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“Unfortunately we have found that the new variants of Covid-19 are continuing to spread. And when you combine the variant of concern, B.1.1.7., the one first reported in the U.K., and the new variant of interest, B.1.5.2.6., that was first reported here in New York, together these new variants account for 51 percent of all cases that we have in the city right now. So for the variant of interest, B.1.5.2.6., that was reported here first in New York, our preliminary analysis indicates that it is probably more infectious than older strains of the virus. You know, what I referred last week to ‘Covid Classic.’ It may be similar in infectiousness to the B.1.1.7., the U.K. strain, but we’re not certain about this yet.

Genetic analysis suggests that roughly half of coronavirus cases in New York City now are caused by two new forms of the pathogen, city officials reported on Wednesday.

Another more contagious variant, B.1.1.7, first discovered in Britain, also is spreading steadily in the city, accounting for 12 percent of cases analyzed in the last week of February, up from 8 percent the prior week. B.1.1.7 may be more lethal than earlier versions of the virus.

Nearly a year ago, New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that all nonessential workers in the state would have to stay home. The announcement was one of many that marked the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

But, just as history has shown us time and time again, a year turned out to be a lifetime in their political careers

Cuomo, Newsom and Trump all experienced classic examples of a rally-around-the-flag event. When a crisis hits, constituents give their leading politicians bumps in the polls. These bumps rarely ever last -- a lesson all three of these politicians have now learned. Cuomo was probably seen as the biggest hero of the early days of the pandemic. He gave daily news conferences that became must-see television for many. He even wrote a book about leadership.

As states try to scale up vaccine rollouts that have been marred with confusion and errors, the online registration sites — operated by a welter of agencies and using a range of technologies — are crucial.

There are many, many more people who want to be vaccinated than there are opportunities to get the shot.

“The registration system worked as designed, but there is far greater demand than available supply at this time,”

Cuomo allegations test Democrats’ commitment to #MeToo

Andrew Cuomo suffered a major blow on Sunday in his attempt to stay as governor of New York in the face of allegations of sexual harassment and workplace bullying

The majority leader of the state senate and the speaker of the assembly, two of the most powerful Democrats in New York, said it was time for Cuomo to go.

Democrats running for New York City mayor will square off in a crucial debate Wednesday night, but they won't just be trying to convince voters that they're the best candidate for the job -- being someone's second, third, fourth or even fifth favorite could be almost as good.

Unlike past elections, Big Apple voters will pick their party nominees for mayor on June 22 using ranked-choice voting, and it could take weeks to determine the winners.

This will be the first time voters will be able to rank their top five choices in order of preference for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and city council instead of selecting just one candidate for each spot.

President Donald Trump's actions during his final days in office have significantly increased his exposure to potential criminal prosecution, lawyers say, complicating his life after the White House.

Over five days last week -- beginning with a phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State directing him to "find" votes to overturn the election to encouraging the pro-Trump crowd to "show strength" in their march to the Capitol -- lawyers say the President has put himself under the microscope of state and federal prosecutors.

The Manhattan district attorney's office has a broad criminal investigation looking into allegations of insurance fraud and tax fraud. The New York attorney general has a civil investigation into whether the Trump Organization improperly inflated the value of its assets.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

The talented staff that remain still produce memorable journalism. But when it comes to covering Trump – according to interviews with 18 current and former Journal staffers, some of whom have provided the Guardian with previously unpublished emails from Baker – many say this is no thanks to management.

“The Journal has done a lot of good work in covering the Trump administration, but not nearly as much as it should have,” another recent departee said. “I lay almost all of that at Gerry’s doorstep. Political editors and reporters find themselves either directly stymied by Gerry’s interference or shave the edges off their stories in advance to try to please him (and, by extension, Murdoch).”

“This is the most access he has had to a sitting president ever – that is something he’s tried to do and has done in other countries particularly with British prime ministers,” Ellison said. “He’s choosing his own personal access over having any journalistic clout.

At the trial of Peter Liang, the jurors kept returning to the 11.5-pound trigger of his New York Police Department standard-issue 9mm Glock.

Liang was the officer who killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father, for no reason but that Gurley had walked into a dark stairwell.

iang’s defense had been that he kept his finger off the trigger, but that in the dark stairwell a loud sound surprised him. His finger twitched, leading to what Liang’s lawyers called “a tragic accident.”

Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed, annotated and fact-checked

It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Putin here is implicitly defending Russia's right to use its veto to block the United Nations from any action on Syria, including simple press releases condemning the use of chemical weapons.

Only 20 patients had been transferred to the ship, officials said, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for the thousands infected with the coronavirus. Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.

Across the city, hospitals are overrun. Patients have died in hallways before they could even be hooked up to one of the few available ventilators in New York. Doctors and nurses, who have had to use the same protective gear again and again, are getting sick. So many people are dying that the city is running low on body bags.

At the same time, there is not a high volume of noncoronavirus patients. Because most New Yorkers have isolated themselves in their homes, there are fewer injuries from car accidents, gun shots and construction accidents that would require an emergency room visit.

