Good Thursday morning.
It’s International Dance Day, which was created by the Dance Committee of the International Theatre Institute ITI, the main partner for the performing arts of UNESCO, in 1982. To mark this dance, which is a celebration of all things related to moving the body rhythmically, a prominent dance personality is chosen to issue a statement or message.
This year, it’s Friedemann Vogel, a German ballet dancer who performs with the Stuttgart Ballet as a Principal dancer and also as a frequent guest artist at major ballet companies around the world. In his statement, Vogel reflects on the past pandemic year and how it prevented performers like himself from doing what they love – and also earning a living.
What follows is a snippet…you can find the entire statement here:
Never in recent history has the dance community been so collectively challenged to stay motivated, to find our raison d’être. Yet, it is precisely when something precious has been taken away from us that we truly appreciate how vital it is what we do, and how much dance means to society at large.
Though theaters are starting to reopen here in New York, the pandemic has really taken a significant toll on the arts, which are so fundamental to who were are as humans. I am hopeful that the community will survive – it is nothing if not resilient and creative.
Also, it was a little bittersweet to read a recent the New York Times story about how the dance world is experiencing a baby boom as women who otherwise would not have been able to find the space to take time off from the stage to have children now had the ability to do so.
On the one hand, it’s awesome that these women were able to have their families without sacrificing their careers,, as COVID-19 forced them to take a break. On the other hand, the idea that these women are so restricted in their ability to so something as elemental as having a child, should they so choose, because their professional performance window is so small makes me sad.
Since we are coming down to the end of April, I feel I would be remiss not to mention that this was both Parkinson’s Awareness Month. There are people in my life who are impacted by this disease and raising the collective knowledge about what that means is important.
In case you didn’t know, BTW, the official definition of Parkinson’s is: “a neurodegenerative disorder that affects predominately dopamine-producing (“dopaminergic”) neurons in a specific area of the brain called substantia nigra.” The cause is unknown and there is no cure. The disease itself is not fatal, but the complications it causes can be.
A reminder: All of New York’s state-run vaccination sites will be open for walk-in appointments today.
I hate to be the bearer of more bad news…but there’s rain in the forecast again today. It will be very humid, and the temperature could hit around 63 degrees.
In the headlines…
President Joe Biden spoke directly to working- and middle-class Americans who “feel left behind and forgotten” in a rapidly changing economy in his first address to a joint session of Congress.
Biden pressed his so-far popular agenda, which includes a $2 trillion infrastructure plan and a newly unveiled, $1.8 trillion plan for families, children and students. He also touched on racial justice and reiterated his administration’s efforts to ban “ghost guns.”
The president delivered his speech before a sparse, socially distanced audience in the House Chamber — and declared that “America is on the move again.”
Under the cloud of a pandemic and an insurrection, a locked-down Capitol provided an unusual backdrop for President Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress.
Biden laid out an ambitious agenda to rewrite the American social compact by vastly expanding family leave, child care, health care, preschool and college education for millions of people to be financed with increased taxes on the wealthiest earners.
Here’s the full transcript of the president’s speech.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina criticized Biden and argued he is failing to deliver on his promises in the GOP rebuttal to the President’s first address to a joint session of Congress. The full transcript of his speech is here.
Scott, who is Black, knocked Biden for “empty platitudes” about national unity while also accusing the U.S. of “systemic racism”, insisting that “America is not a racist country.”
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, of Texas, was caught sleeping during Biden’s speech.
For the first time in history, two women sat behind a president during an address to a joint session of Congress. “Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President,” Biden said. “No president has ever said those words from this podium and it’s about time.”
Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert displayed a thermal space blanket similar to those distributed to migrants held at detention facilities at the southern border during Biden’s speech.
The livestream of Biden’s speech included an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter, the first time in history an administration has provided ASL interpretation for such a congressional address.
Federal authorities raided the Manhattan apartment and offices of former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, amid a continuing investigation into the former New York mayor’s dealings in Ukraine, his attorney said.
The execution of search warrants is an extraordinary action for prosecutors to take against a lawyer, let alone a lawyer for a former president.
An attorney for Giuliani, Robert Costello, said the warrant described an investigation into possible violation of foreign lobbying laws and that it sought communications between Giuliani and people including a former columnist for The Hill, John Solomon.
