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      New York City mayor’s longtime friend now holds high-paid NYPD job

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      New York City mayor’s longtime friend now holds high-paid NYPD jobLisa White, who earns $241,000 a year, is one of a number of Eric Adams’s friends, family and former colleagues hired to top roles A career 911 dispatcher and longtime friend of New York City mayor Eric Adams who rented a room to Adams in her apartment in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights for four years now has one of the highest-paid jobs in city government, records show.In May, the NYPD appointed Lisa White as its deputy commissioner for employee relations, at a salary of more than $241,000 a year – a nearly fivefold boost over her prior salary there and almost as much as the police commissioner makes.In her new role, White attends to the health, wellbeing and morale of the NYPD’s 35,000 uniformed members, including their corps of chaplains, along with bereavement and other support services for families.‘Egregious acts of violence’: why is Eric Adams cracking down on subway buskers and mango sellers?Read moreCity Hall confirmed that Adams’s connection with White extended beyond a mere professional relationship, also characterizing it as a friendship that dated back decades and that involved sharing an address for years.Government payroll records show that White served as a 911 operator, formally known as a police communications technician, from 1995 through December 2019, when she retired with a base salary of just over $53,000. She is currently earning a pension of about $30,000 a year, on top of her current salary, according to the website SeeThroughNY.White’s bio on the NYPD website notes that “throughout her 30-year career with the Department, she served in positions within the Communications Division, including Interim Supervisor.” It also highlights her most recent job before her appointment as deputy commissioner, as a field supervisor for the US Census Bureau.White’s ties to the mayor run back for years – part of a pattern of appointments by Adams that demonstrates a determination to hire friends, family and former colleagues for top administration posts.City Hall spokesperson Fabien Levy said Adams played no role in White’s appointment.He said Adams and White both had a professional relationship and were also friendsfrom their time with the group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, which Adams co-founded while he served in the NYPD.Levy said that before becoming mayor, Adams rented a room at the Crown Heights address.Prior to White’s deputy commissioner appointment, she served as a volunteer board member and treasurer for Adams’s Brooklyn Borough Hall-affiliated nonprofit, the One Brooklyn Fund, from 2014 to 2021, according to tax records and a conflicts of interest disclosure form she filed with the city this year.The bad old days: how policing in New York City turned back the clockRead moreAdams used the nonprofit not just to hold events and offer services to residents of the community, but also to tout his government work and bolster his standing politically. The fund raised money from businesses and distributed grant dollars to local groups.The ties between White and Adams go back further still, to at least the 1990s. Media clips indicate White served as a spokesperson for 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, which Adams co-founded to draw attention to and reform the NYPD’s interactions with the Black community.One news article published in 1999, about a protest by 911 staff over their equipment and working conditions, identifies White as a 911 dispatcher and a member of 100 Blacks. Representing that group, she did an on-air interview in 2000 with the radio show “Democracy Now” about a wave of sexual assaults in Central Park.Public records show that for years, White claimed residence at an apartment on the 20th floor of Ebbets Field Apartments, which is in Crown Heights and named for the Dodgers baseball stadium that once stood there.White made eight political donations from that same address between 2008 and 2019 – including two to Adams’s borough president campaign, state board of elections records show. The contributions to Adams, both in 2012, list her employer as “NYC Police Department” and her position as “Police Communications Tech”, according to city campaign finance board records. City payroll records confirm her title was “police communications technician”.In 2013, as Adams ran for borough president, he changed his voter registration – to declare his residence as the same McKeever Place apartment where White had also declared her residence.City board of election records show Adams maintained that he lived at the McKeever Place unit between June 2013 and March 2017.Last year, when questions arose about Adams’s real estate holdings and where he was living, his mayoral campaign spokesman also said that Adams lived at the McKeever Place address from 2013 to 2017.The mayor thinks New York gets ‘special energy’ from crystals. Is he right?Read moreWhite was also paid $1,000 in November 2013 as a consultant for Adams’s initial campaign for Brooklyn borough president – sent to her at the McKeever Place address. She surfaced once more to speak as an Adams political representative in July 2020, as he faced questions about law enforcement contributions to his budding mayoral campaign while protests against police brutality raged.Just days after Adams was sworn in as mayor on 1 January 2022, the NYPD dismissed its deputy commissioner for employee relations, Robert Ganley – opening the post that the department named White to in May.White didn’t respond to a message left at a phone number listed for her, and Ganley also didn’t respond.An unnamed NYPD spokesperson said her appointment fell within department standards.