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    Self-identifying ‘hot girls’ are mobilizing to elect a progressive as New York City mayor

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    “Hot girls” may not be a pollster-approved voting bloc in the way that young men or the college-educated are, but since the 2020 election the demographic has held a particular status – at least for the very online.It started in 2020, when the model Emily Ratajkowski officially endorsed Bernie Sanders’s pre-pandemic presidential campaign. Inspired by Ratajkowski, self-professed hot girls piled on their endorsements, posting selfies with the hashtag #HotGirlsForBernie. Some saw it as a way to counter the persistent “Bernie bro” narrative, a rebuke of the idea that Sanders’s fandom consisted solely of obnoxious, socialist-in-name-only men who lived their lives on Twitter.Five years later, “Hot Girls for Bernie” is a relic, one of the last gasps of hope young progressives felt before the reality of Trump 2.0 took hold. Nevertheless the phrase has returned, this time in support of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist and state assemblyman from Queens who is running for New York City mayor. This week, a social media account called “Hot Girls 4 Zohran” dropped on X and Instagram to give away free Mamdani swag.View image in fullscreenThough the account is unaffiliated with the Mamdani’s official campaign (and Mamdani’s representative declined to comment), it speaks to the grassroots enthusiasm fueling the millennial’s run for office.Mamdani does not have the widespread name recognition of contenders such as the current mayor, Eric Adams, who is running as an independent after a series of scandals, or Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor of New York in 2021 after facing multiple sexual harassment accusations, which he denied. But Mamdani’s campaign has tapped a hyper-progressive wellspring by putting forth policies that sound ripe for a Fox News scare segment. They include increasing the city’s minimum wage from $16.50 to $30, opening city-owned grocery stores, and making childcare and bus fares free.Mamdani, a failed rapper and son of the indie filmmaker Mira Nair, is most at home on social media, especially TikTok. He exudes a kind of nerdy-cool vibe, which has earned him a GQ profile and a spread in Interview Magazine, where he fielded questions from New York luminaries such as Chloë Sevigny, Cynthia Nixon, Eileen Myles and Julio Torres. Last month, more than 18,000 citywide donors helped his campaign secure $8m, hitting the fundraising limit set by the city.Hot Girls 4 Zohran is run by two friends, Cait, 24, and Kaif, 28, who live in Brooklyn and did not want their last names published due to privacy concerns. Cait, who is very active on X, says she has been harassed by users who don’t agree with her political opinions. But she’s fine with her face being out there – she posed for the account next to a box of Hot Girls 4 Zohran T-shirts.Cait and Kaif say they are supporting Mamdani because he wants to make the city more affordable for the working class and courts individual donors over the super-rich. “We’re both fairly skeptical of institutional politicians, especially given the last election,” said Cait, who works in marketing. “We really just want to get his name out there.”And hot girls help. Not in an ogling way, but as a tongue-in-cheek way for voters to self-identify and convince others to do so too. “It’s empowering for women, and it brings us together,” Cait said. “There’s an intersectionality to it.” Kaif says that they use the “girl” descriptor liberally – it’s more of a mindset than a gender classification. “So many men have also reached out to us asking for T-shirts,” he said.Cait was in high school when Hot Girls for Bernie went viral. “I was still pretty young, but I noticed it even back then,” she said.She has Danaka Katovich to thank for the inspiration. In 2020, after seeing playful memes about Ratajkowski’s support for Sanders, the then student at DePaul University in Chicago made a group chat for “hot girl” Bernie supporters. Katovich told Vox that 50 friends joined the group, which dropped a social media campaign featuring equally sexy and silly selfies.“I’m surprised people are still doing this,” said Katovich, who is now 25 and working for a feminist non-profit aimed at ending US warfare and imperialism. “Back then, journalists asked me: ‘What does Hot Girls for Bernie mean to you?’ I was 20 – it didn’t mean anything to me, since it started as a joke.”Katovich remembers people criticizing the “hot girls” label for being glib or exclusionary, but she insists it was inclusive. “Anyone could post a picture, non-binary people were included,” she said. “Sure, there were some dudes who would comment on a picture and say, ‘You’re actually more of a seven,’ but at the time, it didn’t feel like anyone who mattered really cared what you looked like at all.”View image in fullscreenKari Winter, a professor in the global gender and sexuality studies department at the University at Buffalo, agreed that “hot girls” can mean whatever posters want. “Although I personally would not use the term ‘hot’ or ‘girl’ as a trend, I like the way young women, LGBT, non-binary and disabled people use it to claim their own multi-faceted existence in the world,” she said. “It reminds me of a time when a lot of us had bumper stickers and T-shirts that said, ‘This is what a feminist looks like,’ and the point was to be inclusive, because feminists look like everything and anything.”A recent AARP New York and Siena College poll shows that Cuomo holds a strong lead of 34% in the Democratic primary pack, thanks to older voters. Mamdani follows at 16%, and 20% of Democratic voters say they are undecided among the nine total candidates. The June primary is ranked-choice voting, a confusing system that has New Yorkers listing candidates in order of preference. The winner will probably face off against Adams and a Republican in November.Despite Cuomo’s early lead, Winter says that Mamdani’s intense focus on courting working-class voters can serve as a lesson to Democrats. “Democrats need to understand that the way to energize people is not to keep trying to play to some mythical middle, but to galvanize people who are so sick of corruption and the pandering to wealth,” she said. “The only way forward is to galvanize people who care about common people and the common good.”View image in fullscreenThe Democratic national convention might not recognize a hot girl delegation, but Bernie evangelists say the movement wasn’t all frivolous. Hadiya Afzal, a former DePaul University student who was active in the Sanders group chat, says that many of her friends went on to work in progressive politics and still dedicate much of their time to the causes they care about.“I think that’s what folks should take away from this kind of campaign: at the end of the day, it’s about the policies,” Afzal said. “There would have been no Hot Girls for Bernie without an actual policy platform. That’s the backbone of what made it meaningful.”Over at Hot Girls 4 Zohran, Cait and Kaif want people do more with the T-shirts than pose in them for social media. “If you wear the shirt out and about, then it spreads the word, and we really want to mobilize voters of all ages,” Kaif said. Ultimately, he and Cait hope the moniker will aid the candidate in his goal of building “the single largest volunteer operation” of any New York mayoral race ever. With a force of 10,000 door knockers, Mamdani is well on his way.One of those volunteers is Joshua Leirer, a 37-year-old who lives in Ridgewood, Queens. When Leirer canvassed in one of Brooklyn’s parks in March, there were so many volunteers that they had to spread into the “outskirts”. And, crucially, “the volunteers are hot.”“The people I talked to were really cool and friendly,” Leirer said. “A lot of glasses, a lot of beanies. I would call it a Brooklyn hot.” More

