A federal judge sharply critical of New York City police tactics granted class-action status to a lawsuit claiming officers’ stop-and-frisk policy discriminates against blacks and Latinos.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan said in a written ruling that there was "overwhelming evidence" that the centralized stop-and-frisk program led to thousands of unlawful stops. She noted that the vast majority of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never file a lawsuit in response, and she said class-action status was created for just these kinds of court cases.

The ruling comes on the heels of last weekend’s revelation by the Police Department that it made 601,055 street stops of potential suspects last year, with about 10 percent of the stops resulting in arrests. In 2009, there were 575,304 stops. Police conducted more than 200,000 frisk searches in the first three months of this year, it said.

Earlier: New York cops boost stop-and-frisks despite criticism

Thousands of people who were stopped could now join the lawsuit, originally filed in 2008 by four plaintiffs.

The lawsuit alleged that the Police Department purposefully engaged in a widespread practice of concentrating its stop-and-frisk activity on black and Latino neighborhoods based on their racial composition rather than legitimate non-racial factors. The lawsuit said officers are pressured to meet quotas as part of the program and are punished if they do not.

Scheindlin said she found it "disturbing" that the city responded to the lawsuit by saying that a court order to stop the practice would amount to "judicial intrusion" and that an injunction couldn't guarantee the end of “suspicionless” stops.

"First, suspicionless stops should never occur," Scheindlin wrote. She said the department's "cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a 'widespread practice of suspicionless stops' displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers' most fundamental constitutional rights."

She called it "rather audacious" of the Police Department to argue that legislators already would have passed necessary laws if it were possible to protect people from unlawful searches and seizures.

She added that if the department was engaging in a widespread practice of unlawful stops, then an injunction seeking to curb that practice is not the "judicial intrusion into a social institution" that the city claims it would be but "a vindication of the Constitution and an exercise of the courts' most important function: protecting individual rights in the face of the government's malfeasance."

The city law office said in a statement: "We respectfully disagree with the decision and (are) reviewing our legal options."

Darius Charney, who argued the case on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit legal organization, said: "We're very pleased. We think she clearly got everything right on the law."

This article includes reporting by NBCNewYork.com and msnbc.com's Jim Gold.

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Dominique Strauss-Kahn is suing the hotel housekeeper who accused him of sexually assaulting her, saying she seriously damaged his reputation with what he calls a bogus allegation.

The former International Monetary Fund leader struck back at maid Nafissatou Diallo's lawsuit against him with a $1 million defamation claim of his own Monday, exactly a year after she told police he tried to rape her in his Manhattan hotel suite. He says whatever happened was consensual.

Read the original report at NBC New York

He was arrested, resigned from the IMF and spent several days behind bars and three months on house arrest before prosecutors dropped the case, saying they'd lost confidence in Diallo's trustworthiness because she'd lied about her background and changed her account of what she did right after leaving Strauss-Kahn's room. Although prosecutors didn't say they believed she misrepresented the encounter itself, Strauss-Kahn's court papers blast her claims as intentional lies.

"As a direct result of her malicious and wanton false accusation, Mr. Strauss-Kahn suffered ... substantial harm to his professional and personal reputation in the United States and throughout the world," says his Bronx court filing, written by attorneys William W. Taylor III, Hugh Campbell and others. 

Strauss-Kahn's suit was submitted two weeks after the same court rejected his argument that diplomatic immunity should shield him from Diallo's suit, a ruling he may yet appeal.

Diallo's lawyers said Strauss-Kahn's defamation claim an example of the "misogynistic attitude" of a man who now faces preliminary charges of being involved in a hotel prostitution ring in France.

As of last week, French investigators were also examining accusations that Strauss-Kahn may have been involved in a rape during a sex party in a Washington, D.C., hotel in 2010. Separately, a French writer accused him last year of having tried to rape her during a 2003 interview, an accusation prosecutors decided was too old to try. Strauss-Kahn denies all the allegations.

"As with his plea for diplomatic immunity, we are entirely confident this latest desperate ploy will be swiftly rejected," Diallo attorneys Kenneth W. Thompson and Douglas H. Wigdor wrote in an e-mail.

Diallo, now 33, says that when she arrived to clean Strauss-Kahn's suite, he abruptly chased her down, tried to yank down her pantyhose and forced her to perform oral sex. She says a ligament in her shoulder was torn, among other injuries.