“Deputy commissioner Lisa White filed for service retirement from the NYPD communications section in 2019, after a 29-year-career with the agency,” said the spokesperson. “Her hiring was in line with the NYPD’s standards for identifying those best suited for their roles within the department.”Adams has unapologetically hired a number of close friends to top city posts, including David Banks as schools chancellor and Banks’s partner, Sheena Wright, as a deputy mayor.The mayor tapped Banks’s brother Philip Banks – who resigned as NYPD chief of department in 2014 amid a federal bribery probe in a case that later identified him as an unindicted co-conspirator – as deputy mayor for public safety, reporting directly to Adams.Adams also tried to give his own brother, Bernard Adams, a $242,000 gig as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of governmental affairs, the New York Post revealed. City conflicts of interest prohibitions on nepotism forced Adams to significantly curtail his brother’s responsibilities and pay him only a nominal salary of $1 for overseeing his personal security.Another of Adams’s longtime friends from the police department, Tim Pearson, was quietly handed a $242,000 role at the city’s Economic Development Corporation overseeing public safety and Covid-19 initiatives.New York’s mayor is getting paid in bitcoin. But can he pay the bills with it?Read moreAt the start of his tenure, Adams brought on the longtime counsel for the Brooklyn Democratic party, Frank Carone, as his chief of staff, and later gave a $190,000 job to the husband of party chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who had staunchly backed Adams’s mayoral candidacy. The Adams administration has also brought on at least half a dozen former city council members who had endorsed his mayoral run – one of whom, department of buildings commissioner Eric Ulrich, recently resigned amid a federal probe into alleged organized crime and illegal gambling, according to the New York Times.When questioned about these and other hires, Adams has repeatedly maintained that he picks the best people for the job.Adams’s years living at McKeever Place in Crown Heights got little scrutiny amid the wider questions that arose last year during his campaign for mayor about his real estate holdings and where he actually lives.At the time that he was living at McKeever Place, Adams already owned a four-unit townhouse on Lafayette Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant and co-owned a co-op in Prospect Heights that he had bought years earlier with a woman he called a “good friend”.During the campaign, Adams repeatedly insisted that he had turned over his 50% share of the co-op to his friend, Sylvia Cowan, back in 2007 – but he acknowledged after the election and this year on city financial disclosure forms that he indeed still co-owned the unit. He has said he wasn’t aware that Cowan didn’t finalize the transfer of shares.In 2016, Adams bought a co-op in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with his current partner, Tracey Collins. At a later point, Cowan also bought a unit in that same building, one floor below Adams.Adams responded to the questions raised about his residence by providing the media with a tour of the ground floor unit of his Bedford-Stuyvesant townhouse, which is where he and his campaign spokesperson said he has lived since 2017.This story is posted in collaboration with The City.TopicsEric AdamsNew YorkUS politicsNYPDUS policingnewsReuse this content More

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      How a five-term New York Democrat lost a House seat to a Republican

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      How a five-term New York Democrat lost a House seat to a Republican Sean Maloney, head of the influential Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, lost by less than 1% – and redistricting may have been part of itJack Dunnigan stood behind the counter of Pickwick Bookshop, a venerable store he owns, with its homey smell of nobly ageing paper, in the picturesque, liberal riverside town of Nyack about 30 miles north of downtown New York City, and sighed.“I had a feeling he was going to,” Dunnigan said of the local Democratic congressman and national party stalwart Sean Maloney’s loss to his Republican challenger, Mike Lawler, in the midterm elections.Who were the big winners and losers of the US midterm elections?Read moreIt was a mild afternoon in the Hudson Valley, four days after Democrats did much better than expected nationally but took damaging tumbles in the elections in solidly blue New York, which helped Republicans win a slim majority in the House of Representatives. It seemed Dunnigan, 77, had known something Maloney didn’t. Maloney was a five-term congressman and headed the influential Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which describes itself as “the only political committee dedicated to electing Democrats to the House of Representatives”.Maloney had spent the election cycle using funds and Washington knowhow to shore up vulnerable Democrats across the country and then late on had to rush back to his own district for frantic campaigning when it