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      Andrew Cuomo enters race for New York mayor as frontrunner – but trailing baggage

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      Abraham Rios, a 76-year-old army veteran and retiree, regularly meets friends at a coffee shop around the corner from his home in Brooklyn, and that is about all he does, he says.The Puerto Rico native who served in the Vietnam war is satisfied with the money he gets from social security and enjoys life, but he would like to see more police in his Clinton Hill neighborhood, where he has lived since 1964.Rios thinks Andrew Cuomo, who on 1 March entered the New York City mayoral race in an attempt to resurrect a seemingly dead political career, can make that happen.“He is a very good leader,” Rios said of Cuomo, who resigned as New York governor in 2021 after facing sexual harassment allegations, which he denied. “He made his mistakes, like all of us have,” but “the governor built bridges. He helped the poor. He helped everybody.”Cuomo’s long history in New York politics and name recognition has helped him storm to a lead in a candidate field featuring an incumbent – Eric Adams – whom many see as corrupt, and a large number of lesser-known candidates who are struggling to get much traction.The scandal that brought Cuomo down and his controversial handling of the Covid-19 pandemic probably won’t have a significant impact on his chances of winning, New York political analysts say, but some voters don’t like what they viewed as his heavy-handed approach as governor and don’t think he is progressive enough.“The judging of the mayor is going to be determined not on incidents in their past but who we feel has got the best chance of leading the city when things that are not predictable happen,” like the pandemic and the September 11 terrorist attacks, said Mitchell Moss, New York University professor of urban policy and planning. “He is the only candidate” with experience “at the federal level, the state level and who understands how to make the tough decisions”.The Democratic mayoral primary, which will probably determine who wins the general election in the blue city, is scheduled for 24 June. The city will again use a ranked-choice system in which voters pick their preferred candidates from one to five, though they do not need to select more than one. If someone captures more than half the votes, they win; if not, the candidate with the fewest first-round votes is eliminated, and their supporters’ votes go to their second choice. That process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes.Cuomo, who for months was rumored to be considering running, had a wide lead in February polls, with about a third of voters in two surveys saying he was their favorite candidate among nine Democrats, while the runner-up in each only received 10%.Other candidates include Adams, who faced a federal indictment until the US justice department dropped the charges against him, it appears, in exchange for his help implementing Donald Trump’s immigration policy; the current and former city comptrollers, Brad Lander and Scott Stringer; the New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani; and the state senator Jessica Ramos, among others.In announcing his candidacy, Cuomo said the city was in crisis.“You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway,” Cuomo said in a video. “These conditions exist not as an act of God, but rather as an act of our political leaders, or, more precisely, the lack of intelligent action by many of our political leaders.”View image in fullscreenAs governor, Cuomo allegedly bullied those who disagreed with him. While that made it hard for him to find allies when he faced calls to resign, it also contributed to the perception that he is a strong leader, said Doug Muzzio, a retired political science professor who worked at Baruch College.Meanwhile, “the incumbent is seen to be a weak person who is in the pocket of a president who the voters despise”, Muzzio said.Cuomo can also point to his infrastructure accomplishments, Moss said, which include rebuilding a bridge that connects Brooklyn and Queens, an overhaul of La Guardia airport and construction of the Moynihan Train Hall.Kim Grover, a graphic designer who lives in the East Village, said she was concerned about the allegations that Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women and that his administration underreported how many people died in nursing homes during the pandemic.Still, Grover thinks Cuomo stood up to Trump during the pandemic – and in doing so, to many, became a hero. She now worries about maintaining New Yorkers’ civil rights and sanctuary city policy, which keeps local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration officers, something Trump and Republicans have attacked.“In terms of his excellent delivery and communication skills, my first thought would be that [Cuomo] would be a good person to stand his ground against President Trump,” said Grover, 67, who has not decided whom she will support.Gabe Russell, a petitioner for a Democrat in the comptroller race – whom he declined to name – did not like Cuomo even before the Covid and sexual harassment scandals, and Cuomo is not on his list of five candidates. His top two choices are Mamdani and Lander.Cuomo “was very cozy with the real estate lobby … and that is always a bad sign”, said Russell, 33, who wants the government to use mathematics to prevent gerrymandering. “New York is one of the bluest states. We should have been doing far more lefty stuff than we ever do.”Russell also thinks Cuomo could lose support, citing the 2021 mayoral election, when Andrew Yang was the frontrunner and then fell to fourth place.Elena Siyanko, a longtime leader of arts organizations who moved to New York in 1996, said the city was once a “generative place in terms of culture, where artists could afford to live” but had become a place “for hi-tech and financial services”.An East Village resident, Siyanko blames Cuomo for the safety issues he now decries because of how he cut funding for social services. For example, to address a budget shortfall, he discontinued $65m in annual payments for a rental assistance program, while also refusing to raise taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents.“He is in this neoliberal camp of removing any safety net and economic support from public life,” said Siyanko, 53, who immigrated from Kyiv, Ukraine, and is undecided in the mayoral race. “We just need to try to get to a corruption-free candidate in this chapter of our life in New York City.” More

