Despite the mayor’s impressive environmental master plan, the city Water Board’s executive director told the few people assembled at a recent hearing that one of the main reasons for the hefty hike this year, was that people were cutting down on their water use.

Last week, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein parachuted into the northwest Bronx to promote and explain his ambitious overhaul of New York City public schools. Also known as the Children’s First Initiative, the plan has been met with national accolades, local opposition, and often, just plain confusion.

The ballroom dancing program comes to schools like PS 340 from the American Ballroom Theater’s Dancing Classrooms program, which began in 1994 and is based in Manhattan. Sessions last 10 weeks and meet for two 45-minute classes a week during the school day.

Inside the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center, the press, various guests, and hospital associates eagerly awaited the arrival of formerly conjoined twins Carl and Clarence Aguirre. That Friday, April 20, the boys celebrated their fifth birthday, almost two and a half years since the unprecedented surgery that successfully separated them.

Major construction on the controversial water filtration plant being built in Van Cortlandt Park, already two months behind schedule, ran into another major obstacle when the contractor for the project withdrew its $1.127 billion bid

On Christmas Day, public schools across the city shut down. They close on several Jewish holidays, too. But Muslim holidays aren’t recognized in the same way by New York City’s Department of Education (DOE), leaving some parents with a dilemma: keep the kids at home so the family can celebrate together, or whisk them off to school so they don’t miss their classes.

Affordable, and sometimes free, high-speed Internet access is coming to the Bronx – one restaurant, building and neighborhood at a time. The virtual reality is that there’s a digital divide between those who have high-speed Internet access and those who don’t. That gap is widest in working-class, low-income communities like much of the Bronx.

For decades, community leaders and environmentalists have dreamed of cleaning up the Harlem River, and renovating its underutilized eastern shoreline. It’s quite a dream. The eight-mile waterway is polluted; its shoreline, on which factories and power plants once stood, is presumed to be one large brownfield (land whose redevelopment is complicated by environmental hazards).

Thanks to YouTube, the Bronx and the world were made aware this weekend of a German military training exercise where soldiers were told to imagine African-Americans in the Bronx exiting a van before firing off their machine guns. But anyone who has a Google News Alert set for Bronx will learn relatively quickly that our borough is frequently used for target practice by clueless people trying to make a point in violent contexts. In fact, the Norwood News ran an editorial about exactly this last July. Here are a couple of excerpts: