Dan Bobkoff

Tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians live in New York City, and many with close ties to their countries are on edge over what's happening back home.

We're used to rounding up the total on our taxi ride or dropping a buck or two in a jar at the coffee shop. Now, new high-tech ways to pay are nudging us to tip more generously and more often.

Cartooning was his passion as a kid, and he enrolled in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture to become better at drawing backgrounds. Now, some call Ingels a "starchitect," because his challenging designs are getting built.

The New York City Council is slated to vote on a bill today that would add electronic cigarettes to the city's smoking ban. If the bill passes, use of e-cigarettes would be prohibited from public and private venues such as beaches, parks, restaurants and offices.

For freelancers and artists living in expensive cities like New York, the home-sharing site Airbnb has become a way to subsidize their rents. It's also often illegal. With the site's users in the crosshairs of New York's attorney general, and questions elsewhere, some now wonder if the good times are going to end.

New York City Mayor-Elect Bill deBlasio named William Bratton to head the city's police department Thursday. Bratton was New York's police commissioner in the 1990s, and was police chief in Los Angeles and commissioner in Boston. He'll return to the role as head of the nation's largest police department as the NYPD faces a crossroads. Despite unprecedentedly low crime rates in the city, the department has come under scrutiny in recent years for its controversial stop-and-frisk policy — tactics the mayor-elect has strongly criticized for souring relations between police and minority communities.

At least four people are dead after a Metro-North Railroad train derailed in New York on Sunday morning. This past summer, a freight train carrying trash derailed on the other side of the curve. And in May, two Metro-North trains collided in Connecticut, injuring more than 70 people.

Two members of the up-and-coming indie band The Yellow Dogs were among the dead in a Monday morning murder-suicide in Brooklyn. It's a tragic ending for a band that came from Iran to escape crackdowns on rock music.

The value of a brand doesn't include anything physical. It's just the name of the company — and all of the customer loyalty attached to that name.

JPMorgan Chase agreed pay $5.1 billion to settle litigation over mortgage assets sold during the housing bubble. The deal, announced late Friday afternoon, is to resolve claims the company misled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the housing market crashed. It is part of a tentative $13 billion deal the company is trying to reach with federal and state agencies over its mortgage liabilities.