Baby may have died from being dropped by older brother

The 23-day-old infant found dead in his East Harlem home may have been accidentally dropped by his 6-year-old brother, police sources said Saturday.

Deion McNeil was found unconscious by his mother, Ebony McNeil, 31, in their Washington Houses apartment at around 7:20 p.m. on Friday, cops said.

The mother told authorities she awoke from a nap and found the door to the baby's room, which he shared with his two siblings, ajar. But only her 18-month-old daughter was there, she told them.

She rushed to the kitchen, where she found her older son cradling his baby brother, who had a gash on his forehead, sources said.

The 6-year-old's white T-shirt was stained with blood, authorities said. Blood was also found on the family's coffee table, the sources said.

Deion was unresponsive when emergency responders transported him to Metropolitan Hospital, where he died 45 minutes later.

The boys' mother told investigators her older boy loved to hold and kiss Deion.

Neighbors told The Post the baby was often cared for by his grandparents, who share the apartment with Deion's mom.

"I couldn't believe it — I'm still in shock," said one neighbor, who called the grandparents "beautiful decent people."

The medical examiner will determine the infant's cause of death.

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Study says fairy tales too bleak for kids — but that’s what they need

It's not easy being the mom or dad of a fairy-tale character. As a recent study in the British Medical Journal concluded, "risk of parental death was five times higher in children's animated films compared with dramatic films for adults.

In fact, the BMJ found that on-screen deaths were generally more likely to occur in children's movies than in grown-up ones.

Using regression analysis, the article's British and Canadian researchers note:

"Common causes of death in children's animated films included animal attacks and falls (intentional or not), while in comparison films common causes of death were gunshots, motor-vehicle crashes and illnesses. Notable early on-screen deaths included Nemo's mother being eaten by a barracuda four minutes and three seconds into 'Finding Nemo,' [and] Tarzan's parents being killed by a leopard four minutes and eight seconds into 'Tarzan.' " "The Lion King" and "Bambi" give those a run for their money.

If you think those are bad, be sure to go back and read the original "Grimm's Fairy Tales." "The original edition was not published for children or general readers," says Jack Zipes. Zipes, who just authored a new translation of the original, told a public-radio interviewer the tale of a boy who kills his younger brother. Then the boy is stabbed by his mother, who leaves another child in the bath. That child drowns, the mother kills herself and the father is so distraught he too dies.

Part of what makes the Pixar films so great, and heirs to the fairy tales that came before them, is that they understand that kids grow by grappling with emotion.

"It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families," according to Zipes.

For that matter, Bible stories can be pretty frightening too, but kids are exposed to those less and less.

So, should we stop letting kids watch this murder and mayhem? The authors of the BMJ study warn that "Exposure to on-screen death and murder could have deleterious and long lasting effects on children, especially young children. Recent evidence suggests that media exposure to real life traumas (such as terrorist attacks) can trigger symptoms of post-traumatic stress among children . . . In one experimental study, children exposed to fictional on-screen depictions of death reported increased worry about the occurrence of similar events and increased avoidance of situations relevant to those events."

The truth is that most American kids today lead such sheltered lives that movies (and books) are the only times they are exposed to tragedy. It is pretty unusual to have a parent, let alone a sibling, die before children reach adolescence. Life spans are longer and less violent, and child mortality is much lower than it has ever been.

Yet children's programming has gotten softer and softer. It's hard to learn anything from "Dora the Explorer" besides "it's important to share" and don't take things that don't belong to you. ("Swiper! No Swiping!") Strong emotions are immediately smoothed over.

"WALL-E"Photo: Everett Collection

These transition easily to the safe tween shows on the Disney Channel, which rarely go deeper than "be nice to unpopular kids" and "don't use drugs."

