Sure Mongolia is a sparsely populated nation with a GDP just over 25% of what Wall St. alone pays out in bonuses, but this is New York City; and you gotta pay what you owe. So said a U.S. District Court judge Friday, when he ruled that India, Mongolia, and the Phillipines owed New York City tens of millions of dollars in back taxes. Generally consulates, missions, and embassies operate under the convention that they......

Martial arts master and star of movies and television, Chuck Norris, is suing a New York publishing company along with a Brown University student who established an Internet site that passes along purported facts about him. The Norris-facts phenomena is a longtime Internet meme and the actor says that he doesn't mind when sites continue it as long as they are non-commercial. Ian Roberts, the Brown student who operates one Norris-facts site, teamed up with......

The NY Times is reporting that the Nets won't be playing in Brooklyn for the 2009-2010 season because the arena won't be finished until 2010. The Times attributes the delay to legal challenges. The most publicized lawsuit is the federal case brought by 13 property owners and tenants. The suit alleges that the taking of their property via eminent domain was unconstitutional. In June, a US District Court judge dismissed the case, finding that......

The AP reports on two Picasso paintings that have hung in the MoMA and Guggenheim for decades, and the fight to keep them there. Julius H. Schoeps claims they are the property of his great uncle who was persecuted in Nazi Germany, and has demanded the museums hand over the paintings, "Boy Leading a Horse" (MoMA) and "Le Moulin de la Galette" (Guggenheim). The suit was filed at the District Court in Manhattan. Both museums......

If you've been hungering for a totally insane office lawsuit ever since the Knicks lawsuit case ended, prepare to be sated: A former senior VP-group creative director of ad agency Dentsu is suing his former employer for a hostile work environment that included demands he go to a brothel and a "crotch shot" photographs of women including tennis star Maria Sharapova. Steve Biegel filed a lawsuit in Manhattan's U.S. District Court claiming that he and......

Anucha Browne Sanders gets the cover treatment from the Post and Daily News after a jury believed that Knicks coach and president Isiah Thomas and that Madison Square Garden (the owner of the Knicks) were liable for sexual harassment. amNY, though, chose to put Isiah Thomas on its cover, with an inset of Knicks owner James Dolan, next to the headline "Rotten to the Court" - oh snap! Browne Sanders was also awarded $11.6......

In the wake of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's resignation last month, President Bush will nominate former U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mukasey for the position. Mukasey, who was born in the Bronx and educated at Columbia and Yale Law School, was "appointed to the federal bench" by Ronald Reagan and has presided over terrorism trials, such as the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. He is also a friend of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (he......

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Holwell found that fast food restaurants do not need to make their calorie information more prominent. Last December, the Health Department had voted that national chain restaurants, which already have caloric information, should display that info on menus or menu boards. Naturally, the fast food industry protested, because it's very hard to order a Big Mac when it says "540 calories, 29 grams of fat"! And, crap, an Oreo McFlurry......

Yesterday morning, Paulino Valenzuela, who had formerly worked at the massive Bronx housing development Co-op City as a janitor and porter, returned on a shooting rampage, killing a former supervisor and inuring two other men. Then he took the bus and subway to a Bronx courthouse and, covered in blood, he confessed to court officers, "Cuff me, because I just killed somebody. I have my revolver in my bag, and I have the blood on......

Has Andy Warhol's estate been dominating the market for the artist's work? One owner of a silkscreen by Warhol says that it has, and yesterday filed a $20 million lawsuit in the U.S. District Court. Filmmaker Joe Simon-Whelan's Warhol original was marked as a fake by the estate who he says has conspired for 20 years to control the market and create an artificial scarcity of original works. The board does this with the authority......

With the Yankees enduring an epic losing streak, with Boston of all teams in the Bronx, we'd like to take mental refuge in the good fortunes of the first-place Mets. Unfortunately, we are reading about the Amazins' batboy dealing speed and 'roids in the Shea clubhouse? It's a poorly kept secret that the World Series Champions '86 Mets were partakers of recreational drugs. That was more than 20 years ago and it was 1986,......

After its story about how the NYPD spied on organizations for at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, the NY Times reports that the city wants to keep NYPD records sealed, in fear that the media will "fixate upon and sensationalize them." Well, that's probably too late. The Times also reports that the city is worried the sealed information will hurt its "ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests."......

Is it just Gothamist or does anyone else wish they were selected for jury duty at the United State District Court in Manhattan after reading the NY Times story about dodgeball movie dreams and theft. Judge Shira Scheindlin, the same judge who presided over the most recent John Gotti Jr. trial, ruled that a lawsuit from David Price, a national amateur dodgeball champion, and his writing partner Ashoka Thomas against the makers of Dodgeball: A......

Federal Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. banned the police's ability to routinely videotape demonstrations yesterday. Haight found the NYPD violated Handschu v. Special Services Division, a 1971 decision that established "consent decree"; Haight wrote in his decision, "Solely politically based investigations are flatly prohibited by the guidelines. In other words, there must always be a legitimate law enforcement purpose - having a purpose of investigating political activity exclusively for its own sake is never......

Of all things you don't want to bring to your swearing-in-as- an-American-citizen ceremony is a gun. But that's exactly what security screeners found in the purse of a Korean woman who was on her way to a naturalization ceremony at U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. Mal Soon Jin, who has lived in America for 20 years and works at her family's Brooklyn fruit store, denied knowing how a five-shot Derringer got in her purse. The......

Sparks Steakhouse is being sued by a former waiter who claims the restaurant misappropriated tips and did not pay minimum wage. From the NY Times:The suit, filed in Federal District Court, said that Sparks operated a tipping pool for employees who did not serve customers, like appetizer expediters, banquet and kitchen managers, dessert station chefs and wine cellar masters. According to state and federal labor law, only those employees connected with the actual serving of......

The jurors listened to testimony from September 11 attack victims' families yesterday during the death penalty sentencing trial of Zacarais Moussaoui, a confessed conspirator in the plots. The families-turned-witnesses cried, and jurors themselves cried with them. US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema did note that Moussaoui's lawyers feel the prosecution's presentation was overly dramatic, leading her to limit prosecution witnesses to five photographs each. A wrenching tape of Melissa Doi, who worked in the south......

This is something about the 2003 Blackout that we didn't know about: The city dumped 30 million gallons of "untreated human waste" into the East River because the Department of Environmental Protection's backup generators didn't work! Good work, DEP. A federal judge has put the city agency under probation for three years, and the Times notes that this is the "latest embarrassment" for the DEP, joining the "mercury in drinking water reservoirs" and "employees who......

The U.S. government arraigned Baz Mohammed, the alleged drug kingpin from Afghanistan whose idea of a jihad on America was to put heroin on the streets. The DEA's Karen Tandy said that Mohammed, who was extradited here last week, "now faces what all drug kingpins fear the most — justice in a court in the United States, delivered by an American jury on the very streets of New York that he'd sought to poison." Yes!......