Sonia Sotomayor has decided advantages as she begins the most important trial of her long legal career, a nationally televised consideration of her nomination to be the first Hispanic  on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thirteen people and an unspecified mortgage origination company are under indictment for a $100 million mortgage fraud scheme, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office said Wednesday.

The developer of the World Trade Center site has threatened to go to arbitration to settle a monthslong impasse to rebuild ground zero.

By any measure, New York's new Democratic U.S. senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, got off to a rocky start. She was neither a Kennedy nor Clinton, just an unknown appointed by an unpopular governor.

A man walks into a bar. He’s carrying a carpet under his arm. He wraps himself in the carpet, lies on the floor, covers his face and waits for people to step on him. A sign taped to the bar reads: “Step on carpet.”

Ruth Madoff, 68, has not been charged with any crime or even questioned by prosecutors. But she has become perhaps the most vilified spouse of a financial rogue in history. When her husband, Bernard Madoff, divulged his Ponzi scheme, a $65-billion fraud for which he awaits sentencing later this month, Mrs. Madoff’s life was also ruined. Although no evidence has emerged to date that she conspired or even knew about her husband’s crimes, her plight has evoked no apparent public sympathy. She has been pilloried and turned into a pariah.

A plainclothes policeman who drew his gun while chasing someone he had found rummaging through his car was shot and killed by a fellow officer who saw the pursuit, police said.