emerged that he, too, was suddenly vulnerable. But to no avail – he lost, by less than 1%.Some blamed his strategy and ground game, others said he was unlucky, especially in the congressional redistricting this year that started off favoring Democrats in New York but wound up weighing in Republicans’ favor.When the maps were redrawn this spring, Maloney decided to run in New York’s 17th congressional district rather than his longtime, more urban, 18th district, even though that meant booting out the newer Mondaire Jones, his fellow Democrat and the incumbent congressman in the 17th district.Redistricting placed almost three-quarters of the constituents Maloney had represented for a decade outside his new, heavily suburban district.At his store, Dunnigan added: “I said, Well, this guy’s got a lot of clout but, you know, he built up a lot of clout in his area. I don’t think he had time to really build up that clout [in the 17th district], and he was trying to.”Bill Clinton stumped for Maloney last month in Nyack, but as a blue enclave the Democratic vote there was hardly imperiled. “I said: that’s impressive but you know, when you’re here, you’re preaching to the choir,” Dunnigan said.But the 17th encompasses all of Rockland county, home to several right-leaning constituencies: cops and firefighters who commute to New York City and Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities who often vote as a conservative bloc.“Sean Patrick Maloney really did not come to our community. In terms of campaigning, I feel like until early voting, I didn’t really hear him here,” said Rivkie Feiner, a Rockland county resident who practices Orthodox Judaism and owns a grant-writing company. “I did see in the newspaper once that he was locally within Rockland or within the district on a Saturday, but tens of thousands of us are Sabbath observant,” Feiner said in a phone interview. “So, you know, it wasn’t like any of us were at any of those events.” Maloney told the New York Times that he invited leaders of several majority-Hasidic villages to meet with him.Feiner, who advocated for Lawler on the ground, described herself as a lifelong Republican but who has “absolutely” crossed party lines for the right candidate. She said that Lawler had been providing excellent constituent services long before the election – including at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.Some felt that Maloney didn’t focus enough on bread-and-butter issues such as inflation and he didn’t take seriously enough Republicans’ discourse on crime – which was emphasized by the New York Republican candidate for governor, Lee Zeldin, who ran the incumbent governor, Democrat Kathy Hochul, uncomfortably close.Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political strategist based in New York City, said that in the 17th and other suburban districts where seats were flipped by Republicans, voters “cared about things that the National Democratic party didn’t seem to care about.” Or, at least, that they talked about a lot less.He said: “They included crime, because the [national] discussion was about abortion, but the subject in that district was crime – in the sense that New York City with all its ills might be encroaching on the people who live there, right? And economics.”Sheinkopf replied “probably not” when asked if Maloney or his party could have done anything to win his seat.“They couldn’t get past the Washington negatives and New York City, and the idea that New York City was creeping into their lives, and New York City would become the norm, which [to them] meant crime,” he said.Maloney’s office didn’t respond to a request for an interview. But he told the New York Times: “Suburban voters are always concerned about the state of New York City. In this case, they were told very negative things, even though in suburban areas north of the city we are blessed to have some of the safest cities anywhere and crime rates that are lower than just a few years ago.”However, Hochul only won by about six points in a state that went for Joe Biden over Donald Trump by 23 points in 2020, Shawn Donahue, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo’s department of political science, noted.“Lee Zeldin may have lost, but he may have delivered the house to Kevin McCarthy,” Donahue said. “Democratic turnout was not good in a lot of parts of New York, Republican turnout was, which is a lot different than it was around the country, where both parties’ turnout was pretty good – and it seems like Zeldin’s relentless push on the crime issue really had a big effect in the suburbs.”Some of Maloney’s supporters in the district, like Dunnigan, weren’t shocked by his defeat.Amy Roth, a television producer who voted for Maloney, pointed out that “a lot of New York [District] 17 has turned red recently”.“Mondaire Jones used to be our guy and he wasn’t even allowed to run, so I think it was upsetting more than shocking. I think it was just like, you know, they’ve kind of screwed up,” Roth said. She also noticed more Lawler signs in the district and the campaign “seemed to knock on more doors”, she said.Lawler himself told the Guardian he felt that redistricting dealt a heavy blow to Maloney but added that voters were dissatisfied with Democratic heavyweights’ handling of inflation, crime and immigration issues.Still, Lawler thinks there’s a universe in which a Democrat could have bested him. “I think, obviously, given the close margin, Democrats certainly could have won. There’s 70,000 more Democrats than Republicans [in the district], but I think there’s a confluence of incidents that contributed to this,” he told the Guardian in a phone interview.