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This article reports that more than 600 patients in New York State have been notified by the state that they should be tested for hepatitis and HIV infection due to treatment three years ago by an anesthesiologist in Nassau County who reused syringes. Dr. Harvey Finkelstein was charged with infecting patients through the improper use of medical equipment three years ago but the patients were just notified of their risks in 2007.

This article describes how people continue to go into the closed up Kings Park Psychiatric Center in Long Island, New York. The Center has been closed for nearly ten years and vandals and other curious visitors go through fences to view the property that housed nearly 10,000 mental patients at one time. A group of young men are regular visitors and they are drawn by the history of the buildings and the people who stayed there.

This article discusses the clashes going on in cities around the United States, including Massapequa, New York, between homeowners of older and smaller homes in suburban neighborhoods and new owners who tear down the smaller homes to erect larger ones. Preservationists have been making some progress in saving the older homes and the neighborhoods. The slowdown in the building boom has given some cities and towns a chance to enact building moratoriums and zoning changes that have slowed down building.

This article discusses how retirees gather daily in all types of weather on the boardwalk at Jones Beach, New York to get exercise and visit with one another. Most of them are seeking a different, quieter version of their former working lives and they enjoy discussing subjects such as investments, doctors, and grandchildren. Although they might not remember names of deceased friends, they miss them when they are gone.

This article describes the efforts of some residents of Farmingville, Long Island, New York to secede and form their own incorporated town. The secessionist supporters live in the wealthier western portion of Farmingville. The town has become infamous as a haven for illegal immigrants and some of the citizens believe that the reputation is affecting home sales and prices. Those opposed believe that bigotry and prejudice are driving the secession effort.

The article profiles Hykiem Coney, a 24-year-old who was shot and killed in Long Island, New York. Coney, who had once led a life of crime as a gang leader and drug dealer, was participating in community outreach, working as an anti-gang organizer, and studying to become a minister when he was murdered in 2006.

The article reports on the sentencing of Ryan Cushing, who was convicted of throwing a 20-pound frozen turkey into the windshield of a car being driven by Long Island resident Victoria Ruvolo. The compassion of Ruvolo helped secure a lenient jail sentence for Cushing, who might have faced as much as 25 years in prison on the multiple felony charges originally brought against him in the attack. Ruvolo broke every bone in her face and suffered brain injuries as a result of the incident. Cushing was sentenced to six months incarceration after Ruvolo forgave him for his actions. New York.

Reports on the concerns of residents in Maspeth regarding the mayoral election on November 8, 2005 in Queens, New York City.

Examines reactions of Americans to the London subway terrorist bombings. Comments of residents of New York City, Chicago, Boston, Miami and San Francisco; Concerns over safety and terror preparedness; The American psyche since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; Issue of fatalism; Puzzlement of some law enforcement officials over why terrorists had not tried to attack the transportation systems of major U.S. cities; Ways that Americans are handling the anxiety of a possible next attack. INSET: Giuliani Was near Site of Bombing.

Discusses the outlook for an elevated park created on an abandoned railroad viaduct above the streets in Chelsea. Location of the proposed park in Manhattan; Background on the project that originated in 1999 when some neighborhood residents became known as Friends of the High Line; The purpose of the permit issued by the federal Surface Transportation Board; How the federal rail-preservation law allows "interim" use; Comment of New York City Planning Commission chairwoman, Amanda M. Burden, who supports the High Line project.

