Al-Shabaab Twitter avatar.

Just in time for tonight's Presidential debate on foreign policy, Al-Shabaab, a Somali group which reportedly merged with al Qaeda in early 2012 has issued series of apparently threatening tweets on its Twitter account.

The posts were directed at the British government and referenced the "extradition and trial of Sheikh Abu Hamza Al-Misri." Al-Misri is a one-armed cleric who will soon be extradited from the U.S. to Great Britain. He will face charges connected to a hostage incident that occurred in Yemen in 1998 as well as charges related to fomenting jihad abroad and attempting to create a jihadi training camp in Oregon in 2001.

After referencing Al-Misri's pending extradition, Al-Shabaab tweeted the following declarations:

We remind the British government that we're a nation that doesn't tolerate oppression & their actions will be repaid in retaliatory measure

— HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) October 22, 2012

Britainwill pay the heftiest price for its brazen role in the war against Islam and endless brutality against innocent Muslims. — HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) October 22, 2012

The nightmare that surreptitiously looms on British shores is bound to eclipse the horrors of 7/7 and 21/7 combined insha –allaah. — HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) October 22, 2012

The "horrors of 7/7 and 21/7" likely reference terrorist attacks that occurred in London on July 7 and July 21, 2005. The attacks killed more than 50 civilians and injured 700.

Al-Shabaab also addressed American Muslims:

It is time especially for the Muslims in the United States to make their stand, for such a level of vulnerability is painfully insufferable.

— HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) October 22, 2012

Al-Shabaab's Twitter bio does not mention al-Qaeda. It describes the group as "an Islamic movement that governs South & Cen. Somalia" and states it is also part of "the global struggle towards the revival of Islamic Khilaafa."

London's new ride, with access for all.

The Bloomberg administration continues to fight efforts to make all of its Taxis of Tomorrow accessible. But a funny thing just happened. Our perennial rival London just unveiled its own new version of their iconic black cabs. It just so happens to be designed by Nissan, and looks very much like our own. But as Capital New York deftly points out, theirs is different in one important one: The cabs are handicapped accessible.

While taking credit for inspiring the design, the Taxi and Limousine Commission dismisses the possibility of making our own cabs accessible, instead blaming federal regulations:

“We love the fact that the London version will be using many of the passenger amenities that we achieved in the design process with Nissan, but its design and engineering standards are radically different from the vehicles we’ll be getting here in New York City," said Allan Fromberg, spokesman for the Taxi and Limousine Commission. "For one thing, it’s not ADA compliant."

According to the TLC, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires taller cars and more gently sloping entry ramps, to accommodate more kinds of wheelchairs, scooters, and the like.

"The bottom line is that, if the goal is to provide great taxi service to everyone who wants it, we’ve got that covered between the New York Taxi of Tomorrow, and the 2,233 wheelchair-accessible taxicabs that will be available through our new accessible dispatch system that lets people ‘hail’ an accessible cab five different ways—by phone, app, email, text or web site,” Fromberg said.

And yet, the mayor has no problem lobbying Washington for stricter gun rules and looser Wall Street regulations. Why not get a waver or exemption to make it easier to make our own cabs accessible? Making the entire fleet accessible would certainly be more in the spirit of the ADA than saying it complicates matters and throwing up our hands. (To be fair, there is a dispatch system, but that sounds more like separate but equal than just good old equal.)

One Hyde Park: the tax bills will be higher.

Besides polo, Ferraris and fine dining, the wealthy elite of the world now have another common cause uniting them—London is slapping a higher stamp duty on properties valued over £2 million (it's going from 5 to 7 percent). Worse yet, those who use offshore corporations to buy must pay a 15 percent tax bill, reports The New York Times.

If the rich can't count on escaping taxes by structuring purchases through offshore corporations, what can they count on? And after all these years of evading taxes altogether! (Previously, many foreigners legally avoided paying taxes on the properties they bought by structuring deals through offshore entities.)

The Times frames the issue through the lens of xenophobia, citing a media campaign earlier this year that urged the government to collect more taxes from the wealthy foreigners who are the biggest buyers of central London luxury properties. Fortunately, the government didn't stop there: higher taxes for everyone buying luxury properties!

Worse yet for all the buyers who thought they could escape from taxes scot-free—the government will charge an annual tax of less than one percent on properties that are currently owned by offshore entities and owners will have to pay capital gains taxes when they sell. (Sidenote: the internet informs us that scot-free is from the old English sceot, a British tax that some sneaky residents were quite adept at evading).