The married Strauss-Kahn, 63, has acknowledged there was a sexual encounter and called it a "moral failing," but insisted it wasn't forced. His new filing says he and Diallo "engaged in mutually consensual sexual acts" and says she "suffered no injuries whatsoever."

At the time, Strauss-Kahn was considered a leading Socialist candidate to take on conservative incumbent French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Socialist Francois Hollande won the election last week.

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A day after the state's top court found that simply viewing child pornography wasn't a crime in New York, two legislators said Wednesday that they would soon introduce a measure to make it one.

The state Court of Appeals — the equivalent of the Supreme Court in most other states — ruled Tuesday in the case of a college professor whose work computer was found to contain illegal images that "merely viewing Web images of child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either possession or procurement," which are illegal under state law.

Viewing child porn on the Web 'legal' in New York, state appeals court finds

"Rather, some affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that were on his screen," Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote for a majority of four of the six judges.

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The ruling generated headlines and opposition across the country. Patrick Trueman, president of the conservative institute Morality in Media and director of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the U.S. Justice Department during the Reagan administration, called on state authorities to take over all child pornography cases "until this opinion is overturned." 

Wednesday, two lawmakers from Brooklyn — Sen. Martin Golden, a Republican, and Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, a Democrat — said they planned to introduce a bill within the next few weeks that would prohibit "knowingly accessing" child pornography "with intent to view."

"Federal regulations are already in place to see that those who access child pornography face the stricter standards of the law," Golden told Reuters on Wednesday. "New York must adopt these same policies."

The decision Tuesday didn't free the defendant. Instead, it dismissed one of the two counts of promoting a sexual performance of a child and just one of dozens of counts of possession of child pornography on which James D. Kent was convicted. The court upheld the other counts against Kent, an assistant professor of public administration at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Kent — who said at his sentencing that he "abhorred" child pornography and argued that someone else at Marist must have placed the images on his computer — was sentenced to one to three years in state prison in August 2009.

The decision turned on the question of whether accessing and viewing something on the Internet is the same as possessing it. In essence, the court said "no."

The court noted that possessing or procuring child pornography is illegal, but the majority said that it was up to the Legislature, not the courts, to decide whether it's also illegal to passively view it online, without taking any other action. 

The practical effect, wrote Judge Victoria A. Graffeo — who concurred with the result but disagreed with the majority's reasoning — is that "the purposeful viewing of child pornography on the Internet is now legal in New York."

You can read the full ruling here, in .pdf form.

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Viewing child pornography online isn't a crime, the New York Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in the case of a college professor whose work computer was found to have stored more than a hundred illegal images in its Web cache.

M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

The court dismissed one of the two counts of promoting a sexual performance of a child and one of the dozens of counts of possession of child pornography on which James D. Kent was convicted. The court upheld the other counts against Kent, an assistant professor of public administration at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Kent — who said at his sentencing that he "abhorred" child pornography and argued that someone else at Marist must have placed the images on his computer — was sentenced to one to three years in state prison in August 2009.

Watch US News videos on msnbc.com

The decision rests on whether accessing and viewing something on the Internet is the same as possessing it, and whether possessing it means you had to procure it. In essence, the court said no to the first question and yes to the second.

"Merely viewing Web images of child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either possession or procurement within the meaning of our Penal Law," Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote for a majority of four of the six judges. 

"Rather, some affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that were on his screen," Ciparick wrote. "To hold otherwise, would extend the reach of (state law) to conduct — viewing — that our Legislature has not deemed criminal."

Read the full appeals court ruling (.pdf)

In other words, "the purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York," Judge Victoria A. Graffeo wrote in one of two concurring opinions that agreed with the result but not with the majority's reasoning.

Kent's attorney, Nathan Z. Dershowitz, told msnbc.com that he hadn't yet had a chance to talk to his client, so he couldn't discuss what they would do next. But he agreed with Graffeo that the ruling means that "in New York, there is no crime" in simply viewing child pornography. 

All of the judges agreed that child pornography is an abomination, but they disagreed whether it was necessary to "criminalize all use of child pornography to the maximum extent possible," as Ciparick wrote in the majority opinion. The majority said that was up to the Legislature, not the courts, to decide. 

