt, police said.

A couple in Southampton, New York are being charged with child endangerment for leaving their 2-month-old in the car while they went into an OTB to watch the Kentucky Derby. And the brainiac mom can’t figure out that she did anything wrong:

Krystal Rose Downes, later told officers she thought her infant was safe enough because the car’s heat was on. She said she hadn’t endangered the baby “because after all, she didn’t leave the baby out in the cold,” and “she made sure she left the vehicle running so the heat could be kept on,” police told Newsday newspaper.