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    When Taxpayers Fund Shows Like ‘Blue Bloods’ and ‘S.N.L.,’ Does It Pay Off?

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    Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has proposed an increase in the film tax credit to stay competitive with New Jersey and other states.New Yorkers — and residents of many other states — have paid more for entertainment in recent years than just their Netflix or Hulu subscriptions.Each New York household has also contributed about $16 in taxes, on average, toward producing the drama series “Billions” since 2017. Over that period, each household has also paid roughly $14.50 in production incentives for “Saturday Night Live” and $4.60 for “The Irishman,” among many other shows and movies.Add it all up, and New York has spent more than $5.5 billion in incentives since 2017, the earliest year for which data is readily available. Now, as a new state budget agreement nears, Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she wants to add $100 million in credits for independent productions that would bring total film subsidies to $800 million a year, almost double the amount from 2022.Other states also pay out tens or hundreds of millions each year in a bidding war for Hollywood productions, under the theory that these tax credits spur the economy. One question for voters and lawmakers is whether a state recoups more than its investment in these movies and shows — or gets back only pennies on the dollar.New York has one of the largest tax credit programs and makes most of its data public, so we totaled its spending to see which productions benefited the most. More

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      Trump Administration Halts Building of Giant Wind Farm Off N.Y. Coast

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      Gov. Kathy Hochul quickly responded that she would “fight this decision every step of the way.”Just as construction was starting on a massive wind farm off the coast of Long Island, the Trump administration ordered an immediate halt on Wednesday that could spell a serious setback for hopes of powering New York City with offshore wind.Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, called for the cessation of “all construction activities” on the Empire Wind project, which was designed to provide enough electricity to power about 500,000 homes in New York.On the first day of his new term in office, President Trump signed an executive order that limited the approval of offshore wind farms. But Empire Wind had already received all of the permits it needed to get underway.In a social media post on Wednesday, Mr. Burgum said the halt would allow for “further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, quickly responded that she would “fight this decision every step of the way.” She called the secretary’s move a “federal overreach” that she would not allow to stand.The order came two weeks after Representative Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, asked Mr. Burgum in a letter to “do everything in your power” to stop what he called an “underhanded rush” to build the wind farm. Another Republican representative from New Jersey, Jeff Van Drew, has pressed Mr. Trump to put a stop to other wind farms that were planned in the Atlantic Ocean to provide renewable power to New Jersey.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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      Mother and 3 Children Detained by ICE at Upstate N.Y. Farm Are Released

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      The family was returned to New York after being taken into custody last month and held at a detention center in Texas, officials and advocates said.Three children and their mother have been released from federal custody after being detained by immigration enforcement agents last month at an upstate New York dairy farm, officials said on Monday.The case sent shock waves through tiny Sackets Harbor, N.Y., a village of about 1,400 people on Lake Ontario where the children were enrolled, and well liked, at the town’s school.The family’s detention was another move amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown to touch off protests. About 1,000 people rallied on the family’s behalf on Saturday, according to North Country Public Radio.The release of the woman and her children — a third grader and two high school students — was announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and the local state assemblyman, Scott Gray, a Republican“We are open to working with federal immigration enforcement to crack down on gang members or violent criminals,” Ms. Hochul said in a statement. “But I will never support cruel actions that rip kids out of school or tear families apart.”Mr. Gray said in a separate statement that “we are all profoundly grateful” that the family had been returned to New York.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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      Upper West Side Theater Is Sold After Governor Allocates $3.5 Million

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      A nonprofit bought the landmark Metro Theater after receiving financial support from Gov. Kathy Hochul, the State Senate and Steven Spielberg’s foundation.A landmark Art Deco movie theater that closed 20 years ago on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was sold to a nonprofit after it received $3.5 million in discretionary grants from Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York.The nonprofit, the Upper West Side Cinema Center, used those funds and $500,000 in grants from the State Senate to complete its $6.9 million purchase of the Metro Theater on Friday. It plans to revitalize the building, on Broadway near West 99th Street, with a five-screen theater, a lobby lounge and a public cafe.Additional fund-raising of $15 million to $25 million is required to construct a new interior, replace the marquee and clean graffiti from the facade, the nonprofit says.“The Upper West Side community deserves another world-class venue for cinema and art, and that’s why I was proud to step in,” Hochul said in a news release.Assemblyman Micah Lasher, a Democrat who took office in January, grew up going to the Metro Theater and fondly remembers seeing “Ali” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus” there with his family.“Its loss for the last 20 years has been not just an eyesore, but a deeply felt scar for the neighborhood,” he said.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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      Rejected by Washington, Federal Workers Find Open Arms in State Governments

