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NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – The FDNY is at a high-rise under construction in Midtown where a crane has collapsed. The call came in around 2:30 p.m. Monday at the building on West 57th Street. The top of the crane, about 75-stories up, could be seen dangling down from the luxury building. WATCH LIVE: CBS 2 | LISTEN NOW: 1010 WINS | WCBS 880 All residents of buildings on West 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues have been ordered to move to lower floors. All others have been told to avoid the area. There is no falling debris, but the...

Updated at 8 p.m. ET: NEW YORK - A suspected terrorist parked a van packed with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb next to the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan and tried to detonate it Wednesday morning before he was arrested in a terror sting operation, authorities said. The suspect, 21-year-old Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, is a Bangladeshi national who came to the U.S. on a student visa in January for the specific purpose of launching a terror attack here, authorities said. He allegedly told an undercover agent last month that he hoped the attack would disrupt...

The four areas where organized crime reigns in America -- New York City, Dirty Jersey, Chicagoland and South Florida -- also account for the lion's share of corruption convictions by federal prosecutors against local officials as reported by Joe Palazzolo for The Wall Street Journal Law Blog. The U.S. Department of Justice has released the number of corruption convictions its prosecutors have won against public servants over the last ten years across the 93 federal judicial districts into which the country is divided, and at the top of the list is New Jersey with 429 convictions. Third on the list...

It is one thing for tungsten-filled gold bars to appear in the UK, or in Germany: after all out of sight, and across the Atlantic, certainly must mean out of mind, and out of the safe. However, when a 10 ounce 999.9 gold bar bearing the stamp of the reputable Swiss Produits Artistiques Métaux Précieux (PAMP, with owner MTP) and a serial number (serial #038892, likely rehypothecated in at least 10 gold ETFs across the world but that's a different story), mysteriously emerges in the heart of the world's jewerly district located on 47th street in Manhattan, things get real...

Manhattan man to challenge Obama's appearance on the November ballotStaff reports September 13, 2012 12:00 AM A Manhattan man was scheduled to argue before state officials Thursday afternoon that President Obama's name should not be allowed on the November general election ballot. The appeal by Joe Montgomery was to be heard by The Kansas Board of Objections, a three-person body that resolves ballot-eligibility issues. The board is comprised of Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Atty. Gen. Derek Schmidt. All three are Republicans. In material filed with the Secretary of State's office, Montgomery argues that Obama's...

It wasn't a movie poster for a monster or disaster film. It was an illustration of America's worst nightmare - that an atomic bomb would strike a major U.S. metropolis. The harrowing image of the New York City skyline marred by a giant mushroom cloud splashed the cover of Collier's magazine on August 5, 1950 - at a time of heightened American anxiety. The Collier's issue was spotlighted recently on Smithsonianmag.com, which ran the same pictures that appeared in the same 1950 issue of the magazine. While recent films like The Avengers, Independence Day and Cloverfield touched on a fictional...

New York City’s diminutive apartments have long been the butt of many a housing joke, but now developers are poised to take the concept of downsizing to a new low. City planners believe that tiny studio units measuring 300 square feet – or six times the size of a standard jail cell at Rikers Island - could be the answer to a growing population of singles and two-person households. Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Monday invited developers to come up with ways to fill 335 East 27 Street with what officials are calling ‘micro-units.’

When only macadamia–based cheese will do for that late-night craving, a new luxury condo on New York’s Lower East Side delivers: the Madison Jackson has been “designed to support a vegetarian or vegan organic lifestyle,” offering prospective tenants 24-hour organic vegetarian room service, organic dry cleaning and an on-site juice bar, “for those who get kale cravings at 2 a.m.” The “vegan condo” will also offer in-house nutritional counselling, craniosacral therapy and Jivamukti yoga, which combines hatha yoga with meditation and stresses veganism and environmentalism. “We have many people who are health conscious,” Michael Bolla, the building’s developer, told DNAinfo.com....

An upper Manhattan public elementary school will be the first in the city to require that students study Arabic, officials said last week. Beginning next semester, all 200 second-through fifth-graders at PS 368 in Hamilton Heights will be taught the language twice a week for 45 minutes, putting it on equal footing with science and music courses, The New York Post reported. Principal Nicky Kram Rosen said that she selected Arabic, as opposed to more common offerings, such as Spanish or French, is because it will help the school obtain a more prestigious degree standing. “She proposed this to the...

Fred Hakim’s family owned a hole-in-the-wall hot-dog counter in Times Square that was the last of its kind when New York decided to revitalize the area in the 1990s by condemning dozens of establishments like it. It was a seven-seat, 250-square-foot piece of Edward Hopper streetscape at 229-31 West 42nd Street, which Mr. Hakim’s father had opened in 1941 and wryly named the Grand Luncheonette. Mr. Hakim (pronounced HAY-kim) tried to keep the place open as a sort of living museum of the golden age of hawkers and honky-tonks in Times Square. But the city had other ideas, and after...

