The Challenger Was Brought Down By An O-Ring . . .

Other things you don’t want to know include that six-ton piece of steel is held up there by a $50 piece of nylon webbing:

A prime suspect in Saturday’s East Side crane collapse — a spectacular disaster across two Manhattan blocks that has now claimed seven lives and is expected to cost untold millions — is a $50 piece of nylon webbing that investigators suspect may have broken while hoisting a six-ton piece of steel.

A photograph taken at the site shows the yellow nylon sling ragged at the end like a child’s broken shoelace, indicating, according to experts, the immense force that may have torn it apart.

The investigation into the accident continued on Monday as workers recovered three more bodies from the rubble of a four-story town house on East 50th Street that was demolished when a section of the toppling crane slammed into it. That brought the death toll from the collapse to seven, making it one of the deadliest construction accidents in New York City in recent memory.

Swooping Crane

The short list of stuff to be scared of includes but is not limited to being pushed in front of a subway and stepping on electrified streets. Now add collapsing cranes to that:

Emergency crews continued to search the wreckage of smashed buildings on the East Side of Manhattan on Sunday, a day after a gigantic crane toppled across a city block, killing at least four people and injuring more than a dozen others.

The collapse occurred at 2:22 p.m. on Saturday as the crane, about 22 stories tall and attached by girders to the apartment tower under construction at 303 East 51st Street, east of Second Avenue, broke away from its anchors and toppled south, across the block between 51st and 50th Streets, as workers at the site and people in high-rises for blocks around looked on, stupefied.

Witnesses told of a rising, thundering roar and clouds of smoke and dust as the crane — a vertical latticed boom for its base, topped by a cab and jib, the swinging arm that lifts building materials — fell across 51st Street and onto a 19-story apartment building at No. 300, demolishing a penthouse and shaking the building with the force of an earthquake.

Looking For Bones, Just Not That Kind

City kids are smart enough to know that when you see an unattended suitcase, nine times out of ten it contains money of some dubious provenance. But on that tenth time:

Four children playing in a Queens park Tuesday stumbled upon a suitcase filled with human bones, a police source said.

A skull, a spine and several other bones packed in a blue rolling suitcase were found about 4:30 p.m. in Forest Park in Woodhaven, cops said.

“They dragged it out . . . and opened it up and took the skull out,” a source said. “They thought maybe there was some money in [the suitcase]. What a surprise.”

He Should Have Taken Them To Planned Parenthood . . . Sorry, Was That Out Loud?

The cab driver who delivered an infant to safety after becoming the unwitting participant in a nurse-and-dash scheme seems to have made up parts of the story as a cover up and has been arrested:

In a stunning turnaround, the cabby hailed as a hero for delivering an “abandoned” baby to a Queens firehouse Thursday was arrested yesterday for making up the heart-wrenching story.

In a dramatic jailhouse confession to The Post, livery cabdriver Klever Sailema, 45, said he was only trying to help the infant.

“I feel really bad. It wasn’t my intention to hurt anybody,” a shaken Sailema said from a holding cell in Kew Gardens yesterday. “We did it so that the girl would be well cared for. I just wanted to help.”

The cabby, a father of three from Elmhurst said that he kept up the ruse because “every time I lied I thought it would end there.

“I felt terrible. In my heart I knew it wasn’t right. It was a mistake.”

Sailema allegedly teamed up with the child’s dad, Carlos Rodas, 27, and paternal aunt, Maria Siavichay, to enact a bizarre plot to get rid of the kid, dubbed “Lourdes,” but whose real name is Daniella Perez, after the little girl’s 14-year-old mother said she could no longer handle being a mom, police sources said.

The plot unraveled late Friday night, when a neighbor who spotted the baby girl’s picture in the newspapers called cops.

. . .

Sailema told The Post that Siavichay, a waitress in his neighborhood, asked him for a ride to work Thursday, as she frequently does.

But when he arrived at her apartment at 7:30 a.m., she walked out carrying a baby in her arms along with Rodas, whom he had never met. All three got in the back of the cab.

Sailema initially thought that the baby, whom Siavichay had mentioned before, was sick and therefore Siavichay was taking the tot to work with her.

“The father said, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I need to ask you a favor. Can you take my girl to the fire station?’ ” Sailema told The Post.

Rodas wouldn’t take the child himself, because he “had a problem with the courts,” Sailema said.

“At that point I knew they were talking about bringing her to a safe place,” the cabby added.

Sailema dropped off the dad, a construction worker, a few blocks away and then headed to Queens.

A few blocks from the firehouse, Sailema said, Siavichay became worried because “she did not have [immigration] papers” and asked Sailema to drop her at work and take the baby to the firehouse — Engine 289 in Elmhurst — alone.

Just before 10 a.m., the cabby arrived at the firehouse. “That’s when I invented the story,” he told The Post.

. . .

“I don’t know how I committed a crime,” said an exasperated Sailema.

New York City, Where The Parks Even Have Silverware

I understand why it’s wrong to make cracks about the silverware:

Moving to close the books on a long and ugly chapter in New York’s employment history, the city has agreed to pay more than $20 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit charging that the Department of Parks and Recreation systematically discriminated against black and Hispanic employees in awarding jobs and setting salaries, lawyers for the plaintiffs said Tuesday.

In announcing the agreement, lawyers and the plaintiffs painted a portrait of an agency that under its long-serving commissioner, Henry J. Stern, routinely rewarded a handpicked coterie of inexperienced white workers with plum assignments at the expense of experienced black and Hispanic employees.

In addition, the plaintiffs charged, white employees earned more than black and Hispanic workers performing the same jobs, and those who complained faced punishments like being reassigned to dusty basement desks or to an office far from home.

. . .

According to court documents, statistics show that in 2000, 92.9 percent of employees earning less than $20,000 a year were black or Hispanic, while only 14.2 percent of those earning between $50,000 and $60,000 a year were black or Hispanic.

And, according to the papers, Mr. Stern and senior parks employees routinely made derogatory, racially charged remarks. Mr. Stern told one former employee, Tanya Bowers, who is Jewish and black, that although she looked black, he knew she was Jewish when he heard her talk.

“I can bring you home and know that the silverware will still be there when you leave,” he said, according to her deposition.

But what does that have to do with swimming (“Wasn’t that a requirement?”)?