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    Angela Bofill, R&B Hitmaker With a Silky Voice, Dies at 70

    Starting in the late 1970s, she scored multiple hit singles, including “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and “I Try,” but multiple strokes in the 2000s ended her career.Angela Bofill, a New York-bred singer whose sultry alto propelled a string of R&B hits in the late 1970s and early ’80s before strokes derailed her career in the 2000s, died on Thursday in Vallejo, Calif. She was 70.Her death, at the home of her daughter, Shauna Bofill Vincent, was announced in a social media post by her manager, Rich Engel. He did not specify a cause.With a silky blend of Latin, jazz, adult-contemporary and soul, Ms. Bofill is best remembered for jazzy love songs like “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and funk-inflected pop numbers like “Something About You.” Armed with a three-and-a-half-octave range, her voice was “as cool as sherbet, creamy, delicately colored, mildly flavored,” as Ariel Swartley wrote in Rolling Stone magazine in 1979.Starting in 1978, Ms. Bofill logged six albums in the Top 40 of the Billboard R&B charts, with five of them crossing over to the Top 100 of the pop charts. She also scored seven Top 40 R&B singles, including “Angel of the Night,” (1979) and “Too Tough” (1983).Angela Tomasa Bofill was born on May 2, 1954, in New York City to a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father and grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, in Manhattan and in the West Bronx. She started writing songs as a child.By her teens, she was already showing off her vocal chops in a duo with her sister Sandra and a group called the Puerto Rican Supremes, and also as a member of the prestigious All-City Chorus, a group composed of top high-school singers in the city’s five boroughs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Warms Up to Bringing Haley ‘On Our Team in Some Form’

    Former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday opened the door to bringing Nikki Haley into his circle, another step in what looked to be a thawing of hostilities between the two former rivals.“Well, I think she’s going be on our team because we have a lot of the same ideas, the same thoughts,” Mr. Trump told News 12, the New York area cable outlet, one day after Ms. Haley said that she would vote for him in the November election.That admission from Ms. Haley, his one-time United Nations ambassador-turned-bitter rival for the Republican presidential nomination, was a seemingly requisite first step toward reconciliation between the two.In the interview after his rally in the Bronx on Wednesday, he also engaged in a rare moment of praise for Ms. Haley, calling her “a very capable person.”During the lopsided G.O.P. primary race, which ended in March with Ms. Haley’s withdrawal, Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley exchanged frequent attacks.Mr. Trump repeatedly called Ms. Haley “birdbrain” and insinuated that her husband, a National Guardsmen, left for a deployment in order to escape her.Ms. Haley increasingly clapped back at Mr. Trump and his attempts to push her out of the race, referring to him in late January as “unhinged.”Until recently, the prospects of the two making amends appeared to be uncertain, with Mr. Trump shooting down a report this month that he was considering Ms. Haley as his running mate.Mr. Trump has enlisted several other former G.O.P. opponents in his bid to avenge his defeat in the 2020 election: Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur.Mr. Trump’s “team of rivals mantra,” one made famous by Abraham Lincoln, appears to be a recognition of Ms. Haley’s potential value to his campaign, both in terms of dollars and votes.Despite leaving the G.O.P. nominating contest more than two months ago, Ms. Haley has continued to draw significant numbers of voters in subsequent primaries, chipping away at critical support that Mr. Trump is likely to need in a close election against President Biden. In Wisconsin, she received more than 75,000 votes (nearly 13 percent of ballots cast) in this month’s Republican primary.And then there are Ms. Haley’s connections to donors. In April, she was named the Walter P. Stern chairwoman at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank with a formidable list of high-dollar donors.Jazmine Ulloa More

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    At a Trump Rally in the Bronx, Chants of ‘Build the Wall’

