Looting...

Minneapolis residents woke Friday to smoke-filled skies and the sounds of sirens. Rioting in south Minneapolis overnight delved deeper into the neighborhoods of the city’s south side, with fires gutting businesses before firefighters could quench them.

Firefighters worked through the morning to control the fires set at Ivy Building for the Arts in the city’s Seward neighborhood. The historic building housed artists and craftspeople. Regina Marie Williams and her husband had space in the building. 

Clash...

 

A  clash of the social network titans is taking shape after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called out Twitter for adding a fact-check to a tweet from President Trump. On Tuesday, Twitter added a fact-check label to Mr. Trump's tweet about mail-in voting, along with a link directing users to information debunking the president's false claims about mail-in voting fraud.  

In an interview with Fox News' Dana Perino, Zuckerberg differed with Twitter's approach, saying "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online," and neither should other private companies.

Zuckerberg's reaction to the situation comes after President Trump threatened to "strongly regulate" or even shut down social media companies. "Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.

No one is making the social media a guardian of the truth. Just a thought.

Landscaping...

Mic...

Tears...

Rupture...

Manhattan needs its people back. But do the people need Manhattan? COVID-19 may not be a pause, as Gov. Cuomo puts it, but a rupture  one that has vast implications for New York.

For half a century, New York’s growth policy,  has been as follows:

Step one: Build up a dense corporate office hub centered around 150 blocks of Midtown Manhattan. 

Step two: Improve transit, so that you can move these millions of commuters onto the island of Manhattan every day in crowded metal tubes, and then, at the end of the day, move them back out.

Moving people back and forth from Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey during the day. Manhattanites who no longer walked to work from tenements to the docks or the Garment District could take the subway to new jobs in restaurants, retail, cleaning  serving a huge office market.

Yet this system was in peril even before the outbreak. Subways and commuter lines were beyond capacity at peak hours, and even off-peak. Developers had overbuilt, thanks to cheap global money and the politicians hunger for collecting taxes.

So when Covid 19 hit, New York City became death trap.  Just a thought.

Andy...

Andy Byford, the popular former boss of New York City’s subways and buses, will take the helm of London’s transit agency, the city’s Mayor Sadik Khan announced Wednesday.

“I look forward to working with Andy as we build a greener city with clean and environmentally-friendly travel, including walking and cycling, at the heart of its recovery,” Khan said in a statement.

Byford, 54, who previously ran the transit system in Toronto, began his career in 1989 as a station foreman in London’s subway system.

He left the NYC MTA in February after just two years, during which he clashed with Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

In his dramatic exit, Byford said Cuomo made his job “intolerable” and “yelled” at transit staff behind his back.

The cheery Brit was also known for taking public transit to work with his nametag on, and a cult of personality developed around him — with fans dubbing him “Train Daddy” and designing stickers with his face in front of a subway car.

Failed...

Whether there was a specific timeline for the next phase of reopening, the governor of the Empire State had a surprisingly candid response.

“Now, people can speculate. People can guess. “I’m out of that business because we all failed at that business. Right? All the early national experts. Here’s my projection model.  They were all wrong. They were all wrong.”

Cuomo continued: “There are a lot of variables. I understand that. We didn’t know what the social distancing would actually amount to. I get it, but we were all wrong. So, I’m sort of out of the guessing business, right?”

The state has reported over 362,000 Covid-19 cases and over 29,000 deaths from the highly contagious virus.

Now is the time to blame all this failure on everybody else. Is not only me, look at the experts.

The governor earlier rejected the experts in remodeling La Guardia air port since he new it all.

Just a thought

Mumble...

Tsunami...

Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on Sunday warned that key employees -- including health care workers, firefighters, police officers and teachers -- could be laid off if the state does not receive additional funding from the federal government.

The Democrat  have called for additional federal assistance while the White House is reluctant to provide additional funds to states. On Friday, Murphy announced the state is estimated to have a revenue loss of $10 billion.

Governor Cuomo’s budget office is due to release an updated financial report, and the numbers are grim. Cuomo says the pandemic and the resulting “economic tsunami” caused by stay at home orders has meant a 14% drop in state revenues to $13.3 billion dollars, which is projected to total $61 billion dollars over the next four years.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett on Sunday said " there should be a data analysis on state budget shortfalls and that some state's requests are "radically more money than the expected shortfall for the year."