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    Charter Company in Fatal Helicopter Crash Had Prior Mechanical Failures

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    The firm that operated the helicopter that crashed in the Hudson River on Thursday, killing all six people aboard, has a long history of flying excursions around New York City, some of which have encountered safety problems.In 2013, one of the helicopters operated by the company, New York Helicopter Charter, was carrying a family of four on a sightseeing tour when it suddenly lost power. It was forced to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River near the Upper West Side of Manhattan.About two years later, another of its helicopters crashed while hovering 20 feet off the ground after taking off in northern New Jersey.In that episode, the pilot reported that the helicopter had started to spin out of control before he put it down for a “hard landing.” An investigation found that the aircraft had previously been involved in a hard landing in Chile in 2010 and that a drive shaft that was “unairworthy” was installed on the aircraft, according to a report by the National Transportation Safety Board.The investigation found that the faulty drive shaft had been painted by a previous owner, making it impossible to tell whether it had been part of the helicopter during the earlier hard landing.The investigators found that the probable cause of the crash was “deliberate concealment and reuse” of the faulty component “by unknown personnel.”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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      Congestion Pricing Will Live On for Several Months After Court Agreement

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      State and federal officials agreed to a timeline in their court dispute over the tolling program that is likely to leave it in place until the fall. Other threats to the program still loom.The federal government and New York transit officials have agreed to allow congestion pricing, the tolling program opposed by President Trump, to continue until at least midsummer, and most likely into the fall, according to a new court filing.But it remains unclear whether the federal Department of Transportation, which has raised the specter of defunding mass transit projects in the state, could exert pressure outside the court system to try to force the program to end sooner. Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, has said he wants the toll to end by April 20.The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the program, declined to comment on the letter that detailed the agreement. The document was filed on Friday in federal court in Manhattan as part of a lawsuit by the M.T.A. against the Department of Transportation over the government’s efforts to kill the toll. The letter said that the authority and federal officials would abide by a timeline that would not resolve the dispute until at least late July. It also noted that the federal government does not currently plan to seek an injunction, which could have potentially halted the program in the meantime.The Department of Transportation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The agreement signals another temporary reprieve for the M.T.A. and Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has vowed to keep the tolling cameras on. Congestion pricing, which charges most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street during peak traffic times, began in January, with the goals of reducing traffic and raising $15 billion for critical mass-transit upgrades in the region.Sam Spokony, a spokesman for the governor, declined to comment on the court document, but reiterated Ms. Hochul’s support for the program. “Since congestion pricing took effect three months ago, traffic is down and business is up — and that’s the kind of progress we’re going to keep delivering for New Yorkers,” he said.For months, President Trump has promised to kill congestion pricing, claiming, without offering evidence, that the toll is harmful to the city’s economy.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 Columbia Campus Occupation Could Have Ended Without Police, Report Says

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      A university senate review concludes that some demonstrators who occupied Hamilton Hall were willing to leave voluntarily.Columbia University’s move to use police force to clear demonstrators from a campus building last spring could potentially have been avoided, as some students were urgently asking if they could leave voluntarily, according to a report released Tuesday by the university’s senate.The students, who early that morning had broken into Hamilton Hall and barricaded the doors, told faculty intermediaries that they had enlisted the help of a Harlem pastor to help them depart safely. But university administrators, saying time had run out, allowed hundreds of police officers to come onto the campus to remove protesters from the building.The new details of the final hours of the occupation of Hamilton Hall on April 30 were among the key revelations of the 335-page report, which was written by a group within the senate, a Columbia policymaking body that includes faculty members, students and administrators, with faculty in the majority. The senate is independent from the administration and has been critical of its protest response.Called the “The Sundial Report,” it provides a play-by-play chronology of the events surrounding the protests on campus related to the war in Gaza beginning in October 2023.The demonstrations and Columbia’s response put the school at the center of a national debate over how to protect students from harassment by demonstrators while also protecting the free speech and rights of protesters.The events of last spring resulted in significant disruption on the university’s Morningside Heights campus, and some critics of Columbia’s response said administrators waited too long to take action. The unrest culminated on April 30, when a smaller group of protesters — including some who were unaffiliated with Columbia — broke off from a tent encampment and took over Hamilton Hall.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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      Working Families Party Endorses 4 Candidates in Strategy to Beat Cuomo

