June 15, 2005

A sightseeing helicopter lifting off from a Lower Manhattan pier plunged into the East River yesterday afternoon, leaving the pilot and six passengers bobbing in the swift-moving water and clinging to the overturned craft until police rescue boats could reach them. The pilot and the passengers all survived the crash, although one woman remained in critical but stable condition last night at Bellevue Hospital Center, the police said.

THE French have a thing for abbreviations. ''Boul' Mich'' is the Boulevard St. Michel; ''sympa'' is sympathetic, ''McDo'' is -- well, you know what that is. And then there is Pudlo. ''Check it out in Pudlo,'' someone will say here. Or, ''Do you have the new Pudlo?'' Or, ''Pudlo says it is really great.''

Near the big-bang finish of ''Batman Begins,'' the title avenger, played by the charismatic young British actor Christian Bale, scoops up a damsel in distress, played by Katie Holmes, and spirits her away to his lair. Watching this scene, it was hard not to think how nice it would have been if Batman had instead dispatched the infernally perky actress, whose recent off-screen antics have threatened to eclipse this unexpectedly good movie. As it happens, the most memorable rescue mission in ''Batman Begins'' isn't engineered by the caped crusader, but by the film's director, Christopher Nolan. ''Batman Begins'' is the seventh live-action film to take on the comic-book legend and the first to usher it into the kingdom of movie myth. Conceived in the shadow of American pop rather than in its bright light, this tense, effective iteration of Bob Kane's original comic book owes its power and pleasures to a director who takes his material seriously and to a star who shoulders that seriousness with ease. Until now, Mr. Bale, who cut his teeth working with Steven Spielberg on ''Empire of the Sun'' almost two decades ago, has been best known for his scarily plausible performance in ''American Psycho,'' an intellectual horror movie that now seems like a prelude to this one: think American Psycho redux, this time in tights.

IN the soothing voice of a yoga instructor, with black beads threading through a stone-like medallion around his feng shui neck, Phil Jackson re-introduced himself yesterday as coach karma, holistic healer of Hollywood. But clear away the incense smoke, and Jackson is also the man who peeked while meditating around Kobe Bryant for five seasons, and then, by aromatherapy candlelight, wrote passages for a best-selling book last year that all but began, Dear Diary.

Plans for the city's first elevated park -- a singular ribbon of green space stretching a mile and a half along an abandoned railroad viaduct 30 feet above the streets of Chelsea -- have taken a major step forward with a favorable ruling by a federal transportation board. The ruling, on Monday, essentially cleared the way for the city to begin negotiating use and development of the High Line, a weed-overgrown railroad bed that has not been used since the late 1960's and that, seen from above, looks like a painter's thick stroke of brilliant green along the gritty Lower West Side of Manhattan, between 34th Street and Gansevoort Street, in the meatpacking district.

The swells who showed up before Al Franken's speech at a Democratic fund-raiser to down finger food and punch were thrilled to see him, all the more so because he continues to make threatening noises about running for the Senate here in 2008. A former writer and performer for ''Saturday Night Live'' and more recently a radio host on Air America, Mr. Franken has used his outsider status to hurl humor-based invective and indignation at the powers that be, but he is considering becoming part of what he so frequently assails.

Phil Jackson returned to the Los Angeles Lakers yesterday, completing the most unlikely, the most unexpected and the most dizzying reunion in recent N.B.A. lore. Only 361 days earlier, Jackson walked away from the Lakers, the franchise he had guided to three consecutive championships. The team's owner, Jerry Buss, wanted a new voice in the locker room, and Jackson, worn by the physical and emotional strains of a dysfunctional dynasty, agreed it was time to go.

Suicide bomber blows himself up in crowd of retirees lining up to get pensions at bank in Kirkuk in northern Iraq, killing at least 22 people and wounding 80 others, including women and children; photos; assault arouses fears of new phase of violence targeting large groups of civilians; politically precarious city sits atop some of Iraq's richest oil fields and could descend into large-scale civil strife if political solutions are not carefully laid out in new constitution; five Iraqi policemen die when suicide bomber's car rams checkpoint near Baquba; US soldier is killed by grenade in Baghdad and two others die from roadside bomb near Ramadi; US marines accidentally kill five civilians after firing at two cars speeding toward checkpoint near Ramadi just after attempted suicide bombing; Baghdad hospital receives bodies of 24 people apparently executed, including 17 truck drivers; Prime Min Ibrahim al-Jaafari tells national assembly of difficulty balancing Kurdish and Arab demands in Kirkuk; most of bombing victims there are Kurds (M)

People here like to say that they live in the county where the country begins. Forty miles north of New York City, Putnam County still represents a sharp departure from the suburbs separating it from the city -- a tableau of roads twisting through woodland, stony ridges rising up from the Hudson River and charming villages like this one. But in the last decade, with development pressures rippling up from Westchester County, that has begun to change. Big-box stores have arrived, along with a spate of McMansions and the occasional town house community. As a countermeasure, the County Legislature recently voted unanimously to place a bond referendum on the ballot in the fall that would allocate $20 million to preserve open space.

AT 8 a.m., Elly Hushour hoists a bright blue flag with a white goat over her Greenmarket stand. Until last year, Ms. Hushour, 47, a farmer from Nazareth, Pa., sold cheese and yogurt made from the milk of her Saanen goats, the same breed that Heidi of the storybook tended for her grandfather in the Swiss Alps. Then she recognized a growing market for goats themselves, or rather, goat shanks, shoulders and so on.

Near the big-bang finish of ''Batman Begins,'' the title avenger, played by the charismatic young British actor Christian Bale, scoops up a damsel in distress, played by Katie Holmes, and spirits her away to his lair. Watching this scene, it was hard not to think how nice it would have been if Batman had instead dispatched the infernally perky actress, whose recent off-screen antics have threatened to eclipse this unexpectedly good movie. As it happens, the most memorable rescue mission in ''Batman Begins'' isn't engineered by the caped crusader, but by the film's director, Christopher Nolan. ''Batman Begins'' is the seventh live-action film to take on the comic-book legend and the first to usher it into the kingdom of movie myth. Conceived in the shadow of American pop rather than in its bright light, this tense, effective iteration of Bob Kane's original comic book owes its power and pleasures to a director who takes his material seriously and to a star who shoulders that seriousness with ease. Until now, Mr. Bale, who cut his teeth working with Steven Spielberg on ''Empire of the Sun'' almost two decades ago, has been best known for his scarily plausible performance in ''American Psycho,'' an intellectual horror movie that now seems like a prelude to this one: think American Psycho redux, this time in tights.

Pripyat Journal on strange vacation package now available to tourists who wish to see Chernobyl exclusion zone, eerily abandoned scene of worst civilian disaster of nuclear age; infamous power plant that exploded in April 1986, spewing radiation across broad region of Ukraine and beyond, became dark symbol of Soviet rule, conjuring memories of incompetence, horror and sickness; zone's officials say chaperoned tours do not carry health risks because radiation levels have always been uneven and most of zone is far cleaner than in 1986; visit with group of Finns in their twenties described; photos (M)