Part of what makes the Pixar films so great, and heirs to the fairy tales that came before them, is that they understand that kids grow by grappling with emotion. "Toy Story," "Up" and "Wall-E" all have moments of profound sadness that make them resonate with children more than bland encouragements. The studio's new film this year, "Inside Out," promises to confront these emotions head on, by personifying them in a little girl's head.

Just because we live in a safer, more healthy world doesn't mean children don't benefit from learning how to deal with tragedy. Dealing with pain, loss and fear are lessons like any other — as important as sharing and tolerance.

Where else are they going to see depictions of honor in the face of tragedy, of independence, of true compassion, of bravery? When they do finally confront danger or illness or death, these movies will at least give them a sense of what's expected of them.

Life is sometimes a fairy tale; just the classic kind.

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De Blasio’s ‘reforms’ will keep more NYers dependent on taxpayers

What's the problem with the city's welfare-to-work program? If you ask L. Daneek Miller, chair of the New York City Council's civil service task force, it's that people got jobs.

"It's a broken system that placed low-skilled workers in low-wage jobs," he thundered at a recent hearing.

Instead, Miller supports Mayor de Blasio's plan to shift low-skill workers into higher paying jobs, through the magic of municipal statism for social services. Wall Street, Madison Avenue and the city's growing tech sector will foot the bill.

It all sounds perfectly reasonable — if it wasn't so wrong.

Experience shows us that more government training does not guarantee better jobs, and it increases the number of people living off taxpayers while they look for the "right" employment.

That hasn't stopped de Blasio from turning the city's massive aid agency over to Stephen Banks, a leading "welfare-rights" advocate who plans to undo welfare-to-work.

De Blasio can be more aggressively liberal on welfare because most New Yorkers are barely aware of the policies that reduced welfare rolls from 1.1 million, when Rudy Giuliani took over from de Blasio mentor David Dinkins, to the current 350,000. Giuliani's program was more aggressive about getting people back to work, reforms that were so successful that 75 percent of those placed into jobs remained off welfare a year later.

From 1994–2009, work rates for single mothers rose from 43 percent to 63 percent. Overall labor force participation rose from under 55 percent to more than 60 percent (during a period when labor force participation nationwide declined). In 2011, even after the Great Recession, child poverty in NYC was almost 10 percentage points lower than in 1993, the year before welfare reform started.

Mayor Bill de BlasioPhoto: David McGlynn

Now de Blasio is proposing to replace these successes. Reviving the hoary notion of entry-level work as representing "dead-end jobs," de Blasio suggests that, from the get-go, welfare recipients are owed more than an opportunity to work.

Enter job training and classroom learning, goodbye rapid placement into the workforce — with the Office of Workforce Development, a new layer of city bureaucracy, to implement it all.

More training and education admittedly sounds nice but has a dismal record of advancing the interests of the poor. De Blasio's plan, notes former Giuliani welfare commissioner Jason Turner, "acknowledges that welfare skills training does not work . . . then goes on to recommend a 'new and improved' version."

And while some may still remember New York's bad old welfare heyday of the late '80s and early '90s, the mayor's inspiration extends back further still, to 1933 and FDR's ill-fated National Industrial Recovery Act.

The historical lesson the "reformers" fail to note is that experience matters more than training.

In de Blasio's updated 2014 version, NYC will use its considerable purchasing power, contracts, subsidies, tax breaks and regulatory powers to remedy the "mismatch" between demand for skilled workers and the almost 25 percent of its total labor force earning less than $20,000 annually.

De Blasio's team intends to end this mismatch by creating NIRA-style "Industry Partnerships" that "will work to determine the skills and qualifications that employers need." Low-skill workers will be prepared for skilled work through better evergreen training and education.

If that fails, the city will use its "leverage" to impose "penalties" for noncompliance. Those who do comply (or perhaps contribute sufficiently to de Blasio's political coffers) will be awarded a "NYC Good Business Seal," reminiscent of FDR's NRA Blue Eagles placards. (Workforce agencies, in turn, will be reimbursed on the basis of job quality, not placement quantity.)

