Chrysler Building

NEW YORK -- An underground steam pipe explosion tore through a Manhattan street near Grand Central Terminal yesterday, causing a crater that swallowed a tow truck and killing one person as hundreds of others ran for cover amid a towering geyser of steam and flying rubble. A New York Police Department spokesman, Paul Browne, said the explosion was not terrorism. "There is no reason to believe whatsoever that this is anything other than a failure of our infrastructure," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said during a news conference at the scene of the blast.

If you have to see "Monsters vs. Aliens" - and if you're a parent, you will have to - make sure it's the 3-D version. The film's opening scenes deposit the audience somewhere in the middle of the rings of Saturn with a parsecs-wide vastness that is out of this world. Every kid in the screening I attended blurted out a stunned "Whoa," and so did most of the grown-ups: We were witnessing not just the beginning of a film but the start of the next phase of blockbuster-movie technology, like it or not. The rest of "Monsters vs. Aliens," unfortunately, brings us slowly back to Earth.

WATERTOWN, Wis. -- John "Jack" H. Lundberg, believed to be one of the last surviving steelworkers who built New York's Empire State Building, died Wednesday at Watertown Memorial Hospital. He was 97. The Empire State Building, at 102 stories, was completed in 1931 and for years stood as the world's tallest skyscraper. Mr. Lundberg also worked on the Chrysler building and Rockefeller Center in New York and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. The Discovery Channel and the BBC interviewed Mr. Lundberg for documentaries about working on the buildings.

NEW YORK -- An underground steam pipe explosion tore through a Manhattan street near Grand Central Terminal yesterday, causing a crater that swallowed a tow truck and killing one person as hundreds of others ran for cover amid a towering geyser of steam and flying rubble. A New York Police Department spokesman, Paul Browne, said the explosion was not terrorism. "There is no reason to believe whatsoever that this is anything other than a failure of our infrastructure," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said during a news conference at the scene of the blast.

If you have to see "Monsters vs. Aliens" - and if you're a parent, you will have to - make sure it's the 3-D version. The film's opening scenes deposit the audience somewhere in the middle of the rings of Saturn with a parsecs-wide vastness that is out of this world. Every kid in the screening I attended blurted out a stunned "Whoa," and so did most of the grown-ups: We were witnessing not just the beginning of a film but the start of the next phase of blockbuster-movie technology, like it or not. The rest of "Monsters vs. Aliens," unfortunately, brings us slowly back to Earth.

For all the millions of dollars spent on digital astonishments in "Men in Black 3," the film's most remarkable special effect is an analog one. It's the carbon-based Josh Brolin, who plays a younger version of Tommy Lee Jones's Agent K with an uncanny replication of the older actor's bearing and vocal mannerisms. Brolin's performance is funny, masterful, confident, and more than a little unsettling. If one human being can sample another, that's what's going on here. The rest of "Men in Black 3" is about as good as one could hope for from an unnecessary sequel that's a decade late to the party.

For all the millions of dollars spent on digital astonishments in "Men in Black 3," the film's most remarkable special effect is an analog one. It's the carbon-based Josh Brolin, who plays a younger version of Tommy Lee Jones's Agent K with an uncanny replication of the older actor's bearing and vocal mannerisms. Brolin's performance is funny, masterful, confident, and more than a little unsettling. If one human being can sample another, that's what's going on here. The rest of "Men in Black 3" is about as good as one could hope for from an unnecessary sequel...

Will Smith jumps off the Chrysler Building and lands in 1969 to save the world from an alien invasion in the upcoming "Men in Black 3. " The action comedy franchise that saw Smith and Tommy Lee Jones first team up in 1997 returns to movie theaters next month. Footage from the time-travel bromance was shared Wednesday night with theater owners at the CinemaCon conference in Las Vegas. In the preview, Smith and Jones survive a fight with an oversized fish at a Chinatown restaurant ripe with alien patrons, only for Jones' character Agent K to suddenly disappear.

No one wants to get sick or have medical complications from eating a forbidden food while traveling, but it can be tricky ordering suitable meals when you don't speak the local language. A new service, called SelectWisely, produces foreign language translation cards that let travelers communicate their food-related allergies or medical issues in clear and simple sentences. Convey your nut allergy in Hungarian, your gluten-free diet in Chinese, or your toddler's lactose intolerance in Norwegian, for instance.

ALBANY, N.Y. -- A coal-fueled power plant in Ohio agreed to make improvements that would drastically cut pollution from its smokestacks, under a settlement with the federal government and three Northeast states announced yesterday. Ohio Edison will spend $1.1 billion to cut emissions by at least 70 percent at the W.H. Sammis plant in Stratton, Ohio, federal officials said. The utility, an operating company of FirstEnergy , was found in violation of the Clean Air Act in 2003, and the settlement comes before a second trial that was to determine how...

WATERTOWN, Wis. -- John "Jack" H. Lundberg, believed to be one of the last surviving steelworkers who built New York's Empire State Building, died Wednesday at Watertown Memorial Hospital. He was 97. The Empire State Building, at 102 stories, was completed in 1931 and for years stood as the world's tallest skyscraper. Mr. Lundberg also worked on the Chrysler building and Rockefeller Center in New York and the John Hancock Tower in Boston. The Discovery Channel and the BBC interviewed Mr. Lundberg for documentaries about working on the buildings.

. ART SAFARI Directed by: Ben Lewis At: Museum of Fine Arts Running time: 84 min. Unrated Conceived as a series of short films introducing individual contemporary artists to a wider public, Ben Lewis’s “Art Safari’’ is a hoot. It’s also one of the most intelligent treatments of contemporary art ever to hit the screen. Lewis, its young presenter, is the source of its success. Fluent in at least three languages, he’s bright, curious, inquisitive.

NEW YORK - If the winds are forgiving enough over Lower Manhattan - up where workers can see the whole outline of the island's tip - a steel column will be hoisted into place Monday afternoon atop the exoskeleton of 1 World Trade Center, and New York will have a new tallest building. More important, downtown will have reclaimed its pole star. Poking into the sky, the first column of the 100th floor of 1 World Trade Center will bring the tower to a height of 1,271 feet, making it 21 feet higher than the Empire State Building.