York State

NEW YORK - Richard A. Grasso, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange, rejected the Big Board's demand that he return at least $120 million of his pay package, his lawyer said yesterday. He may file suit to retrieve an additional $50 million. The comments were Grasso's first response since his ouster in September from the world's largest stock exchange and come as current exchange officials call for him to return part of what they have called his "excessive" pay. "Mr. Grasso has no intention of returning any portion of his compensation to the exchange," his lawyer, Brendan Sullivan Jr., wrote in a letter to John S. Reed, the exchange's interim chairman.

NEW YORK - For almost a decade, New York state has been involved in a legal battle over whether the state is paying its fair share toward New York City's vast and ailing public school system. Over the years, the struggle largely appeared to the public to be a complex rhetorical war over money: How much the city's schools need, whether the suburbs were getting more per student, and who should pay to bring the city schools up to a higher standard. But two recent rulings in the case, including one by a state appeals court, highlighted a more fundamental question underlying the dispute - one more philosophical than financial; one involving the Constitution, not a calculator: What is the minimal obligation of government to educate its children?

NEW YORK - Tony Mannetta does not worry about having enough customers at the hugely popular farmers' market in Union Square in Manhattan, or most of the 27 other markets scattered across the city that he oversees for the Greenmarket program. What he does worry about is having enough farmers for all of them. So later this summer he plans to head for the fields in Orange, Ulster and Dutchess counties, to knock on barn doors in an effort to meet the demands of the markets in operation and a dozen more that the program wants to open.

The most violent tornado ever to hit Maryland was the deadly climax of a severe storm system that formed late last week in the high plains and ignited a daylong barrage of extreme weather Sunday across the Eastern United States. The historic F5 tornado in Charles County was born in a "supercell" thunderstorm that crossed Northern Virginia ahead of a cold front that also packed heavy rain, hail and high winds. Twisters also spiked other thunderstorms that struck from Missouri to southern Virginia, and from western New York state to South Carolina.

ALBANY, N.Y. - A federal judge has streamlined the land-claims lawsuit brought by the Oneida Indians against New York state, throwing out several of the state's defenses and winnowing the remaining arguments to a few key points. The recent 70-page decision by Judge Lawrence E. Kahn in the Northern District of New York provides a road map for the Pataki administration and three groups of Oneida as they prepare for trial. The Oneidas charge the state and local governments illegally acquired a quarter-million acres from them nearly 200 years ago in a series of 30 treaties and other agreements from 1795 to 1846.

ALBANY, N.Y. - New York state tax collections in the first two months of 2002 are falling 6.6 percent short, or $500 million below projections made just six weeks ago in Gov. George E. Pataki's proposed budget, state officials said. The January tax collection was $179 million lower than anticipated, state officials said. The February take was $321 million below the target. The decline surprised state officials because Pataki's budget proposal was based on post-Sept. 11 assessments, and its revenue estimates were supposed to reflect the lost jobs, relocations and business interruptions caused by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

WAMPSVILLE, N.Y. - Gov. George E. Pataki has brokered a tentative deal with the Oneida Indian Nation that, if ratified by the state Legislature and Congress, could resolve a bitter 31-year-old dispute over a quarter-million acres that the Oneidas maintain the state bought from them illegally through treaties in the 19th century. Under the agreement, the state and federal governments would pay three branches of the tribe $500 million and the tribe would drop its claim to most of the land.

NEW YORK - The iron shackles still make him uneasy, but they no longer stir up a maelstrom of hate and fury inside him. Oswald Sykes has come to tolerate the shackles because they serve his purpose: To tell the story of the brutal trans-Atlantic slave trade. For the last decade, Sykes has doggedly called attention to the shackles and other excavated remains of the Henrietta Marie, a 17th-century English slave ship that sank during a storm in the Florida Straits in 1700. Sykes designed an underwater memorial to honor those long-forgotten slaves, and was one of a group of black scuba divers who placed it at the site of the shipwreck in 1993.

Westminster city officials have decided to take a few road trips to research how the city might create its arts and entertainment district. "We want to travel to some similarly-sized cities that have an arts district and see how it's done," said Damian L. Halstad, Common Council president. Earlier visits to Providence, R.I. - which has a successful arts district - though informative, weren't relevant, considering that that city's population is about 10 times the size of Westminster's.

Overwhelmed by volunteer doctors and nurses, donated goods and emergency rescue workers offering their assistance, New York officials and nonprofit groups have asked people to hold off on sending more help - for now. "Money is fine. Go to the Red Cross and give blood," said Quentin Banks, a spokesman for the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. "But clothing and food and other things you think of in cases of hurricanes and other disasters are not appropriate in this case. "People are giving from the heart, and that's a wonderful thing.