Nevertheless, as Mayor de Blasio's task force acknowledges, "There is very little data that can be used to validate good job quality and business practices." Hardly reassuring.

Commissioner Jason Turner at City Hall in 2000.Photo: Michael Norcia

The historical lesson the "reformers" fail to note is that experience matters more than training. Former welfare commissioner Turner explained to the City Council that, in the real world, businesses tend to hire, say, $18-an-hour workers from existing $12-an-hour employees with proven records of reliability and effort. Low-skill workers, noted Turner, need good work habits before acquiring new skills to enhance earnings.

Still, with the exception of Councilman Dan Garodnick, the Council politely ignored Turner's effective deflation of the task force's proposal. To the man who helped implement the wildly successful reforms the Council now proposes to discard, not a single question was posed.

In 1935, the NIRA was dismantled when the Supreme Court struck it down as an unconstitutional extension of federal government powers. De Blasio's gimcrack proposals may last longer but have no better chance of success.

Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College. Robert Doar is Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. From 2007–2013, he served as Commissioner of the Human Resources Administration, NYC's principle social-services agency.

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Movie reviewer Kyle Smith lies! (Says the French)

Maybe this happens to you all the time, but for me it was a first: The other day I discovered that I'm the star of a 55-page academic paper by two French economists whose work scientifically proved that I'm a habitual and systematic liar.

In "Structural Estimation of Expert Strategic Bias: The Case of Movie Reviewers," Toulouse School of Economics Ph.D. candidates Fanny Camara and Nicolas Dupuis devise a series of logarithms.

They assess the professional reputations of 35 veteran film critics (including me), whether we thought the movie was going to be good before we saw it, whether our opinions were "correct" (i.e., in accord with the majority) and whether we were telling the truth about what we actually thought.

The model meant to predict our responses didn't work on me (I'm unpredictable), so they concluded I'm a liar. Among 35 critics surveyed, I came out as the leader in "misreporting" my actual views.

It follows that I must routinely publish reviews that are the opposite of what I really think, according to the paper, because "experts may disregard noisy signals and conform to the prevalent opinion in order to pass for good predictors of the state of the world."

I've been accused of many things in 9 ¹/₂ years as a film critic, but this may be the first time anyone's ever said — much less empirically proven! — that I just tailor my views to go along with the majority. I don't recall anyone saying that when I panned "Iron Man 3," "American Hustle" or "Skyfall."

Lazily relying on a simple yardstick — the Google Trends index, which counts how many times Google users searched for a given person in a given month — the Ph.D. students also scientifically prove that I have a really high reputation. They have me at third only to the late Roger Ebert and his "At the Movies" colleague Michael Phillips.

Trust me when I say: This is the first time anyone's ever said that, either.

According to a formula that covers the years 2004-13, my Google-search-based reputation is 40, Ebert's is 1,100 — and New York Times critic A.O. Scott's is 6. Really? My reputation is six times higher than his? I look forward to the Acad♠♥émie Francaise paper that scientifically proves the genius of Jerry Lewis. Charles Manson has a lot more Google searches than I do. Does he have a higher reputation?

In the wacky logic of the paper, which is written in abstruse jargon that doesn't easily lend itself to brief quotation, high-reputation critics have the most incentive to lie. If we're not sure about a movie, we ding it, which means no one goes to see it, which means no one will know we were lying.

"The incentive for the expert to overreport the low signal to obfuscate the realization of the state of the world is stronger for highly reputed experts whose recommendation can change more dramatically the consumers' updated prior on the quality and then influence more their purchasing decisions," says the paper.

In other words, a pan from me and Americans reroute their weekends away from the multiplex. That explains why "The Lego Movie," "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "We're the Millers" flopped.

