Long Island Ny

Nassau County officials are demanding a federal investigation into the tactics federal immigration agents used last week in raids on Long Island. County Executive Thomas Suozzi and Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey are scheduled to hold a news conference today at which they will release copies of letters they have sent to federal officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose agency oversees the agents.

A federal judge has awarded almost $1 million in back wages to two Indonesian housekeepers who were virtually enslaved by a wealthy Long Island couple. Judge Arthur Spatt said the maids were entitled to double their unpaid wages because they were abused while working around the clock for Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani. The victims says they were beaten, slashed with knives and forced to take freezing showers for such misdeeds as sleeping late. The judge awarded the housekeepers a total of more than $936,000 -- at least $700,000 more than the Sabhnanis' lawyers considered reasonable.

Marine biologist Dan Madigan stood on a dock in San Diego and considered some freshly caught Pacific bluefin tuna. The fish had managed to swim 5,000 miles from their spawning grounds near Japan to California's shores, only to end up the catch of local fishermen. It was August 2011, five months since a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami had struck in Japan, crippling the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Madigan couldn't stop thinking about pictures he'd seen on TV of Japanese emergency crews dumping radioactive water from the failing reactors into the Pacific Ocean.

Henry Fukuhara, a California watercolorist and teacher who attracted many of the field's most accomplished artists to annual painting workshops at the Manzanar relocation camp in Owens Valley, where he and thousands of other Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, died of natural causes Jan. 31 at a nursing home in Yorba Linda, according to his grandson, Paul Niwa. He was 96. A retired flower grower and wholesaler who did not begin painting in earnest until he was nearly 60, Fukuhara was known for energetic, abstract paintings, particularly of Manzanar and Santa Monica, where he grew up. "Henry had such a unique style, so different from most plein-air artists," said Bill Anderson, whose Sunset Beach gallery represented Fukuhara.

After trying out Pasadena, Atlanta and Miami, Lilian Junco decided this was the place to retire. Being near her son was the first attraction, but soon she was drawn in by the same combination of features that has lured tens of thousands of others from out of state: Gulf Coast living and super-low costs. With some of the country's lowest prices for housing, gas and food, no state income tax and one of the most resilient economies in the nation, Galveston and other parts of the Lone Star State are emerging as the new Florida.

Weeks after arriving in Pakistan on a flight from New York, Bryant Neal Vinas plunged into holy war: He volunteered to train for a suicide attack and fought in the wilds of Afghanistan. By the time he was captured in November, 14 months later, the Muslim convert from Long Island had journeyed into the innermost circles of Al Qaeda, according to a statement he gave investigators. Vinas befriended fellow trainees who wanted to bomb stadiums in Europe. He learned to assemble explosives vests.

Township officials in Brookhaven, N.Y., caught in an ongoing battle against extreme overcrowding of single-family houses -- apparently used as dormitories for immigrant laborers -- ordered the closing of three residences they said held as many as 90 tenants. Dozens of residents of the Long Island houses -- two in Farmingville and one in Ronkonkoma -- were homeless Saturday after the closures.

For the first time since a 1996 law set off more than 1,000 mergers among radio stations, the Justice Department sued on Thursday to block one of the deals: Chancellor Media Corp.'s $54-million acquisition of four New York stations. In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in New York, the department alleged that Chancellor's deal with SFX Broadcasting Inc.

Investigators seeking answers to the 1996 explosion and crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 fired Stinger missiles into the air from a Florida beach last month to determine whether it is possible that streaks of light seen by several witnesses could have been missiles.

For Rep. Peter T. King, Sept. 11 was personal. It was personal, he says, for everyone in his Long Island district, which was home to dozens of the police, firefighters and financial workers who died at the World Trade Center. And despite concerted nationwide criticism of the Republican's plan to hold a House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday on radicalization in the U.S. Muslim community, King says in his district he has nearly universal support. "Everyone is telling me to go ahead with it," King said in an interview, adding that he thinks his district is a good place to measure public opinion in the U.S. on such issues.