New York

A woman has filed a lawsuit against the United States city of Norwalk for exposure to her colleagues’ perfumes and colognes, alleging officials have failed to lessen her exposure to such scents in the town clerk’s office and that she is being harrassed. She is also seeking an unspecified amount of monetary damages and attorney’s fees.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu said he hopes South Africa’s experience in coming to terms with apartheid will be an inspiration for a new peace centre bearing his name to be built later this year. The centre has collected -million in donations, and another -million is needed to complete the facility.

New York officials on Monday began their pitch to host the 2012 summer Olympic Games in a series of meetings with the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his deputy, Daniel Doctoroff, led a team of experts in the field of sports to meet with the IOC’s 13-member evaluation commission.

In the annals of utterly shameless wartime propaganda, Britain’s casting of the Kenyan Mau Mau as bloodthirsty savages, and its own colonial administrators as heroic benefactors, is pretty much the gold standard. Now an Oxford scholar has unearthed new evidence of Britain’s ruthless response to the Mau Mau rebellion.

Flag-waving supporters of New York’s bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games greeted delegates of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Sunday night, the start of a fast-paced four-day visit. New York is the third stop for members of the IOC after Madrid and London. They will also visit Moscow and Paris.

A New York state court ruled on Friday that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, a decision hailed by gay-rights groups as a major victory. Justice Doris Ling-Cohan said preventing gay and lesbian couples from receiving marriage licenses violates basic freedoms guaranteed in the state Constitution.

The north-eastern United States was emerging on Monday from a snowstorm, ranked among the five worst in the past century, that was linked to at least 18 deaths across eight states. The storm, which started on Friday, dumped 35cm in New York City and close to a metre in some parts of the state of Massachusetts.

A new biography of Abraham Lincoln is making headlines with its assertion that the romantic leanings of the renowned 16th president of the United States were primarily homosexual. <i>The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln</i>, by CA Tripp, has ruffled more than a few feathers.

See Dick and Jane. See Dick and Jane get a lawyer. Pearson Education, the publishing company that owns the copyright to the single-named stars of countless United States reading primers, is suing a division of Time Warner for co-opting the characters in a book called Yiddish with Dick and Jane.

The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday threatened to take measures against Sudan, blaming it for the ”serious degradation of the security and humanitarian situation in Darfur and repeated violations of the ceasefire”. The council condemned ceasefire violations and the shooting at an African Union helicopter.

World crude oil prices rose on Monday as traders worried about heating oil supplies in anticipation of a plunge in temperatures in the northeastern United States. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in January, climbed 30 cents to ,01 a barrel.

For more than a decade, the Fifth Avenue hawks have brought a touch of the wild to Manhattan’s concrete canyons. The raptors that captured the hearts of a city inspired a documentary, a book and reams of newsprint. But now the residents who shared their building with the red-tailed hawks have destroyed their nest.