I confess I don't understand the mathematical equations in the paper, which to me look like a box of spilled toothpicks, but I apply the cold calculus of GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

The underlying assumptions of the paper are simply false. "The career of these reviewers," the authors state, "is built on their reputation for accuracy." No it isn't. I'm not a "financial analyst," a gig they seem to think is equivalent. If I were supposed to trim my sails to the box-office or critical winds, I would have been fired around about the time I said I didn't like "Sherlock Holmes."

Moreover, the paper's assessment of whether a critic is truthful depends on something called "priors," a complex yet silly formula involving the budget of a film, whether it's a sequel, how many screens it's released on and other factors, all of which are tossed into a big equation bouillabaisse that gives the authors magical mind-reading powers. They claim that these figures enable them to rule whether we critics expected to like a movie before seeing it.

Another problem: There is also no empirical way to assess the quality of a film. You can call me a liar if I say nine times five is 6,286, but not if I say "Inherent Vice" is a bore. It's just my opinion.

The paper essentially is a long-winded way of saying that since, among 35 film critics surveyed I am the one least likely to agree with the overall score on the review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes (63%, while the others were mostly in the 70s) that I must lie the most. And I'm doing it so people will love me.

That isn't my understanding of how honesty works. If you're the only one in the room who tells the Robinsons their new baby is ugly, it's more likely you are incorrigibly honest than trying to ingratiate yourself.

It sounds like a lot of effort, coming up with fake opinions and writing detailed arguments to back them up all the time.

Secretly I love all those plodding, plotless arthouse dramas I panned as tedious miserabilism? Hey, maybe I'm also a closeted Al Franken-loving liberal.

If the French students had called me, I would have told them that their thesis sounds completely exhausting. If I'd wanted to work for a living, I wouldn't have become a film critic.

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I lost half my body weight — and nearly lost myself

Andie Mitchell spent the morning of her 20th birthday baking her favorite dessert, sour cream fudge cake. Spreading the espresso icing over the chocolate sheet cake, a feeling of overwhelming longing hit.

"It Was Me All Along," by Andi Mitchell

The cake called to her.

"A new hunger appeared, unexpected and urgent, the kind that forced me to stop whatever I was doing and tend to it," she writes. "It was the kind I couldn't ignore, the one that wrestled away my power, every hidden weapon of will, and thrust me into the kitchen."

She carved one test slice and ate it with fervor.

"It felt like teetering on the ledge on the roof of a skyscraper, exhilarating and terrifying. The split second decision between balance and oblivion."

Oblivion won out. With almost sensual levels of desire, Mitchell unconsciously reached for the knife to cut another slice. And then another, and another, until she snapped out of her sugary trance and looked at the cake stand: Only a single slice remained.

She had eaten nearly all of her birthday cake.

This is the scene that opens Mitchell's heart-wrenching weight-loss memoir "It Was Me All Along," out Tuesday.

The birthday-cake fiasco was a low point — but not even close to rock bottom for the young woman who had never before experienced life as a healthily-sized person. At 200 pounds in eighth grade — ballooning to nearly 300 by her 21st birthday — she was morbidly obese and heading toward a dark future.

But being the "fat girl" was her identity; it was all she knew. So when she dropped an incredible 135 pounds, she found that being thin doesn't necessarily equate to being happy.

Thinness, she would find, was its own kind of prison.

Is that what I've become?

Mitchell, pictured here at her heaviest in 2005.

Mitchell didn't have a chance growing up — both nature and nurture were working against her. She inherited her father's 350-pound frame and his bad habits. He would start drinking in the afternoon and drink through the evening, bingeing on more food the drunker he became. She followed his lead, calling him her "food role model."

Her mother, one of eight from a poor family, expressed love by plying her family with double and triple portions of food. For Mitchell's 5th birthday, she cooked every one of her favorite foods — from spaghetti and meatballs to chicken pâté to cakes to cupcakes to pies.

Mitchell again in 2005.

Food was love personified. "She would stay home with me when no one else would, when no one else could; she let me make decisions all by myself; she promised I was in control when we were together."

