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UT Austin, North Dakota State evacuated after bomb threats

Local media said the school in Austin had received a phoned-in threat from a man claiming to be part of Al Qaeda who had placed bombs all over campus.

Courtesy University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin issued a campus-wide evacuation order this morning in response to a "threat."

Two major public universities in Texas and North Dakota were evacuated Friday after receiving bomb threats, school officials and law enforcement said.

The University of Texas at Austin and North Dakota State University in Fargo both issued campus-wide evacuation orders, but gave little additional information.

It was not immediately clear if the bomb threats at the two schools, some 1200 miles apart, were related.

UT Austin, a sprawling campus home to 50,000 students, placed an emergency notice on front page of the school's website around 10 a.m. Texas time. "Evacuation due to threats on campus. Immediately evacuate ALL buildings and get as far away as possible. More information to come," the statement read.

Gas shutoff burns residents of Gen. Grant Houses 

223 families will have to endur at least another three weeks with no working stoves, home-cooked meals

Mariela Lombard/for New York Daily News

The Grant Houses on Amsterdam Ave. and West 125th. in Manhattan.

Some 450 residents of the General Grant Houses in Harlem have endured three agonizing weeks with no gas in their homes — and the city’s troubled housing agency says service won’t be restored until early October.

That means the 223 mostly poor families who live at 1305 Amsterdam Ave. will have to face another three weeks with no working stoves or home-cooked meals.

Adding insult to injury: A New York City Housing Authority spokeswoman says the tenants will get no break in the rent, despite at least six weeks without gas service, because the problem was “an occurrence beyond NYCHA’s control.”

Hazardous PCB leak at IS 204 in Long Island City has parents seething with outrage 

May take up to nine years to replace rest of school's potentially contaminated light fixtures, officials say

CLARE TRAPASSO FOR DAILY NEWS

Parents Tisha Kirkland (l.) and Doreatha Carson stand in front of IS 204, where they learned on Thursday that a light fixture in their seventh-grade children's school was discovered leaking fluid laced with hazardous PCBs.

Parents were outraged this week after learning that a light fixture was leaking PCBs on to the floor in their children’s Long Island City middle school.

Even worse, officials told parents that it could take up to nine years to replace the rest of the school’s potentially contaminated lights.

The leak was discovered by a custodian in a counselor’s office on Monday at Intermediate School 204, Department of Education spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said on Thursday.

No one was in the room, she noted, and the light was removed that day.

Small Brooklyn colleges score big on U.S. News and World Report rankings of top schools

Marino, Joe

Brooklyn College

Four small Brooklyn colleges have scored big on the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of the top schools in the northeast.

The list names St. Francis College, The Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College and St. Joseph’s College as four top schools in the region.

“I think it’s terrific,” said St. Francis provost Timothy Houlihan. “It’s well deserved recognition for the faculty, students and the hardworking staff.”

The rankings - which came out Wednesday - were based on freshman retention, class sizes, school selectivity, graduation rate and alumni donations.

St. Francis ranked 26th among 46 other regional colleges in the northeast. Among universities, Pratt was ranked 20th, Brooklyn College was ranked 55th and St. Joseph’s came in 86th out of 143 schools.