Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
Pedestrians pass by a subway station in Manhattan on May 17, 2021. ( Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
NEW YORK CITY — MTA ridership broke records for the fifth time in five weeks, surpassing 2.46 million riders Thursday – the highest number since last March 2020.
It's the latest figure showing a steady return to the rails: the previous record was set on June 9 with 2.38 million riders, followed by May 27 with 2.35 million, 2.27 on May 14 and 2.24 on May 7.
"We are pleased to see that the subway is breaking pandemic ridership records even as schools move to summer recess to begin what is traditionally a slower period for the subways," said Demetrius Crichlow, MTA's executive vice president of subways. "This is a clear sign that the normal rhythms of the region are returning."
Pre-pandemic, over 5.5 million people rode the trains on an average weekday. When the pandemic hit, ridership plunged by more than 90% to a low of roughly 300,000 daily trips last April.
MTA Mask Force volunteers on the 1 line in Manhattan in September, 2020. MARC A. HERMANN / MTA NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT
Subway and other mass transit use is dramatically down since New York first hit PAUSE to slow the spread of COVID-19. In March, subway ridership was estimated to be down around 90% from normal levels, and in September, it was hovering around 60-70% lower than pre-pandemic times. The numbers suggest that many New Yorkers still don't feel comfortable returning to mass transit just yet—but according to a new study, the risks of taking the subway right now may have more to do with perception than reality.
The study, which was commissioned by the American Public Transportation Association, found that there is no direct correlation between public transit use and COVID-19 spread, either worldwide or in New York City. As long as people wear masks, and trains and buses are well-ventilated, the authors of the study concluded public transit is relatively safe.
In many cases, virus spread went down even as riders gradually began returning to the transit system. Researchers found that in the city, there were about 150 million subway and bus rides between June 1st and August 18th, but the positive rate of infection "dropped 70 percent, from 3.3% down to 1.0%, and cases went from over 600 per day to around 250 over the same period."
NYC COVID-19 Cases & MTA Subway/Bus Ridership
"In the very beginning, people were blaming transit with absolutely no backup, with just looking at New York City becoming the epicenter of the outbreak back in March and April," said Sam Schwartz, better known as "Gridlock Sam," the former NYC Traffic Commissioner whose transit-consulting firm made the report. He compared it to a statistics professor testing first year students by showing correlation between eating ice cream and drowning; they both may peak during summertime, but that doesn't mean eating ice cream leads to drowning.
Instead, the myth around subway usage and the spread of the virus has become what he calls a factoid, "something that is untrue but gets repeated time and time again. It seems to be plausible, it fits in with people's thinking," he told Gothamist. "It also is very discriminatory, and I believe it was stated by many people who don't ride the subway system, who don't ride public transit."
Looking around the rest of the country and world, including Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong, he found example after example of places with a lack of correlation; they found that case rates are tied primarily to local community spread, rather than correlated to public transit ridership rates. The U.S. cities with the highest infection rates—like Gallup, New Mexico, which had 58.2 cases per 1,000—have little transit usage. The study notes, "it appears that what you do at the end of a trip affects the probability of contracting the virus far more than the mode of travel."
Schwartz argues that another reason for the assumption about spread in NYC in particular has to do with essential workers and their reliance on public transit: "Our essential workers travel by transit overwhelmingly," he said. "The people we relied on to save us, to feed us, to take care of our every need ride transit. And they were getting sick at a higher rate, whether they traveled by transit or by car. So immediately we blamed transit, and then discriminated against people."
Back in May, the New York Stock Exchange partially reopened but said no one who rides mass transit could come to the trading floor (they later rescinded that). The CDC recommended at various points during the crisis that employers should pay workers to drive alone.
"Well, lower income workers can't drive alone, they don't have cars," said Schwartz. "Even in New York City the income disparity between car owners and non-car owners is over $45K a year in income. So it's a narrative that fits a group of people that are short-sighted, that just saw an outbreak occur in New York City and came to a false conclusion that scientists have now shown is not the case."
