Glenn Hauman: View From Above

“We’re also not too happy about what’s going on in the United States,” the Russian Information Agency Novosti quoted him as saying. “Do you think that the electoral system in the United States is without problems? Is it necessary to recall how the elections went this time and the previous time?”

The president also noted that OSCE observers described elections in the Ukraine and the United States in practically the same terms.

“They mentioned that not all voters were permitted into the polling stations, some were even intimidated; that candidates did not have equal access to the media,” Putin said.

A homeless woman lying on the ramp of an upper East Side parking garage was crushed to death early yesterday when she was run over by a mammoth sport utility vehicle, police said.

The driver, real estate executive Anthony Bergamo, told investigators he did not see the woman from his driver’s seat.

Bergamo was driving a 5,770-pound Ford Expedition.

Medics pronounced the unidentified woman dead at the scene.

An autopsy determined that she died of crushing injuries to her chest, said a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner.

The death was ruled accidental and Bergamo, 54, who manages the Milford Plaza hotel in Times Square for its owner, real estate magnate Howard Milstein, was not charged.

Who was police commissioner then? Why, Bernard Kerik. And who is Anthony Bergamo? Oh, THAT Anthony Bergamo…

Rescue workers were combing through the World Trade Center rubble around the clock when Mr. Kerik called Anthony Bergamo, a well-connected vice chairman of the Milstein family real estate company and a police buff, and asked for help finding a place for the workers to rest during breaks, the executive said.

The family owned Liberty View, a 28-story yellow brick tower two blocks southwest of the trade center at the corner of West Street and Third Place.

She was aware of an incident at Belmont Ridge Middle School in which her son, Yishai Asido, was assigned to write a letter to U.S. Marines and responded, according to his teacher, by saying, “I wish all Americans were dead and that American soldiers should die.” Yishai and Albaugh deny that the boy wished his countrymen dead.

Albaugh, a U.S. citizen, and her husband, an Israeli citizen who manages a Leesburg moving company, say the investigators’ visit and the school’s response were a paranoid overreaction in a charged post-9/11 environment. But law enforcement officials say the terrorist attacks and the Columbine school shootings require them to consider whether children who make threats might post a danger to their classmates. The case illustrates the balancing act that schools and law enforcement must find between the free speech of minors and community safety.

Albaugh described her son as a rambunctious student who has long opposed armies of any kind. He refused the Veterans Day assignment and told his teacher that the Marines “might as well die, as much as I care.” Whatever was said, the words had been the source of anguished conferences, phone calls and, ultimately, a day of in-school suspension.

Albaugh thought the whole thing was resolved in school until Investigators Robert LeBlanc and Kelly Poland showed up last week. What followed, she said, was two hours of polite but intense and personal questioning.