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Vladimir Markin, the head of Russia's main investigating agency the Investigative Committee, told Russian news agencies that the charges had been reclassified.

Last week, 11 Nobel prize-winners wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin, urging him to drop the charges of piracy.

Mr Putin said last month that the activists had violated international law but it was "absolutely evident that they are, of course, not pirates".

"The Arctic 30 are no more hooligans than they were pirates," he said in a statement.

All 30 people who were on board the ship are in pre-trial detention in the northern port city of Murmansk until late November. They have complained of being held in harsh conditions,

They were detained when Russian security sources stormed the ship five weeks ago following a protest against drilling for oil in the Arctic.

Greenpeace denies any wrongdoing and is calling for the release of the detainees, who come from 18 countries, and the Arctic Sunrise.

classes were videotaped. This was not a vestige of Soviet surveillance. Rather, he wanted to critique how teachers interacted with — and nurtured relations between — children. Bogin and his staff often worked late into the night, reviewing footage and discussing methodology.

Life at New Humanitarian was full of academic Olympiads, poetry-reciting contests and quiz bowls. The school stressed oral exams, even in math, where children had to solve an equation at the blackboard and explain methodology.

Children were graded and ranked, with results posted. We were not accustomed to this: in Brooklyn, the school instilled an everyone’s-a-winner ethos. At New Humanitarian, Danya says, “they send an entirely different message to the kids: ‘Learning is hard, but you have to do it. You have to get good grades.’ ”

Danya, now nearly 14, was ambivalent about leaving, drawn toward being a teenager in New York City. But Arden and Emmett would have gladly stayed. “I feel like I’m tugged in two ways, and I have no idea what to do,” Arden told me last spring. “That’s the one problem with living abroad. You end up getting those weird feelings like, Oh, I can’t leave; I can’t stay.”

And if you want to understand the ferocity of the opposition to him on the Catholic right, this is the key. His most determined opponents are far-right closet cases, living in palaces, leading completely double lives, backed by the most vicious of reactionaries and bigots on the European and American far right

As a secular gay journalist, not hostile to the church, he walked into the Vatican and was simply staggered by its obvious gayness.

(Lepore hazards a guess that 80 percent of the Vatican’s population is gay.

as Martel probes deeper and deeper, one theme emerges very powerfully: “Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something.”

it’s highly predictable that John Paul II’s pontificate, which launched a new war on homosexuals, turns out to be the gayest of them all — and the one most resistant to any inquiry into stories of sex abuse

Ratzinger, (the future Pope Benedict XVI) personally received notification of every claim of sex abuse in the church under John Paul II, ignoring most, and made the stigmatization and persecution of sane, adjusted non-abusive gay people across the globe his mission instead. There wasn’t a theological dissident he didn’t notice and punish, but barely a single pedophile he found reason to expose

Martel explains how two of John Paul II’s favorite cardinals — whose nicknames within the Vatican are Platinette (after a drag queen) and La Mongolfiera — set up an elaborate and elite prostitution service that continued through the papacy of Benedict XVI, and was financed from the Vatican coffers.

He notices simple things that some might call innuendo, but any gay man will instantly recognize, like the fabulous interiors of the gay cardinals’ palaces, always with their “assistants” or young “relative” on hand

take Martel’s interaction with the Swiss Guards, one of whom vents: “The harassment is so insistent that I said to myself that I was going straight home. Many of us are exasperated by the usually rather indiscreet advances of the cardinals and bishops.”

Or the prostitutes who keep elaborate records of their clients, and have already caused huge scandals in Italy.

Or a confessor-priest in Saint Peter’s who guides Martel into the Vatican with the words: “Welcome to Sodoma.”

If you want to find a figure who crystallizes all this hypocrisy in the narrative, it would be the late Colombian cardinal, Alfonso López Trujillo, tasked by John Paul II in the 1970s to rid Latin America of liberation theology, and then to launch a global crusade against homosexuality and the use of condoms

Trujillo’s own master of ceremonies on these trips tells us: “López Trujillo travelled with members of the paramilitary groups … He pointed out the priests who were carrying out social actions in the barrios and the poorer districts. The paramilitaries identified them and sometimes went back to murder them. Often they had to leave the region or the country.”

