Hours before a new coronavirus crackdown began in New York, Borough Park was fuming. On Monday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered public and private schools to close in 20 New York City zip codes where positivity rates had spiked in recent weeks, most of them home to substantial ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Anger was already palpable that afternoon on the streets of one of the hottest hotspots citywide, a traditional home of New York’s Hasidic population. “It’s just political theater,” raged Mike Weber, whose teenaged sons attend the Nesivos Hatalmud yeshiva, standing maskless outside the facility on the neighborhood’s north end. “I’m not […]
Bill de Blasio
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A U.S. Postal Service board member, who reportedly played a key role in the selection of Louis DeJoy to lead the agency, called the Black Lives Matter movement violent and floated a conspiracy theory that it may be financially backed by foreign entities. In June, John M. Barger, who serves on the Postal Service’s six-member Board of Governors, engaged in a back-and-forth on LinkedIn with a contact in Hong Kong. The exchange is publicly accessible on Barger’s profile on the platform. It began with that contact posting a photo of the strict public health measures in effect in Hong Kong due […]
MSNBC host Chris Hayes took New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to task on Thursday night for falsely claiming that New York police hadn’t beaten protesters despite video evidence to the contrary. In recent days, several videos have surfaced on social media showing NYPD officers whacking peaceful protesters with batons, including a “horrifying” viral clip of three officers bludgeoning a cyclist on Wednesday night. The latter video prompted widespread outrage—except from the governor and mayor. Noting that Wednesday night’s New York protest over George Floyd’s death devolved into violence because “the NYPD started beating […]
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo openly hypothesized on Tuesday about overthrowing NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio after rampant looting and destruction swept across Manhattan on Monday night, overwhelming the NYPD and leaving the city looking like a war zone. “I’m disappointed and outraged by what happened in New York City last night. That criminal activity hurt everyone,” he said. De Blasio had doubled NYPD officers out on the streets to 8,000 on Monday night and imposed an 11 p.m. curfew after three nights of protests against police brutality were overshadowed by violence. But it was not enough to stop rampant looters […]
As protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody boiled over in New York City on Saturday and video of an NYPD vehicle driving into demonstrators sparked outrage, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would not “blame” police officers facing such an “impossible situation.” “If those protesters had just gotten out of the way and not created an attempt to surround that vehicle, we would not be talking about this,” de Blasio said in a call-in appearance on NY1 just before a hastily scheduled late-night press conference. That was his first live appearance in over two nights of nationwide […]
“Current and former administration officials said the conflict” with his own top health official stemmed from the leader’s “apparent distrust of experts and his dissatisfaction with public health recommendations, which are often based on scientific analysis of imperfect and at times incomplete information” while the leader “prizes certainty, decisiveness and directness.” Remind you of anyone? Actually, that’s New York City’s mayor, as described in the New York Times’ story, He Saw ‘No Proof’ Closures Would Curb Virus. Now He Has De Blasio’s Trust. The article details how Bill de Blasio shoved away the city Health Department—with more than a century of […]