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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

BY BILL HAMMOND A pending change to New York’s Medicaid program known as the pharmacy “carve-out” is drawing opposition from a range of interests, including insurers, AIDS clinics and the health-care labor union 1199 SEIU. New Yorkers concerned about good

BY E.J. McMAHON New York could be on the way to its first population decline in any decade since the 1970s, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Empire State’s July 1, 2020 population of 19,336,776 was down

BY E.J. McMAHON New York State’s tax receipts in November were a whopping $800 million above Governor Andrew Cuomo’s projections for the month—further evidence that the current-year budget gap is probably much smaller than Cuomo has been claiming. Meanwhile, however,

Western New York’s leading legal mind — a civil rights lawyer who is widely considered to be among the top five or ten criminal defense attorneys in North America — and his exemplar legal sidekick are the architects of a

President-elect Joe Biden is offering his formal backing to an ‘omnibus Indian recognition bill’ early in the next Congress.  Sources close to the matter expect the bill to include formal federal recognition of the indigenous political status of Native Hawaiians

Activists at Six Nations say that Crown-Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett is risking the credibility of the Trudeau government’s wide-ranging rhetoric relating to Canada’s historic alliance with Six Nations if she continues to delay the direct talks that she has

Sources familiar with Governor Andrew Cuomo‘s thinking explain to The Chronicle that — if he were to come out as ‘openly bisexual’ as many Albany politicos have been rumoring for weeks — it would be a more nuanced announcement.  “Italian-Americans don’t

At first, it might seem outrageous to even consider — perhaps even preposterous — but contemplate for a moment a plausible (albeit far-fetched) scenario of geopolitics: Imagine that Canada’s thirteen provinces joined the United States of America as thirteen sovereign

According to sources inside Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth II is planning to name Prince William as the successor to Her Throne in Scotland and to name Prince Harry as the successor to Her Throne in Northern Ireland.  Despite rumors to

In the unlikely event that the alleged President-elect Joe Biden, 77, dies before the House of Representatives officially certifies the election on January 6th, the House of Representatives would elect the President.  If Biden dies after that certification but before

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is telling close associates that she will run for United States Senate in the Democratic Party Primary against Minority Leader Charles Schumer — if he settles for anything less than full student loan forgiveness during the next

The son of the presumptive Vice President-elect Joe Biden is facing allegations in Chinese media this week that he used racial epithets during an aggressive sexual encounter with an African American woman in Maryland in 2018, which was recorded on