U.S. Representative Joe Crowley (D-NY), along with representatives from California, Kentucky, and Illinois spearheaded legislation to award the Congressional Gold Medal to Aung San Suu Kyi, an imprisoned Burmese leader. Kyi has been crusading to end the human rights-abusing military dictatorship in Burma since the 1980s.

The Class of 1973 celebrated its 35th anniversary by raising $6,000 in honor of deceased classmates Regina Lambeau, Kathy O’Shea, Marian Collier, and Mary Smith. The funds went toward the installation of a new bench at the school and the establishment of a scholarship fund in the class name.

Last year, Congressman Eliot Engel introduced legislation to ban the Belgian FN Five-seveN pistol, a weapon that can currently be purchased legally and has the ability to penetrate police bulletproof vests "from two football fields away," according to Engel. The gun is advertised as being able to cut through 48 layers of Kevlar, the synthetic fiber used in most bulletproof vests, at 50 meters. After the same type of gun was recently used in a Philadelphia shooting in which a man was shot in the hand and a child cut by flying glass near a car detail shop owned by NFL All-Pro receiver Marvin Harrison, Engel renewed his battle to get his legislation, the PLEA Act, through Congress.

A listing of public and community meetings in the northwest Bronx.

Several hundred youngsters from PS/ MS 20 and the 52nd Precinct Explorers Program participated in the first-ever NYPD Explorers Community Awareness Day, held along Mosholu Parkway at Webster Avenue, on Saturday, May 3.

Fordham residents are hoping that community organizations create a unified plan for a youth center at the old Fordham Library within the month, as the city eyes the contaminated building for a possible animal shelter.

A thousand index cards, in groups of 10, connected by paper clips, were painstakingly draped from the third floor ceiling of PS 246 in Kingsbridge on May 2. The index cards were part of an effort by Pedro Cruz’s sixth grade class to honor the lives of children who died during the Holocaust.

Nearly 150 people of all ages, races and backgrounds gathered at Shoelace Park at East 219th Street and the Bronx River to participate in the 9th Annual Amazing Bronx River Flotilla on Saturday, May 10.

Quick, what are the first and last names of the three officers acquitted in the killing of Sean Bell? I’ll give you a few seconds…

Give up? The answer is: Marc Cooper, Gescard F. Isnora, and Michael Oliver. Now, given that Sean Bell was murdered nearly 18 months ago, and that the court case and acquittal of his killers has been a prominent news story for two months, why didn’t you remember these names? Because, whether in the major media or in the courtroom, it was never the three officers who were on trial. It was Sean Bell and his friends.

Before and after the verdict, the legal proceedings at hand were dubbed: “The Sean Bell trial.” This is strange terminology, considering that Bell is the victim. (How many articles have you read about the “Ronald Goldman trial?”)

This language betrays the very reasons that Cooper, Isnora, and Oliver walked out of a Queens courtroom and into the long tradition of officers who have killed unarmed men of color with impunity. When, in November of 2006, news first broke of a 23-year-old black man gunned down on his wedding night by officers who fired 50 shots, it was so clearly heinous that those who are at once rational, empathetic, and unfamiliar with the American legal system could be forgiven for wondering: How are the officers possibly going to get themselves out of this one?