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      Trump administration briefing: pro-Ukraine rallies across US as Trump officials fume at Zelenskyy

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      The disastrous meeting between US president Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday has catalysed a series of pro-Ukraine protests across the US.Protesters took to the streets in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, with hundreds gathering to express support for Ukraine and Zelenskyy.Hundreds of protesters also gathered in Waitsfield, Vermont, on Saturday to oppose vice-president JD Vance’s visit to the state for a ski trip with his family.The demonstration had been planned earlier in the week by the Mad River Valley chapter of Indivisible, a grassroots group, but additional protesters said they were motivated to join after watching Vance and Trump’s combative Oval Office meeting.Pro-Ukraine rallies in multiple US cities after chaotic White House meetingVideos posted on social networks showed hundreds of demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square, many carrying the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine on their backs. In Los Angeles county, a pro-Ukraine crowd rallied in front of a SpaceX’s facility, and protesters in Boston held an “emergency rally” for “fair peace” for Ukraine at Boston Common.Read the full storyTrump officials fume at Zelenskyy for disregarding advice before meetingInside the Trump White House, officials blamed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, for the meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday, and expressed frustration that he pushed for security guarantees even though the US had made clear they wanted to negotiate that later, according to people familiar with the matter.Read the full storyFiring of watchdog agency chief illegal and would give ‘license to bully officials’, court rulesA US judge on Saturday declared Trump’s firing of the head of a federal watchdog agency illegal in an early test of the scope of presidential power likely to be decided at the US supreme court.Read the full storyKennedy Jr backtracks and says US measles outbreak is now a ‘top priority’Two days after initially downplaying the outbreak as “not unusual”, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Friday said he recognized the serious impact of the ongoing measles epidemic in Texas – in which a child died recently – and that the government was providing resources, including protective vaccines.Read the full storyAndrew Cuomo announces run for mayor of New York CityFormer New York state governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Saturday he would run for New York City mayor, an attempt to come back from a sexual harassment scandal that forced him to resign more than three years earlier.Read the full storyEmail shows Musk ally is moving to close office behind free tax-filing program at IRSAn Elon Musk ally installed in the US government said in a late-night email going into Saturday that the office behind a popular free online tax-filing option would be shuttered – and its employees would be let go.Read the full storyMedicaid recipients fear ‘buzzsaw cuts’ for Trump’s agendaRepublicans are considering a rollback of the federal social safety net, particularly Medicaid, which has nearly 80 million enrollees in all 50 states. The budget plan proposes an $880bn reduction in funding for the insurance over the next decade, an amount experts warn would hollow out the program.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Civil rights attorneys sued the Trump administration on Saturday to prevent it from transferring 10 undocumented immigrants detained in the US to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

      A FedEx cargo airplane caught on fire after striking a bird shortly after the plane’s departure from Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday morning, according to officials.

      A decision by regulators to extend the life of two of the oldest reactors in the US decades beyond their original permits has elevated the risk of a nuclear disaster in heavily populated south Florida, environmental groups are warning.

