DAILY NEWS: City disaster prep is no game, just looks it

On a life-sized wraparound screen in a nondescript Brooklyn warehouse Thursday, a virtual explosion ripped through a building and engulfed firefighters gathered outside.

A city worker playing an FDNY chief grabbed a joystick, zoomed back for a better look, and shouted for more pumped water, more engines and help for an injured pedestrian.

Across the room, Office of Emergency Management training expert Natan Mandelbaum punched those commands into one of his two laptops, then added some twists of his own.

NY TIMES: Trying to Understand Two Bronx Juries’ Opposite Verdicts on a Fatal Fire

They were separate juries considering the fates of separate defendants, but for weeks they sat side by side in a Bronx courtroom hearing much of the same evidence. Still, the juries returned verdicts that indicated anything but a common opinion of the proceeding they had witnessed.

Prosecutors had alleged that two tenants of a Bronx apartment building, the building’s former landlord and its current landlord were at fault in the deaths of two firefighters who jumped from a window to escape a fire in 2005. The prosecution said that illegal partition walls erected by the tenants to subdivide the apartments had disoriented the firefighters.

The jury considering the case against the owners convicted them of criminally negligent homicide. But the jury judging the tenants who were accused of installing the walls cleared them of all charges.

NEWSDAY: Guilty verdict in Bronx fire that killed 2 firefighters

Whispered cheers of "Yes!" erupted in a hushed Bronx courtroom Wednesday when a jury found the manager of an apartment building and the company that owns it guilty of criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment in the deaths of two firefighters who jumped four stories in 2005 to escape a deadly blaze in the Tremont section.

The jury took four days to convict a limited liability company named 234 East 178th Street and Cesar Rios, manager of the building where the firefighters died, in the so-called Black Sunday deaths that occurred in a blizzard on Jan. 23, 2005.

The company, owned by Leslie Berman O'Hara, also owns 236 E. 178th St. where the blaze occurred. O'Hara was not a defendant.

NY TIMES: To Solve Mystery Smell: Catch It, Send It to a Lab and Sniff Across the Hudson

Baffled city investigators began calling them “maple syrup events”: mysterious waves of sweet-smelling air that periodically wafted over Manhattan, delighting some, troubling others and vanishing as quickly as they had arrived.

YAHOO/AP: NSA helped uncover 1973 NYC bombing plot

NEW YORK – It was the National Security Agency that uncovered a 1973 plot to bomb New York City, a scheme since linked to a terrorist who is nearing release from prison, according to government documents and interviews.

Khalid Al-Jawary, a Black September terrorist, placed two car bombs along Fifth Avenue and one near Kennedy Airport. The attack was meant to coincide with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's arrival in the city. The bombs failed to detonate, and Al-Jawary quickly fled the country before being arrested nearly 20 years later.

RCR WIRELESS: New York City rolls ahead with public-safety network plans

The state of New York may have struck out for the time being in building a statewide public-safety communications network, but New York City continues to make progress on a network of its own.