UFT President Mike Mulgrew was caught “in flagrante delicto” with a guidance counselor at William Grady HS, where he taught before becoming the union’s boss, a bombshell lawsuit charges. The accusation that Mulgrew was seen having sex with a co-worker in a woodshop at the vocational school, and that it was hushed up, comes in a rambling 73-page suit filed in Brooklyn federal court last week by Andrew Ostrowsky, a math teacher at Frank Sinatra HS of the Arts in Manhattan. Ostrowsky, 35, names Mayor Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Mulgrew and the UFT, claiming the teachers union conspired with...

The Manhattan-based madam, Anna Gristina, arrested last week for running a high-end escort service was warned of an impending crackdown on escort services by her client Attorney General Elliot Spitzer in 2005. Kristin Davis, who ran a Manhattan call-girl service used by disgraced former Gov. Spitzer, said she shared a booker, Winnie Wong, with Gristina. Davis said she once spoke to Wong, who told her that Spitzer alerted Gristina to a 2005 investigation. Davis has taken and passed a lie detector test regarding her conversation with Wong in which Wong declared that Spitzer had given Gristina the warning.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein woke to a headache yesterday. One of his vice presidents chose to resign via the New York Times opinion page, saying that he no longer wanted to take unfair advantage of the firm’s customers. But the people who should go to bed worried tonight are New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Goldman’s PR crisis is New York’s fiscal crisis. Goldman veteran Greg Smith wrote that he was leaving the company after nearly 12 years because its culture was “as toxic and destructive” as he’d ever seen. He claimed that Goldman’s business model...

Consider yourselves warned. @GridlockSam, our favorite source of New York City traffic information, calls today "the gridlock alert day of the decade." It's going to be a traffic nightmare today as President Barack Obama is in town for three fundraisers, coinciding with the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. Obama is landing at JFK around 5 p.m., choppering in Marine One to Wall Street, and then attending three events in Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, and West Midtown. Each neighborhood will be subject to a traffic freeze while the President is on the move. Plus, the area...

SNIPPET: "In July, the British government warned that Al Qaeda’s exploitation of social networking websites is on the rise." SNIPPET: "The massive and multifarious network of websites and social media has presented a challenge to authorities in trying to combat it. Additionally, civil liberty concerns have conflicted with government efforts to spy on communications. Reducing terrorist activity on social media sites has been particularly difficult because users have adopted new forms of communication to conform with the new formats. Many Arabic speakers on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other sites use Arabizi, a form of colloquial Arabic written in the Latin...

A Dominican with an anti-American grudge has been busted for building a bomb in his upper Manhattan apartment to blow up a police station, sources said Sunday night. -snip- The suspect was identified through one of the al-Awlaki web sites, where he posted anti-American comments, the source said.

Downtown residents and business owners angry that their neighborhood has been occupied for two months by the Wall Street demonstration are staging a protest of the protest Monday, declaring that City Hall has let it get out of control. Angry over all-day drumming, people urinating and defecating on the streets and verbal attacks from protesters, organizers say they will rally at City Hall Monday to send officials a message. "Laws are clearly being violated and we simply want them enforced," Lower Manhattan resident Linda Gertsman told NBC New York. Exasperated residents and businesses said they are "pursuing all options," including...

NEW YORK -- An "Occupy Wall Street" protester threw a violent fit in a McDonald’s after employees refused to give him free food. Fisika Bezabeh, 27, ripped a credit-card reader from a counter and threw it at workers at about 2:30am local time Friday at the downtown Manhattan restaurant, which has become a bathroom spot for protesters.

Families Terrorized By Swarms Of Underground Insects That Invade Homes NEW YORK (CBS 2) — An insect invasion is terrorizing New York City homeowners, making life miserable, even dangerous, for many families. Parents have been forced to take extreme measures to protect their children and their homes. CBS 2’s Dave Carlin investigates the growing Upper West Side mosquito mystery: These rare mosquitoes are extra blood-thirsty and active year-round. Carlin saw some of them in a lab after they were collected in the unlikeliest of places, Bernard Lagan’s home on West 84th Street. “They trapped 150 mosquitoes in the basement in...

Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 1:37 PM EDT ... DANGEROUS TRAVEL CONDITIONS... WITH INCREASINGLY WIDESPREAD DOWNED TREES... TREE LIMBS AND POWER OUTAGES EXPECTED THROUGH 5 PM... HEAVY BANDS OF WET SNOW WILL CONTINUE TO AFFECT THE AREA THROUGH 5 PM... WITH SNOW FALL RATES OF 1 TO POSSIBLY 2 INCHES PER HOUR. EMBEDDED THUNDER WILL ALSO BE POSSIBLE. THIS WILL RESULT IN DANGEROUS TRAVEL CONDITIONS WITH SNOW AND SLUSH COVERED ROADS AND VISIBILITIES REDUCED TO 1/4 MILE OR LESS AT TIMES. WINDS WILL ALSO BE INCREASING THROUGH THE LATE AFTERNOON HOURS TO 15 TO 25 MPH WITH GUSTS 30 TO 40...