Studies from across the world have shown that there is a definite correlation between outbreaks and bars, indoor restaurants, weddings, and houses of worship. So what's different about mass transit? This study posits that one major factor may be that people generally don't talk on mass transit, while there is a lot of that (and singing) in those other scenarios. In addition, transit trips are "usually short in duration, and the vehicles often have high rates of ventilation, make frequents stops and, in some cases, have open windows."
The MTA, which has spent millions to thoroughly clean subway cars and reassure straphangers that using the subway is okay, said the report backed up their own findings. “This report adds to the growing body of evidence that mass transit is safe with the proper public health safeguards in place," said Abbey Collins, spokesperson for the MTA. "In fact, New York has served as a national model with transit ridership increasing as the infection rate declined. The MTA will continue to take every possible action to protect our customers and employees and combat the spread of COVID-19."
Earlier this month, the MTA announced that subway and bus riders who refuse to wear a mask while taking public transit will now be subject to a $50 fine, as part of a crackdown aimed at achieving "universal mask compliance." Since that began on September 14th, the MTA says that MTA officers have asked 2,342 customers to make adjustments to the masks they already were wearing so that they were covering both nose and mouth, distributed 2,646 masks to those who didn’t have them, and issued six summonses.
Schwartz agrees that mask compliance and other safety measures are still paramount in the subways. "When I took the 1 train today, there were two younger people not wearing masks. It bothered me, and I moved as far away from them as I could get," he said. "There's always going to be a stumbling block unless we can get close to 100% compliance. I've done some surveys that show we're in the 90% range of mask-wearing, which is very good, but we have to get 100%. So yes, the city, the police, the MTA and others need to get that message across."
According to Schwartz's research, truck traffic in NYC is already back at 100% of pre-pandemic levels, with car traffic back around 90% -- another reason he encourages people to return to mass transit rather than rely on cars. "I'm in my 70s, I do have asthma, I wear a second mask over my first mask, so I'm being extra cautious," he said. "But I am not hesitant to take the subway."
Demonstrations continued across Brooklyn this weekend as thousands of protesters again took to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to decry the recent police killings of black people across the country. And after nearly three months, New York City is ready to make a comeback from COVID-19.
Protesters hope this is a moment of reckoning for American policing. Experts say not so fast.
Glimmers of hope have emerged for Americans demanding action on police violence and systemic racism in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, the black man who gasped for air beneath the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer last month.
All four officers involved have been fired and charged in his death, a far more rapid show of accountability than has followed similar killings of unarmed black people. Massive, diverse crowds have filled streets nationwide, sometimes with politicians and law enforcement officials marching and kneeling alongside. Legislation banning chokeholds and other forms of force have been passed by local governments. And on Monday, congressional Democrats plan to roll out a sweeping package of police reforms on Capitol Hill.
But there are signs that Floyd’s killing might not be the watershed moment that civil rights advocates are hoping for, some experts say.
The extraordinary facts of the May 25 incident — the gradual loss of consciousness of a handcuffed man who cried out for his deceased mother with his final breaths — distinguishes it from the more common and more ambiguous fatal police encounters that lead to debate over whether use of force was justified. And the politics of police reform that have squashed previous efforts still loom: powerful unions, legal immunity for police and intractable implicit biases.
“We have 400 years of history of policing that tell me things tend not to change,” said Lorenzo Boyd, director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven. “It’s a breaking point right now, just like Trayvon Martin was a breaking point, just like Michael Brown was a breaking point. But the question is: Where do we go from here?”
It’s a familiar question for Gwen Carr, who watched her son take his final breaths on video as a New York police officer held him in a chokehold and he pleaded, “I can’t breathe.” Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, speaks on May 28 to a group of people gathered outside the Cup Foods where George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn. Carr was joined by Rev. Al Sharpton (L) and spoke about the need to hold police officers accountable for their actions. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Thousands of Americans filled the streets for Eric Garner in 2014 — mostly black men and women — with bull horns and protest signs in dozens of cities.