      Singer Angie Stone, known for her hit Wish I Didn’t Miss You, has died in a car crash at the age of 63. More

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      Andrew Cuomo announces run for mayor of New York City

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      Former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo on Saturday announced a run for mayor of New York City, an attempt to come back from a sexual harassment scandal that forced him to resign more than three years earlier.Cuomo, 77, served as governor from 2011 to 2021, guiding the state through the worst, deadliest months of the Covid-19 crisis. But he was forced to resign in August of his final year as governor when an investigation commissioned by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, found he had sexually harassed at least 11 women during his time in office.The former governor, a Democrat, is aiming to unseat incumbent the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, who has been grappling with criminal corruption charges that the US justice department is seeking to have lifted – pending a judicial sign-off – at the behest of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration.In a campaign video announcing his mayoral candidacy, Cuomo verbally painted the so-called Big Apple as a city in crisis.“The first to solving a problem is having the strength, having the courage, to recognize it, and we know that today our New York City is in trouble,” he said, pointing to empty stores fronts, graffiti, grime, an influx of migrants that has taxed municipal infrastructure, and violent crime in some instances carried out by people who are mentally ill and lack access to treatment.“The city just feels threatening, out of control,” Cuomo said in his more than 17-minute announcement video. “These conditions exist not as an act of God, but rather as an act of our political leaders, or more precisely the lack of intelligent action by our political leaders.”The city faces a ranked-choice Democratic primary in April now dominated by two political figures with tarnished reputations, both betting that voters will overlook claims against them as politically motivated – or, in Cuomo’s case, that sexual harassment allegations which he vigorously denied have lost their power to derail political careers several years since the dawn of the #MeToo era.“How can you have a report that says 11 cases [of sexual harassment], and then it goes through law enforcement and they find no cases?” Cuomo said at a South Bronx church in March 2022, calling the report “a fraud”.A former staffer, Charlotte Bennett, later dropped her sexual harassment lawsuit against Cuomo, shortly before she was set to give her deposition in the case.A former Cuomo top aide who claims Cuomo made unwanted sexual advances towards her in 2000 told the New York Post that “women’s rights” will suffer if he is elected NYC’s next mayor.“Women haven’t done enough to toughen laws to protect women from such immoral, unethical and what should be illegal behavior by men in positions of power, such as Cuomo,” Karen Hinton said Saturday, adding that the mayoral election “should be an opportunity … to give women a strong, powerful voice” in city government that it “won’t get it if Adams or Cuomo is elected”.In his statement, Cuomo briefly addressed the end of his governorship, which included claims that he had allowed Covid-19 to fatally tear through state nursing homes and then attempted to cover it up.“Did I always do everything right in my years of government service? Of course not,” he said. “Would I do some things differently knowing what I know now? Certainly. Did I make mistakes? Some painfully. Definitely. And I believe I learned from them and that I am a better person for. And I hope to show you that every day.”He added: “I will fight Washington and Albany to make sure we get our fair share of funding, and to protect the rights and values that New Yorkers hold dear: that we believe that any discrimination by race, color or creed is anti-American.”Adams, a Democratic star when elected in 2021, has seen his support dwindle amid a swirl of scandals that ensnared some of his closest confidantes.Four deputy mayors recently resigned after it was claimed that the justice department’s request to drop its criminal indictment against Adams amounted to a “quid pro quo” with the Trump administration leaning on the mayor to help with federal deportation efforts.In a crowded field of mayoral candidates, Cuomo benefits from high name recognition, with 32% of those polled picking him as their favorite candidate. Other candidates – including former city comptroller Scott Stringer, incumbent city comptroller Brad Lander, state senator Jessica Ramos and Adams – are at 10% or less.There’s a dynastic component to Cuomo’s entry into the race. His father, Mario Cuomo, also served as New York governor, but he failed to win a bid for New York City mayor in 1977.Since stepping down as governor, the younger Cuomo has maintained his public profile, visiting Black churches and Jewish community groups. Both are constituencies where Adams and Cuomo are bound to seek key voter support.“Leading in practically every public poll so far, even before announcing his candidacy, Cuomo appears poised to prove that he has managed to overcome scandals that may have felled other politicians after his yearslong dedication to staying in politics and a series of legal victories that he has framed as vindication,” the journal City and State recently opined. More

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      How a faded New York hotel became a lethal political battleground