Judge throws out child porn charge against Washington man

The technical details revolve around copies of deleted files that remained in the cache of Kent's Web browser, which were the basis of the two counts that were dismissed. They were discovered, along with other materials, during a virus scan that Kent had requested because his computer was running slowly.

To demonstrate possession of the images in the cache, "the defendant's conduct must exceed mere viewing," Ciparick wrote, adding that "the mere existence of an image automatically stored in a cache" isn't enough.

Furthermore, the prosecution failed to prove that Kent even knew his Web browser had a cache in the first place, writing, "A defendant cannot knowingly acquire or possess that which he or she does not know exists."

Dershowitz said the "real problem here is that legislation is not keeping up with technology," arguing that federal courts also haven't fully addressed the legal standing of images stored only in a browser cache.

The federal statute outlawing possession of child pornography — 18 USC 2252A — doesn't mention browser caches. The few cases that have examined the issue at the federal level — notably a 2002 federal appeals case involving a Utah man and a 2006 federal appeals case involving a visitor to Las Vegas — generally conclude that cached images alone can establish possession if the defendant knows about the browser's caching function.

Both courts noted that it was hypothetically possible for the defendants to be innocent if they were ignorant of the cache function. 

"Those statutes are probably not quite as incomprehensible, but they are anything but clear," Dershowitz said.

Kent's convictions on the other counts rested on other evidence, including a folder on his machine that stored about 13,000 saved images of girls whom investigators estimated to be 8 or 9 years old and four messages to an unidentified third party discussing a research project into the regulation of child pornography.

"I don't even think I can mail the disk to you, or anyone else, without committing a separate crime. So I'll probably just go ahead and wipe them," one of the messages said.

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A knife-wielding man was shot by police officers responding to a domestic dispute on New York City's Upper East Side Monday, law enforcement sources told NBCNewYork.com. The suspect's mother was also struck by the gunfire.

It happened at about 2:14 p.m. ET at 408 E. 65th Street. Police said a woman called 911 to say her 22-year-old brother was holding their mother at knifepoint.

"The police trucks started coming in, and sirens were going all over, cops were running," Amy Emery, who was in the area attending a job interview, said. "People were running around, they were actually screaming and running away from that area."

Responding officers arrived to find Edgar Soto and his mother in the sixth-floor hallway outside their apartment, authorities said. The officers called for back-up, and a sergeant arrived with a stun gun and deployed it on Soto, to no effect.

Read more on NBCNewYork.com

That's when Soto turned to approach the police officers with the knife, police said. Two officers fired a total of five shots, and Soto was shot in the abdomen, side and groin.

His mother, identified as 49-year-old Flora Soto, was hit in the buttocks, police said. 

Both were taken to New York Presbyterian Hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

It's not clear what sparked the dispute.

Longtime friends of Edgar Soto said there was no warning for what happened.

"It's shocking," neighbor Steve Letavish said. "I knew the kid for awhile. I give him a high-five when I see him. You don't believe it until you hear it for yourself, and you can't go home because of it."

Another neighbor, Daniel Brown, said, "My heart hurts for the father. I've known him for a long time."

Edgar Soto's father is said to be a longtime city sanitation supervisor. He could not be located Monday.

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Eduardo Munoz / Reuters

Members from the fire department search for victims amid rubble at the scene of a building collapse in Harlem Friday. No casualties were reported, according to police officials.

An unoccupied five-story brownstone collapsed in Harlem Friday afternoon releasing a cloud of dust and smoke, NBC New York reported.

No one was injured when the building on West 123rd Street "pancaked" -- meaning all the floors fell onto each other -- officials said.

"All we heard was crack, crack, crack," said Shane Weekes, who was standing on the sidewalk across the street when the 100-year-old building went down.

Search and rescue crews combed through the rubble, using search dogs and listening devices before determining that no one was trapped.

Read more on NBC New York

The block between Lenox and Seventh Avenues remained shut down as fire crews continued their clean-up efforts Friday evening.

A Queens construction company had a permit to work on the foundation of the building though contractors had finished for the day when the building fell apart just before 5 p.m.

The Department of Buildings has no records of violations at the site, though they are conducting an investigation and will be speaking with contractors to find out what may have caused the collapse.

Craig Schley, president of the block association, said the construction in the area has concerned him.

"We have a lot of construction, fast development here," he said. "My personal opinion, some foundation work, construction work—looks like it went bad."