“I represent a 2-1 Democratic district in the [state] assembly and I have a proven record of being able to reach across the aisle and get Democrats and independents to support me,” Lawler said. Maloney, on the other hand, was “primarily speaking” to his base, Lawler claimed. “It certainly would have been possible for him to win, and it would have been possible for another Democrat to win,” Lawler said. “But I think in this election, in this climate, we ran a very disciplined campaign and had a message that appealed to a broad coalition of voters.”TopicsNew YorkUS midterm elections 2022US politicsDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      What a relief I’ve been denied my favourite election day hobby – hating fellow Americans | Emma Brockes

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      What a relief I’ve been denied my favourite election day hobby – hating fellow Americans Emma BrockesWhen things going less badly than planned is a small win, the lack of a revival of Trump-backed candidates is cheering In the playground on Tuesday, we stood in a huddle and indulged in the primary joy of election day: loathing one’s fellow Americans. In New York, where I live, the only close race was the race for governor, where the choice between Kathy Hochul, the Democrat incumbent, and Lee Zeldin – a pro-Trump, anti-abortion Republican – threatened to mess with the very idea of the city.Early lessons from the US midterm elections as votes are still being countedRead more“You know who I really hate?” said a friend who had taken the train in from Long Island to vote.I did know. Democrats take more pleasure in hating other Democrats than in hating Republicans. “Andrew Cuomo,” I said.“Yup. If he’d kept his dick in his pants we wouldn’t be here.” A line that could, sadly, be applied to any number of men in American politics. “Now we’re going to end up with a Republican governor because people won’t vote for a woman.”That was midday on Tuesday, when it still seemed probable, per polling and received wisdom about the midterms, that the dominant party in government would suffer the most losses. Anxiety about the economy and inflation; the impression that President Biden is too old; the ugly face of Trumpism apparently not yet vanquished; plus the usual superstitions and defeatist instincts of the left: all led to a mood among Democrats on Tuesday that fell somewhere between panic and gloom.So we did what people in denial do: we told ourselves that, when the results came in overnight, the worst eventuality might actually – sound the counter-intuitition klaxon! – be for the best. A friend had a friend who was a political analyst at Brown (this was how the conversations on Tuesday played out), and she said that it would be no bad thing if the Democrats lost control of Congress because in two years’ time that would mean Republicans would have to carry the can when people voted in the presidential election.This kind of worked. But then there were the races that were so starkly depressing that no amount of fancy footwork could neutralise them. Chief among these was the Pennsylvania Senate race between Dr Oz, the rightwing TV host who said in a recent debate that abortion was a matter between “women, doctors and local political leaders”, and the Democratic candidate, John Fetterman.The importance of this race was underscored when both Biden and Barack Obama turned up to stump for Fetterman on Saturday, undoing all the detachment I’d managed to achieve about the midterms. Watching Obama do his thing in front of a stadium of people in Pittsburgh was intensely moving. It was also a hard reminder of how far we had fallen since 2008. Accustomed as most Americans are these days to seeing the apparent lunatic in any race win, Obama’s appearance seemed to guarantee Oz would ascend to the Senate.Fetterman won with 50.4% of the vote. Kathy Hochul won with 52.5% of the vote. That the size of the relief was so huge, on Wednesday morning, was an indication both of how slim the margins were, and how little we needed to feel some hope. By midday, while it was still unclear whether Congress would remain in the hands of the Democrats, it was apparent there would be no red wave. There was no big revival in support for Trump-backed candidates. And there were some hugely cheering results from the centre of the country, where for example in Kentucky voters defeated the anti-abortion constitutional amendment. For the first time in ages, it was possible to think warmly of people one was used to dismissing as nutters.There were some let-downs among the reliefs. JD Vance, the bearded memoirist turned ultra-right Republican, won the Senate seat in Ohio. Beto O’Rourke lost out once again to Greg Abbott in Texas, and Stacey Abrams was defeated in Georgia. The satisfaction of seeing Trump’s candidates underperform on Wednesday was, meanwhile, eclipsed in part by Ron DeSantis winning decisively in the gubernatorial race in Florida. DeSantis, a more credible version of Trump, remains the most dangerous indication that the movement is alive and well.Still, slight gains, or at least losses on a smaller scale than anticipated, made for a whiplash effect midweek. In the playground on Tuesday, as the kids ran around, we returned to the subject of all the people who were ruining the country. On Wednesday, it was time to feel something else: relief, joy and the disorienting novelty of things going better than planned.