“López Trujillo beat prostitutes; that was his relationship with sexuality. He paid them, but they had to accept his blows in return. It always happened at the end, not during the physical act. He finished his sexual relations by beating them, out of pure sadism.”

if the Catholic right wants to weaponize the book, they’ll have to take on their own icons, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a whole range of their closest allies in the church.

what was Trujillo’s task in Rome? You guessed it: president of the Pontifical Council for the Family! This was the figure who spearheaded the war on gays in the 1980s and 1990s, who forbade the use of condoms, who spread the lie that condoms don’t protect anyone from HIV. And yet when he died, Benedict XVI gave the homily at the funeral mass.

It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try:

And the core thesis of the book — which is that it is the hypocrisy of the closet that is the real problem — is not one the right will be able easily to absorb.

Critically, Martel reaches the same conclusion I did recently — the omertà of the closet was a core reason for sex abuse

Gay priests felt unable to report pedophiles or abusers or hypocrites because they too could be outed by the abusers and forced out

When Trujillo was promoted to Rome, the reckless excesses went into overdrive. A Curia source tells Martel: “Everyone knew that he was homosexual. He lived with us, here, on the fourth floor of the Palazzo di San Calisto, in a 900-square-metre apartment, and he had several cars! Ferraris! He led a highly unusual life.”

There can be no meaningful reform until this closet is ended, and the whole sick, twisted syndrome is unwound.

only a radical change will help. Ending mandatory celibacy is no longer an option

Women need to be brought in to the full sacramental life of the church. Gay men need to be embraced not as some manifestation of “intrinsic moral evil” but as human beings made in the image of God

Francis is nudging the church toward this more humane and Christian future, but the more he does so, the more fervently this nest of self-haters and bigots will try to destroy him.

Everything I was taught growing up — to respect the priests and hierarchs, to trust them, to accept their moral authority — is in tatters.

the last drops of moral authority the Vatican might hope to have evaporate with this book. It is difficult to express the heartbroken rage so many of us in the pews now feel.

It tells you a lot about the LGBTQIA++ movement that it’s now lost Martina Navratilova.

A pioneering open lesbian who had an openly transgender coach in her glory years, who did more for gay visibility than any gay group ever has, is now being disowned by Athlete Ally, a New York–based organization that supports LGBT athletes

She argued in an op-ed that a trans woman who started out in life as male has an unfair advantage in sports over women who have never biologically male. For this, her comments have been condemned as “transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people.”

The truth, of course, is that the science is firmly behind Navratilova.

If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt

denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people

if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.

There is no “gay lobby.” There is a “honeycomb of closets,” often insulated from each other, built on deception and self-hatred, that amounts to a system where protecting the image of the church became far more important than saving children from rapists.

Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.

Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?

Smollett was dumb and incompetent in his elaborate hoax. But he was smart about one thing. The most noble thing in our current culture is victimhood

Smollett aimed for the jackpot — physically attacked for being gay and black by Trump supporters

so all good liberals instinctively and with good intentions believed him, embraced him

His identity as gay and black rendered him instantly innocent, just as the Covington boys’ whiteness rendered them instantly guilty.

Booker, Harris, Pelosi: They’ll never apologize for their rush to judgment. This may not have been “precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” you see, but it was morally true.

Believe Jussie. Just believe. He may have made up an entire story, but “he’s not lying.”

for most of human history, men worked in really nasty jobs that damaged their health for three reasons: to support themselves, to support their families, and because that was what manliness required.

we have simply failed to replenish what we inherited from the Greatest Generation of these sources of identity for the Americans who cannot pat themselves on the back because they’ve made it to Harvard

: religion, patriotism, community, and yes, pro-social masculinity.