The year Mitchell's father died of a stroke at age 40, 12-year-old Mitchell gained 27 pounds.

Her doctor issued a stern warning: "At this rate, I predict you'll weigh 300 pounds by the time you turn 25," he said. She tried dieting and even enlisted in two weight-loss studies, with limited to counterproductive results.

She had just become a teenager and had already outgrown most of the sizes sold in her mall's stores. For her first high school dance, she had to hire a tailor to custom-make her eggplant-colored dress.

At college, her weight skyrocketed. She ate with mindless abandon. She recalls one late night stop at McDonald's where she ordered a large fries. Only after she had finished them, she turned to her friend and said, "I don't even like McDonald's french fries."

When she returned home for the first time from school, she was a size 22, up two dress sizes from high school.

She visited the local YMCA and stood on the scale for the first time.

"I was 268 pounds. This was a really scary moment for me. Terrifying. I just saw that my dad was 350, I knew that there were future versions of me that were bigger and bigger. I was 20 years old. I didn't want to turn 21 having never felt good about myself," Mitchell tells The Post.

"I compared myself to the spectacle of people I'd seen on television shows. The half-ton man; the woman who never left her house again; the panel of obese teens on talk shows; the mother who was forklifted from her home. . . . Is this what I've become? Or at the very least, am I on my way?" she writes.

Losing the weight

Mitchell while on a trip to Costa Rica

It would be torture, but Mitchell vowed to hit the elliptical. She kept a food journal and diligently logged her caloric intake. She set a goal weight — of 140 pounds — and recited a mantra she read in O magazine: "Can you do it today? Can you make it through today without bingeing?"

Eating healthily during the day wasn't the problem — breakfasts of egg white and whole-grain bread and lunches made up of salads were easy — it was after sundown that tested her willpower.

"I felt that deep longing for sweets. Come 8 or 9 p.m., my stomach felt hollow. I wanted cake. I wanted chocolate. I couldn't watch television without looking at my lap, where I wished there could be a bowl of crunchy something," she writes.

Her sugar addiction was so acute that she would wake up with "sweaty palms, my body writhing in discomfort."

She recalls nights of insomnia because her "mind was running the aisles of a supermarket, grabbing Oreos and Lucky Charms in a fever."

To distract herself, she called friends, wrote in her diary, and took long walks in nature, which she says made her feel that she was more than just her food cravings.

By the end of that summer, she had lost 30 pounds and continued to lose weight at school. And then it was off to Italy for a semester abroad—which, for most people, would have been a diet death sentence.

But Mitchell discovered the European way of life. She began to walk everywhere. She ate only three meals a day and never snacked.

"Everyone talked about food in the most loving ways. They discussed where it came from, the ingredients. The portions were smaller, even the plates were smaller," she says. "I was more aware of what I was eating and therefore appreciated it more. I felt a fullness that was entirely new."

When she returned from her trip abroad she had lost 55 pounds. Two months after returning from Italy, she lost another 22 pounds, besting her goal weight by clocking in at 133 pounds.

Pain of being thin

She felt "attractive and desirable and valuable in a way that I wasn't before. And that made me sad."

The downsides, less obvious than the benefits at first, hit her harder.

Mitchell said she felt She felt "attractive and desirable and valuable in a way that I wasn't before. And that made me sad."

She became obsessive, counting every morsel that passed her lips and making sure that she ate nothing more than 1,600 calories a day. Going out to parties only waylaid her efforts (how could she afford the caloric amount to have a drink?) so she avoided them altogether.

When in public, she felt under watch. If she ate a salad, someone would inevitably remark with pity how hard it is to stay thin; if she opted for a slice of pizza, someone would warn her not to eat too much.

"This was a very hard time for me. Food is fun. Food makes up some of my best memories, and now I was changing my relationship to food and it changed my relationship with everyone else. It led to depression. I was like, 'This is me. I've changed.' And it really hurt my family."