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      Manhattan’s Roosevelt hotel, with its faded Renaissance revival facade, last week became the focal point of a fast-moving political battle enveloping New York City’s mayor, the state governor and the department of justice in the service of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.Trump’s new head of homeland security, Kristi Noem, claims the formerly luxurious 1,025-room hotel, now a shelter for mostly Central and South American immigrants, is a “base of operations” for Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan prison gang.Noem’s head of immigration enforcement, Tom Homan, wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to be able to enter the hotel, but New York’s sanctuary city laws prevent New York police from cooperating.The Trump administration, under Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Doge team, claimed that $80m had recently been transferred to New York to house migrants, including in the Roosevelt, and clawed it back.The Roosevelt is a grimy backdrop to an extraordinary battle that has pitted the city’s Democrat mayor, Eric Adams, seeking re-election this year, against Governor Kathy Hochul, and has had career federal prosecutors, Democrat and Republican, at each other’s­ throats over claims of bias and corruption.Late Friday, the justice department moved to dismiss corruption charges against Mayor Adams, the latest move in a legal saga that led over two days to the resignation of seven career prosecutors and left a justice department in chaos.View image in fullscreenDuring his campaign Trump vowed to “save” New York, claiming that businesses were fleeing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who were sucking up public resources. Last year, the city estimated that the migration crisis has cost New York $5bn in two years, and costs are expected to double in 2025.Last week, the justice department in Washington sent a proposal to New York’s southern district to shelve an indictment against Adams on corruption charges of accepting illegal campaign donations in exchange for political favours, arguing that it would interfere with his ability to help the administration tackle illegal immigration.Democrats claimed the move amounted to using the law to influence an elected politician. It was characterised by one of Adams’ prosecutors as a “dismissal-with-leverage” proposal, a corrupt exchange for allowing federal agents to deport tens of thousands of migrants in the city against sanctuary city laws.Danielle Sassoon, acting US attorney in New York, said she could not “agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations”, and resigned. Emil Bove, acting deputy US attorney general, accepted her resignation, alleging that she was “incapable of fairly and impartially” reviewing the case.Hochul said she was considering removing Adams as mayor over the alleged deal and claims Trump’s department of justice “is already showing they’re corrupt”. Homan called Hochul an “embarrassment” who “needs to be removed”. Progressive Bronx Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “This corruption poses a real threat to the people of the city.”View image in fullscreenThe escalating drama kicked off last month when Damian Williams, the former Democrat prosecutor who brought corruption charges against Adams, wrote that New York was “being led with a broken ethical compass” – seemingly a reference to Adams.That was a red flag to the incoming administration, whose chief executive is still smarting over a state conviction on a scheme to obscure hush-money payments to a porn actor and an $83m civil judgment for defaming writer E Jean Carroll and has seemingly found an ally in the Democrat mayor.“We are living in an era where political favoritism overrides the legal process in pursuit of political gains. This marks a dangerous new phase where selective law enforcement, applied at whim, is a weapon,” said Mike Quinn, a lawyer involved in the drive to hold Sackler family members accountable for the opioid crisis.Adams, like Trump, claims the criminal actions brought against him are politically motivated. The two are growing closer, with Adams visiting Trump at his Florida estate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe impact on Adam’s re-election prospects are hard to read. A recent poll ahead of the Democrat primary in April had the mayor in third or fourth place, behind Trump’s arch enemy Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal. Cuomo has not yet officially declared. In the running also is Zohran Mamdani, a progressive Democrat, who has vowed to lower the cost of living for working-class New Yorkers.A poll last month found that 73% of likely primary voters held an “unfavorable” view of Adams, with fears about subway crime, highlighted in December when a homeless woman was fatally set on fire in a subway car, among the factors behind their dissatisfaction.“New Yorkers have the idea that the mayor turns on the lights in the morning and turns them off at night,” says Democrat consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “They instil in him tremendous values and powers. When he fails to meet them on either side of the aisle, people lose their minds, and that’s what’s happening in New York right now.”But Adams has scored some wins, including reducing a post-Covid rat infestation by introducing plastic rubbish bins. “Everybody wants the city to function, and if it doesn’t function it doesn’t really matter what your ideological bent is,” says Sheinkopf. “It’s about how the garbage gets picked up, how you don’t feel threatened by homeless people and how your life functions.”But the left also dislikes Adams as a matter of reflex. “It’s a natural response, because anything Trump touches is right by definition,” Sheinkopf points out.If Adams loses the Democrat nomination, he could run as a Republican, much as three-term mayor Mike Bloomberg did in 2002. New York has only had four Republican mayors in a century, each one elected after a crisis.The crisis this time, says Sheinkopf, “is that New York is out of control. Corruption, crime and the sense that things have broken down.” But he doubts Adams is the one to fix it. “He created it, so it’s a hard sell”.One scenario, hinted at by City Hall insiders, is that under a deal to drop the Adams corruption charges, the mayor could then switch party in a bid to stop Trump’s arch enemy, Cuomo.Trump and Cuomo have fought bitterly over the years, including in 2019, when Trump called his brother Chris, a former CNN host, Fredo after the hapless brother in The Godfather. “If I wasn’t governor of New York, I would have decked him. Period,” Cuomo said. More

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      Ex-aide to New York governors charged with being agent of Chinese government

