NEW YORK (AP) – The coronavirus case surge that swamped New York City’s 911 emergency line last month also deluged its 311 helpline, as calls soared from an average of 55,000 a day to about 200,000 daily. Wait times grew long in some cases. To tackle the problem, the city has trained 285 new call-takers […]

NEW YORK (VINnews) — NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio issued an apology on Monday for a tweet sent last week that profiled the Jewish community. The Mayor held a conference call with Orthodox Jewish media outlets on Monday. During the call, he expressed his regret for his poor choice of words. “I used words I […]

NEW YORK (JTA) – New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted a message last week calling out “the Jewish community” for violating social distancing guidelines after a Hasidic funeral drew hundreds onto the streets of Brooklyn. The tweet was swiftly criticized for unfairly targeting the Jewish community when the majority are abiding by public health guidelines, […]

NEW YORK (AP) — Sirens. Birds. The ice cream truck. Sirens. Sirens. Sirens. The stall of a delivery vehicle. The downstairs neighbor telling her dog to do his business. The muffled talk of a masked couple walking down the block. People ask me what it’s like to live in New York City, the U.S. epicenter […]

NEW YORK (AP) – Mayor Bill de Blasio called Saturday’s confrontation in Manhattan’s East Village “very troubling” and “absolutely unacceptable” but contended it was an outlier among “tens of thousands of interactions between police officers and civilians over the last weeks that went very well.” The officer was stripped of his gun and badge and […]

NEW YORK (AP) — Three hours before mealtime, a line begins to form on the sidewalk outside St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, facing Park Avenue in one of New York City’s poshest neighborhoods. By 5:30 p.m., when plastic bags of carry-away suppers are unloaded from a van and ready for pick-up on a folding table, the […]

DENVER (AP) — A retired Colorado paramedic who died from coronavirus after volunteering to help combat the pandemic in New York City was being honored Sunday as his body was returned to Denver. Paul Cary, 66, who worked 32 years as a firefighter paramedic in the Denver suburbs, died April 30, a month after he […]

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York City police officer who was caught on video Saturday pointing a stun gun at a man and violently taking him to the ground over an alleged social distancing violation has been stripped of his gun and badge and placed on desk duty pending an internal investigation. Bystander video […]

NEW YORK (AP) — Faced with 19,000 coronavirus deaths and counting, the nation’s nursing homes are pushing back against a potential flood of lawsuits with a sweeping lobbying effort to get states to grant them emergency protection from claims of inadequate care. At least 15 states have enacted laws or governors’ orders that explicitly or […]

NEW YORK (JTA) – Two Hasidic synagogues defended New York Mayor Bill de Blasio from charges of anti-Semitism and called on members of their communities to adhere to government social distancing requirements. The letters – issued on Thursday by two rival factions of the Satmar Hasidic community in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn – offered […]