(Photo: Anna Silman)

Earlier today, multiple bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing at least two and injuring dozens more.

New York City has already stepped up its own security efforts in case there is a plot to attack additional cities, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced.

“[T]he NYPD has stepped up security at strategic locations and critical infrastructure, including our subways," the mayor said in a statement.

"Some of the security steps we are taking may be noticeable, including deployment of Critical Response Vehicles and additional police personnel, and others will not be. We have 1,000 members of the NYPD assigned to counter-terrorism duties, and they – along with the entire NYPD and the investments we have made in counter-terrorism infrastructure – are being fully mobilized to protect our city.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo issued his own statement announcing that all state agencies are on "a heightened state of alert as we learn more about this incident," the facts of which are still emerging.

"I have directed state agencies, including the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, State Police, the MTA and the Port Authority, to be on a heightened state of alert as we learn more about this incident," Mr. Cuomo said.

(Photo: Anna Silman)

"New York National Guard on Sunday sent three vehicles and 6 soldiers to support the Marathon, and they are on hand to assist with emergency response and work together with local authorities following this incident."

Several other cities, including Washington D.C., have begun taking similar steps to secure landmarks and high-trafficked areas.

In Times Square, bystanders were frightened by the news and the heightened police presence.

Kirsten Andrews and Lauren Adamo, visitors from Maine, had been following the news for the past hour in their hotel room and came out to observe the scene in the square.

“I wanted to come down and talk to a cop and see if they have a plan in motion if anything happened right now, because it would be chaotic," said Ms. Andrews. "I’m wondering why subways and buses are still running."

Ms. Adamo was concerned about the possibility of more explosions. “My stepdad’s in the military and he says all big cities are under threat right now,” said Ms. Adamo. “It’s a little unsettling.”

The sputtering sound you’ve been hearing has been Speaker Christine Quinn’s spit takes. For she, more than any other candidate for the Democratic nomination, has the most to lose with Mr. Weiner in the race.

The Speaker’s primary campaign has been designed with one goal in mind: Win 40 percent of the primary vote and avoid a runoff with the second-place finisher. Ms. Quinn has held her own against a multi-candidate field. But in a one-on-one runoff against a presumably formidable foe, she won’t be able to rely on personal narrative and old-fashioned retail politics. She’ll have hard questions to answer about her years on the Council, and that could get complicated.

The chatter about Mr. Weiner’s possible candidacy speaks to his party’s anxiety about its available choices. Nobody, including the front-runner, Speaker Quinn, has captured the party’s imagination. Democrats haven’t won a mayoral race since 1989 – some may well be wondering if the party has forgotten what it takes to run City Hall.

Anthony Weiner is not going to be the next Mayor of New York. But he may have a large say in determining who that will be. Anthony Weiner's possible entrance complicates all candidate paths, but as the second white Manhattanite to join the field, he hurts Ms. Quinn the most. And he doesn’t need a lot of support to create chaos in the Democratic Party. All he needs is a few percentage points here and there.

Let’s say, for example, that without Mr. Weiner in the race, Ms. Quinn is hovering around the magic threshold of 40 percent, while her top rival – at the moment, probably Public Advocate Bill De Blasio – has a little more than 30 percent, with others – former Comptroller William Thompson, current Comptroller John Liu, and former Councilmember Sal Albanese splitting the rest.

In that scenario, Ms. Quinn emerges with the nomination outright. But if Mr. Weiner enters and peels off just a few votes from Ms. Quinn – even if he finishes dead last – the campaign’s dynamics change dramatically. It sets up the potential for a Quinn-De Blasio or Quinn-Thompson runoff (the two most-likely scenarios). And that will allow the second-place finisher to mount a stop-Quinn campaign among Democrats who already have demonstrated their uneasiness with her – an uneasiness that will surely harden as her foes pile on for her perceived deviations from party orthodoxy on matters like development and minimum wage laws.

With Mr. Weiner in the race, Ms. Quinn would have to run a defensive campaign designed to offend as few voters as possible – if she goes on the attack against second-tier candidates, their supporters could deliver payback in a runoff.

Right now, it would seem, Anthony Weiner is one of the most-powerful people in New York politics.

And you can be sure he knows that.

(Photo: Getty)

At a press conference earlier today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced public schools will continue be closed on Thursday and Friday, but will "hopefully" be open again on Monday of next week.

"Schools will remain closed for students tomorrow and Friday," Mr. Bloomberg said. “However, on Friday we ask all teachers, administrators and school staff to report to work. Friday, Chancellor Walcott and the Department of Education will have lots of things to do to get ready for next week."

As for parents who will struggle with the simultaneous tasks of taking care of their children and needing to go to work, Mr. Bloomberg sympathized with their plight but said the damage from Hurricane Sandy was too great.

"I know this is a great inconvenience for parents who are missing work because they don't have anyone to take care of their kids," he said. "But the bottom line is that there are an awful lot of schools that have received damage or don't have power. It's just so many that, in the end, we need the next four or five days to clean up and hopefully, by Monday, everything will be back perfect."