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
      TopicsUS midterm elections 2022OpinionUS politicsNew YorkKathy HochulJoe BidenDemocratsRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      AOC vows to champion LGBTQ+ rights after hecklers storm New York event

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      AOC vows to champion LGBTQ+ rights after hecklers storm New York eventHecklers were attacking a policy providing affordable housing for LGBTQ+ people The progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said she will stand up for LGBTQ+ rights after an attack by hecklers caused chaos during a recent speaking event in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York.The Democrat from New York met the heckles at the back of the Boys and Girls Club with dancing, the video of which has gone viral on social media.“AOC has got to go,” the protesters shouted in unison to the sound of a beating drum.These homophobes were yelling Westboro Baptist-style anti-LGBT+ slogans. What do you think I’m gonna do? Take them seriously?😂💃🏽🪩If you want to associate w/ their views, that’s your business.But NY-14 will ALWAYS have a champion for LGBTQ+ people on my watch. Period. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️💕 https://t.co/aFTp8hv8SH— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 23, 2022
      On Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez responded to the video, saying the hecklers “were yelling Westboro Baptist-style anti-LGBT+ slogans. What do you think I’m gonna do? Take them seriously?“If you want to associate with their views, that’s your business.”Referring to the 14th congressional district of New York she represents, Ocasio-Cortez added: “But NY-14 will always have a champion for LGBTQ+ people on my watch. Period.”A video online of the 19 October confrontation between Ocasio-Cortez and the hecklers showed one of them badgering her about how a policy providing affordable housing for LGBTQ+ seniors would discriminate against heterosexual people.Another heckler shouts “there’s only two … genders” – a concept that is discriminatory toward people who identify as non-binary.One heckler held up a homemade sign in support of Tina Forte, a rightwing candidate from Rockland county running against Ocasio-Cortez in the midterms.Last month, the local news outlet NY1 reported that Forte was at the US Capitol during the January 6 attack staged by supporters of Donald Trump.In a video posted on the day, Forte is seen wearing a pro-Trump beanie on the steps of the Capitol. The video showed her standing next to a large caricature of Nancy Pelosi, saying “we will not allow this election to be stolen from us” even though Joe Biden beat Trump in the 2020 presidential race.Hey @SpeakerPelosi this ones for you pic.twitter.com/0uWJwyP5I0— Tina40 (@RealTina40) January 6, 2021
      In response to questions about her whereabouts on 6 January, Forte has said: “I went there to shine light on the election. I did nothing. I didn’t participate in anything that went on that day, from what I see on videos or anything that they want to call it. I’m not going to say I regret it because I don’t.”As Forte’s campaign vows to “stop socialism”, Ocasio-Cortez is expected to easily win reelection to a third term during the 8 November midterms.Polls show the congresswoman holds a significant lead over Forte. Her campaign has raised more than $11m (£9.8m) while Forte has raised less than $1m (£887,995).Last week was not the first time that a video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing went viral. A video of her dancing on a rooftop while she was a student at Boston University went viral on the day she was sworn in to her first term in 2019, with her opponents on the political right wing trying to use it to embarrass her and her supporters, drowning out that criticism with positive reactions.TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsNew YorknewsReuse this content More

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      Trump Organization to face criminal tax fraud charges in New York court on Monday

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      Trump Organization to face criminal tax fraud charges in New York court on MondayFormer CFO is expected to testify about off-the-books compensation scheme to evade paying payroll taxes The Trump Organization is set to face criminal tax fraud charges on Monday in New York in a trial that could start to tease out the many allegations against the company and by extension its patriarch, Donald J Trump.It comes as the former US president faces a maze of legal troubles and mounting costs – by some estimates running at close to $4m a month to his leadership Pac – over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss, the removal of government documents from the White House when he left office and a defamation case relating to a rape allegation.Republicans’ lawless leaders at odds with midterm law and order messageRead moreMonday’s case is centered on charges that his Manhattan-headquartered real estate company defrauded New York tax authorities by awarding “off the books” compensation over 15 years to company executives, including lease payments for cars, apartment rent and tuition fees for relatives in lieu of some salary, enabling the company to evade paying payroll taxes.If found guilty, the company, which is run by Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, could face $1.6m in fines and find its ability to operate hotels, golf courses and other assets impeded.But the trial will likely be most interesting for its subplots and how it intersects with a separate, civil investigation by New York state attorney general Letitia James that harvested a 200-page indictment last month accusing the Trump Organization, Trump and three of his adult children of overstating property values and Trump’s net worth to get favorable bank loans and insurance coverage.The Manhattan investigation into Trump’s company has followed its own rocky path to a jury trial. It began under district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr and is now in the hands of his successor, Alvin Bragg. Two prosecutors who led the investigation resigned in February, with one saying felony charges should be brought against the former president.Lawyers for the Trump Organization have claimed the case is a “selective prosecution” motivated by opposition to Trump’s political views – a claim that the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, has rejected. They also said that prosecutors are seeking to punish Trump’s