Month: January 2021

BY LEON ARON On his return from Germany, where he recuperated from an attempt on his life by Russian secret services, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested at the airport and sentenced to 30 days in prison for allegedly violating the

BY E.J. McMAHON The two top priorities Governor Cuomo identified in his State of the State speech Monday morning were “Defeat COVID” and “Vaccinate New York.” Judging by my personal experience of the Health Department’s labyrinthine vaccine appointment system, the

The Cuomo administration is refusing to release a full count of coronavirus deaths in New York nursing homes for another two months, until March 22. In a letter to the Empire Center on Wednesday, the Health Department claimed that it needs a

BY E.J. McMAHON State tax receipts in the month of December came in $1.4 billion above the latest projection by Governor Cuomo’s Division of the Budget (DOB), according to a cash report released late today by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s

BY E.J. McMAHON Somewhere within that vast fog bank of a FY 2022 Executive Budget that Governor Cuomo began to roll out today is a structural budget gap, opened during the pandemic recession and temporarily obscured by piles of federal cash that

BY E.J. McMAHON The Cuomo administration is quietly extending a temporary freeze on scheduled pay hikes for about 135,000 unionized state government employees and public college faculty members—although the largest affected labor union says it still expects those bucks to

BY BILL HAMMOND After second-guessing the FDA with its own vaccine task force, the Cuomo administration is declining to share even basic information about that panel’s approval process until mid-February. Replying to a Freedom of Information Law request from the