Larry King is announcing the end of his show tonight, according to a posting on his website. He won't be leaving CNN and will "continue to contribute... with periodic specials." Click through for statement, speculation, and CNN memos.

Albert Trummer, co-owner of the Chinatown bar Apotheke, was arrested by fire marshals Sunday for setting liquor aflame on his bar. Flaming bars outlawed in New York? If only there were some humor to be found here. [NYT. Pic via]

As of June 13, the 85-year-old Depression-era comic strip will no longer be syndicated in newspapers by broke ass Tribune Media Services. The company will instead focus on rebranding Annie for the Age of the iPad. [AP, pic]

The rise of video cameras — surveillance or cellphone — means that loose cannon cops, who won't do things 'by the book' no matter what the chief says can no longer mete out their own brand of vigilante justice. [AP]

Nothing embodied the gaudy excess of New York's restaurants more than Central Park's Tavern on the Green. But today the restaurant is up-for-grabs and no one seems to be grabbing.

For as long as mankind has occupied New York, there have been two Starbucks locations on Astor Place, a block away from each other, which occasioned many predictable remarks. No more! This means everything.

Here is a humdinger of a bit of gossip actual confirmed news: Liz Smith, octogenarian gossip queen of New York, has been dropped as a New York Post columnist. Sad, but expected.

"This is William Kristol’s last column." What a shock! Is January over already?

Aw, we're almost misty-eyed. In an hour, the Bush White House will release a damning report on a Friday afternoon for the very last time.

Our lives will be so empty without George W. Bush to push around. Right?

Is this the end of monkey ads? The nonprofit Ad Council—which makes all those famous public service ads you see everywhere—has agreed not to use any more "great apes" in its ads. No chimpanzees or orangutans! Not only that, but the CEOs of dozens of major advertisers and ad agencies sit on the Ad Council's board, and PETA is promising to urge all of them to stop with the ape ads, too. Kiss your precious CareerBuilder monkeys goodbye!

Shoe leather reporters get your tissues out. There's word that Len Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, is going to accept a buy-out. Don't let the hairline fool you: He's old. At 65, he's just five years younger than Ben Bradlee was when he retired from the title. He's also just not that into the whole internet thing, and there's some pressure on the business end for an executive editor who knows how to Google. The buyouts don't start until mid-April, but Downie might have to make an announcement to settle the rumors. FishbowlNY is suggesting Jim Brady, the washingtonpost.com editor, as a replacement, which would make sense if the paper wants to be more webby. Other bandied names for the position: New York Times DC chief Dean Baquet, and Marilyn Thompson—who went back to the Post from the Times over the McCain story debacle.

The Moonie-owned right-wing-allied Washington Times has changed its editor, and now its styleguide. Some of the seriously loaded code languge is no longer the Times standard! So long "homosexual 'marriage'"! Farewell "illegal aliens"! We thought we'd be in the cold ground before the Washington Times recognized the term "moderate." Alas, times change. White supremacist-sympathetic editors-in-chief get ousted. Times newsroom email, via CQ, after the jump.

There goes the neighborhood. Rupert Murdoch is planning to move his Wall Street Journal newsroom from the financial district where it's lived for over 100 years to News Corp's headquarters on Sixth Avenue. The Midtown Journal just doesn't have quite the same ring, though. We predict singing rumble sequences in the cafeteria between WSJ staffers and their new Fox and New York Post siblings. Manhattan's newspapers have either died or migrated uptown over the century, choking the neighborhood around Rockefeller Center, but the Journal was a holdout of a bygone era. After the jump, a stroll around New York's former press nucleus.

Is this the end of days? We're hearing that Interview editrix Ingrid Sischy left the title yesterday. She was a downtown publishing fixture, if a minor one, known mainly for her famous friends from an earlier New York era, like Robert Mapplethorpe, Calvin Klein, Elton John and the Versaces. True to the mission of the magazine, she interviewed them at length, often at excessive length. More background, after the jump.

Sophie's, that dive bar on E. 5th Street that never carded and where I once made out drunkenly on the pool table with a woman who, at the time, I was convinced was Catherine Keener but in fact was just this girl who lived on the floor below me in my dorm , is closing in the New Year. Boo! [NYP]