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"SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman hung out with North Korea's Kim Jong Un during his improbable journey to Pyongyang, watching the Harlem Globetrotters with the leader and later drinking and dining on sushi with him. "You have a friend for life," Rodman told Kim before a crowd of thousands Thursday at a gymnasium where they sat side by side, chatting as they watched players from North Korea and the United States face off in mixed teams, Alex Detrick, a spokesman for the New York-based VICE media company, told The Associated Press. Rodman arrived in Pyongyang on Monday with three members of the professional Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, VICE correspondent Ryan Duffy and a production crew to shoot an episode on North Korea for a new weekly HBO series."

"(CNN) -- A federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, has ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make the morning-after birth control pill available to people of any age without a prescription. The order overturned a 2011 decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to require a prescription for girls under 17."

The Student Press Law Center voiced concern Monday that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling denying the First Amendment claims of a high school blogger is a setback for the rights of student journalists everywhere. The New York appeals court ruled 3-0 that school administrators did not violate "clearly established" First Amendment precedent, either when they disciplined Avery Doninger for her off-campus blog or when they punished her and her classmates for wearing "Team Avery" T-shirts at a school "The ruling is worrisome in several respects. What Avery Doninger was doing was not terribly different from what an editorial commentator might do - trying to arouse the public to call and email the school to express an opinion about a disputed policy decision. It's troubling that the Second Circuit is willing to entertain the possibility that inciting citizens to contact their public officials is unprotected by the First Amendment if the issue is so controversial that people feel strongly about it, which is the takeaway from this decision," LoMonte said. "The circuit has indicated, in essence, that it's safe for students to engage in discussion about issues that nobody cares about, but if the issues raise strong emotions, then the students' involvement might be considered 'disruptive.'"  "It's clear that the federal courts have abdicated their responsibility to protect the basic human rights of vulnerable young people, and so young people are going to have to organize and mobilize like never before to petition their legislators and members of Congress for better statutory protection," LoMonte said. "This ruling is a wake-up call to every student in America that their rights are in peril and that they cannot depend on the federal courts to police even the clearest disciplinary overreactions."

Stephen Glass, a former The New Republic reporter who gained notoriety for fabricating dozens of stories in the mid-90s, is making headlines once again. This time, it's because California's Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on whether Glass is morally fit to be a lawyer in the state. After being tarnished with the plagiarism brush, you probably won't be hired as a journalist again. But you can go down other avenues and be successful. So why has Glass chosen to go into law, a field where his past moral ambiguity is clearly going to be questioned?For almost a decade, Glass has been fighting a steep uphill battle to become a practicing lawyer. After graduating from Georgetown University with a law degree in 2000, Glass has unsuccessfully lobbied to gain admission to first the bar in New York state and later, California. 

Andy Rooney, whose prickly wit was long a mainstay of CBS News and whose homespun commentary on "60 Minutes," delivered every week from 1978 until 2011, made him a household name, died on Friday in New York City.

This season, the council urged its members to insist on seeing identification from models to prove that they are 16 by the time of their shows.

NEW YORK - The late-night guessing game is over, with a startling twist: Conan O'Brien has chosen TBS as his future talk-show home.

NFL owners voted Tuesday to put the 2014 Super Bowl in the new $1.6 billion Meadowlands Stadium that this season will become home to the New York Jets and Giants. It's the first time the league has gone to a cold weather site that doesn't have a dome and, until now, those places couldn't even bid on the big game.

NEW YORK - A rally pushed the Dow Jones industrials back over 10,000 after the stock market sank to its lowest level of the year Tuesday. The late-day rebound did nothing to erase lingering worries about Europe's debt crisis.

Eagles coach Andy Reid said a CT scan Monday showed the star quarterback bruised his hand in Philadelphia's 29-16 loss to the New York Giants on Sunday. Reid said X-rays taken during the game showed Vick may have a fracture.

Jorge Posada came off the bench and helped the Yankees to yet another first-place finish with a go-ahead single in the eighth inning, and New York swept the Tampa Bay Rays by identical 4-2 scores in a day-night doubleheader Wednesday to win the AL East.

NEW YORK - On the eve of his final start in this most disappointing season, Mets starter Mike Pelfrey pondered the answer to a question that's both simple and confounding. Most people wouldn't understand, Pelfrey explained. He turned to rookie Josh Stinson for corroboration.

Perhaps no space in New York City is governed by as complex a set of social rules as the cramped subway car, that lurching human Petri dish that has spawned a thousand sociology papers. Its nuanced etiquette is known to generations of New Yorkers: head down, body clenched, contact of eyes or limbs a no-no.

Four underground stations in Manhattan will come alive on Tuesday with an amenity that has long eluded the city's subterranean realm: cellphone service, loud and mostly clear. In a landmark trial, New York City Transit will unveil a fiber-optic network that could be expanded to every underground platform by 2016.

A Queens teen facing immediate deportation to Bangladesh got a last-minute reprieve Thursday - one day before her 20th birthday.

The other night, I interviewed Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who was in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly. A lot has been written about Mikati, who was appointed in January. He's been accused of being too accommodating to Syria and Hezbollah (Hezbollah and its allies hold an 18-seat majority in the cabinet he formed in June 2011). For this reason, I fully expected Mikati to skirt any discussion of Hezbollah or the situation in Syria. Instead, I found him surprisingly candid about the tightrope he is walking - trying to keep the peace between all of Lebanon's many factions.

New York City labor unions are preparing to back the unwieldy grassroots band occupying a park in Lower Manhattan, in a move that could mark a significant shift in the tenor of the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street protests and send thousands more people into the streets. The Transit Workers Union Local 100's executive committee, which oversees the organization of subway and bus workers, voted unanimously Wednesday night to support the protesters. The union claims 38,000 members. A union-backed organizing coalition, which orchestrated a large May 12 march on Wall Street before the protests, is planning a rally on Oct. 5 in explicit support. And SEIU 32BJ, which represents doormen, security guards and maintenance workers, is using its Oct. 12 rally to express solidarity with the Zuccotti Park protesters.

We've all heard of buying a house, an apartment and a car. But an island?

SHE MAY BE the darling of the British tabloids, but on the other side of the Atlantic, Kate Middleton, otherwise known as Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is seen as rather average - at least as a clothes-horse.

A calico cat named Willow, who disappeared from a home near the Rocky Mountains five years ago, was found on Wednesday on a Manhattan street and will soon be returned to her family, where two of the three children and one of the two dogs may remember her. A man discovered Willow on East 20th Street on Wednesday and took her to a shelter. How she got to New York, more than 1,800 miles away, and the kind of life she lived in the city are mysteries. But thanks to a microchip that was implanted when she was a kitten, Willow will be reunited in Boulder, Colo., with her owners, the Squireses, who had long ago given up hope.