    Nearing the end of the criminal trial that has kept him in New York City for much of the last five weeks, former President Donald J. Trump held a rally in the Bronx on Thursday, where he made a litany of promises to improve New York, railed against the Biden administration and made overtures to Black and Latino voters.Speaking to a more diverse crowd than is typical of his rallies, Mr. Trump lamented the surge of migrants across the southern border and criticized President Biden’s economic policies as disproportionately hurting people of color, whose support he is eager to win from Democrats.“African Americans are getting slaughtered. Hispanic Americans are getting slaughtered,” Mr. Trump said to a crowd with large numbers of Black and Hispanic voters.As he has before, he insisted that the migrant influx, which has prompted a crisis in New York, was disproportionately hurting “our Black population and our Hispanic population, who are losing their jobs, losing their housing, losing everything they can lose.”The Trump rally drew at least a thousand people to Crotona Park in the South Bronx.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesMr. Trump’s screeds against those crossing the border illegally and his vow to conduct the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history — both staples of his campaign rallies — were met with cheers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    N.Y.P.D. Commissioner Won’t Punish Officers in Bronx Man’s Killing

    The officers, Brendan Thompson and Herbert Davis, were previously cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the fatal 2019 shooting of Kawaski Trawick.Two New York City police officers involved in the fatal shooting of a 32-year-old Bronx man in his kitchen in 2019 acted within the law and will not be punished, the city’s police commissioner said on Friday.The announcement by the commissioner, Edward A. Caban, was the last in a series of decisions clearing the officers, Brendan Thompson and Herbert Davis, of wrongdoing in the killing of the man, Kawaski Trawick.The officers entered Mr. Trawick’s apartment the night of April 14, 2019, after responding to 911 calls saying that he had been acting erratically and threatening other tenants.When Mr. Trawick jumped toward them with a knife, the police said, Officer Thompson used his Taser against him before shooting at him four times. The two left Mr. Trawick lying on the floor of his apartment, according to police documents.Mr. Trawick’s parents, Ellen and Rickie Trawick, condemned the commissioner’s decision, saying in a statement that Mayor Eric Adams and the Police Department “don’t seem to care about protecting New Yorkers from cops who kill.”They added that “the utter disregard they have for our son’s memory” was “disgusting and shameful.”The Bronx district attorney, Darcel D. Clark, declined in 2020 to file charges against the officers, citing what she said was an inability to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that Officer Thompson’s “use of deadly physical force was not justified.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    U.S. Charges 8 in Beer Heists That Targeted Trains and Warehouses

    The men stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of beer, mostly Modelo and Corona, by robbing rail yards and warehouses across the Northeast, federal prosecutors said.Eight Bronx men were charged on Wednesday with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of beer, mostly Modelo and Corona imported from Mexico, by robbing train yards and warehouses in dozens of thefts across the Northeast over the past two years.An indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors in Manhattan accuses Jose Cesari as being the mastermind of what it describes as the “Beer Theft Enterprise” and says he recruited other participants in the brazen heists via Instagram posts.In one post, the indictment says, Mr. Cesari wrote, “Need workers who want to make money.” The post had a “Yes” or “No” button, a moneybag emoji and a railroad track in the background, the indictment says. In another, the indictment says, he offered a “guarantee” that those he hired would “make 100k+ in a month” by following the “beer train method.”Mr. Cesari, 27, who was at large on Wednesday, was charged with conspiracy to steal from interstate or foreign shipments by carrier and six other counts. The seven others face the same conspiracy charge, and several were also charged with other crimes.Those charged as Mr. Cesari’s co-defendants are Kemar Bonitto, 38; Justin Bruno, 23; Miguel Cintron, 32; Antonio Gonzalez, 33; Luis Izquierdo, 40; Wakeim Johnson, 31; and Deylin Martinez-Guerrero, 28.“Today’s arrests reinforce that the Beer Theft Enterprise’s staggering thefts will not be tolerated,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Subway Death in NYC Gives Insight Into the City’s Challenges