company because “a handful of its officers allegedly failed to report fringe benefits on their personal tax returns”.But the stakes for both parties – prosecutor and defendant – are high. Unlike Trump’s floundering efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, the Trump Organization has brought in an A-team of lawyers to counter claims by a matched array of prosecutors to meet a high burden of proof in criminal trials.Eyes and ears will be on the testimony of the Trump Organization’s then chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, 75, who was charged in the DA’s 2021 indictment but has since pleaded to 15 counts ranging from grand larceny to tax fraud to falsifying business records in exchange for his testimony.Weisselberg has been subpoenaed to testify but he is not a cooperating witness. Still, his five-month sentence agreed to with prosecutors depends on truthful testimony. Crucially, the Manhattan DA ensured that Weisselberg’s sentencing would be deferred until after the case.To prove the company is guilty, the government is entitled to impute liability from not only Weisselberg but also other executives at the firm, potentially including Donald Trump himself, who they may try to show were aware of the alleged tax scheme.“It’s strategically a really difficult case both for Weisselberg and Trump because they could end winning the battle and losing the war,” says Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at New York University.“If they do a typical defense cross-examination of Weisselberg and they catch him in some sort of lie then his deal is over and the pressure on him to flip [on Trump] is going to be that much greater.”Under the circumstances, the Trump Organization’s lawyers can’t simply try to eviscerate the credibility of Weisselberg, Weissmann points out, without potentially rewarding investigators with evidence that their larger quarry, Trump himself, knew of the arrangements to reward executives with untaxed compensation.“The idea that Trump didn’t know is going to be the critical thing that Weisselberg is asked about. If he denies that Donald Trump knew, you can see the judge saying, ‘I don’t believe it and I’m going to take that into account when I sentence you.’”Under those circumstances, Merchan could kick Weisselberg’s sentence up to 15 years in prison, not five months on Rikers Island – an onerous sentence for a 75-year-old.Further, Letitia James’s civil complaint makes an allegation that Weisselberg committed fraud by make false representations to the Zurich North American insurance company. In theory, Weisselberg could be still charged by Bragg if his testimony is deemed untruthful.“Clearly, they still want Weisselberg to cooperate,” Weissmann says.But as the trial gets under way next week, there is a sense that Bragg’s case could be easier to prove than James’s complaint, which centers on building valuations but requires a lower burden of proof.“Bragg’s allegations are much more concrete because they allege making payments that were clearly part of the person’s salary, keeping track of them, but only reporting what was listed as salary,” Weissmann says.“The problem for the defense is that if they say this is a gray area and isn’t a crime, they have to say that Weisselberg is lying. If the judge agrees, Weisselberg is in a tough position.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS crimeNew YorkDonald Trump JrUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Is the US better prepared for a nuclear blast today than it was 60 years ago?

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      Is the US better prepared for a nuclear blast today than it was 60 years ago?Despite advances in technology and decades of research, experts worry we are still underprepared to handle a blast – and the aftermath If you look hard enough, you’ll spot faded yellow signs proclaiming “Fallout shelter” around New York City. They are remnants of a cold war program that signaled spaces within ordinary buildings – from schools to banks to the Brooklyn Bridge – with adequate supplies and walls thick enough for riding out a nuclear blast safely.Many of these windowless shelters housed little more than rats and sewage before the practice was terminated in 1979. In 2017, the city’s department of education ordered the “misleading” signs removed from its buildings, but many others remain –– vestiges of nuclear fears that never materialized.All you wanted to know about nuclear war but were too afraid to askRead moreThose fears feel a little more real again amid Vladimir Putin’s repeated nuclear threats. In July, New York mayor Eric Adams’s office published a public service announcement about what to do in case of a blast. A couple of weeks ago, nuclear preparedness re-entered headlines when the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was buying a supply of the anti-radiation drug Nplate, though the agency denied it was in response to any specific threat.All of this raises the question: are we better prepared today to survive a nuclear blast than we were 60 years ago, when it seemed all we could do was head to the basement and pray?Jeff Schlegelmilch has been trying to answer this question for years as the head of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, a Columbia University research program that works with government agencies. But while the United States has made many advances in nuclear preparedness since the cold war, “some of those have eroded because of funding cuts and attention going elsewhere,” he said.One of the biggest challenges is educating the public, which requires sustained communication –– something that’s become nearly impossible given today’s political polarization and short attention spans, Schlegelmilch said. Because of this, disaster preparedness officials look for “teachable moments” like big news events to get their messaging through. And while we’re not currently at the level of “everybody to the bunker, grab your helmet”, this is an important opportunity to get people informed, he said.In the event of a nuclear incident, preparedness experts agree you should shelter inside a building with thick walls and remain for at least 24 hours to avoid the worst of radioactive fallout while awaiting further instructions, or “Get inside, stay inside, stay tuned,” the phrase recited in a recent New York City public service announcement. If there is a nuclear explosion, text messages called Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) will probably be sent out.What may be of larger concern in the nuclear preparedness realm are issues likely to emerge