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      A former New York state government official who worked for the former governor Andrew Cuomo and current governor, Kathy Hochul, was charged on Tuesday with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors revealed in a sprawling indictment.Linda Sun, who held numerous posts in New York state government before rising to the rank of deputy chief of staff for Hochul, was arrested on Tuesday morning along with her husband, Chris Hu, at their $3.5m home on Long Island.Prosecutors said Sun, at the request of Chinese officials, blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to the governor’s office, shaped New York governmental messaging to align with the priorities of the Chinese government and attempted to facilitate a trip to China for a high-level politician in New York, the indictment said. Hu is charged with money-laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and misuse of means of identification.In return, she and her husband received benefits including help for Hu’s China-based business activities and undisclosed tickets to performances by visiting Chinese orchestra and ballet groups, the indictment says. A Chinese government official’s personal chef prepared “Nanjing-style salted ducks” that were delivered to Sun’s parents’ home, it adds.The couple then laundered the financial proceeds, using them to buy their property in Manhasset, a condominium in Hawaii for $1.9m and luxury cars including a 2024 Ferrari, the indictment says.“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the … state executive chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the” country’s communist party, US attorney Breon Peace said. “The illicit scheme enriched the defendant’s family to the tune of millions of dollars.”A lawyer for Sun, Seth DuCharme, did not immediately return an email seeking comment. Sun and Hu were expected to make an initial court appearance on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn said.The indictment outlines a series of exchanges Sun had with officials in the Chinese consulate in New York in January 2021, when Cuomo was still governor and Hochul was lieutenant governor. Neither leader is named in the document, but they are instead referred to as “Politician-1” and “Politician-2.”After Chinese officials requested a lunar new year video from the governor, Sun said Hochul could probably do it and asked for “talking points of things you want her to mention”.“Mostly holiday wishes and hope for friendship and cooperation / Nothing too political,” an official told her, according to the indictment.Sun later told a different official that she had argued with Hochul’s speechwriter over the draft because the speechwriter insisted on mentioning the “Uyghur situation” in China. She promised that she would not let that happen, and the final speech did not mention the Muslim ethnic minority, according to the indictment.The FBI searched the couple’s $3.5m home in Manhasset in late July but declined to release details at the time.Sun worked in state government for about 15 years, holding jobs in Cuomo’s administration and eventually becoming Hochul’s deputy chief of staff, according to her LinkedIn profile. In November 2022, Sun took a job at the New York labor department as deputy commissioner for strategic business development, but she left that job months later in March 2023, the profile said.In a statement, a spokesperson for Hochul’s office said the administration fired Sun after “discovering evidence of misconduct”.“This individual was hired by the executive chamber more than a decade ago. We terminated her employment in March 2023 after discovering evidence of misconduct, immediately reported her actions to law enforcement and have assisted law enforcement throughout this process,” the statement reads.A spokesperson for Cuomo did not immediately return an emailed request for comment.Sun and Hu live in a gated community on Long Island called Stone Hill. The couple bought the house in 2021 but placed it in a trust earlier this year, records show. More

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      Andrew Cuomo found to have subjected 13 women to ‘sexually hostile work environment’

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      The former New York governor Andrew Cuomo subjected at least 13 female government employees “to a sexually hostile work environment” and retaliated against four who complained, a formal agreement between the state executive chamber and the US justice department said.“Governor Cuomo repeatedly subjected these female employees to unwelcome, non-consensual sexual contact; ogling; unwelcome sexual comments; gender-based nicknames; comments on their physical appearances; and/or preferential treatment based on their physical appearances,” read the agreement, which was released on Friday.Cuomo, a Democrat and son of a former governor, Mario Cuomo, rose to national prominence during the Covid pandemic in 2020 and was widely held to hold presidential ambitions.He denied accusations of sexual misconduct, but Cuomo resigned in August 2021 after the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said she found 11 such claims credible. He was replaced by his lieutenant, Kathy Hochul.Now 66, Cuomo is fighting civil lawsuits from two accusers and, in the words of the New York Times, “slowly manoeuvring toward re-entering political life”. But, the paper added Friday, such “efforts may be sharply compromised by the justice department findings”.The investigation by the federal civil rights division and the US attorney for the eastern district of New York opened in August 2021.The settlement released Friday said Cuomo “subjected at least 13 female employees of New York state, including executive chamber employees, to a sexually hostile work environment”.The executive chamber was aware of the governor’s conduct but did not “effectively remediate the harassment on a systemic level”.“When employees attempted to raise concerns about Cuomo’s conduct to his senior staff,” the agreement said, “Cuomo’s staff failed to follow equal employment opportunity policies and procedures to promptly report those allegations to the appropriate investigative body.“Indeed, the executive chamber’s response was designed only to protect Cuomo from further accusations.”The investigation “also found that Cuomo’s senior staff were aware of his conduct and retaliated against four of the women he harassed”.The agreement listed reforms to be implemented and some undertaken under Hochul, beginning with the removal of employees held to have “facilitated Cuomo’s misconduct and/or engaged in unlawful retaliation against women who raised concerns”.Rita Glavin, a Cuomo lawyer, told the Times: “This is nothing more than a political settlement with no investigation. Governor Cuomo did not sexually harass anyone.”But Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, said: “Executive chamber employees deserve to work without fear of sexual harassment and harsh reprisal when they oppose that harassment.“The conduct in the executive chamber under the former governor, the state’s most powerful elected official, was especially egregious because of the stark power differential involved and the victims’ lack of avenues to report and redress harassment.”Hochul said: “The moment I took office, I knew I needed to root out the culture of harassment that had previously plagued the executive chamber and implement strong policies to promote a safe workplace for all employees, and [I] took immediate action to do so.”Breon Peace, US attorney for the eastern district of New York, said: “We appreciate the governor’s stated determination to make sure that sexual harassment does not recur at the highest level of New York state government.” More

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      What’s Left Unsaid review: Andrew Cuomo and the case for his defense