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Federal prosecutors say a lawyer, who moonlights as a pastor, and his associate swindled a retired teacher from Harlem out of a building she had owned for 40 years.

Ina McCarther, 80, told NBCNewYork.com that she had saved to buy a 37-unit building on St. Nicholas Avenue for $198,000 in 1954. Decades later, she was hoping to sell her property for $4 million.

Read the original story at NBCNewYork.com

That was in 2006, around the time that Ifeanyichukwu Eric Abakporo, a Nigerian citizen and Brooklyn lawyer, and Latanya Pierce, who worked in his office, cozied up to the elderly woman and persuaded her to let them take care of collecting rent checks from the building, according to investigators.

Abakporo, who owns a home in the wealthy part of Jamaica Estates in Queens, N.Y., is also a pastor at Deeper Life Bible Church, investigators said.

Instead of turning the checks over to McCarther, who prosecutors say was in declining physical and mental health, they deposited the rental checks into their own bank accounts.

Federal prosecutors say Abakporo and Pierce further tangled McCarther in a “web of lies” and ultimately persuaded her to sell them her property for $3.1 million. But instead of giving her real money, they paid her in phony checks, prosecutors said.

Read the indictment filed by federal prosecutors

Prosecutors say that once the pair secured the building, they made fraudulent statements to take out a $1.8 million loan against the property from Washington Mutual, which, when it collapsed in 2008, was the largest bank failure in American history. They allegedly then used the mortgage to benefit themselves and others.

They later defaulted on the mortgage, according to court records.

Abakporo and Pierce were arrested this week and charged with wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud. They face a prison sentence of up to 30 years if convicted.

Neither returned calls for comment. A man who answered the door at the church Wednesday night said the accused pastor, Eric Abakporo, wasn't there.

"I have no idea what you're saying," said the man, who declined to give his name. "That should be a lie -- these lies cannot help you."

McCarther says she started crying when she learned she'd been scammed.

"I said, 'Who could do this to me?'" she said.

McCarther said she wasn't selling the building to get rich. After painful foot surgeries, she wanted a comforting clause in the contract.

She still lives in the building but said she hasn’t seen the money she was promised. She says the alleged swindlers didn’t think she’d live long enough to follow up on what happened to the money.

"They miscalculated," she said.

This article includes reporting from NBCNewYork.com and msnbc.com's Isolde Raftery.

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New York police are seeking the public's help finding a group of a dozen girls they say taunted two other girls during an early-morning train ride in March, pulling the two victims by the hair off of the train at a Bronx subway stop. No arrests have been made, but now, in the hopes of catching the suspects, the NYPD has released video of the alleged incident.

The two 16-year-old victims were riding southbound on New York's No. 4 train on Saturday, March 31, at 3:15 a.m. when they were approached by the group - a dozen girls ages 15 through 18, none of whom the victims knew, according to the police. The group took one girl's French fries and then dragged the victims by the hair off of the train at East 176th Street, according to police, where the group took one of the victim's cell phones before fleeing.

Both victims refused medical aid on the scene, police said.

Nine days after the incident, police received a tip via a website unrelated to crime activity that there was video of the alleged assault, a police department spokesman, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to talk about the case, told msnbc.com.

"We received a tip that there was a fight on the No. 4 train on this website, and that's how we became aware of this," he said. Along with the tip was a short video with no audio showing teenage girls in a subway car, laughing. It's unclear what the girls are doing in the video, and whether the victims are in the footage.

"There's really not much to go on. [We have] no arrests. It's under investigation," said the department spokesman.

It's not known who shot the video. 

Anyone with information in regards to this robbery is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS.

The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers Website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or texting their tips to 274637(CRIMES) then enter TIP577.

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One World Trade Center, the giant monolith being built to replace the twin towers destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, laid claim to the title of New York City's tallest skyscraper on Monday. Workers erected steel columns that made its unfinished skeleton a little over 1,250 feet high, just enough to peak over the roof of the observation deck on the Empire State Building.

The milestone is a preliminary one. Workers are still adding floors to the so-called "Freedom Tower" and it isn't expected to reach its full height for at least another year, at which point it is likely to be declared the tallest building in the U.S., and third tallest in the world.

Those bragging rights, though, will carry an asterisk.

