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    Hanif Wins Re-election in Council Contest Defined by Israel and Gaza

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    Shahana Hanif defeated Maya Kornberg, a first-time candidate, in an acrimonious race for a City Council seat in Brooklyn.Shahana Hanif, the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council in New York City, has held onto her seat in Tuesday’s Democratic primary contest, which had turned into a tense race where the politics of the Middle East became a focal point.Ms. Hanif, who represents Brooklyn neighborhoods including Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington, defeated her challenger, Maya Kornberg, a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, according to The Associated Press.Ms. Kornberg, 33, said she decided to challenge Ms. Hanif, 34, who was elected in 2021, because of the councilwoman’s focus on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, and she regularly characterized her as being insufficiently concerned with the needs of the district.“The Council member’s disproportionate focus on that issue and taking public divisive stances on that issue, instead of focusing on the local issues facing our district — on fixing potholes and planting trees — is precisely the progressive attitude we need to change,” Ms. Kornberg said in a recent television interview.The race was animated this winter by the vandalism of an Israeli restaurant in Park Slope. Ms. Hanif condemned it, but some constituents felt she had not been vocal enough in calling out the vandalism as antisemitic. In an interview before the primary, Ms. Hanif said her opponents had tried and failed to belittle her efforts to bring more housing to Brooklyn, among other priorities.She cited as an example her efforts to rezone the site of the Arrow Linen & Uniform Supply Company in Windsor Terrace for housing. Many community members opposed the redevelopment, which passed the City Council earlier this year. Before it did, Ms. Hanif worked to scale it down and to ensure that more affordable units were included.“My campaign has been a multiracial and intergenerational coalition of people who want to build bridges,” said Ms. Hanif, who was supported by and campaigned aggressively with the progressive mayoral candidates Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and Comptroller Brad Lander.“If you look at the other side, you’re not going to see anything close to that sort of coalition.”In the end, Ms. Hanif, who grew up in the district in Kensington, prevailed in part because of her grass-roots outreach in immigrant communities. The efforts helped her withstand about $400,000 in super PAC spending from, among others, Uber and companies associated with Madison Square Garden, deployed to boost Ms. Kornberg’s campaign and attack Ms. Hanif. More

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      What to Watch for When the N.Y.C. Mayoral Results Come in

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      A winner on Tuesday night is unlikely, but not impossible. Ranked-choice voting will play a big role in the outcome. Here’s what else you should look for as votes are counted.We are unlikely to know the winner of the Democratic primary race for mayor on primary night.Polls show a close contest between two candidates, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. In the ranked-choice election, voters can select up to five candidates in order of preference, and if neither man gets more than 50 percent of the first-place votes on Tuesday, a series of subsequent rounds will tally the final results based on voters’ second-through-fifth-place choices.But that count will not take place until July 1, a week after the election, because absentee, mail-in and affidavit votes, which can be important in a close race, can be received and counted up until then.Polls close in New York at 9 p.m., and first results will start to come shortly after that.Here’s what else you’ll need to know ahead of Primary Day:The math of ranked-choice votingThis is New York’s second mayoral primary election using the ranked-choice voting system. Vote counting proceeds in rounds, with the last-place candidate eliminated in each round. If a voter’s top choice is eliminated, the vote is then transferred to the voter’s next choice. Elimination rounds continue until there are two candidates left and one gets more than 50 percent of the vote.Most reliable polls suggest that neither Mr. Mamdani nor Mr. Cuomo will receive more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round of vote counting on Tuesday night. But their performances will offer a look at who has the upper hand: The closer a candidate is to 50 percent, the better chance that candidate has to win in the end.The first results to come in on Tuesday night, from a period of early voting that began more than a week ago, are likely to favor Mr. Mamdani. That’s because a jump in the number of early voters this year appears to be driven by younger voters, who tend to prefer Mr. Mamdani.Bill Knapp, a strategist and consultant for Fix the City, the pro-Cuomo super PAC that has raised roughly $25 million from billionaire donors and corporate interests, acknowledged that the first votes counted would probably not favor Mr. Cuomo.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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      American Charged With Trying to Firebomb Embassy Building in Tel Aviv