But their pleas for comprehensive police reforms took hold in only a smattering of the country’s more than 18,000 police departments. Dozens of agencies adopted training on de-escalating tense encounters. Sixteen states passed stricter requirements for use of deadly force.
Not a single piece of federal legislation passed on Capitol Hill.
The effectiveness of policy changes is blunted by police union contracts that protect officers from discipline and firing for wayward behavior.
“There are so many terms and conditions in the collective bargaining agreements that insulate police from accountability and transparency,” said Jody Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “Can we know who the bad police are? Are there public records? A lot of times, that is squelched in collective bargaining.”
Even changes to training can have little effect. A growing number of police departments are providing cadets with de-escalation and anti-bias training, but once they are assigned to a field training officer — a veteran on the force — the training can fall by the wayside, according to police training experts.
One of the rookie officers who helped hold Floyd down questioned whether they should roll the gasping man over, but then-officer Derek Chauvin dismissed the suggestion and insisted on “staying put” with his knee on Floyd’s neck, according to court records.
“Seasoned officers will push away from what they learned in the academy and go to what works for them in the street,” Boyd said. “And officers will often say, ‘We have to police people differently because force is all they understand.’”
“When you give police discretion to enforce any law, it seems to get disproportionately enforced against black folk. Whether it’s curfew, social distancing,” said Armour, noting that Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill.
“Would you have put your knee on a white guy’s neck like that? Would you have a little more recognition of humanity, and when he’s screaming out, ‘I can’t breathe,’ would that have raised more concern?” he said. “That’s the deeper problem.”
The vast majority of such cases are not caught on video and therefore often go unnoticed, Boyd said. For example, Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old emergency room technician who was shot at least eight times inside her home by Louisville police in March, is often left out of the discussion of systemic injustice — in part because no one was there to record Taylor getting shot by officers serving a drug warrant,said Andra Gillespie, director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. All three remain on administrative leave, but no charges have been filed, according to the Courier Journal.
Even killings captured on video rarely lead to prosecution of police officers. Sterling had a handgun in his pocket when he was tackled by police outside a Baton Rouge convenience store, and police said he was reaching for it when officers shot him six times.The DOJ and Louisiana attorney general decided not to file criminal charges against the officers involved. Attorneys for the officer who put Garner, 43, in a chokehold argued that he probably died because he was obese and had resisted arrest. Daniel Pantaleo lost his job after a disciplinary hearing four years later, but the Justice Department declined to bring criminal charges.
Charles H. Ramsey, a former chief in the District and Philadelphia and co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, said perhaps the biggest obstacle to nationwide change is the unwieldy way in which police departments are organized. With every city, town, state and county fielding its own force, he said, it’s hard to standardize training and policies.
“Regionalizing them would be a solid first step,” Ramsey said. “But then you get into the politics. Every county and every mayor; they want their own police force, they want their own chief.”
Meanwhile, the FBI still hasn’t followed through on a pledge to aggressively track the nation’s fatal police shootings.
“It’s been five years since they promised to fix that database,” Ramsey said. “Come on. That’s enough time.”
As New Yorkers Return To Subways, Mask Compliance Remains An Open Question
As riders trickle back to the New York City subway system as Phase One of reopening gets underway and regular service resumes, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Metropolitan Transit Authority have said that face coverings are required on public transit. But whether New Yorkers will comply, especially heading into a hot summer, remains an open question.
At Atlantic Terminal, there were MTA staffers distributing free masks and free hand sanitizer bottled by state prison inmates.
While many were seen wearing masks across a span of two hours, dozens of riders were seen entering the station without a mask. Several wore the masks incorrectly, either failing to cover their noses or mouths.
Jose Martinez
✔@JMartinezNYC
Scorecard from a subway car on a Bronx-bound No. 2 train with 13 riders:
Interim President of New York City Transit Sarah Feinberg reported seeing, “nearly 100% compliance on wearing masks,” on the L, F and Q lines.
MTA Chairman Pat Foye, speaking on WCBS said the agency conducted a survey last week and found out of 50,000 customers, 92 percent wore masks.