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      Where the federal government sees waste, states see opportunity — both to serve as a counterweight to the Trump administration and to recruit some much-needed talent.In the weeks since the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began eliminating jobs, state and local governments have been actively recruiting federal workers impacted by the Trump administration’s effort to dramatically reduce the federal work force.Hawaii is fast-tracking job applications. Virginia started a website advertising its job market. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania signed an executive order aimed at attracting federal employees to the state’s 5,600 “critical vacancies” in the state government. Both New Mexico and Maryland announced expanded resources and agencies to help federal workers shift into new careers in the state, and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York is encouraging people to “come work in the greatest state in the nation.”There has been interest. The New York governor’s office said roughly 150 people have signed up to attend information sessions hosted by the state’s Department of Labor.But it’s too soon to say how many federal employees are applying for state-level roles and how exactly demographics could shift as a result, according to William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.There were about 2.3 million civilians employed by the federal government’s executive branch when President Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20. Thousands of government jobs have been cut as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts across a range of agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.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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      New Yorkers Protest as White House Defends Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia

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      Hundreds of demonstrators marched downtown while a spokeswoman for President Trump said the president had the authority to detain Mahmoud Khalil.As hundreds of demonstrators made their way through Lower Manhattan on Tuesday to protest the detention of a prominent pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University, the White House defended the arrest and rebuked the school for what it called lack of cooperation.The activist, Mahmoud Khalil, was a leader of student protests on Columbia’s campus and often served as a negotiator and spokesman. Mr. Khalil, 30, who is Palestinian and was born and raised in Syria, is a legal permanent resident of the United States and is married to an American citizen.He was arrested on Saturday and transferred to detention in Louisiana.A spokeswoman for President Trump, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Tuesday that the government had the authority to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card under the Immigration and Nationality Act.“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers with the logo of Hamas,” she said.Her remarks came a day after Mr. Trump vowed that the apprehension of Mr. Khalil was “the first arrest of many to come.”Some free speech groups and civil rights activists have questioned the legality of Mr. Khalil’s detention, which his lawyers have challenged in court. On Tuesday, some New York Democrats expressed concern about the arrest. But Mayor Eric Adams shrugged off questions about it at a City Hall news conference, saying that the federal government, not the city, had authority over the matter.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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      New Deal Reached to End Wildcat Strikes by N.Y. Prison Guards

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      The state and the correctional officers’ union agreed that officers should return to work Monday and that some provisions of a solitary confinement law would be put on pause.A new agreement has been reached to end wildcat strikes by thousands of New York State correctional officers, which have created chaos throughout the prison system.Under the agreement, negotiated by state officials and the correctional officers’ union, the officers are expected to return to work Monday.The officers, who maintained that staffing shortages, forced overtime and dangerous working conditions prompted the illegal strikes, had received an ultimatum this week from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision: go back to their posts or face discipline, termination or, possibly, criminal charges, according to a memorandum issued by the agency.The union agreed on Saturday to the terms outlined in the memorandum, the corrections department said in a statement. Those terms will take effect when 85 percent of staff return to work. Any disputes over the agreement will be resolved by an arbitrator.It was unclear on Sunday how the union, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, would enforce the return-to-work provision since it did not authorize the strikes. The department and the union struck a similar deal last month that would have ended the strikes by March 1. Most officers ignored that agreement.In the new memorandum, the state agreed to a 90-day pause on some provisions in the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, known as HALT, which limits the use of solitary confinement for prisoners.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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      CUNY Removes Palestinian Studies Job Listing on Hochul’s Orders

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      The language in the listing included terms — like “settler colonialism,” “apartheid” and “genocide” — that Jewish groups said were offensive when applied to Israel.When Nancy Cantor became president of Hunter College last fall, she asked faculty, students and staff what they wanted from the school. One answer was more attention to Palestinian studies.Faculty members began working on possible approaches. They came up with a plan for two tenure-track faculty positions that would cross several departments and began drafting job descriptions.The Hunter College job listing for Palestinian studies called for scholars who could “take a critical lens” to issues including “settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid” and other topics.When the listing was posted last weekend, Jewish groups protested the inclusion of words that they said are antisemitic when applied to Israel. Their objections were first reported in The New York Post.By Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul demanded that the college, a part of the City University of New York, take down the listing.“Governor Hochul directed CUNY to immediately remove this posting and conduct a thorough review of the position to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom,” a spokesperson said in a statement, adding, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.”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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      Prison Boss Elevated by Hochul Was Accused of Rape by 2 Former Inmates

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      The attacks occurred years earlier when Bennie Thorpe worked at a state women’s prison, his accusers said. Now he runs a prison where an inmate was fatally beaten by guards.After guards at the Marcy Correctional Facility in central New York beat a handcuffed prisoner to death late last year, Gov. Kathy Hochul promised immediate reforms to turn the troubled prison around.One of her first directives was to install a new leader, Bennie Thorpe, who had recently run another correctional facility and had experience with security operations and rehabilitation programs. Mr. Thorpe, she said, had “expertise and a fresh perspective on what must be done.”He also had a record of being accused of rape and sexual assault by inmates at one of his former workplaces, records and interviews show.In lawsuits filed in 2023, two women who had been incarcerated at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County accused Mr. Thorpe of sexual abuse when he was a captain there.One said he summoned her to an office, groped her breasts and raped her in December 2018.Another said he raped her three times in the spring of 2019 in a room near the prison’s medical unit.Neither of the allegations has been previously reported. Both lawsuits are still pending in the New York State Court of Claims.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