(CNN)By the end of March, 1 in 7 New York adults had Covid-19 -- about 10 times higher than the official account, according to a new study sponsored by the New York State Department of Health.

He added, however, that there's another side to this report: It shows that even in New York, which had already suffered a sizable outbreak by the end of March, the vast majority of residents were uninfected and therefore still not immune to the virus.

After statistical adjustment and extrapolation, the researchers estimated that more than 2 million New York adults had been infected by the end of March. That's 14% of all New York adults, or 1 out of 7.

Only 11 miles from Manhattan, Hart Island has been the final resting place for New York’s unclaimed and poor for over a century.

It is the largest mass grave in the United States. At least 1,000 bodies are buried on the island a year, and more than 1 million can be found in the plots of its potter’s field, known as City Cemetery.

Its earliest iteration was as a training ground for soldiers during the Civil War. Purchased by the city in 1868, the land in the Long Island Sound has been home to a boys reformatory, asylum, prison, rehab center and even a Nike missile silo

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has ordered fantasy-sports operators Fan Duel Inc. and DraftKings Inc. to shut down in the state, saying that the games constitute illegal gambling and are subject to criminal penalties.

A handful of other states have previously said fantasy sports amounts to gambling and isn’t allowed. But Tuesday’s cease-and-desist order from New York is the first time fantasy-sports operators have been formally accused of criminal activity. It is the latest blow for the daily fantasy industry, dominated by FanDuel and DraftKings, which faces a federal criminal probe and scrutiny of state legislatures over the legality of their business model and the oversight of their operations.

“Daily fantasy sports is neither victimless nor harmless,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “And it is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country.” FanDuel responded in a statement: “This is a politician telling hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers they are not allowed to play a game they love…. The game has been played — legally — in New York for years and years, but after the attorney general realized he could now get himself some press coverage, he decided a game that has been around for a long, long time is suddenly now not legal.”

New York’s congressional delegation will shrink by one seat after the 2022 election, the Census Bureau announced on Monday, but the state came excruciatingly close to snapping an eight-decade streak of declining representation in Washington: It was 89 residents short, to be precise.

Ms. Menin said she believed that the personal animus between Mr. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio was a driving factor in the state’s approach to the census, adding that she was “100 percent” sure that an additional 89 people would have been counted had there been greater state involvement. “It’s unconscionable,” she said.

California will remain the state with the largest congressional delegation, with 52 districts, losing one seat. Texas will pick up two seats for a total of 38. Florida and New York had been tied with 27 seats each, but Florida will gain a seat as New York sheds one, part of a broader trend of population shifts to the South and West in recent decades.

There is something about Andrew Yang that makes him the candidate to beat in New York City's mayoral race. With less than two months to go before the Democratic primary on June 22, Yang continues to outpace his many rivals in a notoriously tough city.

Yang, who had a brief stint in corporate law, has more substantial experience in business. He worked for a number of start-ups, headed an education company and in 2011, founded the non-profit organization Venture for America in an attempt to create jobs and bring high-tech work to cities that were suffering from the Great Recession. While the Obama administration listed him as one of the 500 "Champions of Change" and a "Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship," Venture for America so far has failed to meet its own goal of creating 100,000 jobs by 2025.

But Yang has gained traction by pushing unconventional ideas like a universal basic income. His presidential bid centered around his proposal to offer $1,000 a month to everyone over 18 — a policy he has reworked and narrowed significantly to try to tackle extreme poverty in New York. He has also proposed the Big Apple Corps, an initiative in New York that would hire 10,000 aspiring college graduates to tutor 100,000 public school students.

Some elections are determined in the mad rush of a campaign’s final days. And others are effectively over before they begin. In New York, the Democratic supermajority in control of the legislature made two fatal mistakes driven by arrogance and incompetence that sealed the fate of its congressional candidates many months ago

Those mistakes point up the dangers of one-party rule, especially when it becomes so entrenched and beholden to its most activist wing — and in this case causes some Democrats to vote Republican just to break that stranglehold.

The first mistake: After an independent commission created by voters failed to agree on a new map of House districts in New York, Democrats got greedy. Instead of drawing maps that were modestly advantageous, they went whole hog — producing an extremely gerrymandered map that invited a successful legal challenge.

I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.

“In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”

This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.

Scholars are increasingly voicing concern that the shift to working from home, spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, will bring the three-decade renaissance of major cities to a halt, setting off an era of urban decline.

They cite an exodus of the affluent, a surge in vacant offices and storefronts and the prospect of declining property taxes and public transit revenues.

Insofar as fear of urban crime grows, as the number of homeless people increases, and as the fiscal ability of government to address these problems shrinks, the amenities of city life are very likely to diminish.

"We ended up getting our first positive patients -- and that's when all hell broke loose," said one New York City doctor.

"We don't have the machines, we don't have the beds," the doctor said.

"To think that we're in New York City and this is happening," he added. "It's like a third-world country type of scenario. It's mind-blowing."