after any initial blast. Aside from a scenario of total Armageddon, it’s likely millions of people would survive but need urgent care. And while Schlegelmilch said government agencies have been doing “very serious” behind-the-scenes work for many decades, he worries it’s not nearly enough. “When it comes to special needs, when it comes to more of the social aspects, we’re still not as ready,” he said.Two of the most important offices overseeing the US’s nuclear preparedness efforts – the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), and the less well-known Administration of Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), the disaster response division of the Department of Health and Human Services – have summed up their approach for allocating scarce resources after a nuclear disaster in two giant guidebooks. Fema’s Planning Guide for Response to a Nuclear Detonation, last updated in May, and ASPR’s 212-page A Decision Makers Guide: Medical Planning and Response for a Nuclear Detonation, last refreshed in 2017, are meant to offer expertise to officials in the event of a crisis on everything from nuclear fallout patterns to recommended messaging to triaging burn victims.Both agencies have also invested heavily in tech tools including dashboards that aim to give decision-makers live visualizations of unfolding disasters, and Fema’s “Improvised Nuclear Device City Planner Resource Tool” –– kind of an apocalyptic SimCity that lets officials visually game out what a nuclear blast might look like and how to respond. These hi-tech investments can feel reassuring, but they aren’t nearly enough on their own. Although ASPR maintains the US’s strategic national stockpile, a cache of lifesaving drugs including anti-radiation medicine, Schlegelmilch said health resources in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, or the ability to distribute the resources it has, greatly concern him. He is particularly worried that there won’t be sufficient mental health and social services: “Those are areas which people will always say are very important, but we don’t see the additional resources.” And in the aftermath of any potential nuclear catastrophe, there will be far more people who need those services than will be available, he said.One of the main problems is that there have been huge cuts to disaster preparedness programs that were enacted after 9/11. A key program, ASPR’s Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP), described as the “primary source of federal funding for healthcare system preparedness and response” for large-scale emergencies and disasters, lost 62% of its funding by 2021. There also doesn’t seem to be political will to invest more in disaster preparedness, despite the Covid pandemic. “It’s really shocking to me that we aren’t seeing a more cohesive push for preparedness in the face of what we’ve all just gone through,” Schlegelmilch said. “A lot of it comes down to the polarization in our politics –– and that’s a very, very dangerous path to go down. It’s preventing us from taking the kinds of actions that are staring us in the face.”Schlegelmilch said that same polarization could also cause mayhem in the aftermath of a nuclear event: if you thought Covid misinformation was bad –– imagine nuclear blast deniers.“We’re raised to think the world is very deterministic, and if we can just figure out all the variables, we can crack the code and know what we need to do. My experience is that the world is much more chaotic, with spheres of probability: we know what will make us more likely to do well in an adverse event. So I’m okay with incremental progress, as long as it’s in the right direction,” he said, adding that even without a nuclear blast, preparing for one will help us survive other disasters, like pandemics and climate change.“When we look at the root causes of disasters as an intersection of all these different aspects of civil society, we do see common threads,” Schlegelmilch said. “There’s value in investing in resilience, there’s value in investing in the future.”TopicsNew YorkNuclear weaponsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Can Democrats win tight midterm races with a pro-choice message? Pat Ryan says yes

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      InterviewCan Democrats win tight midterm races with a pro-choice message? Pat Ryan says yesPoppy NoorThe congressman won a swing upstate New York district with a progressive platform – and says Democrats can use his playbook When Democrat Pat Ryan got elected to New York’s 19th – a largely rural district in upstate New York that swung for Trump in 2016 and only narrowly elected Biden in 2020 – people were surprised.His contender in the August special election, Marc Molinaro, was a well-known local politician who entered the political arena when he was just 18, becoming the mayor of Tivoli, which is in the district, at 19. Molinaro was the favorite to win: leading in the polls, by as much as 10 points, right up to the moment Ryan claimed victory.The special election was watched with bated breath, as a tight race in a swing seat that could be a harbinger in the midterm elections, where Democrats are fighting to keep a slim House majority come November. Now, people are looking at Ryan’s campaign as a political playbook for how to win other tight races across the country.Many credit Ryan’s win to seizing the political moment around the fierce fight for abortion rights in the US.Just hours after the constitutional right to abortion was dismantled by the US supreme court on 24 June, Ryan, a US army vet, released a campaign ad making his stance clear. In a surprising twist, the video tied his military service to the attack on abortion.“How can we be a free country if the government tries to control women’s bodies? That’s not the country I fought to defend,” he said in the ad.It was a much-needed balm at a time when the Democratic party was being criticized at the national level for lacking a sense of urgency in responding to the fall of Roe v Wade, the landmark decision that had protected abortion rights in the US for several generations.“I think what is missing in our politics right now is just speaking from the heart, rather than poll testing,” Ryan told the Guardian when asked why he thought that message on abortion resonated.Then, a few months into Ryan’s campaign, the Republican senator Lindsey Graham introduced a bill that would ban abortion at the national level, after 15 weeks. The bill never would have had enough support to pass, but it didn’t matter: after months of the Republicans saying abortion rights should be put to the states, Graham appeared to have revealed his party’s hand in pushing for a national crackdown.