Fear fueled her weight loss. She retreated into a private world of calorie counting and self-flagellation, another side of the same "obsessive coin" as her overeating.

"Everyone was like, 'You've changed.' It seemed like I was being very narcissistic and selfish. And I'm a people-pleasing person, so this is the worst thing you can say about me," she says.

She began to fight with her then-boyfriend Daniel, who also suffered from overeating.

She pictured the rest of her life in this diet prison and began to see "the sadness, the isolation, the dullness of color palette" of her new life. She calls it "the heaviness of being."
Even Mitchell's new body had to adapt. She had surgery to remove rolls of excess skin from her stomach.

"It has taken me a long time to accept that it will always be marked and scarred. They are the scars of my past, and I will always have a little insecurity," she says.

Mitchell had never been a depressive person before—the food was a numbing agent against those feelings. Now, despite losing the weight, she was sadder than she had ever been before.

Mitchell is now a healthy, and a manageable 150 pounds.

Eventually she sought out therapy and professional guidance. She began to talk about her association between food and love and was diagnosed with an eating disorder.

She also began to take her food journaling public by writing a deeply personal blog called "Can You Stay For Dinner?" There she tackled the struggles of keeping the weight off and her failures. A devoted audience shared their stories and cheered her on. The whole process became a catharsis.

Now she does not restrict any food group — but practices "everything in moderation." She works out three to four times a week and walks constantly around her Hell's Kitchen home. She sticks to healthy, homemade foods most nights but allows herself to go out to eat at least once a week. She says that she would "never live a week without a dessert."

With these concessions, she's gained 15 pounds and is a more manageable weight of 150 pounds.

"It's taken me 10 years to find a weight where I feel like, 'I'm good here.' It's the weight where you don't have to struggle. It's when you don't have to turn down an Oreo," she says.

Food is still her life's central focus — perhaps even obsession. In addition to her food-centered blog, she also recently finished the manuscript for a cookbook that will be published next year.

Though she no longer experiences food-anxiety, she does admit that she does have a fleeting sense of hunger in the face of emotional discomfort, but she knows the source now and is able to control it.

That little inner chubby girl, the middle schooler who ate her feelings, is still there, she concedes. "And probably always will be."

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Pedicab takes tourist for $165 New Year’s Eve ride!

This pedicab trip makes Uber's surge pricing look reasonable.

A man visiting the city with his family was cheated on New Year's Eve by a rickshaw driver who charged him $165 to ride about 15 blocks in Midtown, The Post has learned.

Ken Smith, 41, a Red Cross worker living in Haiti, was sightseeing in Manhattan with his daughter, Samantha, and wife, Peothong, when they took a pedicab ride from Herald Square to Rockefeller Center.

The cabby hit them with a bill for $165, illegally charging per rider and using his feet to cover his sign on which prices were printed in small type, Smith said.

"It's a rickshaw. I thought, 'How much can it cost?' " Smith said.

The driver asked for a tip, but Smith told him the fare itself was already too much.

"I felt like I was robbed," said Smith, who is originally from Wisconsin but has traveled all over Southeast Asia and Africa.

"We saw and know most of the scams all over the planet, and, sadly, we're victims to one in our own country."

Smith and his wife paid the driver, who claimed the way he calculated the fare was company policy.

"We could have taken a 15-minute trip in a helicopter," Smith said. "Then at the end, you really get socked. It's a shame. It happened to me in New York, of all places."

Smith has done recovery work in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and his wife owns a toy company in Laos.
He has lived abroad doing humanitarian work for the past 20 years.

Still, Smith said they hope to return to the city soon.

"We still love New York City," he said.

He said that he used Square, a credit-card payment app, on the driver's cracked iPhone to pay the fare and that he reported the rip-off to 311 Thursday.

Drivers are required to prominently display their rates and their company information. They are banned from per-passenger fees.