For most of humanity’s history, masculinity was something achieved, not given, and it pointed men in directions that their society defined as pro-social

Above all, in modern times, to work and marriage. The connections between work, marriage, fatherhood, and manhood unleashed enormous social energy

Being a husband and a father was a socially and sexually reinforced masculine identity. It wasn’t just being a parent or a caretaker

A good husband and father worked. The guy who didn’t was not just a deadbeat, not just a social menace, but a failure as a man.

The redefinition of masculinity into personhood has not produced a generation of men who act like women. The deep sources of motivation are not the same for both genders.

Today we’ve defined men as the enemy unless they pretend to conform to the idea that gender doesn’t matter.

Adult men are now retreating to the world of video games where their aggressive impulses are valorized, not despised — without risk and without real reward.

If the future of work isn’t quite biased against men, it certainly seemed biased against the traditional idea of manliness. Construction and manufacturing, two male-dominated industries, are down 3 million jobs since 2008. Most of those jobs are dead, forever.

Meanwhile, the only occupations expected to add more than 100,000 jobs in the next decade are personal care aides, home health aides, medical secretaries, and marketing specialists, all of which are currently majority female.

What are these young men doing?

“The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games.” And, so far, they like it pretty well this way: “Happiness surveys actually indicate that they [are] quite content compared to their peers,”

this situation is largely voluntary: Not only are these men not looking for work, “only a minority report that they’ve left the labor force because they cannot find a job.”

“Ever-greater numbers of working-age men simply have dropped out — some for a while and some forever — from the competition for jobs. These men have established a new and alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job.”

Almost 40 percent of all Americans without work are now male.

Between 1948 and 2015, the proportion of women between 25 and 64 in the workforce doubled from 34 percent to 70 percent, masking the continuing retreat of men from work.

By the late 1990s, women’s workforce participation stopped rising. “Only then did the overall work rate for U.S. adults begin to register a decline,” he writes. “For two full generations, the upsurge of employment for women disguised the steady decline in work for men.”

the number of working-age men without work is still almost 10 million, or about 10 percent of the working-age male population.

Between 1965 and 2015, the share of working-age men who are jobless more than doubled, from 10 percent to 22 percent. Among “prime age” men, the percentage without jobs shot from 6 percent to nearly 16 percent

Stocks rise and fall, but the recent sell-off shows the ultimate folly of the president’s fact-free existence. For a year, he took credit for stock market gains that were the continuation of a nine-year bull market

Now, the market is, arguably, beginning to react to Trump’s actual policies — a tax cut that added fuel to an already strong economy, raising fears it will overheat, causing inflation, higher interest rates and recession.

In ways large and small, reality is catching up with Trump.

In the same State of the Union address, Trump boasted that “African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded.” (Never mind that this continued an eight-year trend.) Barely 60 hours later, Trump’s Labor Department reported that this boast was no longer true: Black unemployment swelled to 7.7 percent in January from 6.8 percent in December.

Republicans had mocked Nancy Pelosi for saying the cut amounted to “crumbs” for ordinary workers. But on Saturday, House Speaker Paul Ryan tweeted out a message pulled from an Associated Press story: “A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week . . . she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year.” Amid the social media ridicule that followed — Rep. Joe Kennedy noted that the wealthiest Americans get an extra $3,000 per week — Ryan took down the truth-telling tweet.

A record-high number of Americans—75 percent—said in 2018 that immigration is good for the United States. Although the Trump administration took steps last week to limit even legal immigration, the Trump presidency has seen an increase in the number of Americans who support more legal immigration—not just among Democrats, but even slightly among Republicans.

white Americans are 19 percent more supportive of a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants than they were four years ago, and slightly less supportive of increased deportations

more Democrats say blacks are treated unfairly at work and by the police than in 2016—remarkable given how coverage of police violence toward African Americans has dropped in the past few years—while Republican attitudes have remained unchanged.

voters have now gotten a chance to see him implement ideas that seemed novel or at least worth a shot during the campaign, and they don’t like what they’re seeing in practice

64 percent of Americans think free trade is good, up from 57 in 2017, 55 in 2016, and 51 in 2015. Meanwhile, the percentage who say free trade is bad has dropped 10 points since 2017.

