Crane Collapse In Manhattan Kills Crane Operator

Please look upward while going about your daily life in New York. The life you save may be your own.

A crane toppled and collapsed onto a high-rise apartment building on East 91st Street on the Upper East Side on Friday morning, tearing off balconies and raining broken brick and shattered glass onto the street below, in the second Manhattan crane collapse in two months. At least one person, the operator of the crane, who was sitting in the cab as the structure fell, was killed, officials said.

The crane, which was apparently being used for a construction project at 354 East 91st Street, snapped apart moments after 8 a.m., sending the top piece onto the white-brick residential building at the southwest corner of 91st Street and First Avenue.

ConEd Sues New York City

Can we sue ConEd?

Consolidated Edison has sued New York City and a contractor, contending they contributed contributing to the explosion of one of the utility’s steam pipes in Midtown Manhattan last summer that killed one person, injured dozens of others and displaced thousands more.

Con Edison alleged that a sealant used by Team Industrial Services, a contractor hired by the utility to prevent leaks, clogged steam traps designed to remove condensation from steam pipes. With the traps not working, water built up and helped trigger the explosion, according to the complaint, which was filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Was That Stock Tip Legit?

Do you trust your friends to provide you with sound investment advice? Well, some people did and now they are paying a hefty financial price:

A former stock trader was charged on Thursday with duping friends out of $16 million over six years by luring them into various investments, most of which never existed.

Instead of investing the money his friends handed him, the ex-trader, David Holzer, 58, spent it on luxuries, including a $300,000 Aston Martin, a gold Cartier watch with diamonds and bracelets from Hermès. He spent the money so quickly, prosecutors said, that he now has only $375 in one bank account and just over $1,000 in a brokerage account.

Choose your friends wisely.

Double-decker Buses Could Make Comeback

Who says what's old can't be made new again:

Double-decker buses — a fixture of the streetscape in London and other international cities — could be making a comeback in New York City. Officials at New York City Transit said today that the agency was considering bringing back double-decker buses, similar to ones that used to run in the city decades ago.

Maybe the bus prices could also decrease.

Officers In Sean Bell Case Face Departmental Charges

Keep in mind that although the officers face departmental charges, those charges have been suspended pending a federal investigation into civil rights violations:

The three detectives who stood trial in the case — Detectives Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper — were charged with “discharging their firearms outside of department guidelines. Detective Isnora was also charged with taking enforcement action while working as an undercover officer instead of letting officers who were present, and not working undercover, take control.

Lt. Gary Napoli, the ranking officer at the scene, faces internal charges of failing to supervise the operation. Sergeant Hugh McNeil and Detective Robert Knapp, of the Crime Scene Unit, were also charged: the detective with failing to thoroughly process the crime scene and the sergeant with failing to ensure a thorough processing was done.

If nothing results from the federal investigation, then the departmental charges will probably go down the drain as well.

Officers In Sean Bell Case May Be Fired

Could the officers, in the Sean Bell case, who were found not guilty by a juror face the possibility of losing their jobs. Well, that depends on what further action the police department takes:

On Tuesday, additional charges were filed accusing the three detectives and one other shooter who wasn't charged in the criminal case with firing outside of police guidelines. Isnora, who followed the men and fired first, also was charged with ''taking enforcement action while acting in an undercover capacity while other non-undercover officers were available.

In addition, the department accused a lieutenant of failing to properly plan the undercover operation, and two more detectives of failing to properly process the crime scene.

The officers are to be tried by an administrative judge, with private attorneys defending the officers. The trial commissioner makes recommendations to police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has final say. It is unclear when proceedings would begin.

Do you think the officers should be fired?

New York City's Subways Out Of the Loop

If you depend on New York City's Subways, you may want to know about the following problems:

One of every six elevators and escalators in the subway system was out of service for more than a month last year.

The 169 escalators in the subway averaged 68 breakdowns or repair calls each last year, with the worst machines logging more than double that number. And some of the least reliable escalators in the system are also some of the newest, accumulating thousands of hours out of service for what officials described as a litany of mechanical flaws.

Two-thirds of the subway elevators — many of which travel all of 15 feet — had at least one breakdown last year in which passengers were trapped inside.

Noose Display To Result In Felony

It's been a long time coming but thank God it is here:

Gov. David A. Paterson says he has signed legislation that will make it a felony to display a noose as a threat. The crime will be punishable by up to four years in prison.

The noose, a symbol of lynchings in the Jim Crow South, has made news in other cases around the country, including in Jena, La., where six black teenagers were charged with beating a white student. The beating happened after nooses were hung from a tree on a high school campus there.