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Eateries ride the grade-y train as violations dip in 2014

City restaurants have been cleaning up their act, according to the latest Health Department figures.

Big Apple eateries received 32,392 health-code violations from January through November of 2014 — a drop of 13 percent from 36,804 during the same period in 2013, records show.

November marked the fewest offenses in two years, with inspectors dishing out only 2,418 violations.

Also, more summonses are being successfully appealed. The dismissal rate went up from 40 to 42 percent.

"This is certainly positive," said Robert Bookman, a lawyer for the NYC Hospitality Alliance and a frequent Health Department critic.

"There are fewer summonses and a lot are being dismissed," he added.

A department spokeswoman attributed the decrease to cleaner eateries, not lower standards.

"The reduction . . . is entirely due to restaurants' continued improvement in food-safety practices and sanitary conditions," said the spokeswoman Megan Montalvo.

But some restaurant owners say not much has changed.

"It's a shakedown," said the manager of a Staten Island eatery. "It looks like a nice restaurant, and they think they can take $2,000, $3,000. It's a money pit to them."

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Man wanted in alleged cop threats parties the night away

The alleged gang member charged with threatening the NYPD with copycat killings just hours after two cops were assassinated in Brooklyn spent New Year's Eve partying almost until dawn — despite being wanted for failing to appear in court, The Post has learned.

Devon Coley

Devon Coley, 18, looked groggy and puffy-eyed as he cursed and slammed the door on a reporter at his Brooklyn apartment Thursday morning.

Another young man who answered the bell and woke up Coley said the teen had returned only hours earlier from a raging party to ring in 2015.

"He didn't get in until 4 o'clock this morning," said the other man.

Detectives had tried to catch Coley at his apartment on Thursday, but he wasn't there at the time, law-enforcement sources said.

A warrant for Coley's arrest was issued when he missed a scheduled appearance in Brooklyn Criminal Court on Monday.

Coley was supposed to certify he'd done three days of community service as part of a plea bargain over his possession of a stolen Citi Bike, according to sources.

Coley was free to skip court because Judge Laura Johnson — who released him without bail after he was caught with the Citi Bike in July — freed him again on Dec. 22 when he was busted for posting a photo on Facebook that showed a gunman shooting into an NYPD squad car.

Coley posted this threatening photo and message on Facebook mere hours after a man executed two NYPD officers.Photo: Facebook

The disturbing image appeared online just hours after cops Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were gunned down the same way on a street in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section.

Prosecutors tried to get Coley locked up on $250,000 bail, and Johnson's decision to spring him without bail outraged law-enforcement officials, with the head of the state court-officers union blasting her as "unfit."

On Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio infuriated cops further by re-appointing Johnson to another one-year term on the bench.

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Paltrow pouts about haters, says divorce going great

Consciously uncoupled Gwyneth Paltrow called herself "misunderstood" in a recent interview — and dropped an ­F-bomb while describing her relationship with rock star Chris Martin.

"We've worked really f- -king hard to get to [this] point," she said of rebuilding a relationship with the Coldplay frontman and father of her two children.

"But we're very, very close, and it's so nice," the Oscar-winning actress and lifestyle guru told Marie Claire.

Paltrow and Martin even spent Thanksgiving with the kids, Apple and Moses.

"I feel like it's, in a way, the relationship we were meant to have," she said.

Paltrow, who is co-starring with Johnny Depp in the upcoming comedy "Mortdecai," hopes her kids will be "more whole and happier" because of how they've handled the divorce, she said weepily.

As for why her 10-year marriage officially went up in smoke, she insisted that "there was nothing dramatic."

"I had built my life on trying to be all things to all people, and I just couldn't do it anymore, and I really had the sense that I wasn't allowed to have needs, and I had to prove my specialness or self-worth by doing all this stuff and taking care of everybody else, and I just sort of hit a wall," she said.