The poll found that “people who rejected racial stereotypes were more interested in voting in the 2020 general election than those who expressed stronger levels of anti-black or anti-Hispanic biases.” That wasn’t the case in 2016, when Americans who held strong antiblack views were more politically engaged.

NO2 levels also dropped in South Korea, which has long struggled with high emissions from its large fleet of coal-fired power plants but also from nearby industrial facilities in China.The country has avoided putting entire regions under lockdown but is meticulously tracing and isolating suspected coronavirus cases.

Monks, the former chair of the UK government’s science advisory committee on air quality, said that a reduction in air pollution could bring some health benefits, though they were unlikely to offset loss of life from the disease.

The World Health Organization describes NO2 as “a toxic gas which causes significant inflammation of the airways” at concentrations above 200 micrograms per cubic metre. Pollution particles may also be a vector for pathogens, as well as exacerbating existing health problems. The WHO is now investigating whether airborne pollution particles may be a vector that spreads Covid-19 and makes it more virulent.

The source is not yet clear. One possibility is a slowdown of activity in Italy’s industrial heartland. Another factor is likely to be a reduction in road traffic, which accounts for the biggest share of nitrogen dioxide emissions in Europe.

Although the UK is more than a week behind Italy in terms of the spread of the disease and the government’s response, roadside monitors already show significantly reduced levels of pollution at hotspots such as Marylebone in London.

“What I think will come out of this is a realisation - because we are forced to - that there is considerable potential to change working practices and lifestyles. This challenges us in the future to think, do we really need to drive our car there or burn fuel for that,” said Monk.

Multiple times throughout Friday's press briefing, the President claimed the current situation was unprecedented and unforeseen. According to Trump, "nobody was prepared for this," not even past presidents. He added, "In all fairness to all of the former presidents, none of them ever thought a thing like this could happen."

This is false. The US intelligence community and public health experts had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic. Experts had also warned that the country would face shortages of critical medical equipment, such as ventilators, if a pandemic occurred.

Trump said of the coronavirus: "You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus, you know you can call it many different names. I'm not sure anybody even knows what it is."

You cannot accurately call the coronavirus "a flu." They are, simply, different viruses with different characteristics, though they share some symptoms the coronavirus has a much higher mortality rate.

it's significantly more serious" -- with a mortality rate approximately 10 times higher than the 0.1% for the flu. It's also obviously untrue that there is not "anybody" who knows what the coronavirus is.

“Currently, from a policymaker’s perspective, it’s a relative balance between managing the spread of the virus and opening the economy.”

But the U.S. stock market benchmark is still down about 25% from its February high.

Even after Friday’s drop, the Dow ended 12.8% higher, its best week since 1938.

Many investors see a strong risk the market could fall deeply again as coronavirus infections increase and more people die, however.

U.S. consumer sentiment dropped to a near 3-1/2-year low in March, according to a survey released on Friday, a day after data showed a record 3 million surge in jobless claims last week.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI slumped 4.06% to end at 21,636.78 points, while the S&P 500 .SPX lost 3.37% to 2,541.47.

The Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 3.79% to 7,502.38.

Volume on U.S. exchanges was 13.4 billion shares, its lowest since March 5, according to Refinitiv data.

The Pyongyang regime threatened retribution against Washington for any new sanctions measure threatening to inflict “the greatest pain and suffering” the US has ever encountered.

A diplomatic source at the security council said that the revisions in the draft had been made with the aim of securing acquiescence from China and Russia, who expressed serious reservations about the original version.

he hefty monetary enforcements are yet another example of the distrust that has deepened since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Democrats say they can't count on certain Republicans to abide by safety measures, while GOP lawmakers argue the fines are an unnecessary power grab by the House majority.