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      Joseph Neumeyer, 28, is also accused of threatening President Trump. He appeared in federal court in Brooklyn on Sunday.An American citizen was charged with trying to firebomb a U.S. Embassy office in Tel Aviv, after he approached the building with Molotov cocktails and had threatened to kill President Trump in a series of social media posts, federal prosecutors said on Sunday.The man, Joseph Neumeyer, 28, of Colorado, was deported to the United States on Saturday and appeared Sunday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn before Magistrate Judge Peggy Kuo. He is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center without bail.Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that Mr. Neumeyer had been charged with “planning a devastating attack targeting our embassy in Israel, threatening death to Americans and President Trump’s life.”A lawyer for Mr. Neumeyer, Jeff Dahlberg of the Federal Defenders of New York, declined to comment.Mr. Neumeyer’s arrest comes at a time of unease for embassy officials in Israel and the United States. Last week, two Israeli Embassy employees were shot and killed outside the Jewish Museum in Washington. A man, Elias Rodriguez, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the shooting; he said he “did it for Palestine,” according to an F.B.I. affidavit.Mr. Neumeyer, a dual citizen of the United States and Germany, began making a series of disturbing posts on his Facebook account in late March, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York.“We are killing Trump and Musk now,” read one post from March 22, in an apparent reference to Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and adviser to Mr. Trump. It was followed by subsequent posts that month that wished death upon Mr. Trump.Mr. Neumeyer left the United States in February and arrived in Israel on April 23, prosecutors said. On May 19, Mr. Neumeyer wrote on Facebook, “Join me this afternoon in Tel Aviv — we are burning down the US embassy.”The U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem in 2018, but the United States maintains a branch office in Tel Aviv.That afternoon, according to prosecutors, Mr. Neumeyer approached the employee entrance of the Tel Aviv office carrying a dark backpack. He spat at a guard, who then tapped on Mr. Neumeyer’s shoulder and tried to apprehend him.In trying to stop Mr. Neumeyer from fleeing, the guard grabbed his backpack and discovered a bottle with a black cloth jutting out, which the guard understood to be a Molotov cocktail bottle after smelling an odor of “pure” alcohol, prosecutors said.Mr. Neumeyer got away but was later arrested by Israeli police officers at his hotel, where he said his backpack had Molotov cocktail bottles with vodka inside. According to prosecutors, Mr. Neumeyer’s backpack contained three bottles with ethanol.“Death to America. Death to the West,” read one of Mr. Neumeyer’s final posts on May 19, according to prosecutors. More

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      Teachers Saved My Life. Why Do We Treat Them So Poorly?

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      I have attended commencements of all kinds throughout my career, and I can tell you that some of the best are in prisons.Over and over, I have spoken at these commencements with incarcerated men and women who acknowledge the awful choices or stupid mistakes they made, the strangers or loved ones they hurt, yet emerge from prison renewed through higher education. While 95 percent of the people incarcerated will come home one day, they often return to the same cycles that led them to prison in the first place. Through college coursework, they are able to reflect on their past, develop a clearer vision for their future and gain the skills to contribute to their families and communities.One student told me that pursuing college while incarcerated was the first time he had moral and academic credibility with his family. The potential for higher education in prison to change lives is the reason that I worked to expand these programs when I was the U.S. secretary of education and president of a national education civil rights organization, and do so now as chancellor of the State University of New York.I believe so deeply in the transformative power of education because teachers saved my life.When I was 8 years old, in October of 1983, my mother died suddenly from a heart attack. It was indescribably devastating. I then lived alone with my father, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s until he died when I was 12. During those years with my father, no one outside our home knew he was sick, and I didn’t know why he acted the way he did.Some nights he would talk to me; some nights he wouldn’t say a word. Other nights he would be sad or angry, or even violent. Home was scary and unstable, but I was blessed to have New York City public schoolteachers who made school a place that was safe, nurturing, academically rigorous and engaging.If not for Allan Osterweil, my teacher in fourth, fifth and sixth grade at P.S. 276 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, I would be in prison or dead. Amid the darkness of my home life, Mr. Osterweil gave me a sense of hope and purpose. In his classroom, we read The New York Times every day. We learned the capital and leader of every country in the world. We did productions of Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll.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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      At Least 3 Dead After Boat Capsizes Near Staten Island, Officials Say

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      Officials said one person was missing and two people were hospitalized after the boat, with six aboard, overturned on Sunday in the Ambrose Channel.At least three people died and one person was still missing after a boat they were in capsized in the frigid waters of the Ambrose Channel near Staten Island on Sunday, officials said.One passenger was in critical condition, the police said, and another passenger was in stable condition. One person was still missing in the water, according to a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman, Petty Officer Second Class Sydney Phoenix.Emergency operators received a call about a boat taking on water a little after noon on Sunday, according to a Coast Guard news release. It wasn’t immediately known how it overturned or what kind of boat it was.The Coast Guard believes the missing person is in the water about five miles southeast of Breezy Point, N.Y. The search for the person was continuing as of 8:30 p.m.Two of the five people who were in the boat were airlifted to Staten Island University Hospital and three others were taken to the Coast Guard station in Sandy Hook, N.J.Four of the five people pulled from the water were unresponsive, according to the Coast Guard. A police spokesman said three of those on board had died.New York City’s fire and police departments are investigating with the U.S. Coast Guard.The water temperature near the Battery in Manhattan was 36 degrees on Sunday afternoon, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.The Ambrose Channel runs between Brooklyn and Staten Island and extends into the Atlantic Ocean. It is the main shipping channel in and out of the Port of New York and New Jersey, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. More

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      The Housing Crisis Forces Change on a Low-Rise Pocket of Brooklyn