Even with the tax jump, London still has lower taxes than Monaco, which are 15 percent. (Someone has to support the Grimaldis in their customary splendor) and real estate tax rates are fairly middle of the pack for world cities.

Naturally, the real estate community is terribly put out, particularly the developers of uber-luxury buildings like the Candy brothers.

“First we had banker-bashing, now we’ve got property-bashing,” Nick Candy, told The London Evening Standard earlier this year (as reported in The Times).

Mr. Candy and others worry that the tax will drive buyers in the market for their third, fourth, fifth or sixth "homes"/investment properties in the arms/sky mansions of other destination cities like New York.

Race you to the bottom!

kvelsey@observer.com

Kings Cross Central, one of London's newest "private estates."

Until last fall and the occupation of Zucotti Park, privately owned public spaces, or POPS, were a mystery to most New Yorkers. Ever since, people have been debating the fate of these spaces and what the city should do to ensure their accessibility at the same time to public is expected to behave themselves.

But it turns out such contentious urban space is not the sole preserve of New York. As a recent report in The Guardian reveals, our arch-nemesis London has been grappling with "private estates."

Over the past decade, large parts of Britain's cities have been redeveloped as privately-owned estates, extending corporate control over some of the country's busiest squares and thoroughfares. These developments are no longer simply enclosed malls like Westfield in White City or business districts like Broadgate in the City of London – they are spaces open to the sky which appear to be entirely public to casual passers-by.

It appears from the scale of the change that privatisation of space is now the standard price of redevelopment. There are privatised public zones across Britain, including Brindleyplace in Birmingham, jointly owned by the property firms Hines and Moorfield, and Liverpool One, owned by the Duke of Westminster's Grosvenor estate. In Exeter, Princesshay is described as a "shopping destination featuring over 60 shops set in a series of interconnecting open streets and squares". The spaces here are owned and run by the property group Land Securities and the Crown Estate, which manages the monarch's property portfolio. Land Securities also owns Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, a waterside complex of shops, bars and restaurants. Bishops Square, which includes Spitalfields market, two squares and historic streets in east London, was sold to JP Morgan asset management in 2010.

There are, of course, significant benefits to the redevelopments, though some worry that Britain's landscape is being slowly redefined by private ownership in two ways. As the Occupy protest highlighted, private owners can refuse right of entry to members of the public, closing off swaths of the city.

Critics also warn that these spaces are being designed on a corporate model that favours ornament – and high levels of footfall for retailers – while community spirit and sustainability are not a priority.

It's a long piece, and interesting for the similarities and differences between their system and ours. Still, it's good to know we're not alone in suffering the oppression of our corporate overlords.

Goldberg and Adam Driver not all that sure what they're talking about. (Roundabout Theatre Company)

The arrival of Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s revolutionary play about anger, decay and the rage simmering beneath the surface of British losers in the 1950s, revolutionized play writing and marked the beginning of a new decade of torn T-shirts and kitchen-sink misery on the London stage and the end of the well-written, elegantly staged works of Terence Rattigan, Enid Bagnold and Noël Coward. It was hailed as an important work when it opened in 1956 at the small, experimental Royal Court Theatre off Sloane Square, an alternative to the glossy productions in the West End. It was filled with hell and fury and shouted obscenities, a “protest” play unlike any slice of realism ever witnessed by refined London audiences weaned on Ibsen and Shaw. The excitement faded fast. By the time it was turned into a film of sweat, grief and brimstone in 1958 starring a young, virile Richard Burton, its time had passed. The movie was a flop and Look Back in Anger was toothless history. Mr. Osborne was credited (and cursed) with shuttering the complacency of well-ordered British dramaturgy. Time has now born witness to a desperate need to bring back Rattigan, Coward and the others. And not a moment to soon. (Revivals of the Rattigan ouevre are all the rage in London during this, his centennial birthday year, with a pristine new film of The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz in the role originated on stage and screen by Vivien Leigh, set to open next month.)