“That's an incredibly high level," he said. "We want to get it even higher. It is a requirement of state law. Compliance by our employees I think it's fair to say is 100 percent.”
Aside from relying on mask-wearing and social distancing measures, the MTA has been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on extensive cleaning during the day and during overnight shutdowns (the exact figure has yet to be released).
“The tiles, the floor, and even when you go in the train system itself you can smell the complete difference,” Chad Brown, 23, an electrician from East Flatbush, said.
Brown, who was returning to work in Midtown for the first time since the pandemic began, added that he was happy with the cleanliness and the number of people wearing masks, although during the early morning there were relatively few riders.
“I really wonder how we’re going to work it out when we’re on the train and it’s rush hour and there’s a lot of people. That’s my biggest concern,” Brown said.
Platforms at several major hubs were empty Monday morning, allowing most riders to have plenty of room, with only a couple of people standing. At Union Square and Fulton, there were social distancing decals, mostly of a sneaker footprint with an MTA tread, but also others variations, including paws, horseshoes, heels, and even prosthetic limbs.
Overnight subway service is still suspended from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., and Governor Cuomo suggested Monday that he doesn’t see an end to that.
To tout the return of the city’s “mojo” the Governor himself broke his more than three year streak of not riding the subway, by taking a symbolic ride on the 7 train from Queens to his office in Midtown.
Minuscule number of potentially fraudulent ballots in states with universal mail voting undercuts Trump claims about election risks
A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.
The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election.
The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the novel coronavirus — undercutting the president’s claims.
Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from around the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.
Current and former election officials in the three states said allegations that mail voting fosters widespread cheating are not only defied by the data, but also do not acknowledge the sophisticated and tightly controlled ways that voting operates in their jurisdictions, which have layers of security designed specifically to root out fraud and build confidence in the system.
Election officials and security experts said certain measures are important for preventing fraud in mail voting, such as accurate voter rolls and a method of authenticating ballots such as signature matching. Such safeguards have been put in place over time in the five states that currently run universal mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
As states move quickly to expand mail voting in response to health concerns, not all have implemented the full range of security measures.
Critics of mail ballots say they provide a bigger opening for fraud than in-person voting because state voter registration rolls contain errors and could allow ballots to be sent to ineligible voters or wrong addresses. And vote-buying schemes may be harder to detect in by-mail elections, as would voter coercion and intimidation, they note.
Current and former election officials in vote-by-mail states said their systems are designed specifically to mitigate these risks, starting with a regular stream of mail contact with voters to establish that the address listed for them on the rolls is accurate. The ERIC system, as well as regular checks against DMV, death and other records, flag voter registration entries that may need updating. Federal law also requires states to conduct basic list maintenance.
Once voting begins, the linchpin of the process is a ballot return envelope, which typically requires the voter’s signature and includes a unique bar code linked to that voter’s record. When the ballot is returned and the bar code is scanned, no other ballot can be cast by that voter for that election.
“I hear chatter a lot about Washington state mailing millions of ballots into a black hole, into the wind,” said Julie Anderson, auditor of Pierce County, Wash., which includes Tacoma. She said many people don’t understand how the envelope design prevents double voting, comparing would-be cheaters to people who purchase a single movie ticket online and print dozens of copies with the goal of admitting others free.
“When the attendant scans your bar code, that’s it,” she said. “All the tickets you gave your friends — they’re out of luck.”[ A voter places a ballot in a secure box as Providence City Clerk Shawn Selleck observes on June 2 in Providence, R.I. (Steven Senne/AP)[
The other mainstay of election security in vote-by-mail states is the signature verification process. Election workers are trained by law enforcement agencies to detect when a signature on the ballot envelope does not match signatures in a voter’s file. Discrepancies trigger a review that could end with a voter proving his or her identity — or being reported to law enforcement for possible ballot tampering.
U.S. economy officially went into a recession in February, ending record 128-month expansion
“The time that it takes for the economy to return to its previous peak level of activity or its previous trend path may be quite extended,” the committee’s report said.
