Facing growing political pressure, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday appointed an independent counsel to take over his office's investigation into the Paterson administration's response to a domestic violence case.

The new chief investigator who stepped into the spotlight in place of Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday was a judge for a quarter century, not only in title but also in temperament.

Sensing a political minefield, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo recused himself from two probes his office is conducting into Gov. David Paterson's administration, and turned the job over to former Chief Judge Judith Kaye as an "independent counsel."

It remains to be seen whether Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch's plan to overhaul state finances will pass the narrowly divided state Senate. But the price tag might include keeping an upstate prison or two open, despite Gov. David Paterson's call to shut the facilities down due to a declining inmate count. Or the state could end up selling some New York City power plants to help balance the budget.

Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch's scheme to borrow $6 billion over the next three years and have state finances overseen by a "Financial Review Board" was criticized yesterday by the state comptroller, mocked by Mayor Bloomberg and attacked by fiscal watchdogs.

WASHINGTON — The House voted Thursday to request an investigation into how long Democratic leaders knew about sexual misconduct allegations involving former Democratic Rep. Eric Massa of Corning before the matter was referred to the House ethics committee.

WASHINGTON — Former Democratic Rep. Eric Massa will have to return $129,251 of the $1 million in donations his campaign committee raised in 2009, according to the Federal Election Commission. But most of the $643,973 in cash that Massa's campaign had as of Dec. 31 won't have to be returned.

The state's tortured eight-year quest to install a limited casino at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens has failed for the third time, with the governor's office announcing Thursday that its chosen bidder would not be awarded the contract.

Opening a new hole in the state's financial plan, the Paterson administration on Thursday disqualified the winning bidder to develop and operate a racino at Aqueduct Race Track in Queens.

State banking regulators on Thursday evening shut down the troubled LibertyPointe Bank, whose chairman, Shaya Boymelgreen, built more than 2,400 apartments in New York City in the last decade. The failure was the 27th in the nation this year but the first in the city in more than a decade, regulators said.

The state Senate's Task Force on Government Efficiency took testimony from a handful of SUNY administrators and labor representatives Thursday afternoon about spending practices deemed "wasteful" at the conclusion of a 2009 probe.

TROY, N.Y. -- Federal funds may help protect parts of the wild forests of eastern Rensselaer County -- an area called the Rensselaer Plateau -- from being nibbled away by development under a plan put forth by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Eliot Spitzer has never come clean about the prostitution scandal that brought down the high-flying governor, killed his presidential ambitions and threw state government into such a tailspin under his successor, David Paterson, that it drove dysfunctional Albany to new lows.

The nation's immigration courts are choked by the largest backlog of pending deportation and asylum cases in history, more than 18,000 of them in Texas, a Syracuse University-based data research institute reported Thursday.

Both political parties are taking tea party activists seriously and are wary of offending them – if they are not already actively wooing them for state races this fall. Just look at the governor’s election in Ohio. Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich openly touts his tea party credentials in his bid to defeat incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland. “I think I was in the tea party before there was a tea party,” Kasich famously told a Columbus crowd earlier this year. “This is a real movement with a real message about people’s frustrations by broken promises that leaders on both sides of the aisle would be foolish to ignore,” he went on to write in a blog posting.