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      The progressive group backed Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, Adrienne Adams and Zellnor Myrie for mayor as part of a broader effort to defeat the former governor, who is leading in the polls.As New York City voters tilt slightly toward the center, the left-leaning Working Families Party hopes that a slate of four mayoral candidates will be better than the one moderate rival currently leading the polls, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.The party on Saturday voted to endorse a slate of four candidates for mayor: Zohran Mamdani, an assemblyman from Queens; Brad Lander, the city comptroller; Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council; and Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn.Ana María Archila and Jasmine Gripper, co-directors of the New York Working Families Party, said in a statement that the city deserved a mayor who could “leave behind the scandal and corruption of the past and lead with integrity.”The four candidates “each have a record of fighting for working families, a vision to make New York City safe and affordable for all and the courage to stand up to Trump,” they added.The slate is the first of a two-part endorsement process that the party has embraced for the June 24 primary. In May, the group plans to throw its support behind a single candidate that its leaders believe is best positioned to defeat Mr. Cuomo.In the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, the three candidates backed by the Working Families Party failed to make the final round under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system. This year, the group has adjusted its endorsement process in an effort to better leverage its influence.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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      Pension Funds Push Forward on Climate Goals Despite Backlash

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      At a time of resistance to environmental, social and governance goals, pension funds have become a bulwark against efforts to sideline climate risks.In the past few months, some of the largest banks and asset managers in the United States have quit net zero networks, the climate groups that encourage their members to set ambitious carbon reduction targets and collaborate internationally on sustainability efforts.But the week after Donald J. Trump won re-election in November, NYCERS, a pension fund for New York City employees, went in the opposite direction. It joined a United Nations-affiliated climate action group for long-term investors, the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance.The timing wasn’t intentional, said Brad Lander, the comptroller who oversees the city’s finances, including the pension fund, and is now running for mayor. But, he added, “we were pleased that the timing sent an important signal.”“It is far more important than it was for pension funds and other big asset owners to take collective action at this moment,” Mr. Lander said.At a time of growing backlash to environmental, social and governance goals and investment strategies, pension funds, particularly in blue states and Europe, have emerged as a bulwark against efforts to sideline climate-related risks.The funds, which sit at the top of the investment chain, have stepped up engagement with asset managers and companies on climate goals and have kept public commitments to use their fiscal might to reduce carbon emissions. In some cases, that has meant shifting to European asset managers, which have not backed off on climate commitments as much as their American counterparts have.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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      Jazzed About Abstraction: Jack Whitten’s Show Is a Peak MoMA Moment

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      “I’m a product of American Apartheid,” the artist Jack Whitten wrote, a blunt fact that led him to project, in his art, a very different reality, one of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It was a vision that propelled and buoyed him through a nearly six-decade career. “This is why I get up in the morning,” he wrote, “and go to work!”And how very lucky we are, at a moment when references to diversity and difference are being scrubbed from accounts of our national history, to have a refreshing tidal wave of a Whitten career retrospective sweeping and scintillating through the special exhibition galleries on the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth floor.Titled “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” the show encompasses some 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, from a 1963 art-school collage to a final painting from just before he died in 2018. Over that span Whitten called every studio he worked in a “laboratory,” and every piece of art he made an “experiment.” And, indeed, much of what’s in the show challenges ready definition.Whitten at his studio in 1974 with a large rake-like tool that he had made to apply a wide layer of paint to a horizontal canvas.Paul Viani, via The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkSuch is the case with a piece called “The Messenger (for Art Blakey)” installed just outside the first gallery. From a distance it could be a photograph of a star-drenched night sky, or of clouds of foam on a dark sea. Or it could a painting with white paint glopped and dripped, Abstract Expressionist-style, on a black ground. Get close and you find that, in fact, it’s a large rough-textured mosaic pieced together from thousands of pixel-like cubes of dried paint.You consult the title for meaning: Art Blakey, Black drummer extraordinaire, leader in the 1950s of the hardbop group called the Jazz Messengers. Suddenly the glops and drips look sonic, like musical bursts and pings.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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      9 Mayoral Candidates Unite to Attack Cuomo on Nursing Home Deaths