CORRECTION APPENDED Hugo Fiorato, a former child prodigy who became the conductor of the New York City Ballet and one of its most enduring influences, died on Monday in Boston. He was 97. His death was confirmed by his stepson Jonathan Scott. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr. Lloyd J. Old, who made seminal discoveries about the relationship between cancer and the immune system, and despite setbacks in the field steadfastly promoted the development of vaccines and other immunological means to fight cancer, died on Nov. 28 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78. The cause was prostate cancer, his family said. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A state senator has scheduled a daylong hearing for Friday on terrorism preparedness in New York City, featuring an array of experts in law enforcement, emergency response and counterterrorism. But his plan to take testimony in Manhattan about the threat from radical Islam is drawing sharp criticism from Muslim and interfaith groups that call the hearing anti-Muslim and incendiary -- a local version of the contentious session held last month in Washington by Representative Peter T. King of Long Island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two co-founders of the plan to build a Muslim community center and mosque in downtown Manhattan have begun exploring a new, and possibly competing, project: an interfaith cultural center that they said might be located at the currently proposed site, two blocks from ground zero, or elsewhere in the neighborhood. Daisy Khan, the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said on Tuesday that she and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, two co-founders whose involvement in the controversial community center plan was curtailed this year after a falling out with their real estate partner, might develop a new project that was ''larger in concept'' than what is now proposed at 51 Park Place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The imam who was named three weeks ago to lead religious services at the proposed Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero said Friday that he was stepping down. The move is the latest in a string of public relations setbacks for the project. The imam, Sheik Abdallah Adhami, who stirred controversy shortly after his appointment by telling a reporter for NY1 News that most homosexual behavior was linked to early childhood abuse, said in a statement that he was giving up his role in the project, known as Park51, to devote more time to completing a book. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two weeks after the developer of a controversial Islamic center and mosque planned near ground zero distanced himself from the imam who co-founded the project, the imam has raised confusion over who is in charge by suggesting that he would move the center to a less contentious space if an opportunity arose. The imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, told the editorial board of The Buffalo News last week during a speaking tour in upstate New York that if someone offered another site, ''I would move; I would move because my whole life is about improving relationships with people.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Long-simmering tensions between co-founders of the proposed Islamic center and mosque near ground zero led to a parting of the ways on Friday that sharply reduced the role of one: the imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, long the project's public face. The break-up sent ripples of uncertainty through a community of religious and political leaders in New York who rallied last summer to the side of Mr. Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, when opponents assailed the plan to build near the site of the 9/11 attacks. Some worried aloud that the curtailed involvement of the couple could cost the project support. Others said the plan would continue to be endorsed by people committed to interfaith dialogue and freedom of religious expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced on Tuesday that 26 elementary schools and one high school that had received heavy subsidies in recent years because of declining enrollment would be closed at the end of the current school year. The announcement capped a two-year review process and represented the largest school consolidation in the history of the archdiocese, which includes 2.5 million Catholics in a sprawling territory stretching from Staten Island to Sullivan County. Among the schools to be shut, six are in the Bronx, four are on Staten Island and three are in Manhattan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MASSAPEQUA PARK, N.Y. -- It was not the first time a health scare had infiltrated the sanctuary of a Roman Catholic church. The bodily contact in certain church rituals has made some people wary of touching hands or sharing chalices of altar wine during every public health emergency, real or imagined, of the last few decades. But unlike some scares based on rumors or overcautiousness, the alarm among parishioners at a Long Island church this week is based on a confirmed finding: Someone who touched the communion wafers distributed at two packed services on Christmas Day was infected with hepatitis A. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The controversy over plans to build an Islamic center in downtown Manhattan subsided in November, almost abruptly, with the end of an election season that amplified its most emotional underlying issues. But the imam behind the project has decided to risk reigniting that opposition by setting out on a nationwide speaking tour next month to promote the planned center and to foster dialogue about Muslim life in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is hard to make it in New York - whether in the arts, in finance, politics or fashion. But no endeavor in the city can be more competitive than the one where you try to get the attention of passers-by in Times Square by smiling at them and handing them glossy leaflets intended to make them think. Into that bazaar of mass preoccupation, half a dozen members of an organization called Muslims for Peace fanned out Friday, smiling and offering their wares. They belonged to a sect, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, that embraces a pacifist tradition within Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing a drop in attendance and a shortage of priests, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn plans to close two churches, fold six parishes into three and impose strict budget constraints on all 198 of its parishes. The move, announced from pulpits on Sunday, was described by church officials as the first phase of a broad consolidation that will result in further closings or mergers over the next two years, eventually affecting every parish in the diocese, which serves an estimated 1.5 million Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Late into the night after learning that the Archdiocese of New York might close his 130-year-old parish school, Msgr. Howard Calkins sat at his desk in the rectory of Sacred Heart Church in Mount Vernon, making lists: Why the school should stay open; how the school could do a better job raising enrollment. But a third list stumped him. He calculated that it would take 200 people donating $1,000 every year for 10 years to keep his school going. He came up with two or three names, then put his pen down. ''We're probably not going to make it,'' he said he told himself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York on Tuesday proposed closing 31 elementary schools and a high school next year in what church officials said was the largest school system reorganization in its history. The schools proposed for shuttering -- described by the Archdiocese as ''at risk,'' pending last-minute appeals to school officials and outside donors -- stretch from New York City to several counties to the north. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many New Yorkers were suspicious of the newcomers' plans to build a house of worship in Manhattan. Some feared the project was being underwritten by foreigners. Others said the strangers' beliefs were incompatible with democratic principles. Concerned residents staged demonstrations, some of which turned bitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent Harlem priest who helped arrange the New York visit of Pope Benedict XVI in 2008 has resigned, two years after he was suspended on charges of sexually abusing high school students he taught in the 1980s. The priest, Msgr. Wallace A. Harris, 63, remains an ordained priest in the eyes of the church, but he ''will never again publicly function or present himself as a priest,'' Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan wrote two weeks ago in a letter to the parishioners of St. Charles Borromeo Church, on West 141st Street, where Monsignor Harris was pastor from 1989 until his suspension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With their call to introspection and atonement, the Jewish High Holy Days have always challenged rabbis to find avenues into the consciences of their congregations -- on personal matters, and worldwide issues like war and peace. But in synagogues around New York this year, rabbis are confronting an unusual quandary as they prepare their sermons: whether to wade into a local cultural war over plans to build an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan and several other religious leaders in New York City are planning to meet regularly to try to reduce the kind of tensions that have surrounded plans for an Islamic center near ground zero. Leaders involved in preliminary discussions said the meetings would first address the conflict about the center, then broaden channels of communication among clergy members of various faiths who are committed to defusing similar flashpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While New Yorkers have been drawn into an increasingly vehement debate over an Islamic center and mosque planned near ground zero, another religious squabble has been simmering. And on Thursday, that battle will culminate at the Empire State Building. There, protesters are planning to rally against a decision by the building's owners not to light the upper floors in blue and white on Thursday night in honor of the 100th birthday of Mother Teresa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The furor over plans to build an Islamic center two blocks from ground zero had already been joined by several politicians. On Monday, two politicians were joined in turn by officials of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, who sought to use the controversy to focus attention on their long-stymied effort to rebuild a church destroyed on 9/11 at the foot of the World Trade Center. At a news conference near the trade center site, church officials appeared with former Gov. George E. Pataki and a Greek-American Congressional candidate from Long Island -- both opponents of the Islamic center -- to make their case: Government officials who appear to be clearing the way for the center, which includes a mosque, are blocking the reconstruction of St. Nicholas Church, the only house of worship destroyed in the terrorist attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WEST SAYVILLE, N.Y. -- Without doubt, many more people line the sidewalks to see the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Manhattan than to watch the St. Mary Malankara Indian Orthodox Church's annual Assumption Day Parade, which began here on Sunday with the usual blowing of the kumbu horn and the dancing of the koladi by the congregation's teenage girls, dressed in saris and banging sticks. But the Indians' parade has its longtime devotees: neighborhood residents, mostly, who say they look forward to the procession because it is practically the only time when the people of the congregation venture outside, not counting getting in and out of their cars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Brooklyn, the borough of churches and trees, Walt Whitman and Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and Mike Tyson, has never lacked for people of distinction -- except perhaps in one category. Nobody from Brooklyn has ever been made a saint. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After more than a century on the West Side of Manhattan, St. Michael Academy had assumed the traits of some of its best students: cash poor, underestimated by peers, capable of defying expectations with breathtaking regularity. An all-girls Roman Catholic high school, St. Michael's admitted many students who had been rejected by every other parochial school in the city because of poor grades or troubled behavior -- then graduated three-quarters of them with state-certified Regents diplomas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A church may be a church, and a temple a temple, but through the prism of emotion that still grips many New Yorkers almost a decade after 9/11, a mosque can apparently represent a lot of things. In the last few months, Muslim groups have encountered unexpectedly intense opposition to their plans for opening mosques in Lower Manhattan, in Brooklyn and most recently in an empty convent on Staten Island. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When news spread the other day that work crews were draping black steel netting over the facade of Our Lady of Loreto Church, the people fighting to save the building from demolition found themselves stymied -- and reflecting on a yearlong campaign at the brink. For them, it has been a campaign for their past, embodied in an architectural treasure in a blighted neighborhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The church, with its frescoed ceilings and fine Italian statuary, was built by Italian immigrants with their own hands in the early 1900s, on land farmed by the first Italian settler in America, because they did not feel welcome in German-speaking and Irish Roman Catholic parishes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of New York City's largest hospital systems has made an offer to take over the financially struggling St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, provoking opposition from elected officials who fear the loss of critical medical services, especially emergency care, for tens of thousands of patients who could be sent elsewhere. The proposal by the hospital system, Continuum Health Partners, to take over St. Vincent's and turn it into an outpatient center would mean the loss of the city's last Catholic general hospital, at least in the form in which it has been known for more than 160 years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tangible things occupy the days of most building managers in New York City. Hot water, floods, bugs, rent checks and so on. But last week, newly added to the tenant issues facing building managers like Harold M. Jacob, who runs a co-op on the Lower East Side where Orthodox Jews inhabit a substantial portion of the 2,500 apartments, was this almost ontological question: [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On a blog catering to young Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (where almost everyone has a blog), one comment seemed to crystallize the mix of puzzlement and dark humor emerging in some parts of their community on Friday, the day after the F.B.I. arrested five Sephardic rabbis on money-laundering charges. The five were netted in an investigation that relied heavily on the work of a confidential informer, reputed to be a prominent Sephardic Jewish businessman who -- as everyone in the tight-knit enclave knew since the F.B.I. arrested him in 2006 -- faced a long prison term for financial fraud. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Things went smoothly for the first hour of the Twitter experiment at Trinity Church in Manhattan on Good Friday in April. While hundreds of worshipers watched the traditional dramatization of the Crucifixion from pews in the church, one of New York's oldest, thousands more around the world followed along on smartphones and computers as a staff member tweeted short bursts of dialogue and setting (''Darkness and earthquake,'' ''Crucify him!''). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn repeated a warning this week that he has leveled at lawmakers for months: If the statute of limitations on child sex-abuse lawsuits is temporarily lifted, as pending state legislation proposes, a cascade of very bad things will happen. His Roman Catholic diocese and others will go bankrupt. Bishops like him will be forced to close churches and schools. And wrathful constituents will punish the politicians who, in his view, will have made this all happen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the peak of the real estate boom, one of New York's largest landowners unloaded more than $100 million worth of property -- and might have sold more if not for the parishioners who clung to their churches and blocked the bulldozers. The seller was the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which closed more than two dozen houses of worship and schools between 2003 and 2008. It sold development rights to a handful of properties, leased others and padlocked the rest in an effort to narrow a local budget gap, while confronting nationwide trends like low attendance, a priest shortage, the rising cost of maintaining century-old buildings, and a new demand for churches in the far exurbs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the regular announcements on Wednesday morning at Ascension School, a Roman Catholic school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a boy named Kevin threw up and was sent home. It would ordinarily not have attracted a lot of attention. Children get sick at school every day. But on