Tom Allon runs for his birthday (NY1)

We had arrived in the middle of one woman's speech about why Mr. Allon's views on teachers was inspiring. (Mr. Allon had taught English at Stuyvesant High School after graduating from Columbia, after all.)

After the woman had tearfully finished, we approached Mr. Allon. "As someone who has to balance a media and political career, who is your inspiration?"

"Boris Johnson," he said, laughing. And to clarify: "Wait, I'm just kidding!"

Mr. Allon added that his hero certainly wasn't Berlusconi.

"I guess Bloomberg is the only person who comes to mind, but he has a very different kind of media company than I do. I think of myself not just as a newspaper or a magazine publisher, but an educator."

Well, Pulitzer and Hearst made this town, we reminded him. So why even bother with politics when he already had the power of the press?

"I don't want to be in politics," Mr. Allon told us. "I want to be a public servant. I've been a media person for 25 years and I'll probably be a media person after I leave office, but I decided to run after I tried to change the administration standards at my old high school and realized how they weren't going to change, no matter how many articles about the issue I banged out."

With that, we let the perhaps future mayor go back to receiving his birthday wishes and congratulations...mostly, we noticed, from schoolteachers who had come to toast their new champion.

But today Foursquare downsized mayors by removing their ability to edit the venue. Until now, mayors were sort of like Wikipedia power users; they could edit details about the venue, correct typos, even change the phone number and map location.

According to Foursquare, "It just didn't make sense anymore as our user base has scaled so quickly. However, we're working on some tools to give superusers more responsibilities and will be doing a (long-awaited) superuser upgrade soon!"

Is this part of the continuing mainstreaming (lamestreaming) of Foursquare as it closes in on 5 million users and increasingly engages in partnerships with major brands?

If the comments on watchdog blog aboutfoursquare.com are any indication, this move is not being well received by longtime Foursquare fans, who point out that a lot of useful editing was being done by these mayors.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Becoming "mayor" of a location is the most coveted status in Foursquare. To win this honor you have to check in to a location more than anyone else, and to do that you actually have to go there, since Foursquare won't let you check in remotely. But last night Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington punked Foursquare's API and made himself mayor of Facebook and Twitter headquarters, all without ever leaving his office.

"A mischievous hacker friend of mine stepped in with a small script that he wrote that will check me in to any venue at all via the Foursquare API," Arrington wrote in a post on TechCrunch. "That means I don't have to spend time finding friends already where I want to be, and since we're using the API we can easily fake out the "you're not actually there" problem."

Obviously Foursquare has a problem if their check in system can be gamed in this way. A big part of Foursquare's appeal is competing with friends and regulars to win the mayorship of your favorite venues. In the comments below Arrington's post, several other users claim to be cheating the system.

"I got my account reset for doing this, but I was up to about 400 mayorships here in Atlanta before they caught on," says Tim Dorr, a programer and web designer. Dorr says that before, this was just for laughs, but now that they have reset his account, he is going after their business model.

"I'm going to build a more complex script that simulates human behavior more correctly (being aware of travel times, waking hours in the day, perturbations in the location of a checkin, and other factors) and then go after locations that offer Mayors a special." If businesses that are offering deals find out they are rewarding hackers and not repeat customers, they may decide Foursquare isn't worth using.

This kind of virtual tourism has been going on for quite some time. Stories about Foursquare users cheating the system first hit the mainstream media back in February, 2010.

Update - We just got a response from Foursquare's PR team saying that, "To be 100% clear, our API was definitely not hacked." Arrington gamed the system, but he didn't hack in and change the Foursquare API in any way. "We have an API so people can build cool apps on top of foursquare. We encourage developers to pass along real locations when they check people in, though there is no technical way to verify that piece of data. in this case, this developer was using the API, but was passing on fake lat-longs [locations]."

Dennis Crowley wrote a post back in February that addressed the issue of fake check ins. "At foursquare, I think we still have some thinking to do on this. We do see a lot of fake checkins (yes, we log and flag them... i think 2-3% of total checkins were "fake" last time we checked) and there are a few bad apples that like to steal mayorships from their couch. We've been punting on addressing this because it requires removing some of the magic from foursquare (mayors, points, badges) for users with non-GPS phones."

At a press conference where Bloomberg named his new housing commissioner, I asked the mayor about his position on repealing the Urstadt Law, which some Democrats at both the state and city level want to do.

“There’s a lot to be said about keeping some of these things at a higher level rather than at a lower level where, where there’s a lot more political pressure,” Bloomberg said. “We also have to be mindful that the housing rules in New York City can’t be enacted or maintained in a vacuum any more than the country’s laws in this day and age be maintained in a vacuum.”

Repealing the Urdstadt Law has been an issue with progressives for years, and now that Democrats have control of both houses of the State Legislature for the first time in decades, it's on the agenda.

Just yesterday, in her State of the City speech, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn—a former housing advocate—said “after nearly three decades, we’ll finally undo Urstadt and take back home rule for our tenants. Control over our own housing policy will be back in New York City, where it has always belonged.”

At least one of Bloomberg's mayoral opponents is likely to make an issue out of Albany's continuing control over city housing laws. Representative Anthony Weiner has said Albany is plagued with "dysfunction" and that by comparison, people in New York City are "the adults. We should be supervising them."