The rules state that the fines will be deducted from the offending lawmaker’s salary and can’t be paid for with office budget or campaign funds

Mast further argued that the fine was unconstitutional and “unenforceable,” citing in part the Constitution’s 27th Amendment that prohibits any change in the salary of members of Congress from taking effect until after the next election.

While Mast, Miller-Meeks and Norman have all confirmed they are fully vaccinated, the other Republicans fined for going maskless have either declined to disclose their vaccination status or openly said they aren’t vaccinated.

The Capitol’s attending physician, Brian Monahan, explained in a memo that masks are still required in the House chamber unless members are recognized to speak during debate because it is “the only location where the entire Membership gathers periodically throughout the day in an interior space.” 

A recent CNN survey found that all Democrats in the House and Senate confirmed they are vaccinated.

Democrats also felt they had to impose fines to compel enforcement of security screenings enacted in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot after several Republicans refused to go through newly installed metal detectors outside the House chamber.

Democrats defending the penalties argue that rules enforcing metal detector screenings or masks enforce what they believe is ultimately a minor inconvenience.

Bays said Wegovy appears far safer than earlier obesity drugs that "have gone down in flames" over safety problems.

The drug carries a potential risk for a type of thyroid tumor, so it shouldn't be taken by people with a personal or family history of certain thyroid and endocrine tumors. Wegovy also has a risk of depression and pancreas inflammation.

Wegovy (pronounced wee-GOH'-vee) is a synthesized version of a gut hormone that curbs appetite. Patients inject it weekly under their skin. Like other weight-loss drugs, it's to be used along with exercise, a healthy diet and other steps like keeping a food diary.

Wegovy builds on a trend in which makers of relatively new diabetes drugs test them to treat other conditions common in diabetics. For example, popular diabetes drugs Jardiance and Novo Nordisk's Victoza now have approvals for reducing risk of heart attack, stroke and death in heart patients.

In January, Kelly was accused of entering the Capitol and obstructing Congress, after a confidential source told the FBI he was posting on Facebook about the riot.

So far, only two Capitol riot defendants appear to have cut plea deals, with one becoming a cooperator against the Oath Keepers paramilitary group. A plea hearing is scheduled for another defendant Wednesday.

Earlier Monday, a Justice Department prosecutor indicated in court some Oath Keeper conspiracy defendants may have the opportunity to make plea deals in the coming months, after some of their lawyers had initial talks with prosecutors.

a two-tiered society. While major metropolises like Seoul continue to grow, putting intense pressure on infrastructure and housing, in regional towns it’s easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children.

according to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100.

Their model shows an especially sharp decline for China, with its population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million in 2100.

China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds.

Demographers warn against seeing population decline as simply a cause for alarm. Many women are having fewer children because that’s what they want. Smaller populations could lead to higher wages, more equal societies, lower carbon emissions and a higher quality of life for the smaller numbers of children who are born.

ut, said Professor Gietel Basten, quoting Casanova: “There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”

The challenges ahead are still a cul-de-sac — no country with a serious slowdown in population growth has managed to increase its fertility rate much beyond the minor uptick that Germany accomplished. There is little sign of wage growth in shrinking countries, and there is no guarantee that a smaller population means less stress on the environment.

Many demographers argue that the current moment may look to future historians like a period of transition or gestation, when humans either did or did not figure out how to make the world more hospitable — enough for people to build the families that they want.

“A large-scale testing infrastructure was set up relatively late, but it has played an essential part in quashing Germany’s third wave”, concedes Janosch Dahmen, a doctor and health policy expert for the Green party.

As of the start of July, the German government has lowered the financial incentives for people who run their own test centre, dropping the compensation for each test from €18 (£15.44) to €11.

health experts warn it would be a fatal mistake for European governments to allow its improvised testing infrastructures to wither away.“If you look at low vaccination rates in some parts of the world, and the speed with which we have seen new variants develop, it should be clear that this pandemic is far from over,”, the Green politician Dahmen told the Guardian.

