The MTA’s capital construction page shows an update for November with pictures from below, where the agency is hollowing out the cavern for the station and making way for the eventual launch of a tunnel-boring machine, which will slowly dig its way along the 1.5-mile route.

The project, budgeted at $2.1 billion, would extend the line from Times Square to the base of the Javits Center on 34th Street, adjacent to the West Side rail yards. The Bloomberg administration has been the driving force behind the extension, which it says will help spawn tens of millions of square feet of West Side development.

The cash-strapped MTA had no desire to pay for the project, so the city is footing the entire bill, up to the $2.1 billion. Should costs exceed the budget (which many onlookers assume they will, given rising costs everywhere), the city and the MTA have yet to negotiate an agreement on who would cover them.

Her weight has risen to 400 pounds from 277 in the past three years, much of it, she says, on account of twice-daily shots of insulin.

[One of The New York Times’ Neediest Cases] is now too big to fit in the complex’s elevators, so if she needs to visit the hospital, or to go anywhere else, the Fire Department must come and carry her down four flights of stairs.

. . .

Because [one of The New York Times’ Neediest Cases] cannot easily leave her bed, even for the bathroom, the world comes to her.

A home health aide comes four days a week, eight hours a day. A doctor visits every two weeks. A psychotherapist meets with her weekly. Volunteers come twice a week to engage her in conversation. Food typically comes from Meals on Wheels, or neighbors or a restaurant with delivery service.

“It’s impossible for me to go out, and I don’t want to fight anymore,” [one of The New York Times’ Neediest Cases] said in Spanish.

The highlight of her day has long come from watching television. A religious woman, [one of The New York Times’ Neediest Cases] said she spends much of her time in prayer, and does not start watching TV until late afternoon, after her second self-administered insulin shot of the day.

But this summer, when her television set suddenly stopped working, [one of The New York Times’ Neediest Cases] said she felt even further cut off from the world. She sank into depression.

“I was looking at the ceiling,” she said.

Bronx Mowgli Wentz weighed 7 lbs., 11 oz., and was 20 1/2 inches long.

“Ashlee, Pete and baby Bronx are all healthy and happy, and thank everyone for their well wishes!” a spokesman said, according to People magazine.

. . .

After a year of bureaucratic delays, the $630 million project to replace the aging span has hit another snag: getting an okay from Native American tribes who have long disappeared from the region.

The feds have refused to sign off on the project until the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans in Wisconsin and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma are given a chance to weigh in, state and federal officials confirmed.

The two tribes once called this area home. The holdup — the third major delay in a year — has further angered Queens and Brooklyn landowners whose future remains unclear as officials try to figure out how to replace the bridge, which opened in 1939.

. . .

For six weeks, the feds have been mulling final approval to replace the Kosciuszko, which carries the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek.

But late last month, the state Historic Preservation Office notified the feds that “some ancestral land” of the two tribes may be affected by the project, said Federal Highway Administration spokesman Doug Hecox.

Federal law requires a Native American tribe to be notified when a federally funded project affects its ancestral homeland.

“They have to consult with us to find out if we have a defined interest in that area,” said Tamara Francis, the Delaware Nation’s Cultural Preservation Director. “Ordinarily this was something the state would do,” Hecox said. “Simply put, the action did not occur, so we are now doing it.”