Welcome, bidders
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority surprised many this week when it agreed to let open bidding decide who might develop the space over its West Side rail yards. Until recently, most insiders assumed that Albany and City Hall had greased the skids for a publicly subsidized New York Jets football stadium and convention facility.

Bad news for hockey
The National Hockey League canceled the remnants of its 2004-2005 season yesterday. It's frustrating that the NHL did so after it and the players union failed - after a rancorous five-month lockout and 835 canceled games - to bridge a mere $6.5-million gap between a salary cap the NHL wanted and a sum the union said it was willing to accept.

Class action: a good reform
It's a lead-pipe cinch that the way class-action lawsuits are handled will change for the better now that the Senate has passed a bill to make most of them federal cases. The House still has to pass the bill, but it has repeatedly approved class-action reform in various guises and will again - possibly as soon as next week. The White House can hardly wait to sign this element of its tort reform agenda into law, so Senate approval essentially clinched the deal.

Bloomberg has a shot if he skips the field
His rising "favorability" poll numbers notwithstanding, Mayor Michael Bloomberg must realize that his support for the increasingly contentious West Side stadium project is putting his re-election at risk.

Short takes
Civil union

LI needs to reduce property taxes
Property taxes are too high. Not simply Nassau county property taxes, which make up a relatively small portion of the total property tax burden and haven't increased for two consecutive years, but school property taxes, which account for 60 to 65 percent of the total tax burden, and town and village taxes, which make up the remainder.

A mature love fit for a king
Ifelt happy for Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles when they announced their engagement last week.

Punchlines
David Letterman, "Late Show with David Letterman": "George Bush is requesting an additional $82 billion for war funding. Of course, that would include Afghanistan, Iraq and a Country to be Named Later."

U.S. needs others to help on N. Korea
When the North Korean government announced last week that it now possesses nuclear weapons, the Bush administration simply expressed the hope that the Communist regime in Pyongyang would reconsider its refusal to participate in the upcoming session of the six-party talks on its nuclear program - a series of occasional meetings involving China, Japan, Russia and South Korea as well as North Korea and the United States.

A new AIDS strain, the same old tune
Scientists say that the recently discovered AIDS "superbug" could be the beginning of a new cycle of deadly AIDS infections.