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Nude lap dances aren't likely to be confused with "Swan Lake." But a New York strip club says they are an art form, too, and should be exempt from state taxes....

Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe lost his way kayaking off New York's Long Island and was picked up by a U.S. Coast Guard boat and ferried to a harbor, officials said Sunday

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe. It is examining whether the firms used a tax strategy to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. The practice involved converting some fees collected for managing accounts into fund investments, resulting in a lower tax rate.

A solar storm means northern lights will fill the skies on Monday night, stretching from New York to Washington State, warn officials.

A New York City zoning law designed to keep adult entertainment businesses away from schools, churches and residential neighborhoods was deemed unconstitutional by a New York state judge on Thursday.

The encounter was breathtakingly brief: a surveillance video showed a gunman outside the Empire State Building on Friday pulling a pistol, pointing it at two police officers, their firing at him and his falling to the sidewalk.

A disgruntled former women's accessories designer shot a former colleague to death Friday and then was killed in a shootout with police near the Empire State Building that left nine others wounded, officials said. The nine people wounded in the gunfire after 9 a.m. on the Fifth Avenue side of the building were expected to survive, police said.

John Lennon's killer was denied release from prison in his seventh appearance before a parole board, New York corrections officials said. Mark David Chapman, 57, was denied parole by a three-member board after a hearing Wednesday, the state Department of Corrections said Thursday. The transcript of his latest hearing wasn't immediately released.

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

The education reform movement, slow economies and federal grant competitions have led lawmakers to tighten the requirements for earning and keeping tenure.