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Bloomberg: Crane Collapse ‘Intolerable’

Photo: Getty Images

REAL ESTATE

• “You can rest assured, I don’t care how much the industry says, ‘Oh you’re slowing down our construction or your jobs.’ First comes safety, and then we can talk about the rest,” Mayor Bloomberg said angrily in a press conference this morning. “And…I don’t need any developer or union leader or anybody else telling me about the consequences of slowing things down. Nobody wants this economy to grow more than me. But we’re not going to kill people.” [NYP]

• The Donnell Library will be razed this week to make room for a hotel, and its longtime patrons are sad. “I cried,” said Esther Hautzig, 77, who worked two days a week at the information desk. [NYT]

• The New York City Housing Authority plans to raise rents between 5 and 15 percent for some tenants and eliminate hundreds of community centers and resident programs. [NYT]

FINANCE
• Wall Street luminary John Marshall, a retired professor who spent decades teaching at business schools, has been accused by the SEC of insider trading. “I am just shocked beyond belief,” says one of his former students. “If he wanted to, he could have made money — lots of money — years ago.” [NYT]
• There might be fewer than expected Wall Street layoffs. The number is still high, at 25,000, but it’s not as bad as the 36,000 the that State Labor Department estimated. [DealBook/NYT]

MEDIA
• Former Details and Star editor-in-chief Joe Dolce can thank author James Frey for finding him a new business partner. [NYP]
• Jessica Yellin, who worked for MSNBC in 2003 and now reports for CNN, said that NBC journalists had been “under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation.” General Electric disagrees. The company “has never, and will never, interfere in the editorial process at NBC News,” a spokesperson said in a statement. Yellin’s rebuttal? “I did not mean to leave the impression that corporate executives were interfering in my daily work.” [NYT]
Portfolio is working on a story about Bonnie Fuller, and Keith Kelly, for the life of him, cannot understand why. [NYP]

LAW
• The lawyer for a bedbug-bitten Fox News employee who is suing the landlord and maintenance company of 1211 Sixth Avenue blamed his client’s condition on foreigners. [NYO]
• The plaintiffs’ lawyers bringing the shareholder class-action suit over the collapse of commodities brokerage Refco, Inc., have been receiving assistance from an unlikely source: Refco’s former chief executive officer. “I can’t think of another time a CEO who led a massive fraud agreed to sit down with the investors he victimized,” one of the lawyers said. [Law.com]
• Art litigation is becoming an increasingly popular specialization, since “lawyers tend to get involved where there is lots of money involved, and they also tend to get involved when people get into disputes.” [Law.com]

Bloomberg: Crane Collapse ‘Intolerable’