This will help teach those, who engage in this type of behavior, how despicable and vile their acts are.

Removing Children From Abusive Homes

We have to learn from our mistakes:

New York City has enacted a tough new policy that allows the authorities to remove newborns from their parents’ homes in all but an “extraordinary instance” if the parents previously had children taken from their custody and their case is still open.

John B. Mattingly, the city’s commissioner of children’s services, announced the more aggressive approach during a City Council budget hearing on Tuesday at which he faced questions on his agency’s role in the death of Pablo Paez, an 11-week-old boy whose older sibling had been removed from the same home at age 3 months, a year earlier.

The children’s mother, Kiana Paez, a 23-year-old drug addict, was charged on April 25 with beating Pablo to death. Child welfare workers had been in frequent contact with Ms. Paez since the first baby was placed in foster care because of violence in the home, but they did not try to remove Pablo.

Mr. Mattingly said that the new policy was influenced by the Paez case, but that he had been considering the changes — a natural outgrowth of other changes he had made at the agency — for a long time. The policy, which had been toughened in 2006, was officially revised again on April 21, 18 days after the baby’s injuries were discovered.

School Bus Safety Officials Indicted

Some people believe everything is for sale these days including the safety of our children:

Four City Department of Education employees were charged in a federal indictment on Tuesday with soliciting bribes in exchange for promising preferential treatment, including on safety inspections, to bus companies that serve thousands of special education students.

The indictment said the bus companies, which were not named, had paid bribes from the mid-1990s to 2007 for a variety of reasons, among them to get reduced fines for safety violations and advance notice of inspections that were supposed to be unannounced. The Education Department said bus safety was not compromised by the bribes.

We cannot be certain that bus safety was not compromised by the bribes. Violations were being overlooked.

Spitzer Prostitute Folly To Plea

Get this! One of the people associated with the prostitution ring that brought down Eliot Spitzer is expected to plead guilty. Prosecutors, however, are undecided as to whether Spitzer himself should be charged:

Several former prosecutors and defense lawyers said the movement toward resolving the charges against Ms. Lewis and her codefendants suggested that prosecutors were nearing a decision on whether to prosecute Mr. Spitzer. The pleas do not indicate clearly what decision the government might reach, they said.

Why is that decision so hard?

I Love New York

How does one express their feelings for New York? Why, with a symbol of course:

Last week, the state tourism board, Empire State Development, announced a retooled marketing campaign centered on the famed slogan and design, this time with an emphasis on gas-sipping day trips and short vacations for residents of the region.

But inherent in the campaign is a drive to reclaim the symbol itself, which, like the Playboy logo, has become devalued, as marketers term it, through overuse. This year, state officials plan to introduce new tools — like a difficult-to-reproduce hologram — that will assure consumers that a product is officially licensed by New York State.

For those who sell unofficial “I ♥ NY” products, officials plan to warn and then penalize offenders.

Scammers will face consequences. Don't buy junk merchandise.

Repubs Wants Fossella Resignation

The Republican Party sees Vito Fossella as a liability due to his scandalous behavior and they would like for the pathetic representative to resign:

Representative Vito J. Fossella, the Staten Island Republican who was arrested on drunken-driving charges in Virginia last week, acknowledged on Thursday that he had fathered a daughter, now 3, in an extramarital affair.

The five-term congressman identified the woman with whom he had the affair as Laura Fay. She is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel whom he apparently called after he was taken into custody early May 1, saying he was on the way to pick up his sick child. The police said his blood-alcohol level at the time was more than double the legal limit, and he faces a mandatory five days in jail if he is convicted.

The repubs will probably get their way.

Uma Thurman Testifies Against Stalker

We have to protect society from the deranged.

Uma Thurman told jurors how Jack Jordan, who is on trial on charges of stalking her on and off over a period of two and a half years, came to the door of her trailer on Prince Street in SoHo late on the night of Nov. 8, 2005, where she was making the movie “My Super Ex-Girlfriend.” He identified himself to one of Ms. Thurman’s assistants as a friend of Ms. Thurman’s parents, she said.

What a harrowing experience for Ms Thurman.

Gee, No Gun Control

Do gun makers sell weapons directly to criminals?

A federal appeals court threw out New York City’s longstanding lawsuit against the gun industry on Wednesday, ruling that a relatively new federal law protects gun makers against such suits.

The appellate ruling killed perhaps the boldest avenue by which the city has sought to stem the flow of illegal guns into New York: a claim that gun makers and distributors have knowingly flooded illicit, underground markets with their weapons.

Criminals have a way of getting guns from law abiding citizens. It is called stealing them---that is what criminals do.