“They’re trying to make Rudy Giuliani look like a criminal. He has done nothing wrong,” Costello said.
Giuliani tweeted that he would appear on his afternoon live radio show despite the FBI raid, but then deleted the tweet and did not come on the air.
The former mayor’s son, Andrew Giuliani, who is mulling a run for governor of New York, blasted the FBI raid and claimed that a judge appointed by former President Barack Obama signed the warrant.
City officials in Chicago released body camera footage showing a police officer fatally shooting Anthony Alvarez, 22, after an early-morning foot chase on the city’s Northwest Side in March.
Three Georgia men were indicted on federal hate crime charges in connection with the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man shot to death while jogging through a South Georgia neighborhood last year, the Justice Department announced.
One day before a jury convicted an ex-officer of murdering George Floyd, police officers answering a complaint about someone loitering in a park in the Bay Area suburb of Alameda pinned Mario Arenales Gonzalez to the ground facedown until he died.
The Justice Department officials plan to ask a grand jury to indict Derek Chauvin and the three other former officers involved in Floyd’s death on charges of civil rights violations.
After deputies in North Carolina fatally shot a Black man last week, law enforcement offered promises of transparency. But few facts emerged – a void of information that raised suspicions and helped stoke national outrage.
About 2 million $1,400 stimulus checks have been issued in a seventh batch of payments. The total number sent to date is now approximately 163 million, or about $384 billion.
Officials from both parties say the census numbers released this week raise questions about the totals, with Democrats contending that the Hispanic population was undercounted.
More than half of U.S. states have seen a significant decline in new coronavirus cases over the past two weeks, as federal health officials have begun to suggest that the virus’s trajectory is improving. But vaccination levels remain uneven.
The United States is reporting an average of 2.7 million daily Covid-19 vaccinations over the past week, according to data from the CDC, about equivalent to levels one month ago. Daily reported vaccinations peaked at 3.4 million on April 13.
A new study suggests that some recipients may experience swollen lymph nodes after receiving the jab, a side effect that the researchers found was more common among those who already had a coronavirus infection.
Biden vowed that the United States will become an “arsenal of vaccination” for the rest of the world to fight COVID-19.
Health experts in India wonder if a more contagious variant that dodges the immune system could be fueling the epidemic inside the world’s hardest-hit nation.
Britain’s health minister Matt Hancock announced the country would be purchasing 60 million Pfizer/BionNTech COVID-19 vaccines to bolster the supply of vaccines ahead of the booster program being implemented in the fall.
Researchers are trying to come up with tests that can be performed using a blood sample that will determine not only whether a vaccine will work but also for how long.
The first two COVID vaccines to gain authorization in the U.S. have proven to be 94 percent effective at preventing hospitalizations among fully vaccinated adults 65 years or older, the CDC said.
Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine can remain stable at temperatures found in refrigerators for 3 months, the company said, citing new data.
Oregon is placing a large portion of the state under new restrictions, pulling back on recent re-openings as Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations climb once more.
New York will end a longstanding curfew next month that forced bars and restaurants to close early in a bid to fight the spread of the coronavirus, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
The curfew, which currently requires establishments to stop serving customers at midnight, will end statewide on May 17 for outdoor dining areas and May 31 for indoor dining.
The announcement came on the same day that the state legislature suspended several of the governor’s executive orders, including one requiring the sale of food with alcoholic drinks at bars and restaurants.
Both chambers of the state Legislature passed resolutions repealing three of Cuomo’s executive orders issued under his COVID-19 emergency powers, marking their first formal rebuke of the governor’s pandemic restrictions.
State lawmakers will be voting on extending the eviction moratorium next Monday.
Many New Yorkers happily shed their masks outside a day after the CDC updated its COVID-10 face covering guidelines.
A New York City Council bill would pave the way for additional car-free roads and outdoor space for New Yorkers under a program that began last year during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The effort by Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in nursing homes in New York State was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months.
Senior Cuomo staffers reportedly buried a scientific paper that reported the true number of nursing home deaths, blocked health officials from releasing the accurate tally and didn’t publicize an audit of the data until months after it was completed.
JCOPE has appointed a new executive director as it confronts scandals surrounding Cuomo: former state Judge Sanford Berland, who is the fourth executive director in the ethics watchdog’s 10-year history.
