Avi Schick, the prosecutor-turned-development official who has served as downstate president of the Empire State Development Corporation for the past two years, will leave his job this week. Mr. Schick emailed a letter on Monday evening to colleagues announcing his departure (a copy of the letter is below).

Mr. Schick's departure comes more than seven months after the Paterson administration announced he would resign his position; in May, the state announced he would leave in September.

At the ESDC, Mr. Schick, once a top prosecutor in the state attorney general's office under Eliot Spitzer, oversaw state involvement in projects such as Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, the development of Governors Island, and Columbia University's West Harlem expansion.  read more »

ALBANY—The state teacher's union is sitting on the sidelines as other labor groups get involved in the fight for the State Senate leadership.  read more »

The head of a union representing 25,000 carpenters in New York City just issued a statement backing Caroline Kennedy for Hillary Clinton's U.S. Senate seat, saying she’s “intelligent, easy to communicate with and grasps our issues.”  read more »

Barack Obama will choose Leon Panetta to run the C.I.A., delivering a surprise "even to some Obama insiders."   read more »

ALBANY—Sheldon Silver is displeased with a report today which said New York's legislature is "still broken."

While most of the Brennan Center's rhetoric was focused on the possibility of change in the State Senate, Dan Weiller, a spokesman for the assembly speaker, issued this statement in response:  read more »

Troubled singer Amy Winehouse is reportedly in talks with British fashion house Fred Perry to design her own clothing collection and has already begun sketching some of her ideas. [Vogue UK]

Gedalio Grinberg, chairman of the Movado Group (where he had worked since the '60s), died on Sunday in Manhattan at age 77. [WWD]

Women who have scored invitations to the inaugural balls have started "registering" their dresses on special websites to make sure no one else will be wearing their gown. [NY Daily News] 

Designer John Galliano has been appointed a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, previously bestowed upon Yves Saint Laurent and Azzedine Alaia. [WWD] 

Some obvious fashion casualties of the recession: young designers, celebrity lines, very expensive designer labels with limited distribution, and $20,000 handbags. [WWD] 

ALBANY—Representative Steve Israel's travels in the last few weeks have taken him to Baghdad, Germany and now: Hornell.  read more »

Some bright news on an otherwise gray Monday afternoon: this coming weekend, Neil Patrick Harris will be hosting Saturday Night Live! We used to dream about Mr. Harris when he played Doogie (in fact, yours truly mentioned this in print a few years ago). We loved his speed-freak cameos in Harold and Kumar. These days we laugh so hard we cry at his portrayal of Barney Stinson, the over-the-top-but-still-believable womanizing scotch-swiller-catchphrase-maker on CBS's How I Met Your Mother. (And yes, yes, we know Mr. Harris plays for the other team.) Fingers crossed he drags HIMYM co-star Jason Segal on for a few sketches. The two are known to do duets now and then; we'd like to see what they'd whip up with Andy Samberg for a digital short. ‘Jizz In My Pants' part two?

At 9 a.m. this morning City Council candidate Ken Mitchell filed 2,000 signatures to get on the ballot for the February 24 special elections, his campaign announced in a public statement.  read more »

Are you ready for all Lincoln all the time? Do you worry that you’ll need some help in cutting through the bicentennial blather? If you’re looking for a quick refresher (as opposed, say, to the two-part, six volume mythologizing biography Carl Sandburg completed in 1939), try The Best American History Essays on Lincoln (Palgrave Macmillan, $16.95), a selection of 11 essays from the past 60 years edited by Sean Wilentz for the Organization of American Historians. All the essays (with the exception of a chapter from Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore) are by eminent professors of history, among them Richard Hofstadter, David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin and James M.  read more »