No wonder Bill de Blasio’s campaign against income inequality hit home. The top 10 percent of earners took more than half the country’s income last year, the highest level ever recorded, according to a study by economists at the University of California, Berkeley. The top 1 percent took home more than a fifth of the country’s income, one of the highest levels since 1913, when the U.S. instituted an income tax. The study found that the recovery from the recession has disproportionately benefited the wealthy, with stocks and real estate prices booming while lower wages stagnated and unemployment remained high.
N,Y, TIMES
Bill de Blasio, whose campaign for mayor of New York tapped into a city’s deepening unease with income inequality and aggressive police practices, captured far more votes than any of his rivals in the Democratic primary on Tuesday. It was not clear if he had won the 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff election on Oct. 1 with William C. Thompson Jr., who finished second. At night’s end, he had won just over 40 percent of the ballots counted; thousands of paper ballots had yet to be tallied, which could take days.
Mr. Thompson, who nearly unseated Mr. Bloomberg in 2009, struggled this time to win over nonwhite voters who were crucial to his campaign strategy as the only black candidate in the race.
Mr. de Blasio, a white Brooklynite who frequently showcased his biracial family, built a broad coalition of support among nearly every category of Democratic primary voters on Tuesday, according to the exit poll by Edison Research. His critique of a city divided between rich and poor — tried in the past by other candidates in New York and nationally with little success — resonated.
Mr. de Blasio's [plan to tax] the wealthy to pay for universal prekindergarten ...was dismissed by his rivals, who said it would never be approved in Albany. But at times Ms. Quinn and Mr. Thompson were left in the unwelcome position of sounding like proponents of the status quo, at a moment when voters made clear they were impatient to be led in a different direction.
Ms. Quinn’s defeat was crushing for a politician whose career as speaker was built on a belief that helping Mr. Bloomberg carry out his agenda would give her a record of accomplishments to run on. Her crucial role in making Mr. Bloomberg’s third term possible antagonized a huge swath of Democratic voters who showed they were unwilling to forgive and forget. 
The winner of the unusually spirited Republican contest was Joseph J. Lhota, a no-nonsense former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He defeated John A. Catsimatidis, a voluble billionaire who ran an often whimsical campaign.
Mr. Lhota, who served as deputy mayor to Rudolph W. Giuliani, will carry his tough-minded approach to crime-fighting and city spending into the general election on Nov. 5. A vocal supporter of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s policies, Mr. Lhota called his victory “the first step in continuing a strong future for our city.”
By contrast, Mr. de Blasio’s vow to make a clean break from the Bloomberg era struck a chord with Democratic voters worried about jobs and schools. Roughly three in four wanted to move the city in a different direction after 12 years with Mr. Bloomberg, an exit poll found.
In the unexpectedly heated race for the unglamorous office of city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, repelled a last-minute comeback attempt by Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor over his use of prostitutes. And in the Democratic primary for public advocate, Letitia James, a City Council member from Brooklyn, will face Senator Daniel L. Squadron of Brooklyn in a runoff election.
Though Democrats outnumber Republicans in New York by six to one, the city has not elected a Democratic mayor since David N. Dinkins in 1989. But the white voters who helped elect Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg are a less potent political force in a city where ethnic and racial minorities now make up a majority of the population.
---------------------------------------------------------------
N.Y. TIMES
Kenneth P. Thompson, a former federal prosecutor, performed the rare feat of defeating a sitting district attorney by beating Brooklyn’s six-term incumbent, Charles J. Hynes, on Tuesday in the Democratic primary.
The primary followed a fierce race that often seemed more a referendum on Mr. Hynes’s lengthy record than a choice between two candidates. Though Mr. Hynes had faced serious and sometimes divided opposition before, this year’s race pitted the 78-year-old district attorney against a single well-financed candidate who rallied anti-Hynes sentiment in the borough. Mr. Thompson, 47, used a torrent of negative publicity about prosecutorial behavior in Mr. Hynes’s office to paint the incumbent as unethical and out of touch.
Mr. Hynes was forced to backtrack or re-evaluate several murder convictions from the early part of his tenure, and was dogged by his handling of cases in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, most of whose leaders endorsed him.
Mr. Hynes was seen as slow to prosecute child sexual abuse allegations against ultra-Orthodox Jews because of rabbinical resistance, but stepped up abuse prosecutions in the last year, and won a significant case involving a therapist who sexually abused a young patient.
Mr. Thompson focused his attacks on the questionable behavior of several members of Mr. Hynes’s staff, including his deputy, Michael Vecchione, whose conduct in a murder case drew sharp criticism from two federal judges. Mr. Hynes ultimately agreed to allow the defendant, who had spent 15 years in prison, to have his murder conviction vacated. Mr. Hynes’s prosecutors also have come under scrutiny for relying on the problematic testimony of a detective, Louis Scarcella, to win murder convictions, some of which the office is now reviewing. [Also refer to : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/nyregion/brooklyn-prosecutor-to-seek-freedom-of-man-convicted-in-1990-killing-of-rabbi.html?hp&_r=0 ]