In what has become our annual recap of what’s gone wrong with the enormous filtration plant being built in Van Cortlandt Park, federal authorities announced this fall that one of the plant’s primary contractors committed fraud in its reported hiring of minority and women-owned businesses.

The Bronx — and much of the country — was left reeling in October, when news broke of a horrific attack on several men and teens in Morris Heights. Police say the perpetrators, members of a gang called the “Latin King Goonies,” chose their victims because they were gay or perceived to be gay. Among those attacked was a 30-year-old known locally as “La Reina” (“the Queen”). He was burned with cigarettes and sodomized with a small baseball bat, the authorities say.

A sixth Bronx church was burglarized this past weekend, the latest in a string of break-ins targeting churches in the area since the start of November. Someone broke into an office window at the Church of the Mediator, on West 231st Street and Kingsbridge Avenue, late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, according to the church’s senior warden Frank Holsapple and the NYPD. The thief, or thieves, made off with several recently donated laptop computers and about $800 in cash, money the church was collecting for a Christmas toy drive. “They hit every church around here, and I guess we were the last stop,” Holsapple said, adding that the burglar or burglars wrecked the office they broke into but were unable to access the rest of the church.”It could have been a lot worse,” he added.

Last week, police arrested Tracey Towers resident Horace Nichols, 38, and charged him with stabbing fellow resident Jack Hewitt to death on Dec. 8. Police also confirmed that a 20-year-old Hispanic male had been shot on Friday, Dec. 10 outside of the Super Laundromat on East 204th Street, but was expected to survive. The investigation is ongoing.

One of the primary contractors that worked on the enormous Croton Water Filtration Plant being built in Van Cortlandt Park admitted on Monday to committing fraud in reporting its sub-contracting of minority and women-owned businesses. Schiavone Construction, which performed much of the tunneling and trucking during the early phases of the filtration plant project, agreed to pay the federal government $20 million in penalties. The company now doing the bulk of the construction work on the filtration plant, Skanska, is also under investigation for similar misdeeds.

Detectives continue to hunt for the individual or people responsible in a string of break-ins and burglaries of churches and Catholic schools in Bedford Park, Norwood and Kingsbridge Heights. The thief or thieves responsible have netted thousands of dollars in cash and electronics. On Monday morning, Our Lady of Refuge, on 194th Street and Briggs Avenue, became the fifth church or Catholic school targeted in the last three weeks when church officials found that someone had broken in through a basement window and stolen a pair of laptop computers, a video camera and $1,300 in cash.