It was the Wild West in Midtown.
The "Naked Cowgirl" Patricia CruzPhoto: Reuters
Cruz, who was not injured, went to report the incident to police after the shove, sources said.
A report for harassment was filed but no arrests were made, according to sources.
The guitar-playing couple, who married in 2013, could not be reached.
Two teaching assistants were busted after they allegedly pushed a student to the ground in a Manhattan public school, authorities said.
Gwendolyn Lucas, 55, and Charlene Butler, 58, allegedly pushed the 14-year-old girl to the floor inside of the Manhattan School for Career Development on the Lower East Side at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, cops said.
"This alleged behavior is disturbing," said Department of Education spokeswoman Devora Kaye. "Ms. Lucas and Ms. Butler have been suspended without pay pending resolution of the matter."
Lucas and Butler were arrested Friday morning and charged with assault, cops said.
It remains unclear what sparked the incident.
A former Parks Department worker has sued the city for sex harassment because she was fired for complaining about "raunchy unofficial holiday parties" where her co-workers and bosses created a makeshift "stripper stage," the federal lawsuit states.
Valerie Marville was also propositioned and groped by Parks Department boss James Cafaro, 54 — including one disturbing assault in an elevator, according to her Manhattan federal-court lawsuit.
"Immediately after the [elevator] door closed, Cafaro fell to his knees, pushed up Marville's skirt and shirt and then rubbed his face against her crotch," the suit states.
When Marville — a single mom of three — pushed Cafaro away, he apologized and said he "crossed the line," according to the suit.
The suit also names a Parks supervisor, Angelo Figueroa, who referred to job training participants like Marville as "just temporary p—y."
Cafaro sued the city last year to get his job back after he was demoted following the allegations of sexual misconduct.
A former top aide to indicted state Sen. John Sampson was sentenced to three years in prison Friday for tax fraud and for conspiring with his former boss to steal $100,000 from the state Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, authorities said.
Melvin Lowe, 53, scammed the money out of the DSCC in 2010 by getting a printing vendor to send the committee a fake invoice and then forward $75,000 of the cash to himself.
Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara called the case " another example of a political figure in New York state putting his own personal greed ahead of the public's trust."
Sampson, who was re-elected to his seat in Brooklyn, still faces eight federal counts.
Gov. Cuomo will ring in his second term with a powerful message: Let freedom ring for the next four years!
In a poignant gesture, Cuomo will be sworn in at the World Trade Center site on Jan. 1, an administration source said. He will head to Buffalo afterward.
Cuomo will also have a ceremony at the Governor's Mansion in Albany on New Year's Eve.
It's unclear whether ailing former three-term Gov. Mario Cuomo will be able to attend his son's WTC ceremony.
President Obama got whiff of Havana when a guest at a White House Hanukkah reception handed him a Cuban cigar.
Obama — who only hours earlier paved the way for normalizing relations with Cuba — seemed amused by the still-embargoed tobacco, which was given to him by a Colorado man at the Wednesday party.
"Oh, nice!" Obama said after John Berzner told him it was Cuban.
Cuban cigars will be legal to bring to the US after more than 50 years of embargo, but the new regulations have not yet gone into effect.
Obama kept the gift. No word on whether he smoked it.
Mayor de Blasio acts more like the leader of "a f- -king revolution" than a city, police-union President Pat Lynch said at a recent delegate meeting.
"He is not running the City of New York. He thinks he's running a f- -king revolution," said Lynch, head of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, during the private gathering in Queens last Friday.
Lynch, who was secretly recorded, also all but ordered a rule-book slowdown, according to the seven-minute tape obtained by Capital New York.
"If we won't get support when we do our jobs . . . then we're going to do it the way they want it," Lynch said. "Let me be perfectly clear: We will use extreme discretion in every encounter."
Lynch, when referring to de Blasio, encouraged members to be wary of what he called "enemies." "Our friends, we're courteous to them. Our enemies, extreme discretion," he said. "The rules are made by them to hurt you. Well, now we'll use those rules to protect us."
PBA spokesman Al O'Leary said Thursday that Lynch was not calling for a slowdown.
"The message I got was do the job right, do the job according to the rules, which is good advice anytime," he said
WARNING: Graphic language.
Police sources say an investigation is under way after a video surfaced Thursday of what appears to be a plainclothes cop punching a youngster multiple times during an arrest on the Lower East Side.
The incident unfolded Monday shortly before 4 p.m. when several uniformed cops arrested two youngsters who they believed had beaten another boy with a cane.
While apprehending one of the boys — who onlookers say looked to be about 12 years old — the plainclothes cop rushes toward him and is seen assaulting the young suspect while assisting the uniformed officers.
Sources say the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau is probing the incident.
A deranged man who stabbed his philanthropist mother to death in their Upper East Side apartment more than three years ago was so insane he's not guilty of the horrific crime, a Manhattan jury decided Thursday.
Jonathan Schwartz grabbed a knife from the kitchen and plunged it into his mother Barbara Fischler while she slept because she'd restricted him to two packs of cigarettes a day and limited his soda intake, Assistant District Attorney Steve Nuzzi argued.
But the defense countered that Schwartz, a diagnosed schizophrenic, murdered his mom during a psychotic break. The housekeeper testified at trial that she never saw Schwartz as crazy as the day before the July 2 2012 murder.
She went into his room and saw him staring at the wall, laughing, she told jurors.
"We believe certainly our client was not legally responsible under the law," said defense lawyer Daniel Gotlin. "This way he'll be able to go to a hospital and get the treatment he needs but there's no victory here for anybody. It's a human tragedy.""
The murder of Fischler was the first in a series of tragedies for the family. Schwartz's stepfather, Burton Fischler, squandered almost all of her $5.8 million fortune on risky short-sales, according to a civil lawsuit brought by her first husband.
Schwartz's brother Kenneth committed suicide about six months after learning that his stepdad had wiped out the inheritance.
Fischler was the daughter of the late financial guru Norman Weiden and headed a charity named after him.
U.S. counter-terrorism officials backed negotiations with two prominent jihadi clerics in a failed attempt to save the life of an American hostage who was later beheaded by Islamic State militants, the Guardian newspaper reported on Friday.
Citing emails, the Guardian said talks with the spiritual leaders of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, aimed at releasing hostage Peter Kassig began in mid-October and ran for several weeks with the knowledge of the FBI.
U.S. officials were not immediately available to comment on the newspaper report.
Islamic State militants beheaded Kassig, 26, in November. U.S. President Barack Obama said at the time that the killing was "an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity".
The Guardian said the unsuccessful initiative to save Kassig, an aid worker, was the work of a New York lawyer, Stanley Cohen, who has represented Osama bin Laden's son-in-law and members of Hamas in U.S. courts.
Cohen persuaded senior clerics aligned with al Qaeda to intervene with ISIS on behalf of Kassig, the newspaper said. FBI staff confirmed that senior officials at its headquarters were kept abreast of Cohen's actions, the Guardian said.
The bureau confirmed it would pay $24,000 of expenses incurred by Cohen, the newspaper said. An FBI spokesman cited by the newspaper said the bureau's top priority was the safe return of U.S. citizens and that it rarely discussed the details of its efforts in public.
The Guardian said it had provided the Kassig family with the details of the negotiation effort before publication but that the family had declined to respond.
