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A mother returned home to her luxury apartment building near Central Park on Thursday to find two of her small children stabbed to death in a bathtub and their nanny, with self-inflicted stab wounds, lying near them, police said.

An New York City police officer is accused of threatening to kidnap, cook and eat women in a bizarre plot where he fantasized about how "tasty" one victim looked and said it would be easy to roast a person in his oven, officials said Thursday.

A provocative ad that equates Muslim radicals with savages is set to go up in the city's subway system as violent protests over an anti-Islamic film ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad sweep over much of the Muslim world....

Occupy Wall Street marks its first anniversary on Monday, and, in a bid to rejuvenate a movement that has failed to sustain momentum after sparking a national conversation about economic inequality last fall, activists plan once again to descend on New York's financial district.

A 73-year-old woman was sexually assaulted Wednesday in New York's Central Park in the middle of the day, police said. The victim was bird watching in the vicinity of 74th Street and Central Park West, also known as Strawberry Fields, just before noon when her alleged attacker approached her. The woman told police they exchanged words and he sexually assaulted her.

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.

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.