The current Broadway revival of Look Back in Anger, produced by the Roundabout at the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street, makes me wonder what the fuss was all about in the first place. Gone is the suffocating claustrophobia of a nasty slum flat in the Midlands that was home to Jimmy Porter, his emotionally scarred wife, Alison, and their lazy flatmate, Cliff, who lies around reading the Sunday papers like a lump of biscuit dough, cracking his toes. The flat has now expanded into a vast, coffin-gray cavern with no wing space and a back wall against which the three louts smash dirty dishes and toss the garbage and each other. I’ve seen ugly devastation passed off as an emotional wasteland before, but I have never seen anything this vile. Even the toilet seems to flush into the room. At one point, Jimmy dumps a can of what looks like dog food on top of Cliff and it stays there for the entire play, on the floor and sliding down the wall, with the actors stepping over and around it like dog poop. The set is littered with tomato peels, used Kleenex, empty beer bottles, broken furniture and a fouled mattress everyone sleeps on. In one corner of the stage I noticed a cabbage someone had tossed onto a pile of soiled underwear. It’s tough to concentrate on dialogue when you’re a nervous wreck about what the actors are going to step in.

Jimmy Porter is a college-educated man who uses words like “pusillanimous” and “phlegmatic” to describe people, but is too dumb to realize that the word “putrescent” describes his environment perfectly. He has never been able to hold down any job other than selling candy in a street stall. He rants against the filth around him, but as an “angry young man” it is never clear just what he’s angry about. His squalid life consists of playing roughhouse with Cliff and emotionally vandalizing his weak, masochistic wife, who is too afraid to tell him she’s pregnant. At one point, he even knocks over the ironing board while she’s doing his shirts in her slip, burning her with a hot iron and ignoring her pain. Three years married and all he does is abuse her, ridicule her for going to church, and toss his used soup tins across the room for her to clean up. They are working-class cretins, the British equivalents of Stanley Kowalski without the humor or the humanity, and “common as dirt” as Marlon Brando used to say, scratching his crotch. Enter the wife’s snobby best friend, Helena, who not only meddles but plots to rescue Alison from her marital prison. After she succeeds, Helena switches gears in an implausible character reversal, moves in with Jimmy and Cliff and takes over Alison’s place in the flat, in the slip, in the bed and at the ironing board. She’s intended to symbolize the ultimate demoralization of women who will lower their values and forsake everything they believe in for a good fuck. Now we have four pitiful, unhappy weaklings instead of three. As the play drags on to a dismal ending, there is more, but who cares?

Sloppily directed by Sam Gold, this dour revival is a two-and-a-half-hour mess. The fire and passion are missing. The acting is functional, with the exception of that of Matthew Rhys, who hails from Wales and looks a lot like Kenneth Haigh, who originated the role at the Royal Court and on Broadway. He has real talent and range, and he shows you the anguish beneath the skin, but his eloquent tirades are tiring. Sarah Goldberg, as the battered, nerve-jangled wife, is no Mary Ure. She shows you the bruises but not the sensitivity, and why are her feet black as coal and hideous black gashes across her legs? When she returns from civilization after losing her baby, her feet are still dirty. These lapses in reason may seem trivial to you, but they drive me crazy. Maybe there is no sink backstage at the Laura Pels. Look Back in Anger is like a pit bull with its teeth extracted. It’s a dated slice of postwar British culture long dead and forgotten, its whining self-indulgence grows wearisome, and it has nothing relevant to say to today’s audiences. Some things should just stay in mothballs and never travel.

rreed@observer.com

The so-called “flight-to-quality” has trophy buildings commanding high prices again, because they are low-risk—New York City is one of few places on the globe that continually shows real rent growth, according to the report. The volume of commercial investment property sales was 163 percent higher than in 2010, according to numbers for the first three quarters.

Nat Rockett, of Cushman’s capital markets group, said this is a good sign for the market as a whole—“If one asset category is rising, it will tend to bring the others with it … All boats tend to rise,” he said. Meaning those pushed out of investing in Class-A space will naturally gravitate to Class-B, and so on. Not everyone is sure that will work, however. “While the trophy sales make the aggregate figures look promising, the lower-quality assets aren’t necessarily benefiting from the increased demand … Sales may actually be dampening the market for lower-quality assets, as the high-priced sales inflate the pricing expectations,” said Ben Carlos Thypin, director of market analysis at Real Capital Analytics.

In addition, a number of recapitalizations accounted for the rise in transaction volume, and many of those were with foreign investors, such as the recent high-profile recapitalization at 230 Park, where an unnamed Korean pension fund joined Invesco in purchasing a 95 percent interest in the building. Whether or not and how much foreign capital we want flowing into our real estate market is, of course, a perennial debate.

