In the wake of a recent cab driver shooting in NYC, the head of New York’s Taxi federation had some blunt words for cab drivers.

“Profile your passengers, it’s very important,” Fernando Mateo, president of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, said yesterday. “I don’t care about racial profiling. You know sometimes it‘s good that we are racially profiled because the God’s-honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics. So if you see suspicious activity, you know what, don’t pick the person up.”

Here’s the video. Al Sharpton of course had to weigh-in on the matter. He predictably condemned both the shooting and call for racial profiling by the Taxi federation.

How ballsy is this? The Ground Zero mosque builders have applied for a $5 million grant from the 9/11 NYC redevelopment fund. Not only do they want to disgrace Ground Zero with a big ass mosque, they want money from NYC’s 9/11 fund to help pay for it.

The audacious move stands to reignite the embers of a divisive debate that dominated headlines surrounding the ninth anniversary of the attacks this fall, say people vested in the issue.

The application was submitted under a “community and cultural enhancement” grant program administered by the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation (LMDC), which oversaw the $20 billion in federal aid allocated in the wake of 9/11 and is currently doling out millions in remaining taxpayer funds for community development. The redevelopment board declined to comment on the application (as did officials from Park51), citing the still ongoing and confidential process of determining the grant winners.

While news of the application has not previously been made public, developer Sharif El-Gamal outlined it in closed-door meetings, according to two individuals he spoke with directly. The thirtysomething, Brooklyn-born El-Gamal is motivated more by real estate ambition—one of these sources describes him as aspiring to be the next Donald Trump—than Islamic theology or ideology.

How much you wanna bet Mayor Bloomberg sees to it they get it?

Some shops in New York City have begun accepting euros and other foreign currency as payment for merchandise.

“We had decided that money is money and we’ll take it and just do the exchange whenever we can with our bank,” Robert Chu, owner of East Village Wines, said.

The weak U.S. dollar has brought scores of European tourists to NYC with money to burn. Obviously, the falling U.S. dollar is not a good thing, but the reality is that we now live in a global economy.

Even if the dollar were strong it makes good business sense to accept euros anyway if that’s what your customers are carrying.

Not far from Chu’s downtown wine emporium, Billy Leroy of Billy’s Antiques & Props said the vast numbers of Europeans shopping in the neighborhood got him thinking, “My God, I should take euros in at the store.”

-Chris Jones

The Smoking Gun has an actual copy of the 16-count indictment against former NYC Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Unlike many pundits, I really don’t think Kerik’s legal troubles are gonna have a negative effect on the Giuliani campaign.

Even if Kerik is guilty of the crimes that are alleged, he still did an excellent job at every position to which he was appointed. The only thing Giuliani deserves criticism for is for is not conducting a more thorough investigation of Kerik before recommending him to head up Homeland Security.

-Samantha Giles

Federal prosecutors will ask a grand jury today to indict Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner, on charges that include tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy counts.

The grand jury, convening in Westchester County, has heard evidence about Mr. Kerik for about a year as part of a broad federal inquiry into a variety of issues, including his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations from a contractor who was seeking a city license.

Prosecutors are also seeking to charge Mr. Kerik, 52, with failing to report as income more than $200,000 in rent that they say was paid on his behalf to use a luxury Upper East Side apartment where he lived with his family around the time he left his city post.