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      Andrew Cuomo resigned as governor of New York in August 2021, amid a blizzard of sexual harassment allegations. None were prosecuted. Against this backdrop, he smolders. Once a giant figure in the Democratic ranks, he is out of a job. He “died as he lived”, Lis Smith, a former adviser, wrote in Any Given Tuesday, her memoir published last year. Cuomo had “zero regard for the people around him and the impact his actions would have on them”.Enter Melissa DeRosa with What’s Left Unsaid, a full-throated defense of her own former boss. On the page and while promoting her book, Cuomo’s chief adviser and most senior aide generally wields a sledgehammer. Except when she doesn’t.“I don’t want to comment on Lis’s book,” De Rosa said, when asked by Vanity Fair. “We all lived through this in our own ways. We all had to cope with the fallout of it.”Subtitled My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis, DeRosa’s memoir is pocked with scenes of a marriage gone south, of trying to cope with Covid-19 and of general governmental strife. She punches hard. Her anger is white hot. Her book is deliberate and focused.She slams Cuomo’s accusers. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and Kathy Hochul, Cuomo’s successor as governor, get it in the neck. Aides to James had sexual harassment-related problems of their own, DeRosa charges. She also calls out CNN and the New York Times for their own alleged deficits on that score.DeRosa has connections. She interned in Hillary Clinton’s office, when Clinton was a New York senator. She thanks Clinton for helping put steel in her spine. She gives a shoutout to Huma Abedin, Clinton’s close aide. DeRosa led New York operations for Barack Obama’s political action committee. She rose through the ranks of state government and Cuomo’s office. She charges Hochul with administrative and political ineptitude, echoing criticism, leveled by Nancy Pelosi, that Hochul cost the Democrats control of the US House by screwing up the New York redistricting process, handing Republicans seats.“The governor didn’t realize soon enough where the trouble was,” Pelosi told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. But here, DeRosa can be myopic. According to Bill de Blasio, the former New York mayor, Cuomo was also at fault in the process that most observers say facilitated Republican gains. If a mere 89 more New Yorkers had been counted, the size of the state’s congressional delegation would have suffered no loss in size.“For God’s sake, if the state had invested in the census, could you have found 89 more people to count? Sure, easily,” De Blasio has said. “This was a lost opportunity by the state government to get the count right.”DeRosa acknowledges tensions between mayor and governor but takes De Blasio to task for his embrace of leftwing politics.“That meant staking out a position that actively opposed police presence,” she writes, blaming De Blasio for problems related to crime. She also calls him out for sidling up to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive star in Congress, and mocks his presidential run to nowhere.DeRosa also deals with the fractious relationship between Cuomo and the White House of Donald Trump, for so long a New York fixture and a former client of the Cuomo family law firm, Blutrich, Falcone & Miller.In 2020, under Covid, New York lockdown policy put it at odds with the administration.“We’ve done polling, and you guys are in the wrong place on this,” a “smug” Jared Kushner is quoted as telling DeRosa, saying New York was out of sync with Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Florida.“We were in the middle of a pandemic, one that had already killed tens of thousands of people, and I was talking with President Trump’s top adviser … about polling in swing states,” DeRosa writes.In fall 2021, Ron DeSantis actively discouraged vaccination. The grim reaper had a field day on the governor’s front lawn. Florida came to surpass New York in fatalities, in absolute and relative numbers. According to the Lancet, Florida’s unadjusted death rate (per 100,000) was 416, for New York 384.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeRosa also attacks Trump for reneging on federal assistance to infrastructure projects. Why? Cuomo publicly criticized Trump. To quote DeRosa, “the president of the United States had lost his mind over four sentences in a convention speech.”Yet Cuomo has more in common with Trump than DeRosa acknowledges. It went beyond being “two tough guys from Queens, raised by larger-than-life fathers”, as the author puts it. Confronted with pushback over his decision in 2014 to disband an anti-corruption commission which he himself appointed, Cuomo bellowed: “It’s my commission. I can appoint it, I can disband it. I appoint you, I can un-appoint.”L’état, c’est moi.DeRosa pays tribute to family. In summer 2021, as Cuomo was brought crashing down, she repaired to her sister’s in-law’s place on Cape Cod, away from prying eyes.She also deals with friends – some of them now former. Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican congresswoman who become a top Trump toady, was a buddy and classmate. DeRosa “knew her as ‘Little Elise’”. Stefanik landed at Harvard, DeRosa at Cornell. DeRosa reports a heated discussion over same-sex marriage that left Stefanik shaken. DeRosa compared her to a segregationist.The fact that Stefanik called for Cuomo and his senior staff to resign probably triggered this trip down memory lane. Left unmentioned: Stefanik was one of 39 Republicans, and the sole member of House GOP leadership, to vote in favor of federal protection for same-sex and interracial marriage.Promoting her book, DeRosa was asked by Vanity Fair about Cuomo, karma and payback. She said: “I don’t like to think that we live in a world where the answer is, ‘Well, you got it because you deserved it.’”Vanity Fair’s headline? “Melissa DeRosa Isn’t Done Defending Andrew Cuomo”. She and her boss are not about to disappear.
      What’s Left Unsaid is published in the US by Sterling Publishing More

