Anthony Almojera is a lieutenant with FDNY EMS, the vice president of Local 3621 FDNY Uniformed EMS Officers and the author of “Riding the Lightning: A Year in the Life of a New York City Paramedic.” For nearly three years, New York City’s EMTs...
Astoria, Queens, is now a tortuous asphalt maze of unforgiving closed streets, bright green paint, white lines, warning signs and merciless traffic arrows pointing and entrapping motorists into a gridlocked abyss. Drivers are stressed to the...
In the struggle to establish credibility as social justice warriors, half the battle is showing up, barking and flashing righteous indignation, while hiding tell-tale signs of the unowned hypocrisy of fiercely defended personal privilege, and...
Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York, now running for mayor is already counting his chickens before they hatch. He’s announced that even before he wins the Democratic primary, which appears to be inevitable, that he intends to...
When New York State's Board of Regents spiked and forever forbade logos, mascots and all Native American conjuring names and imagery from its school sports teams, they no doubt felt they were doing the Lord's work and were on the right side of...
At the end of April, Mark Carney was elected prime minister of Canada, securing the fourth straight term for the Liberal Party. His victory follows a prolonged collapse of confidence in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party and a surging far-right...
A distant relative of mine fled Europe during a period of particular turbulence and settled in South Africa, where due to her racist proclivities, she assimilated comfortably, feeling at home in a similar system of oppression that had persecuted...
My friend's parents' German citizenship, like that of all Jews, was stolen by the Nazis through their "Nuremberg Laws.” Being stripped of nationhood was an early step towards total dehumanization. Although my friend had no interest in setting foot...
Mark Bullaro is a retired NYC DOC assistant deputy warden. President Harry Truman espoused the motto “The buck stops here,” indicating it was he who was ultimately responsible for his decisions and the outcomes. He displayed those words on his...
Mark I. Partnow, a former justice of the Kings County Supreme Court, and Sagar Chadha are senior partners at Liakas Law, a family-run and community-based law firm. The year was 1885. Brooklyn was still its own city, American industry was booming,...
What do the EMS and firing squads have in common? One dispatches ambulances; the other dispatches people. But now, patients are prisoners also. They are captives of FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker's "Computer Aided Dispatch," which has suspended...
After a decade as New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo resigned in 2021 under a cloud of controversy around sexual misconduct. He is now running for New York City mayor. In the words of...
There's a lot of talk these days about cognitive impairment. When it's real and how it's measured is disputed, especially when the subjects are public figures. My original diagnostic test is the most reliable. It can be tailored to holders...
It’s no secret that in New York City the most important qualification for getting elected mayor is being a Democrat. It does not even require a candidate to be a good Democrat. Since the five boroughs merged in 1898, some of the worst mayors have...
I remember rotary phones and telephone booths, so I'm part of the dinosaur subset of the population that actuaries predict will soon return to the primordial soup and revert to pre-birth non-existence. Like when I was a kid, I deal only in...
President Donald Trump’s tariffs, while destabilizing both domestic and global markets, signal more than a shift in trade policy — they mark a rupture in the dominant political-economic consensus. That rupture has sparked a wave of speculation: Is...
Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, and pigs see you as an equal. Winston Churchill's astute observation, slightly tweaked, describes how people of different ideological breeds view the police. In the polarized miasma of contemporary...
The first sentence of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” is foreboding. It reads, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Millions of Americans have been undergoing an ideological lobotomy over the...
I have no plasma screen and all I know about plasma is blood related and my experience with streaming is strictly allergy related. I've attended traditional movie theaters avidly ever since I was uploaded with hormones and found the dark and...
The author is a former 2nd vice president of District Council 37 Local 1549. He was also a member of the Health Care Transition teams of former Governor Elliot Spitzer and Mayor Eric Adams. It is ludicrous for the Trump-Musk government to say...
This week marks the fifth anniversary of the passing of my father, Lenin Fierro — one of the first municipal workers to succumb to complications from Covid. As we commemorate this week, we reflect on his profound impact on our city's safety and...
P.T. Barnum, who said "There's a sucker born every minute,” lived before the population explosion and the present era of warp speed mass gullibility. Today, a sucker is born every nano-second. And all persuasions are equal opportunity suckers for...
Leaking bags of dripping animal blood, receptacles crawling with maggots, goat, sheep and lamb stools, drains clogged with bird droppings and feathers, spoiled, ashen meat by-products hosting larvae and vermin, tortured sentient creatures in...
The eternal truths are always topical, and, if you track current events, the haunting loss of childhood innocence is rich in renewable content. Kids who viewed Sesame Street's debut and befriended Big Bird and Cookie Monster are now queuing for...
Marcella Bencivenni is professor of history at Hostos Community College, where she has been teaching since 2004. Zainab Shakoor is a philosophy and psychology major and a junior at City College of New York. There’s been widespread coverage...