Chris MartinPhoto: Faustine/startraksphoto.com

The "Shakespeare in Love" star has been put down for trying to be too perfect and for sharing out-of-touch thoughts with the public — but she says she is just "misunderstood" sometimes.

"Look, one of the disadvantages of having been famous for so long is I've said some stupid things," she explained. "But when words are put into my mouth, those are the situations I feel aren't quite fair."

She also distanced herself from the much-maligned phrase "conscious uncoupling," which she was teased for using to describe her divorce.

"You can make fun of the term or whatever," Paltrow said. "I didn't invent it."

The new issue of Marie Claire is out Jan. 13.

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Mario Cuomo was an oratorical magician who electrified liberals

Mario Matthew Cuomo believed in government.

He could also turn a phrase.

No surprise, then, that his election as New York's 52nd governor in 1982 propelled him to national prominence.

Hadn't Cuomo defeated a Ronald Reagan mini-me, Lewis Lehrman in November? For sure, it wasn't a blowout, but a win is a win, and this one came as Reagan himself was hitting his stride in Washington and government was in bad odor everywhere in America — including overwhelmingly Democratic New York.

He brought oratorical magic with him as he confidently appeared at Albany's Empire State Convention Center on Inauguration Day 1983 — propelled to the microphones by a dangerously high-decibel rendering of Neil Diamond's enduring anthem to immigration, "Coming to America."

If ever a candidate was well-paired with a campaign theme-song, it was Mario to "America."

The loyal son of immigrants, Cuomo lived the assimilation experience — traveling the poor man's route to the degrees and other credentials that made a career in high-level New York possible. But along the way, he also acquired resentments and insecurities that many believe wouldn't allow him to take the next step and seek the presidency.

There were no hesitations on that frigid Albany afternoon 30 years ago yesterday; a triumphantly joyous Mario Cuomo laid out his intention to return the Empire State to its progressive roots — to recreate a government that Teddy Roosevelt, Al Smith, FDR and Nelson Rockefeller would both embrace and applaud.

Alas.

Cuomo's immediate predecessor, Hugh Carey, had spent most of his eight years in Albany coping with the excesses of expansive government — especially with Rockefeller's barely concealed contempt for constitutional spending restrictions.

Bankruptcy is never pretty, and New York — city and state — had come closer to the brink than most appreciated. Cuomo had the additional misfortune of assuming office as America's Rust Belt decline was emptying much of upstate New York of industry, employment and opportunity.

Thus did circumstance constrict Mario Cuomo's opportunities. In the end, his grand initiative would turn out to be a doubling of the state's prison capacity — nothing to be proud of, in his view, however necessary it might have been during the crime-plagued '80s and early '90s.

But Cuomo remained a lodestar to America's left. His "Tale of Two Cities" speech (ring a bell?) at the Democratic National Convention in 1984 electrified liberals nationwide. And his eloquence while treading tricky political terrain confirmed his singularity.

But, again, he could never quite take the next step. Flirtations with the presidency in 1988 and 1992 came to nothing — nor did a widely rumored appointment to the US Supreme Court. The truth was that, for whatever reason, Mario Cuomo simply lacked whatever it is that propels candidates to the national stage — and that, let's be quite clear, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Cuomo was a rough-and-tumble player no matter what the game, and he rarely forgot a slight — to say nothing of forgiving one.

He was almost monastic in his approach to his responsibilities — up at ungodly early hours to prepare for grueling days, and rare indeed was the adversary who could best him at policy details.

And he was capable of touching acts of no-strings-attached kindness, while taking elaborate care not to let that show.

Through it all, there was Andrew, his first son and loyal ally — sworn in yesterday for a second term in Albany three decades after Mario first took the oath.

It was a nuanced relationship — some would say fraught — but the father's love for, and pride in, the son was so obvious, it barely warranted comment. And vice versa.

Think of it as the immigrant experience, embodied and ratified.

No doubt Mario did. RIP.

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