An informal census by the Times Square Alliance, a business group, counted 52 costumed characters clustered in the plaza on Saturday evening.

WSJ: Street Characters Tread Fuzzy Legal Ground

Times Square is crawling with entrepreneurs who dress up as pop-culture characters and try to make a few bucks posing for photos with visitors to the big city.

NPR: Cookie Monster, Elmo Get In Times Square Trouble

But most exciting were the dozens of square clay tablets inscribed with letters which, if Neolithic, predated by many millennia the Phoenician characters from which Western alphabets were supposed to have come making Glozel, not the Middle East, the cradle of Western civilisation.

ECONOMIST: Emile Fradin