this day it was the topic of intense after-school talk, and even news media attention, because of the recent swine flu outbreak -- and the New York City health commissioner's remark on Tuesday linking Ascension School to the spread of the virus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Longstanding tensions among parishioners at the renowned Riverside Church erupted again this week as a group of congregants went to court to stop the installation of a new senior pastor whose compensation package, they say, exceeds $600,000 a year. In a motion filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the group said that the new pastor, the Rev. Dr. Brad R. Braxton, and the church board that selected him last September after a yearlong search, had dismissed their calls for transparency in financial matters. They also complained that Dr. Braxton was moving Riverside away from its tradition of interracial progressivism and toward a conservative style of religious practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In ceremonies marked by solemn Christian ritual and the stagecraft of the grand entrance, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan was warmly welcomed Tuesday night as the new leader and high priest of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Seven weeks after Pope Benedict XVI selected him to succeed Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who is retiring at age 77, Archbishop Dolan, 59, a mirthful pastor and a theological conservative who has headed the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for the last seven years, rapped sharply on the massive bronze front doors of St. Patrick's Cathedral. In the intricately scripted rite, the doors were pulled open and he proceeded inside for a vespers ceremony -- the start of two days of ritual, prayer and music that will make him the most prominent Catholic prelate in the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Looking drawn and moving stiffly after three days in the hospital this week, Cardinal Edward M. Egan returned to the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Thursday to participate in Holy Week services for the last time as archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. A little more than a week before his retirement, Cardinal Egan, 77, was stricken with severe stomach pains on Saturday night and driven to St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan in Greenwich Village. He was released on Tuesday after treatment for a gastrointestinal virus, with an unspecified appointment to come back for pacemaker implantation surgery, and with instructions from doctors to rest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the mother church of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and one of the city's premier architectural monuments, was rededicated on Sunday, seven years after a smoky fire blackened its vast interior and decommissioned its 8,500-pipe organ. Church leaders and public officials, including New York's two senators, hailed the occasion with sermons and speeches during a three-hour service filled with pageantry, dance and the visceral, booming chords of the church's restored great organ, heard publicly for the first time since the fire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To find the 10th man for a minyan, the quorum required in Orthodox Jewish services, some rabbis on the Lower East Side of Manhattan have been known in recent years to step into the street and stop passers-by. Are you Jewish? they ask. It is a troubling notion for the remaining Jewish population of a neighborhood that in the 19th and early 20th centuries was the American portal for Jewish immigrants -- hundreds of synagogues once thrived there -- and where now a few dozen synagogues struggle in a place jammed with Indian and Thai restaurants and secular-minded young people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tall and charismatic, Msgr. Wallace A. Harris has earned a reputation over a 36-year career for cool-handed crisis management and for forging connections. He revived a Harlem parish where the previous pastor was in drug rehabilitation, helped arrange the pope's visit this year, and as the highest-placed black cleric in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, was talked about as a potential bishop, even cardinal. But as a black man in a largely white organization who saw himself as something of an outsider, friends say, Monsignor Harris also earned a reputation as someone willing to speak up for those he saw as underdogs -- a quality that made him the natural choice of fellow priests in the mid-1990s, when they elected him chairman of the Presbyteral Council, the senate that represents all 650 priests in the archdiocese. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mike from El Paso was on the phone line to ''The Catholic Guy,'' the afternoon drive-time talk program produced via the unlikely partnership of Sirius Satellite Radio (familiar to most people as ''Howard Stern's network'') and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. ''I called the other day?'' said Mike. ''About how much I miss confession?'' This would be the Mike who was barred from the sacrament of confession under church law because he married a divorced woman whose first marriage was never annulled. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ''Downtown'' that Petula Clark evoked in her 1964 pop song of that name (where ''you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares'') never made much sense to anyone who worked or lived in an actual downtown. It was a song for people who did not. So, blaring from the public address speakers to open a recent meeting here, Ms. Clark's hit was probably the perfect score for a conference of suburban officials and planners promoting the idea that Creating Cool Downtowns, the conference title, was the future of the suburbs of New York. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]