But the “startling turnaround in sales volume and in valuation,” as Mr. Rockett called it, is good news for at least one quadrant of the city’s real estate industry. “There is always worry that fear distorts the market, but what is a distorted market?” he asked. With interest rates so low, investing in trophy real estate simply makes sense, according to Mr. Rockett. “Yields are low, but if you compare the yields that buyers are getting to Treasuries, the spreads are within historical norms,” he said.

"We have been in discussion with a number of major venues in London for some time now however nothing has been finalised," a spokesperson for the label wrote in an e-mail.

The show at the Met brought 661,509 attendees between when it opened in May and when it closed earlier this month. The museum extended its hours as the closure loomed, and packed the museum with midnight showings in the last two days of the exhibit. In the end, 17,000 visitors purchased $50 tickets for after-hour viewings.

Is it okay to apply some juvenile pranks to some juvenile pranksters? Because somebody just started doing that. PhotoshopLooter

Maximilian Wiedemann thinks celebrity corrupts and absolute celebrity corrupts absolutely.

In the print entitled "Love Me Or Leave Me Alone" by artists Maximilian Wiedemann and Tyler Shield, Lindsay Lohan is writhing on a bed, in a silk laced bra, her skin and undergarments washed in an absinthe hue. She's wearing a Liz Taylor wig, two fingers rest on her bottom lip, and the whole thing is repeated below, inverted.

And for some reason Ms. Lohan seems completely oblivious to the fact that above her four men are shown from the torso down grasping at their waists, hungrily undoing belt-buckles and ripping off their slacks.

"Well Hung," the duo's show that features the print as its centerpiece, opens this October at Imitate Modern in London.

"We picked Lindsay, not only because we’re mates, but it’s like, 'What has happened to this girl!'" Mr. Wiedemann told The Observer on the phone from Salzburg, Austria, where he had just finished dinner (Local time over there: 1:00 a.m.)

"Girls like Lindsay, deep down, they just want to be living their lives, but they can't -- because she’s a magnet."

Mr. Wiedemann and his partner, Mr. Shield, are only the latest gallery artists intent on making Ms. Lohan a true muse of serious pop-art. For an 2009 New York exhibition, "Vanity Unfair," the artist created a Warhol-heavy re-imagining of the Conde Nast title. According to The New York Times, the displays exposed "the banality of the fashion system and the social injustices that are too often overlooked by an It-bag-obsessed culture."

"Celebrity has become a currency -- brands use it, celebrities themselves use it, artists use it," Mr. Wiedemann explained. "Watches, credit cards, yachts, you name it -- girls, too. Celebrity is one of those currencies."

Mr. Shield, who has shot starlets in ways that have caused his images to be banned in over a dozen countries, focuses on the currency of violence.

"This day and age is moving very first," Mr. Wiedemann said. "That’s why Tyler shows guns, Tyler shows blood, and why I show billion dollar bills."

(At the time of the interview, the riots that ravaged London had not yet taken place.)

After yawning and inviting us for a night out when he's in New York -- "I don’t know you but I’d love to have a beer!" -- Mr. Wiedemann explained how "Well Hung" would diverge from influence of Andy Warhol.

"We are turning around the mission that Warhol had," he said. "He took mass iconography and that would appeal to the masses and then he put that into the canvas. Now, my mission -- and Tyler's mission -- is we use the media as the medium, letting it move much faster than by being in the gallery."

We agreed.

"Every medium is a gallery!" he said.

To that end, now you can look at "Love Me Or Leave Me Alone," in this blog post, below.

Thomas Dane Gallery will christen its new London space with a show by the German painter Albert Oehlen.

London dealer Thomas Dane announced today that he will open a second exhibition space up the street from his current Duke Street gallery in October. The inaugural show there will be a one-person exhibition by German painter Albert Oehlen, who previously showed at the gallery in 2005 and 2008.

The announcement that Mr. Oehlen will be the first artist to show in the new 2,500-square-foot gallery, at 3 Duke Street, comes on the heels of news that the painter had left his longtime New York gallery Luhring Augustine (which had represented his work since the early 1990’s) to show with the Gagosian Gallery.

The Dane Gallery, whose international artists include Steve McQueen, Kelley Walker, Glenn Ligon and Abraham Cruzvillegas, said in a statement that it planned to use the new space for large-scale installations and film and video work. When not being used for exhibitions, it will be open by appointment and used for private viewing.

Mr. Dane started his gallery in 2004, after working as an independent dealer and adviser for 14 years. Earlier this year, he hosted a group exhibition curated by the powerhouse Lower East Side dealer Migeul Abreu.