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      Any Given Tuesday: Lis Smith on Cuomo, Spitzer and a political life

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      Any Given Tuesday: Lis Smith on Cuomo, Spitzer and a political life The Democratic operative delivers a memoir and coming-of-age tale that lands punches – and sometimes pulls themWith Any Given Tuesday, Lis Smith delivers 300 pages of smack, snark and vulnerability. A veteran Democratic campaign hand, she shares up-close takes of those who appear in the news and dishes autobiographical vignettes. The book, her first, is a political memoir and coming-of-age tale. It is breezy and informative.Thank You For Your Servitude review – disappointing tale of Trump’s townRead moreFor two decades, Smith worked in the trenches. She witnessed plenty and bears the resulting scars. Most recently, she was a senior media adviser to Pete Buttigieg, now transportation secretary in the Biden administration, and counseled Andrew Cuomo, now a disgraced ex-governor of New York.According to Smith, Buttigieg made politics ennobling and fun. More important, he offered a road to redemption.“He saw me for who I actually was and, for the first time in my adult life, I did too,” Smith writes. According to exit polls in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Buttigieg brought meaning to middle-aged white college graduates. These days, he is seen by Democrats as a possible alternative to Joe Biden in 2024.Smith dated Eliot Spitzer, another governor of New York who fell from grace.“We were like a lit match and dynamite,” she writes. Smith also gushes about Spitzer’s “deep set, cerulean blue eyes”, the “most gorgeous” such pair she had ever seen. A 24-year age gap provided additional fuel but Spitzer, once known as the Sheriff of Wall Street, spent less than 15 months in office. His administration ended abruptly in 2009, over his trysts with prostitutes.Smith can be blunt and brutal. She savages Cuomo and flattens Bill de Blasio, the former mayor of New York City, like a pancake.Smith recounts in detail Cuomo’s mishandling of Covid, the allegations of sexual harassment and his obfuscation. He “died as he lived”, she writes, damningly, “with zero regard for the people around him and the impact his actions would have on them”.As for De Blasio: “This guy can’t handle a 9/11.” He also came up short, we are told, in the personal hygiene department: a “gross unshowered guy”. De Blasio retracted an employment offer to Smith, after her relationship with Spitzer became tabloid fodder. He also coveted an endorsement from Spitzer that never materialized.“Both of us had tried to get in bed with Eliot but only one of us had been successful,” Smith brags.On Tuesday, De Blasio dropped out of a congressional primary after gaining a bare 3% support in a recent poll.Smith is very much a New Yorker. She grew up in a leafy Westchester suburb, north of the city. Her parents were loving and politically conscious. Her father led a major white-shoe law firm. He introduced his daughter to football and the star-crossed New York Jets.Smith went to Dartmouth. Not surprisingly, her politics are establishment liberal. She worked on campaigns for Jon Corzine, for New Jersey governor; Terry McAuliffe, for governor of Virginia; and Claire McCaskill, for senator in Missouri. In 2012 she earned a credit from Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.Smith has kind words for McAuliffe and McCaskill but portrays Corzine, a former Goldman Sachs chief executive, as aloof, never warming to the reality that elections are about retail politics and people. Despite this, Smith omits mention of the markets-moving failure of MF Global, a Corzine-run commodities brokerage that left a wake of ruin.“I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date,” Corzine testified before a congressional committee. “I do not know which accounts are unreconciled or whether the unreconciled accounts were or were not subject to the segregation rules.”Corzine holds an MBA from the University of Chicago.Smith is candid about the corrosive effects of the Democrats’ lurch left.“If someone doesn’t support every policy on their progressive wish list … they’re branded an enemy or a Republican in disguise. If these ideological purists think a West Virginia Democrat is bad, wait till they get a load of the Republican alternative.”But Smith also falls victim to ideological myopia. Discussing the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and its considerable political consequences, she appears to solely blame the Ferguson police for the death of the African American teen, who she says was “shot to death in broad daylight”. Like Hillary Clinton, Smith neglects to mention that police fired after Brown lunged for an officer’s gun. She also does not mention that Brown tussled with a convenience store owner before his confrontation with the law.Inadvertently, Smith highlights the volatility of the Democrats’ multicultural, upstairs-downstairs coalition. Worship at the twin altars of identity politics and political correctness exacts a steep price in votes and can negatively impact human life. See New York City’s current crime wave for proof.Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican partyRead moreSmith reserves some of her sharpest digs for Roger Stone, convicted and then-pardoned confidante of Donald Trump, pen-pal of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. She calls him a “stone-cold sociopath”. But she skates over animus that existed between Stone and Spitzer, her ex. In 2007, Stone allegedly left a threatening telephone message for Spitzer’s father, a real estate magnate. Months later, Stone told the FBI Spitzer “used the service of high-priced call girls” while staying in Florida.In the end, Smith is an idealist.“I believe in the power of politics to improve people’s lives,” she writes. “I still believe there is hope for the future.”
      Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story is published in the US by Harper
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