June 22, 2005

It is all there on a single orange-trimmed page: a series of spending priorities that would cost New York taxpayers up to $17,371,000. And for the past week, it has circulated quietly among City Council members as they work to complete a city budget by July 1. While it was not an official document, its authorship made it unlikely to be ignored. It came from the Parkside Group, a firm that has carved out a dual role in New York politics: as lobbyist for nonprofit groups seeking city money and as a political consultant to a dozen council members, including the speaker and the Finance Committee chairman, who have a major hand in approving budget requests from those same groups.

American casualties from bomb attacks in Iraq have reached new heights in last two months as insurgents use advanced devices that penetrate armored vehicles and detonate by infrared lasers bypassing electronic jammers; May saw about 700 attacks against US forces using improvised explosive devices, highest number since 2003 invasion; 'shaped' charges also concentrate blast, causing even higher casualties; IEDs of all types caused 33 American deaths in May and at least 35 so far in June; IEDs now account for about 70 percent of American casualties; photo; graph; car bomb attacks against US forces, both suicide attacks and remotely-detonated charges, reached high of 70 in April; senior officials meeting at Fort Irwin grapple with 'very, very dangerous period;' insurgents, especially in rural areas, pack more explosives into huge bombs that, in two recent incidents, killed five marines near Ramadi and five more in Haqlaniya; expertise suggests well-trained bomb-makers, perhaps even rocket scientists from former government (M)

EVEN with his 24 restaurants in nine cities from London to Los Angeles, even with his four homes, his private jet and his television appearances -- even though he can rightfully claim the title of being the Donald Trump of the restaurant world -- Jeffrey Chodorow does not seem a very happy man. That became abundantly clear over lunch the other day at China Grill, his gaudy flagship in Midtown, as Mr. Chodorow talked about what the world thought of him at the end of a two-month sprint on which he had swelled his culinary empire with six new restaurants.

After 16-year-old Robert Lopez won a $375 national award for a piano-and-voice composition called ''Heartbreaking Purity of Flowers'' in 1991, he sent $150 of the prize money to his music school to say thanks. The director of Greenwich House Music School sent the check back. ''I don't want the money now,'' B.C. Vermeersch told the boy. ''Give it to me later, when you make a million dollars.''

''You can take the car out of the junkyard, but you can't take the junkyard out of the car,'' growls Trip Murphy (Matt Dillon), an arrogant stock-car racing champion whose supremacy has been seriously challenged by a souped-up 1963 Volkswagen Beetle and its plucky driver, Maggie Peyton (Lindsay Lohan). Trip, the designated villain in ''Herbie: Fully Loaded,'' eventually comes to believe that the upstart Beetle is demonically possessed. ''It's alive!'' he screams as men in white coats drag him into the back of an ambulance. But Trip isn't crazy. ''Herbie: Fully Loaded,'' which opens nationwide today, is a perfectly silly movie for a silly season that in recent years has forgotten how to be this silly. Directed by Angela Robinson, this latest installment in the movie-television franchise about a tiny car named Herbie with a will of its own and the temperament of a rambunctious 7-year-old knows exactly what it is and what it isn't.