The long dispute over the estate of socialite philanthropist Brooke Astor ended Wednesday with a settlement that frees $100 million for charities and cuts by more than half the amount going to the son convicted of bilking her.

The agreement among Astor’s descendants and the New York institutions she loved ended a five-year legal fight that the judge feared would consume the entire estate. Westchester County Surrogate Judge Anthony Scarpino signed the agreement Wednesday afternoon. State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced the details.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has brokered a deal with legislative leaders to fully fund the last three years of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s five-year capital plan, a person familiar with the agreement said Monday.

The deal, reached Sunday night, provides $13.1 billion for four massive projects now under way: the Second Avenue subway, the Eastside Access for the Long Island Rail Road, the Fulton Street Transit Center and the extension of No. 7 subway line to the far West Side, according to the person who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because the plan hasn’t been formally announced.

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New York Times Co., which hired executive-recruiting firm Spencer Stuart to conduct a search for a new CEO, is focusing on external candidates, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.

The company is looking outside its own ranks to find a successor to Janet Robinson, who was pushed out in December, though it hasn’t made a final decision, said the person, who declined to be identified because the matter is private. Times Co. also has internal candidates, the person said.

New York has made among the nation’s biggest gains in graduating high school students, according to a study released Sunday by an education advocacy coalition.

The state is one of only two that have posted double-digit increases in graduation rates in recent years, going from 60.5% in 2002, about 12% below the national average at the time, to a 73.5% graduation rate in 2009, according to the report by Civic Enterprises.

NY police say a college employee inadvertently photographed himself planting a motion-activated camera in a women’s locker room at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

They tell local media that 56-year-old Thomas McMartin, of Hoosick Falls, was arrested Friday and pleaded not guilty to felony charges of unlawful surveillance and burglary. McMartin declined to comment. The college says he was fired from his job as a heating and cooling supervisor and barred from the upstate New York campus soon after the camera was found.