In the “Focus on Equity” statement that now begins every city agency’s section in the Mayor’s Management Report, the Department of Correction declares itself “committed to building jails that serve the public interest and foster the public’s trust” and thus “focused on creating a culture of accountability and service to persons experiencing incarceration that will ultimately lead to safer and more humane jails ..read more

Cornell 'Black Benjie' Benjamin, 25, a founder of the Ghetto Brothers, was on his way to negotiate a peace deal between two street gangs in the South Bronx when he was brutally murdered, beaten to death with a pipe ..read more

In a new deal with the city’s largest union, DC37, Mayor Adams has finally accepted that the modern workplace is one where many employees can work from home, with tens of thousands of city employees soon gaining the right to work remotely up to two days a week as part of a pilot program ..read more

In Albany, home of the nation’s highest paid Legislature, with the most porous campaign finance laws, the steepest contribution “limits” and the weakest enforcement, we have long joked that campaign finance reform meant instead of taking $50,000 cash in a paper bag, you’d use two bags with $25,000 each ..read more

Brooklyn: Re “Eric plays patriot card” (May 30): As the MAGA right works overtime to use the debt limit as an excuse to slash social programs, Mayor Adams devotes his Memorial Day address to denouncing the left, demanding “protection from the hot rays of socialism and communism.” Why ..read more

A decade-plus of uncertainty continues as Texas Federal Judge Andrew Hanen heard oral arguments this week in a Texas-led, nine-state coalition seeking to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that grants work authorization and protection from deportation to more than 600,000 people brought to the country illegally as children ..read more

Over the past several years antisemitism has exploded online, in our streets, and even on college campuses. But even more concerningly, the alarming proliferation of antisemitism disguised as anti-Israeli foreign policy has also infected state legislatures in the form of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and most recently, a heinous attack on charitable organizations in Israel ..read more

One early morning as he drove to work at a dairy in Livingston County, a rural area outside of Rochester, Javier was pulled over by the police. As far as he could tell, he’d done nothing wrong, he just looked Latino. He couldn’t understand what the police were telling him and they didn’t charge him with a crime. They simply detained him and then turned him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE ..read more

Rikers Federal Monitor Steve Martin informed Judge Laura Taylor Swain in a letter this week that Joshua Valles, individual #4 in the monitor’s recent report on lack of communication from the Department of Correction, died from a skull fracture. This was notable given that nothing from DOC mentioned the injury ..read more

We called for the large majorities of both the ruling Republicans under Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Hakeem Jeffries’ minority Democrats in the House of Representatives to coalesce behind the handshake plan of McCarthy and President Biden to avoid cataclysmic default of the government on the rapidly approaching X-date, Monday, as laid out by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen ..read more