“Especially if we don’t manage to agree on consistent pandemic regulations across Europe, then testing will remain a vital public health screening tool.”

Similar issues have come up in other states in recent years. The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association voted last year to drop its waiver requirement after a high school basketball player in Philadelphia was forced to leave a game because she was wearing a hijab.

As the Times acknowledged back in September, as media focus started to turn in earnest toward Iowa (five months before any actual voting), the state’s caucuses “disenfranchise huge blocs of voters”, and yet, “to a greater degree than in recent campaigns, this unrepresentative and idiosyncratic state is proving that it is the only electoral battleground that matters for Democrats”. We should be counterbalancing that logic, not eagerly indulging it. And yet, as in so many cycles past, the Iowa feeding frenzy is kicking in again, to the exclusion of other issues, and voices, that matter.

Oceans serve as a good indicator of the real impact of climate change. Covering almost three quarters of Earth's surface, they absorb the vast majority of the world's heat. Since 1970, more than 90% of the planet's excess heat went into the oceans, while less than 4% was absorbed by the atmosphere and the land, the study said.

Rising temperatures also mean ocean waters have less oxygen and are becoming more acidic, which has a major impact on nutrients that feed marine wildlife. For example, when an ocean heat wave struck the waters of Western Australia in 2011, scientists noticed there were fewer dolphin births and the animal's survival rate dropped.

"If the leaders of the world changed course, a revolution could take place over about 15 years ... this requires the leaders of China, and the US in particular, along with Europe, to take a strong leadership role and set the stage for the rest of the world to follow," he said.

Officials have differing opinions about how much change Times Square may be in for over the next few years — as new businesses inevitably replace old ones — and how long its full recovery will take. Real estate and tourism officials say estimates range between one and four years.

"2021 is certainly going to feel more upbeat than 2020 did, but I think there will also be some disappointment,"

Douglas Hercher, managing director at RobertDouglas, a private real estate investment bank. "If people are thinking Times Square, by the summer, is going to look like the Times Square we all know and love, that's probably not going to be the case."

A Times Square Alliance study found foot traffic in the neighborhood's busiest block on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was down 70% from the previous year.

Tompkins says about 43% of Times Square's street-level businesses are currently closed, down from 87% in the spring. Hercher estimates 25%-30% of retail rental spaces in Midtown have "gone dark" due to tenants shuttering indefinitely.

"We've been really fortunate in that we raised the original capital for the project prior to Covid," Orowitz said. "At the end of the day, from the perspective of an entertainment and tourism Mecca, I think Times Square continues to evolve and will continue to be what it always was."

Krispy Kreme, for example, opened its new flagship Times Square location in September, a few months after Covid-19 lockdowns caused a 78% drop in Manhattan retail sales activity, according to the Metro Manhattan Office Space blog.

Tompkins says the pandemic hasn't changed Times Square's appeal to retailers looking to create more-engaging shopping experiences for their customers. Luxury real estate developer L&L Holding Company has continued construction of its TSX Broadway experiential retail complex throughout the pandemic.

L&L managing director David Orowitz says the pandemic hasn't shaken the developer's faith in the $2.5 billion project, which is still set to open at the end of 2022.

"You're going to see those retailers reducing their footprint to bring their costs in line with their sales. ... I think rental rates are going to have to come down tremendously to attract tenancy to those spaces."

the normalizing of remote work options across business sectors this year has already led many companies to scale back on office space, which some analysts have predicted will be a permanent shift in the commercial real estate market.

"We've definitely seen in the residential market, rents have dropped 10-15% this year in Manhattan," he said. "That's probably a little bit of the canary in the coal mine."

Only 8% of Manhattan's estimated 1 million office employees returned to their offices for work by mid-August, according to a survey conducted by the Partnership for New York City.

"There's talk about whether it makes sense to make those into residential usage," he said. "The name of the game here in the Covid era is flexibility."