Two men, Ibrahim Kayumi and Emir Balat, arrested after hurling smoke devices at a protest outside New York’s Gracie Mansion, reportedly aimed for carnage exceeding the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, citing inspiration from ISIS propaganda viewed en …
New York’s Democratic-led legislature, led by Governor Kathy Hochul’s less-than-enthusiastic gaze, is proposing tax hikes on millionaires and big businesses in budget talks, seeking to plug Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s $5.4 billion shortfall. Both chambers want higher corporate levies—up to 10.8% for financial firms—and increased income tax for top earners. Whether these headline-grabbing plans outlive the usual legislative horse-trading is another, costlier, matter.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to seize chronically neglected apartment blocks from rogue landlords—such as Daniel Ohebshalom, twice arrested for unmade repairs—received a possible lifeline as the City Council debates the Safer Homes Act. This would let officials repossess buildings with major unpaid taxes and code violations, though political backing remains spotty. We find that few things shift faster than the city’s definitions of “worst of the worst.”
A report from the New York Housing Conference suggests that New York City’s penny-pinched officials could save millions by assisting renters sooner, rather than waiting until eviction looms. As hundreds of thousands wrestle with housing costs, earlier intervention might trim emergency rent outlays—though we doubt budget hawks will warm to a new expense, even if it spares them a larger bill later.
Federal prosecutors have charged Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayum, both from Pennsylvania, with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and supporting ISIS after they lobbed explosives—containing the cheerfully nicknamed “Mother of Satan”—at an anti-Muslim protest near Gracie Mansion in New York. No one was hurt; officials assured us of exhaustive investigations, though the pair’s grander ambitions seem, for the moment, to have fizzled rather more than exploded.
A report details how the Trump administration’s hollowing-out of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helped lenders like Credit Acceptance Corporation, a Michigan firm whose algorithm awards high-interest auto loans based less on creditworthiness than on how much can be recovered after default. This approach, tested on Rochester’s car-seeking working class, echoes pre-2008 subprime tactics—proving, perhaps, that innovation is alive and well in risk redistribution.
New York’s biggest health care union, 1199SEIU, once again urged lawmakers to eject private insurers from Medicaid’s home care payments, touting possible annual savings of $3.5 billion if state coffers handle both funding and oversight. Insurers, with predictable protests, warn of chaos for the state’s 285,000 elderly and disabled beneficiaries, but fiscal prudence, it seems, is forever in need of a good home—if not a managed one.
Measles is enjoying an unwelcome comeback, with over 1,200 cases reported across the U.S. so far this year, nearly 90% linked to concentrated outbreaks in poorly vaccinated clusters from California’s Shasta County to New York. Officials like Dr. Sharon Balter warn that every day counts, especially as many younger clinicians know the virus only from textbooks—a rather sterile vantage for a disease with such contagious enthusiasm.
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, elite American universities such as Johns Hopkins, Brown, and Princeton endured a swift financial reckoning, as the administration halted over $1.5 billion in grants and ordered the abolition of D.E.I. programs. Academia is still reeling; it seems that this time, the age-old conservative mistrust of campus life matured into an expensive, bureaucratic love letter.
