Attorney General Roy Cooper announced Tuesday that North Carolina has joined a lawsuit filed by federal authorities and several other states alleging that Standard and Poor's inflating its ratings on some securities in the lead up to the financial crisis.

Cooper filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court asking the court to stop S&P from "claiming objectivity to the public and require the company to change the way it does business."

The allegations against S&P relate to ratings it made on subprime mortgages. The federal and state complaints allege that "S&P’s analyses were in fact influenced by fees paid by its investment bank clients. As a result, the company knowingly inflated credit ratings for high-risk assets packaged and sold by Wall Street banks."

Cooper alleges S&P, as early as 2001, publicly declared its objectivity while privately compromising its ratings to keep the business of investment banks issuing the securities. The lawsuit alleges the misconduct became acute between 2004 and 2007, and continued until 2011.

More than dozen other states filed similar lawsuits Tuesday. The U.S. Department of Justice filed its suit Monday.

In case you missed it, here's the story from this weekend's News & Observer about the local TV news stations and what they're all doing to win viewers.

Nutshell: WRAL is the ratings leader overall, but WTVD rules with women. And tonight, former longtime WRAL anchor Pam Saulsby (left, with Wes Hohenstein and Penn Holderness) co-anchors her first nightly newscast on NBC-17. 

There's lots of stuff here about Nielsen ratings and market rankings, and a UNC-CH journalism school professor offers context.

Read more.

As I posted earlier this week, Harris Teeter ranked among the Top 10 supermarkets nationwide in a just-released survey by Consumer Reports.

Here are a few more details, along with the rankings of other stores that do business in the Triangle.

Can you guess which Triangle supermarkets were in the very bottom of the rankings?

The ratings for last night's title game between Duke and Butler were 34% higher than last year's match between UNC and Michigan State.

CBS, which aired the NCAA Tournament, says the Duke-Butler game drew a 16 overnight rating, which translates into 16% of TV households in 56 urban markets.

The Duke-Butler audience also tied the 16% for North Carolina-Illinois final in 2005 as the highest overnight rating for the title game since Connecticut-Duke in 1999, which drew a 16.9.

Between 11:30 and 11:45 p.m. ET, the game's rating peaked at 20.3%.