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      A contentious plan to build two 10-story towers illustrates how a pressing shortage of affordable apartments has started to change the politics around development.Change doesn’t always come easily in Brooklyn’s liberal strongholds.But New York’s push to build more housing in every corner of the city — even in places that have sometimes been skeptical of new development — is set to clear a significant hurdle on Wednesday, when a key City Council committee is expected to approve a zoning change that will clear the way for new apartment towers on the border between Park Slope and Windsor Terrace.Two 10-story buildings are planned for the site of an industrial laundry business, Arrow Linen. Forty percent of the 250 units will rent below market rate.The so-called Arrow Linen proposal had all the makings of the sort of fight that has become familiar in middle-class parts of the city with enough political influence to alter or defeat unpopular projects. It was subject to more than a year of contentious debate.Yet the conclusion demonstrates just how much the politics around development have started to morph as the housing crunch has become one of the city’s most pressing crises.That dynamic is playing out beyond New York, too, as leaders in liberal communities across the country are confronting housing shortages so profound that some of their once-reliable voters have begun to drift rightward, expressing skepticism about Democrats’ ability to tackle affordability issues.Progressive politicians who are often sharply critical of real estate developers when running for office have become increasingly supportive of new construction once they are elected.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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      Girl, 6, Is Dead After Being Found in a Water-Filled Bathtub, Police Say

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      The girl was unconscious when officers found her in a Brooklyn apartment Friday afternoon, officials said.A 6-year-old girl died on Friday after being found unconscious in a bathtub filled with water at a Brooklyn apartment, the police said.The cause of the girl’s death was unclear. She had blood clots in her eyes when the officers found her, suggesting the possibility of a struggle, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation.Officials did not identify the girl, and the police said Friday night that the investigation into her death was continuing. The medical examiner’s office was conducting an autopsy, a spokeswoman said.Officers answering a 911 call for help at a home on Elton Street in the Highland Park section found the girl at around 1:30 p.m., the police said. Her parents were home at the time, the police said.Emergency services workers took the girl to Brookdale Hospital, where she was pronounced dead just before 3 p.m., the police said.Several hours later, two officers stood watch in the darkness outside the gated entrance to the small, two-story brick duplex where the girl had been found, on a residential block not far from the elevated J train tracks.Investigators filed in and out of the building’s basement unit through an entrance under a staircase. A small Christmas tree was visible through a front window.Helen Cunningham, who lives across the street, said she had seen officers and emergency workers arrive at the home at around 2 p.m. After a while, she said, they had brought out a small girl on a stretcher, her head visible from beneath the sheet covering her.“I don’t know if she was alive,” Ms. Cunningham, 74, said.She said that the man she knew as the girl’s father had climbed into a second ambulance that followed the one carrying the girl. Some time later, she said, she saw the police leading a young woman away in handcuffs. She said it was the second time in the past week she had seen officers at the address.Ms. Cunningham said she knew the family as neighbors but not by name. “We’re not friends,” she said. She said that two or three children lived at the home and that she had seen the man taking them to school.She said the family had moved into the home within the past few months from a building across the street.The man Ms. Cunningham identified as the father worked at a Bravo supermarket around the corner, according a manager there, Emmanuel Pichardo.Mr. Pichardo said that the father, who has worked at the store for two years and whom he knew only as George, had texted him in Spanish shortly after 4 p.m. to say he would not be coming to work because his daughter had been killed.“I’m going crazy,” the father said in the messages, which Mr. Pichardo shared with a reporter. “I’m here until God gives a miracle. I don’t know what to do.”Chelsia Rose Marcius More

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      Smoky Smell Engulfs NYC After Fires in New Jersey and Brooklyn

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      New Yorkers encountered an unsettling smell on Saturday, a day after fires broke out in Prospect Park and across the Hudson River.The smell of acrid smoke spread throughout New York City on Saturday and persisted into the evening, a day after brush fires broke out on Friday in Brooklyn, the Bronx and nearby New Jersey. It was a surreal experience for a city that is rarely home to wildfires but is in the middle of a drought.On Saturday, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation placed the city, as well as Rockland and Westchester Counties, under an air quality alert until midnight. The smell of smoke woke Desi Yvette, 36, in her Williamsburg home in the middle of the night.“It was close to 2 and I just stayed up for a while,” Ms. Yvette said as she walked her Maltese mix, Midas, on Saturday. “I thought maybe there was a fire nearby, but I didn’t hear any sirens. So I was like, I don’t think it’s an emergency or we would have been alerted. But it does smell bad.”Ms. Yvette had not heard about the brush fire that broke out on Friday night in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, burning two acres in a heavily wooded area. “It’s crazy that it smells all the way over here,” she added. “It’s just been a week of, like, disaster.”

      Smoke forecast

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      Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement on Saturday that there were multiple wildfires burning across New York State, noting that Hudson Valley, Long Island and the Catskills region were at high risk.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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      Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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      The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.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