A woman who said she worked on a 2001 campaign for Scott Stringer, the New York City comptroller who is now running for mayor, has accused him of sexually assaulting her 20 years ago.
The woman, Jean Kim, now a political lobbyist, said at a news conference that Stringer, without her consent, “repeatedly groped me, put his hands on my thighs and between my legs and demanded to know why I would not have sex with him.”
“I have tried my best to put this chapter of my life behind me,” Kim said. “I’m coming forward now because being forced to see him in my living room, TV, everyday, pretending to be a champion for women’s rights, just sickens me, and I know the truth.”
Former state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who himself resigned amid accusations of sexual abuse and harassment, introduced Kim to Stringer in 2001.
Stringer categorically denied accusations that he sexually abused and harassed Kim two decades ago during his campaign for NYC public advocate, saying that the two had a strictly consensual “on and off” relationship.
Stringer appeared with his wife Elyse Buxbaum during a press conference and she defended him while revealing she herself is a survivor of sexual abuse.
The allegations caused one of Stringer’s earliest and most vocal supporters, Queens Sen. Jesscia Ramos, to pull her backing of his mayoral bid.
Other progressive female lawmakers who endorsed Stringer — Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou and state Sens. Alessandra Biaggi and Julia Salazar — issued a statement saying, “as survivors of childhood sexual assault, we believe survivors.”
Leaders of Orthodox Jewish sects in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood are supporting Andrew Yang’s campaign for mayor — a voting bloc that could help greatly in his bid to run City Hall.
Straphangers are slowly returning to the subway — but the number of full-time workers who use the system to commute to work is dragging down the MTA’s ridership numbers, data shared by the agency show.
The NYPD will return “Digidog” — the robotic police dog that became the subject of a City Council subpoena after video of it went viral.
In response to a subpoena from City Councilman Ben Kallos and Speaker Corey Johnson requesting records related to the device, police said a contract worth roughly $94,000 to lease the robotic dog from Boston Dynamics had been terminated on April 22.
Revel, the company best known for its electric-moped-share system, is locked in a battle with New York City over launching an electric-vehicle ride-hailing service in Manhattan next month.
New York City issued a cease and desist notice to JOCO, a privately-run rival to Citi Bike, demanding it halt operations because it isn’t authorized, sources told The Post.
The former head of the Brooklyn chapter of the carpenters union was found guilty of accepting more than $70,000 in bribes from hundreds of people looking for work.
Thirty-five songbirds were discovered hidden inside hair curlers in a man’s clothing when he arrived this week at Kennedy International Airport in New York, the authorities said.
New York City sued the fast-food giant Chipotle Mexican Grill over what it says are hundreds of thousands of violations of a fair scheduling law at several dozen stores.
A veteran NYPD officer ran for his life as an accused drunken driver bore down on him, ignoring traffic cones and flashing police lights before plowing into the doomed cop, a law enforcement source said.
Albany police have launched an internal investigation into why officers obscured their badge numbers during the forceful clearing of an encampment outside of a police station last week.
A rezoning proposal to allow the construction of 240 apartments on land in the city’s far northern reaches was pulled from a vote by a City Council committee this week to make changes to the resolution and supporting documents.
During a four-day period in April, multiple police agencies took part in an investigation into child exploitation and human trafficking in the Capital Region – charging 14 men and one woman with prostitution solicitation, criminal sex acts and attempted rape.
An “armed and dangerous” upstate man killed himself after police chased him in the wake of a fatal shooting of a man and woman in a real estate agency in Watertown, State Police said.
Schenectady City Council President John Mootooveren narrowly survived a no-confidence vote to retain leadership of a panel increasingly plagued by infighting.
For the second time in three days, fire destroyed a row of homes in Troy.
Both a Democrat and a Republican have announced challenges to unseat NY-21 GOP U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik — 18 months before the next election.
Amazon is raising wages for its hourly employees after a majority of workers at one of the e-commerce giant’s warehouses voted not to unionize.
Happy 10th wedding anniversary to Prince William and Kate Middleton!
Kamala Harris will be the first vice president of the United States to get the wax treatment at Madame Tussauds.
RIP Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft Columbia in orbit 60 miles above the moon while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Col. Buzz Aldrin, became the first men to walk on the lunar surface, who has died at the age of 90.