Crowning the world's tallest buildings is a little like picking the heavyweight champion in boxing. There is often disagreement about who deserves the belt.

In this case, the issue involves the 408-foot-tall needle that will sit on the tower's roof.

Count it, and the World Trade Center is back on top. Otherwise, it will have to settle for No. 2, after the Willis Tower in Chicago.

"Height is complicated," said Nathaniel Hollister, a spokesman for The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats, a Chicago-based organization considered an authority on such records.

Experts and architects have long disagreed about where to stop measuring super-tall buildings outfitted with masts, spires and antennas that extend far above the roof.

Consider the case of the Empire State Building: Measured from the sidewalk to the tip of its needle-like antenna, the granddaddy of all super-tall skyscrapers actually stands 1,454 feet high, well above the mark being surpassed by One World Trade Center on Monday.

Purists, though, say antennas shouldn't count when determining building height.

View 180 degree panoramic image from the 69th floor of the WTC

An antenna, they say, is more like furniture than a piece of architecture. Like a chair sitting on a rooftop, an antenna can be attached or removed. The Empire State Building didn't even get its distinctive antenna until 1952. The record books, as the argument goes, shouldn't change every time someone installs a new satellite dish.

Excluding the antenna brings the Empire State Building's total height to 1,250 feet. That was still high enough to make the skyscraper the world's tallest from 1931 until 1972.

From that height, the Empire State seems to tower over the second tallest completed building in New York, the Bank of America Tower.

Yet, in many record books, the two skyscrapers are separated by just 50 feet.

That's because the tall, thin mast on top of the Bank of America building isn't an antenna, but a decorative spire.

Unlike antennas, record-keepers like spires. It's a tradition that harkens back to a time when the tallest buildings in many European cities were cathedrals. Groups like the Council on Tall Buildings, and Emporis, a building data provider in Germany, both count spires when measuring the total height of a building, even if that spire happens to look exactly like an antenna.

This quirk in the record books has benefited buildings like Chicago's recently opened Trump International Hotel and Tower. It is routinely listed as being between 119 to 139 feet taller than the Empire State Building, thanks to the antenna-like mast that sits on its roof, even though the average person, looking at the two buildings side by side, would probably judge the New York skyscraper to be taller.

The same factors apply to measuring the height of One World Trade Center.

Designs call for the tower's roof to stand at 1,368 feet — the same height as the north tower of the original World Trade Center. The building's roof will be topped with a 408-foot, cable-stayed mast, making the total height of the structure a symbolic 1,776 feet.

So is that needle an antenna or a spire?

"Not sure," wrote Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the building.

The needle will, indeed, function as a broadcast antenna. It is described on the Port Authority's website as an antenna. On the other hand, the structure will have more meat to it than your average antenna, with external cladding encasing the broadcast mast.

Without that spire, One World Trade Center would still be smaller than the Willis Tower in Chicago, formerly known as the Sears Tower, which tops out at 1,451 feet (not including its own antennas).

Debate over which of those buildings can truly claim to be the tallest in the U.S. has been raging for years on Internet message boards frequented by skyscraper enthusiasts.

As for the Council on Tall Buildings, it is leaning toward giving One World Trade the benefit of the doubt.

"This is something we have discussed with the architect," Hollister said. "As we understand it, the needle is an architectural spire which happens to enclose an antenna. We would thus count it as part of the architectural height."

But, he noted, the organization has also chosen to sidestep these types of disputes, somewhat, by recognizing three types of height records: tallest occupied floor, architectural top, and height to the tip.

Hollister also pointed out that, technically speaking, One World Trade Center isn't a record-holder in any category yet, as it is still unfinished.

"A project is not considered a building until it is topped out, fully clad, and open for business or at least occupiable," he said.

The debate doesn't quite end there.

Neither of the Willis Tower nor One World Trade are as high as the CN Tower, in Toronto, which stands at 1,815 feet. That structure, however, isn't considered a building at all by most record-keepers, because it is predominantly a television broadcast antenna and observation platform with very little interior space. The tallest manmade structure in the Western Hemisphere will continue to be the 2,063-foot-tall KVLY-TV antenna in Blanchard, N.D.

As for the world's tallest building, the undisputed champion is the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, which opened in 2010 and reaches 2,717 feet.

Not counting about 5 feet of aircraft lights and other equipment perched on top, of course.

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