    The man charged with shoving a man from a subway platform had a violent history, according to officials. The man who died was recovering from his own troubled past, his family said.Before the paths of Jason Volz and Carlton McPherson collided in a terrible moment on a Harlem subway platform on Monday, their lives had seemed to be heading in opposite directions.Mr. McPherson had been hospitalized at least half a dozen times since last year for mental health treatment, according to someone who has seen some of his medical records. A neighbor in the Bronx said he sometimes slept in a hallway closet in his grandmother’s building because she would not let him into her apartment. Last October, a man whom prosecutors believe to be Mr. McPherson — he had the same name and birth year — was charged with beating a Brooklyn homeless shelter employee with a cane.Mr. Volz, 54, was recovering from addiction and had also endured homelessness, but had gotten sober two years ago and had just moved into a new apartment, his ex-wife said.On Monday night, the police say, Mr. McPherson, 24, walked up to Mr. Volz on the uptown platform of the 125th Street station on Lexington Avenue and shoved him in front of an oncoming No. 4 train.Responding police officers, who had been on another part of the platform, found him lifeless beneath the train. His death was a recurrence of the ultimate New York City nightmare, and another example of the difficulty of preventing violence on the subway despite years of efforts by state and city authorities to keep people struggling with severe mental illness out of the transit system.Mayor Eric Adams, who has watched crime in the subway largely defy his attempts to rein it in, sounded a note of defeat on Tuesday, acknowledging that the presence of police officers had not been enough to stop Monday’s attack.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Bronx Teacher Asked. Tommy Orange Answered.

    When the author received an impassioned email, he dropped everything to visit the students who inspired it.Tommy Orange sat at the front of a classroom in the Bronx, listening as a group of high school students discussed his novel “There There.”A boy wearing blue glasses raised his hand. “All the characters have some form of disconnection, even trauma,” Michael Almanzar, 19, said. “That’s the world we live in. That’s all around us. It’s not like it’s in some faraway land. That’s literally your next-door neighbor.”The class broke into a round of finger snaps, as if we were at an old-school poetry slam on the Lower East Side and not in an English class at Millennium Art Academy, on the corner of Lafayette and Pugsley Avenues.Orange took it all in with a mixture of gratitude and humility — the semicircle of earnest, engaged teenagers; the bulletin board decorated with words describing “There There” (“hope,” “struggle,” “mourning,” “discovery”); the shelf of well-thumbed copies wearing dust jackets in various stages of disintegration.When Orange spoke, students paid close attention. Many identified with the characters in Orange’s book “There There” and with the world it portrayed. Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHis eyebrows shot up when a student wearing a sweatshirt that said “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” compared the book to “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy. When three consecutive students spoke about how they related to Orange’s work because of their own mental health struggles, he was on the verge of tears.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Subway Cameras Led to Arrests in Bronx D Train Shooting, NYPD Says

    Investigators say that an early morning argument on a D train last week ended with the fatal shooting of William Alvarez, 45.The police on Monday said footage from a surveillance camera in a subway car helped lead to the arrests of three people in connection with the fatal shooting of a 45-year-old man last week.Justin Herde, 24, Alfredo Trinidad, 42, and Betty Cotto, 38, were in custody in connection with the killing of William Alvarez, 45, of the Bronx, according to the New York Police Department.Mr. Alvarez was riding a southbound D train around 5 a.m. on Friday morning when the three suspects boarded at the Fordham Road station and got into an argument with him, the police said. Mr. Alvarez was shot in the chest, Michael M. Kemper, the Police Department’s chief of transit, said at a Monday news conference. Chief Kemper added that Mr. Alvarez’s attackers fled the train at the 182nd-183rd Streets station.About 1,000 of the system’s roughly 6,500 cars are equipped with cameras, part of a broader effort begun in 2022 by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which plans to install cameras in the rest of the cars by the end of this year.Killings on the subway are rare, but attract intense public attention. This year there have been two other fatal incidents in the system. Earlier this month, a 35-year-old man was killed and five other people were wounded in a shooting at the Mount Eden Avenue station in the Bronx during the evening rush hour. And in January, a 45-year-old father of three was shot on a No. 3 train in Brooklyn after intervening in an argument.Transit leaders are under intense pressure to bring ridership back to prepandemic levels, and making the system feel safe is critical to that mission. Ridership rose by about 3 percent in January, hovering on average at about 3 million daily passengers. In 2019, daily ridership was about 5 million.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More