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      Nearly all the people running for New York City mayor appeared at a Covid memorial event with a shared message: Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s pandemic response is a reason not to support him.Nearly all the men and women running to be New York City’s next mayor came together on Sunday to urge voters not to support the candidates’ shared opponent, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.The group — which ranged in ideology from Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, to Curtis Sliwa, a Republican — gathered to mark the fifth anniversary of a New York State Department of Health order, issued while Mr. Cuomo was governor, that directed nursing homes to readmit hospital patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus. The order, patients’ families and lawmakers have said, contributed to thousands of Covid-related deaths among nursing home residents in the state.For Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who resigned in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal, continued scrutiny of his pandemic response and his administration’s efforts to conceal the true death toll in nursing homes was a political millstone even before he entered the mayor’s race. He has sharply defended his handling of the crisis and has called the criticism politically motivated.On Sunday, nine mayoral candidates stood on a street in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood in front of a memorial wall that displayed photos of nursing home residents who died during the Covid crisis. Each candidate said that they were not attending for political reasons, while taking the opportunity to criticize the former governor, who is leading in the polls. The event was organized by families who have long called for Mr. Cuomo to apologize and take responsibility for their relatives’ deaths.“This is not about partisan politics, but it is about accountability,” said Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running in the Democratic primary in June. “It is not too much to ask Andrew Cuomo to meet with families.”Relatives of those who died have called on former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to meet with their families.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesWe 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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      Why Period Products Aren’t Widely Provided in Schools

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      A lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education alleges that not providing free products amounts to discrimination.Alisa Nudar was in the middle of her math exam when she realized she had unexpectedly started her period.Nudar raised her hand and asked for permission to go to the bathroom. When she got there, she found that she had bled through her underwear. She didn’t have any period products with her, and there were none in the bathroom. “I kept asking people who were coming in and they were, like, Oh, I’m so sorry, I don’t have any,” Nudar said. “And already 10 minutes had passed.”She walked out of the bathroom looking for a better solution and bumped into a friend who ran back to her classroom to get one of her own pads.All of that searching took about 15 minutes, Nudar said — wasted time that she could have put into her exam. Back then, in 2021, Nudar was a freshman at Bard High School Early College in New York City. And legally there should have been tampons and pads in the school bathroom, provided for free by the New York City Department of Education.Now a nonprofit organization called Period Law and an anonymous student are suing the Education Department for not providing those products in schools, a failure that, according to the legal complaint, effectively amounts to discrimination against menstruating people.In 2016, New York City became the first jurisdiction in the country to pass a law mandating every school to be stocked with free period products. The law paved the way for other legislators to pass their own versions of a similar law. Today, 28 states and the District of Columbia have laws on free period products in schools.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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      Adams’s Associates Under Federal Investigation Over Ties to China

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      The Justice Department is pushing to drop corruption charges against Eric Adams in Manhattan while federal authorities in Brooklyn have been investigating his top fund-raisers.The Trump administration appears likely to succeed in having federal corruption charges dropped against Mayor Eric Adams in Manhattan.But in Brooklyn, a separate group of prosecutors has been conducting a long-running investigation involving Mr. Adams’s most prominent fund-raiser — and at one point searched her homes and office for evidence of a possible Chinese government scheme to influence Mr. Adams’s election, according to a copy of a search warrant, portions of which were read to The New York Times.Mr. Adams has known the fund-raiser, Winnie Greco, for more than a decade, and he appointed her to be his Asian affairs adviser after he became mayor in 2022. She has been a close collaborator with people and groups linked to the Chinese government over the years, and she has showed a willingness to steer politicians toward pro-Beijing narratives, The Times reported in October.The searches of her homes in the Bronx and office in Queens occurred early last year and were overseen by prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. The agents conducting the searches were also seeking evidence of solicitation of illegal contributions from foreign nationals, wire fraud and conspiracy, the warrant said.On the day Ms. Greco’s homes were searched, and as part of the same investigation, agents also searched the mansion of another prominent fund-raiser for the Adams campaign, Lian Wu Shao, on Long Island, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The search of Mr. Shao’s home has not been previously reported.A wealthy Chinese businessman, Mr. Shao is the operator of the New World Mall in Flushing, Queens, which housed Ms. Greco’s office. Records show that hundreds of donors associated with his companies boosted Mr. Adams’s 2021 campaign.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