Robert Anderson

The Pataki administration failed to hold onto the Farley Post Office in the last moments of 2006, but negotiations are continuing, this time under Governor Spitzer's purview. In late December, Charles Gargano, then-chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, announced a last-minute blitz to renew the option that the state had to buy the building as part of its Moynihan Station conversion.

Robert Anderson, a spokesman for the United States Postal Service, said no agreement had been reached by the Dec. 31 expiration date, but that there were no plans to try to sell the building to anyone else.

- Matthew Schuerman

The Independent publishes newly-discovered evidence that a Polish barber named Kosminski was the serial murderer who killed 5 prostitutes in London in 1888, and says he was never questioned because he was insane.

The story turns on a renovated police crime museum that is not open to the public:

One of the new exhibits is a book, called The Lighter Side of My Official Life, the memoirs of Dr Robert Anderson, who was an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard at the time of the Ripper investigation. The book was handed down through [the] family [of Donald Swanson, the lead investigator in the case]. Swanson names Kosminski in handwritten notes in that book, which are in the margins, across the bottom of the page and on blank pages inside the book.

Little Fugue, by Robert Anderson. Ballantine, 384 pages, $24.95.  read more »