Now, as states gradually ease pandemic restrictions, the question will be whether “reopening” fuels an economic turnaround anytime soon, or whether the downturn will extend into next year as people struggle to go back to work and the nation contends with a possible second wave of infections.
That the economy had plunged into a recession was not a surprise. As economist Ernie Tedeschi put it: “It’s now official (and utterly unsurprising).”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the economic consequences of the novel coronavirus to exceed $8 trillion. It also expects unemployment to hover above 10 percent into 2021, meaning the nation could still have joblessness that is worse than the Great Recession for months.
But experts say the turnaround will hinge on controlling the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 109,000 people in the United States.
The NBER report had no effect on Wall Street, which is in the midst of a stunning three-month rally. On Monday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index moved into positive territory for the year, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite set a record high and the Dow Jones industrial average extended its winning streak to six days.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has lifted almost all coronavirus restrictions in New Zealand.HAGEN HOPKINS/POOL PHOTO VIA AP[
New Zealand eradicates Covid-19
New Zealand announced that it's eradicated Covid-19, and most pandemic-related restrictions will now be lifted. [New Zealand Herald / Amelia Wade]
There have been no new Covid-19 cases in two weeks, and the last treated patient was released from the hospital 12 days ago. The country had a total of 1,154 confirmed cases and 22 deaths from the virus. [U.S. News / Michael Baker and Nick Wilson]
As a result, the country it's bringing its alert system down to Level 1 –– the lowest of the four ranks. Most restrictions will now be lifted: social distancing is no longer required and people can freely gather in public. Borders, however, will remain closed, and those arriving from abroad will still have to quarantine for 14 days. [BBC]
People will also have to use a government contact tracing app to scan a QR code whenever they enter a business. This will make it easier for officials to track and isolate the virus before a major outbreak occurs. [NYT / Damien Cave]
New Zealand has been applauded for its swift and drastic response to Covid-19 –– which at the time was criticized for being too strict. The country went into lockdown on March 23 when there were no deaths and just 102 confirmed cases. [CNN / Ben Westcott]
New Zealand now joins a small group of countries that have announced their eradication of the virus –– Montenegro, Fiji and the Faroe Islands –– and the only to do so with more than 1,000 cases. Meanwhile, Taiwan, Iceland, Cambodia, and Trinidad and Tobago say they have less than 10 actives cases. [The Guardian / Charlotte Graham-McLay]
The picture for testing is improving, slowly. The United States is completing more than 300,000 tests a day, double the amount of a month ago, according to The Covid Tracking Project.
Still, the level of testing in the United States is orders of magnitude less than what many epidemiologists say it should be. The country should be doing at least 900,000 tests a day — and as many as 20 million — to yield an accurate picture of the outbreak, they say. The need for extensive testing is even more acute as many governors have reopened their states before the epidemic has crested. Without sufficient testing it will be hard to identify and contain new outbreaks.
Most testing is not done by public health authorities — whose labs have been chronically underfunded — but by hospital laboratories and major for-profit testing companies.
There have been calls for more than a decade to create a national laboratory system that could oversee a testing response in a public health crisis. An effort to create one 10 years ago withered away over time because of a lack of funding.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] Sami Adamson, a freelance scenic artist, had to wait more than two months to collect unemployment benefits from New Jersey after applying.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times[/caption]
Jobless claims reach 38.6 million in nine weeks.
Even as restrictions on businesses began lifting across the United States, another 2.4 million workers filed for jobless benefits last week, the government reported Thursday, bringing the total of new claims to more than 38 million in nine weeks.
A recent household survey from the Census Bureau suggests that the pain is widespread: Forty-seven percent of adults said they or a member of their household had lost employment income since mid-March. Nearly 40 percent expected the loss to continue over the next four weeks.
And there is increasing concern that many jobs are not coming back, even for those who consider themselves laid off temporarily.
Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who is a co-author of an analysis of the pandemic’s effects on the labor market, estimates that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job losses. “I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” he said of the path to recovery.
Against Trump’s wishes, the push to vote by mail is growing in several states.
Mr. Trump is continuing to rail against voting by mail, which is increasingly viewed as a necessary option for voting amid a pandemic.
