NEW YORK (Associated Press)– Officials say 13 people, including 10 firefighters, have been injured in a seven-alarm fire on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that burned for more than four hours before being declared under control.

Fire Chief Edward Kilduff said two elderly residents were hospitalized in critical condition with smoke inhalation and a third was being evaluated. He said 10 firefighters were hurt, including one whose hands were burned. Nine others suffered minor injuries. Read the full story

Justice Department opens IBM antitrust probe

By Diane Bartz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department is investigating allegations that International Business Machines (IBM.N) abused its dominance of the mainframe business to squeeze rivals, Computer and Communications Industry Association Chairman Ed Black said on Wednesday. Read the full story

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Not a good look for the Clintons, President Obama, and other key democrats he has helped…

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200908251258DOWJONESDJONLINE000315_FORTUNE5.htm

NY Businessman Charged With $74 Million Bank Fraud Against Citigroup

A New York man was charged with allegedly defrauding Citigroup Inc. (C) out of $74 million in loans. Read the full story

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) — New York City’s Central Park was slammed last night by a sudden thunderstorm with tropical storm- force winds that toppled or damaged hundreds of trees, some of them almost a century old.

“It’s possibly the worst damage Central Park has ever suffered from a storm,” said Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, in a telephone interview.

Scattered thunderstorms developed just west of Newark, New Jersey, around 9:30 p.m. local time, leading the National Weather Service to issue a thunderstorm warning for midtown Manhattan and Central Park, said David Wally, a meteorologist with the service’s forecast office in Upton, New York.

The storm moved over the park at about 10 p.m., with wind gusts as strong as 70 miles (113 kilometers) per hour registering on Doppler radar, Wally said. At least 300 mature trees were toppled or snapped in half, while several thousand lost limbs in a half-mile “swath of devastation” in Manhattan between 90th and 110th streets, from Riverside Park east to Randall’s Island, Benepe said. There were no reports of injuries, he said.

“The tragedy is that we lost many large, mature trees close to a century old and some very important specimens of American elms and horse chestnuts and yellow buttonwoods,” said Benepe, who estimated the cleanup costs would run at least into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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