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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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      New York Women’s Basketball Coach Fired After Pulling Player’s Ponytail

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      The coach of the women’s varsity team in Northville, N.Y., was caught yanking a player’s hair on a television broadcast of a championship game on Friday.The coach of a high school women’s basketball team from a community in New York’s Adirondacks was fired after he pulled a player’s ponytail at the end of a state championship game on Friday, the school district confirmed.Videos on social media and local television news show an older man yanking a distraught player’s hair, talking emphatically and scolding her while another player attempts to separate the two.The hair pulling happened after the girl’s varsity team for the Northville Central School District lost to LaFargeville Central School District in the Class D New York State championship game.The district in Northville, which is in Fulton County about 60 miles northwest of Albany and on Great Sacandaga Lake, said that it was “deeply disturbed” by the conduct of its coach and that the “individual will no longer be coaching” for the district.The statement did not say that the coach had been fired, but Sarah Chauncey, the district superintendent, said in a phone interview on Saturday that the coach’s “service with the district has been terminated.”Dr. Chauncey declined to confirm the identities of the coach or player.According to MaxPreps, a website that tracks high school sports rosters, the head coach for the team is Jim Zullo. The player appears to be a high school senior based on her jersey number.A contact for Mr. Zullo was not immediately accessible.Mr. Zullo told News10 ABC that before the episode, the player had directed an expletive at him when he instructed her to shake hands with the opposing team.Alyssa Leroux, 31, of Watertown, N.Y., was watching the broadcast of the game with her family on Friday. The placement of the team from LaFargeville, which is about 90 miles north of Syracuse, in the championship was a “big deal” in the community, she said.At the very end of the game, as Northville’s six-point loss was finalized, she thought she saw something strange. Then she got a text from a friend who asked her if she “saw that coach pull that girl’s hair.”She replayed the broadcast and confirmed it. Aghast, Ms. Leroux wanted to draw attention to it. She took a video from the television showing the episode and posted it to Facebook.Her video so far has gained 500 reactions — most of them angry emojis — and nearly 900 shares. It was also featured in local news reports“I just felt terrible for the girl,” Ms. Leroux said. “I mean she just played her heart out.”“You can’t do things like that when you’re an older man with a young kid,” she added. More

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      Stefanik Will Be Released From the House Soon for UN Ambassador Confirmation

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      Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, is set to be released from the House on April 2 and head toward a confirmation vote to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, after weeks of waiting to join President Trump’s cabinet.Senate Republicans have been slow-walking Ms. Stefanik’s confirmation because of the too-tight margins in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson could not afford to lose a reliable Republican vote when he needed to pass the stopgap government funding measure that Democrats almost unanimously opposed.So, despite being Mr. Trump’s first announced nominee to serve in his cabinet, Ms. Stefanik is now the only one who has yet to be confirmed. That has left her in a strange in-between: She is a member of the 119th Congress who is not seated on any subcommittees, and she attended the first Trump cabinet meeting despite the fact that she is not technically in it yet. When Mr. Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, she sat with the cabinet rather than her House colleagues.But Ms. Stefanik’s awkward life in limbo can start to resolve on April 2, when two Trump-endorsed Republicans are expected to fill a pair of seats that were left vacant after the departures of former Representatives Mike Waltz and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Senate Republicans are then expected to move ahead with Ms. Stefanik’s confirmation, according to two people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The details of Ms. Stefanik’s confirmation proceedings were first reported by Axios.A spokesman for Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, declined to comment on the schedule for the confirmation vote.The Republican majority in the House will remain slim, but Mr. Johnson will have a little more room to maneuver. He has been forthright about his challenges.“I had 220 Republicans and 215 Democrats, and then President Trump began to cull the herd,” Mr. Johnson said last month, referring to the president’s decision to select House Republicans to serve in his administration. “We have a one-vote margin now — smallest in history, right? So for a big chunk of the first 100 days of the Congress, and perhaps beyond, this is not an easy task, but we’re going to get it done.” 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

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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 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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      N.Y. Corrections Department Issues Ultimatum to Striking Officers

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      The department agreed to some of the officers’ demands but said that those who did not return to work on Friday would face disciplinary action and possible criminal charges.Corrections officers who staged unauthorized strikes that have sowed chaos across New York State’s prisons for the last two and a half weeks received an ultimatum on Thursday night: Return to work on Friday or face termination, disciplinary action and the possibility of criminal charges.In exchange for the officers’ returning to work, the state would place a 90-day pause on some provisions of the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act, known as HALT, which limits the use of solitary confinement for inmates, Daniel F. Martuscello III, commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, said in a news conference Thursday night.The department will also create a committee to study the law, which many corrections officers say has made their jobs more dangerous and difficult.Striking officers have also complained about staffing shortages and forced overtime, with some being required to work 24-hour shifts. The shifts of workers who return to duty on Friday will be limited to 12 hours, Mr. Martuscello said. When all workers are back in place and the prisons return to normal operations, he said, workers will not be forced to work shifts longer than eight hours.Dozens of corrections officers and sergeants have been fired for participating in the illegal strikes, Jackie Bray, commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, said Thursday evening. Others who refuse to return to work on Friday will also be fired, and will face possible disciplinary action, civil contempt charges or criminal prosecution, Ms. Bray said.Those who return to work on Friday can avoid all of that, Ms. Bray said. Striking corrections officers and sergeants who already quit, who were fired, or who face contempt charges or other disciplinary actions will have their records swept clean and their jobs reinstated, but only if they accept the terms offered Thursday night.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 Wants Congestion Pricing Dead by March 21. Not So Fast, M.T.A. Says.

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      Court filings revealed that President Trump is seeking to end the New York toll program within weeks. Legal experts say the deadline is not enforceable.In the furor and confusion over the Trump administration’s move to kill congestion pricing in New York City, a major question remained unanswered: If the president had his way, when would the tolling program end?Federal officials, it turned out, had a date in mind: March 21.The battle over congestion pricing, which the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority is counting on to fund billions of dollars in mass transit repairs, is expected to play out in federal court in Manhattan. While many legal experts say that the March deadline is not binding, some question whether President Trump might resort to other tactics, including withholding federal funding for other state projects, to apply pressure.In a letter last week to New York transportation leaders, Gloria M. Shepherd, the executive director of the Federal Highway Administration, said they “must cease the collection of tolls” by that date. The letter was included in court papers filed on Tuesday in a federal lawsuit brought by the State of New Jersey seeking to stop congestion pricing.Ms. Shepherd requested that New York leaders work with her agency, which is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, “to provide the necessary details and updates” regarding the halting of toll operations.In response, the M.T.A., which operates buses, trains and commuter rail lines in New York and manages the tolling program, vowed to keep collecting the tolls unless a federal judge instructs it otherwise.“We’re not turning them off,” Janno Lieber, the chief executive and chair of the M.T.A., said at a news conference on Wednesday. “In the meantime, everything is steady as she goes.”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