His antipathy, however, has done little so far, to slow its growth as an option in both Democratic and Republican states. Eleven of the 16 states that limit who can vote absentee have eased their election rules this spring to let anyone cast an absentee ballot in upcoming primary elections — and in some cases, in November as well. Another state, Texas, is fighting a court order to do so.
Four of those 11 states are mailing ballot applications to registered voters. And that doesn’t count 34 other states and the District of Columbia that already allow anyone to cast an absentee ballot, including five states in which vote-by-mail is the preferred method by law.
Part of the growth is because of the specter of people voting and getting sick amid the pandemic, as happened in Wisconsin last month. But part reflects the growth of voting by mail as an increasingly desired option even before the coronavirus. In 2016, nearly one in four voters cast absentee or mail ballots, twice the share just 16 years ago, in 2004.
Nearly one in four New Yorkers lacks adequate food, the city says.
Two months into the coronavirus pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of people out of work, nearly one in four New Yorkers needs food, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday.
To address the problem, the city plans to increase to 1.5 million the number of meals it distributes each day by next week, officials said, with a million to be delivered and 500,000 available for pickup at schools.
Before the virus hit, Mr. de Blasio said, officials believed that “somewhere over a million” city residents “were food-insecure, needed food more, at some point in the year.”
As a result of the pandemic, he said, “we think that number is two million or more. So almost a doubling. That’s why we have made food such a central part of what we do in response to this crisis.”
The city has been expanding its food-distribution efforts for weeks and has given out 32 million meals during the crisis, the mayor said.
Subway ridership is up 50 percent from last month, but still far below normal.
New Yorkers are slowly beginning to return to the subway system, in another sign that Americans at the center of the global coronavirus pandemic are eager for a return to normalcy.
Subway rides are now averaging 600,000 a day, after a low of 400,000 in April, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Wednesday.
Bus ridership is up too, from a low of 400,000 to some 700,000 trips a day.
The nation’s biggest mass transit system saw its ridership plummet over 90 percent, in part by government order: Only essential workers are supposed to use it, along with people who absolutely need to.
Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of the New York City Transit Authority, who oversees bus and subway service, said at the monthly MTA board meeting that these relatively modest increases in ridership make proper social distancing on public transit all but impossible.
“The goal will have to be, being absolutely vigilant about your mask use and putting as much distance from yourself and the next person as possible,” she said.
Since the statewide stay-at-home order was announced in late March for all non-essential workers, those essential workers who have had to keep taking mass transit have reported crowded subway cars and buses during rush hours.
The head of buses, Craig Cipriano, urged non-essential workers to avoid riding the buses over the Memorial Day weekend. “We can’t risk overwhelming the system. Part of keeping everyone safe for now is staying off the buses,” he said. “So please don't try to take them to the beach this weekend. We need all New Yorkers to do their part, that means staying away for now.”
The MTA has instituted measures to protect its workers, like protective plastic barriers in work places and on buses, rear door boarding for buses, and it is increasing its “temperature brigades.” Next week, it will roll out its experimental UV light treatment at a few limited locations.
Michael Cohen was released from prison amid coronavirus concerns.
Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, was released from a federal prison on Thursday on furlough and returned to his home in Manhattan, one of his lawyers said. He had asked to be released over health concerns tied to the coronavirus.
His projected release date was November 2021. A law enforcement official said it was expected that Mr. Cohen would serve the balance of his sentence under home confinement.
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Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, speaks on May 28 to a group of people gathered outside the Cup Foods where George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn. Carr was joined by Rev. Al Sharpton (L) and spoke about the need to hold police officers accountable for their actions. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has lifted almost all coronavirus restrictions in New Zealand.HAGEN HOPKINS/POOL PHOTO VIA AP[
A voter places a ballot in a secure box as Providence City Clerk Shawn Selleck observes on June 2 in Providence, R.I. (Steven Senne/AP)[
Sami Adamson, a freelance scenic artist, had to wait more than two months to collect unemployment benefits from New Jersey after applying.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times[/caption]
