New York City, New York | featured news

The nation's fastest texters are facing off in the annual LG U.S. National Texting Competition. Eleven contestants from all over the country are coming to Times Square for the annual competition Wednesday afternoon. The winner gets $50,000. Competitors range from 16 to 24 years old. Last year's champion Austin Weirschke (Wear-Ski) is coming back to defend his title.

Four men, friends from New York University, have spent much of the last 18 years living together in low-rent spaces they found in New York City.

iReporter Jody Brandman shot this video of a window washer being pulled to safety outside a 50th floor window in NYC.

Firefighters will spend the next two weeks setting homes ablaze on a small island in New York Harbor for one purpose: Saving lives. Eighteen abandoned townhouses on New York City's Governor's Island, formerly housing for members of the Coast Guard, have been turned into a setting for roaring fires in experiments aimed to develop new strategies firefighters can use to save lives.

Passengers hailing cabs in Chicago starting Sunday may want to read the fine print on the taxi placards before they get in. In addition to the base fare, cab drivers for the first time can charge sick passengers a $50 vomit cleanup fee.

New York City is testing its first playground for adults, at Macombs Dam Park in the Bronx, hoping it will succeed where treadmills have failed in combating rising rates of obesity.

Nearly half of recently retired officers in a survey said they had “personal knowledge” of crime-report manipulation, but the Police Department questioned the study’s methodology.

Now that the city will allow drivers to transfer the remaining time on Muni-Meter receipts for reuse at any parking space in the city, parking time is about to hit the open market.

New York City is seeking to overtake Silicon Valley as the nation's top technological hub, putting its hopes in a $2 billion research campus planned for an island on the East River... The idea is to create an applied-sciences university where engineers are also trained as entrepreneurs from day one. Proponents say New York, home to powerful global companies and now exploding with technological startups, could shift this sector into top gear if the latest findings went straight into new businesses.

In many parts of the country, a million bucks will buy you a mansion. In New York City, you can get a 12-foot by 23-foot slab of concrete. Yes, Manhattan's first $1 million parking space is scheduled to go on the market this fall.