“They showed themselves to be extremists. Suddenly, we saw the new Republican platform was wanting to criminalize abortions at the national level,” said Ryan.His special election win gives him just a few months representing New York’s 19th before he has to run again in the midterms. And the abortion message is one he continues to campaign on.“There was just another set of horrific reporting out of Ohio, where at least two teenage women under the age of 18 were raped and forced to fly to other states, just to get reproductive health care. That’s just as barbaric. And that’s not who we are as a country,” he said.Adding that he thinks the Democrats will hold the house and the Senate, he continued: “We absolutely have to restore those decisions back to women, and away from politicians, frankly.”Ryan just introduced a bill to make abortion medication legal at the national level. If it passes, it will undermine states’ attempts to ban abortion, considering that more than half of US abortions are completed using medication.His pledge is again a foil to the national party’s mostly lackluster attempts to curtail the destruction of abortion rights across the US, with Joe Biden’s own abortion bill coming under fire precisely because it failed to make it easier for Americans to access abortion pills.It may seem strange that a candidate like Ryan – who wants to pass gun control laws, raise taxes on the wealthy and make abortion pills nationally accessible – would win in a district that elected Trump.But it’s the way he ties together seemingly progressive ideals under the banner of freedom thats seems to resonate. He talks about seeing voters in his own district on the campaign trail. Whether in some of the most rural and conservative parts of his district, at events with small business owners, or speaking to younger people, he says abortion rights came up over and over.So to him, the playbook is simple.“All we have to do is show Americans that we understand how existential this fight is. The fight for reproductive freedom; for voting rights; the fight against gun violence; the fight for our democracy. We need to draw attention to how un-American it is to take away these freedoms,” said Ryan.Does he feel it is contradictory, to stand for the rights of American women, or children at threat of being gunned down in American schools, when he participated in a war and occupation that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians?“I have said publicly that the decision to go to war in Iraq and the way we conducted it – there’s an awful lot we should have done better,” he said.“I personally had to wrestle with seeing my fellow soldiers and innocent civilians – whom I had built relationships with – put at risk. Seeing war very close and personally, you see the darkest and the most evil in human nature come forward. We need people in Congress who understand the seriousness of sending our young men and women into combat. War has to be our absolute last resort,” he said.And with this call for unity he hopes he can win in November.“We’re so divided. And for a long time politicians have pitted people against each other, but we showed in the special election that we can take so-called ‘wedge issues’ and remind people that we actually share these values in common – things like reproductive freedom. This is a moment where we have to be clear-eyed about the stakes,” he says.“Authenticity, and just being a normal human being – that is something that is in short supply right now in our politics.”TopicsUS politicsNew YorkAbortionHouse of RepresentativesfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Two injured in shooting outside New York governor candidate’s home

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      Two injured in shooting outside New York governor candidate’s homeTeenage boys, both 17, treated in hospital after being hit by gunfire from moving car outside home of Lee Zeldin in town of Shirley New York congressman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin says his family is safe after two teenagers were shot outside his Long Island home on Sunday afternoon.The boys, both 17, were walking with a third teenager on the street in Shirley, New York, where Zeldin lives when they were hit by gunfire from a moving car, local police said.The wounded teens then tried to hide in Zeldin’s yard, ducking under his porch and into the bushes, while the person who was with them fled.Zeldin and his wife were not at home at the time of the shooting, but their teenage daughters were in the kitchen doing homework when they heard gunshots and screaming, the congressman said.“One of the bullets was actually found 30ft (9.14m) from where they sitting,” Zeldin said at a news conference late on Sunday.Police said the wounded teens were treated at an area hospital for injuries that were not life-threatening.Authorities didn’t release their names.“At this time investigators have no reason to believe there is any connection between the shooting and the residence,” said a statement from the Suffolk county police department, whose jurisdiction includes Shirley.Zeldin said he did nt know either of the injured teens. He said his 16-year-old daughters locked themselves in a bathroom and called 911.The congressman added that he and his family were shaken but OK.Zeldin and his wife were returning from a parade in the Bronx when the shooting occurred. He said police officers were at his home investigating on Sunday evening and were looking over the home’s security cameras.Police said they had no information to release about who fired the shots.Zeldin is challenging New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, in an election set for 8 November, and he has made violent crime a focus of his campaign. He has called for the state’s bail laws to be toughened, among other measures.“Like so many New Yorkers, crime has literally made its way to our front door,” Zeldin said Sunday.It is the second scare he has had in several months. In July, while Zeldin campaigned in upstate New York, a man approached him onstage and thrust a sharp object near the congressman’s head and neck.He was uninjured, and the attacker was arrested.Hochul said in a statement posted on Twitter that she had been briefed on the shooting outside Zeldin’s home.“As we await more details, I’m relieved to hear the Zeldin family is safe and grateful for law enforcement’s quick response,” the governor said.TopicsNew YorkUS politicsnewsReuse this content More