Family-run Grocers in NYC want fairness

Why Family-Run Grocers Are Suing New York Over City-Run Stores

A coalition of small-business owners is suing for antitrust violations and predatory pricing after the city promised to provide food staples for 30 percent off.

Josefina Aguirre grew up among the piñatas hanging from the ceiling of Little Mexico Meat Market, the store her parents opened in New York City’s El Barrio in 1997, three years after her father crossed the border from Mexico at 17.

She has a bachelor’s degree in business management, a qualification her parents, Oscar and Guadalupe Aguirre, insisted on. But she came back to work at the store anyway—to the same three coolers of fresh cheese and cilantro, the same shelves of jalapeños and tomatillos, and the same customers who still bring in their mail so she can read it to them in English.

The store has survived the opening of a Costco nearby. It survived COVID-19, barely. Her father caught the virus and died before he ever got to enjoy the retirement he had worked 28 years for.

Now, Aguirre and her sisters, who run the shop together, are bracing for what they see as the biggest threat yet: a city-subsidized grocery store that can sell a $10 steak for $7, because, unlike them, it doesn’t have to turn a profit.

“We’re not scared of competition,” Aguirre told The Epoch Times on Aug. 29 from behind the counter in Spanish Harlem. “We just want fair competition.”

Read about it...

Prosecutor squeals on Big Tish

Targeting Trump

A prosecutor in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office alleged that he was instructed to pursue President Donald Trump and several organizations linked to Trump without a credible reason for targeting them, according to an internal email first reported by the Times Union.

In an email sent Aug. 28 to more than 2,000 employees in James’ office, Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld accused his supervisor, Investor Protection Bureau chief Shamiso Maswoswe, of directing him to “find and pursue crimes committed by specific individuals and organizations affiliated with Donald Trump,” the Union reported.

Wiesenfeld reportedly said he was instructed to “target Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard” without what he considered a credible basis for investigating those individuals and organizations. Hewlett Packard recently acquired Juniper Networks in a deal James and other state attorneys general opposed after the Department of Justice (DOJ) approved the merger.

The email was quickly removed from the office’s servers and disappeared from employees’ inboxes, according to the Union, which cited three people familiar with the communications.

The outlet reported that James’ general counsel subsequently sent an office-wide message describing the incident as an internal matter, and the office placed Wiesenfeld on paid administrative leave.

Read more...

Letitia James NY AG targeted Trump and allies

NY AG Letitia James faces accusation her office targeted Trump allies for political reasons

Haven't we suspected/known this all along?

A prosecutor in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office says he was instructed to investigate Trump-affiliated individuals and organizations without credible cause, an allegation James’ office strongly denies.

Daniel Wiesenfeld, a former Brooklyn prosecutor now with the New York Attorney General’s Investor Protection Bureau, sent a mass email accusing his own office of ordering politically motivated investigations. The email, reportedly delivered to about 2,000 staffers and later deleted, charged that he was told to “find and pursue crimes” committed by people and groups tied to former President Donald Trump, even when there was no credible reason to do so.

Wiesenfeld’s message named names. He claimed Bureau Chief Shamiso Maswoswe had directed him to target “Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard (DOJ approved merger)... without having a credible reason for targeting the organizations and individuals.” 

He went further, warning colleagues, “If you believe Trump is using the [Department of Justice] attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interests, you should find it equally troubling that Tish [James] is doing exactly the same thing.”

The prosecutor’s warning was blunt: “I ask you that you not serve as Tish’s personal attorneys by targeting her political enemies. Instead, I hope (he hopes?) you choose to prosecute crimes and find the individuals accountable, rather than targeting individuals and then finding crimes.”

Read about it...

FBI Sting -- arrests woman in ISIS bombing plot

Albany woman charged in alleged ISIS-inspired Capitol bombing plot after FBI sting with three undercover operatives

Federal agents arrested a 35-year-old Albany woman on charges she plotted to bomb the New York State Capitol for ISIS, a case built over weeks by three undercover FBI operatives who posed as terrorist allies and handed her a disabled explosive device.

Jessica Bowie stepped out of a meeting on August 19 believing she had just taken possession of a working bomb. FBI agents were waiting. 

The arrest, the Washington Examiner reported, capped an operation in which three paid FBI sources, all with histories the bureau described as "credible and reliable", had spent weeks drawing out Bowie's intentions, supplying her with inert weapons, and documenting her escalating plans.

Bowie now faces a single charge of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, carrying up to 20 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, and a lifetime of supervised release.

A federal judge ordered her held without bail after her initial court appearance the following day.

Read about it...

NYC Democrat Socialist Rent Advisor is a deadbeat tenant

The daughter of a famed music studio owner is being sued for allegedly squatting in a New York City apartment for years

She has refused to pay rent to her Black landlord for four years...drove him into bankruptcy

Tracy Rosenthal, the 39-year-old daughter of Steve Rosenthal, has been on a 'rent strike' for the last four years after moving back to the city from Los Angeles.

Rosenthal claimed during a North Carolina Democratic Socialists meeting that her two-bedroom $2,300 apartment in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood was riddled with cockroaches, the New York Post reported.

Tracy Rosenthal has no official title in communist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office. Her informal title is “Rent Advisor,” which is interesting considering the fact that she’s a deadbeat who hails from a wealthy show business family and has not paid her rent in four years.

According to the Post, Rosenthal's landlord, Adetunji Akinboboye, lost at least $108,000 from her unit alone and he lost the building to foreclosure in 2023. 'We've been on rent strike ever since,' she championed.

Now it belongs to the Bank and now she faces legal action and eviction from the building. New owners, US Bank, who claim that she and at least two other tenants have 'squatted on the premises,' records filed in November claim, court documents viewed by the Daily Mail claim.

Read about it...

Temporary Protected Status was always TEMPORARY - Now affirmed

New York City fires Haitian municipal workers after courts uphold TPS termination

Mayor Zohran Mamdani acknowledged that New York City dismissed dozens of Haitian employees who lost work authorization after federal courts cleared the Trump administration's termination of Temporary Protected Status, a program the government itself defines as never meant to be permanent.

Mamdani's office released a statement Friday confirming that the city reviewed the work authorization of Haitian TPS holders on its payroll and separated from those who could not show an alternative legal right to work. The mayor framed the move as compelled by federal law, not chosen by City Hall, a distinction that did little to soften the outcome for the workers who lost their jobs.

The dismissals followed two court decisions that, together, removed every remaining legal obstacle to the Trump administration's decision to end Haiti's TPS designation.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June in Mullin v. Doe that the administration could proceed, and on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden appointee, lifted the stay that had kept the termination order on hold while courts reviewed it.

Mamdani also offered free legal help and said city staff would walk affected Haitians through their options.

Read more about it...

New York’s Property Tax Crackdown Is Just the Beginning

Mamdani's tax on 2nd home luxury real estate market

Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax is one month old — and Manhattan's luxury market is already paying the price

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's new tax on high-end second homes took effect July 1, and real estate brokers say it is already freezing buyers, inflating the luxury rental market, and pushing wealthy purchasers out of New York City altogether.

A month into the policy, the picture emerging from Manhattan's brokerage offices is blunt: international buyers are walking away from signed deals, sellers are listing properties they once planned to keep, and six-figure-a-month rental units are filling up with people who would have bought if the city had not added a new annual bill on top of already steep property taxes.

The tax applies to second homes valued above $5 million, starting at a 4-percent annual rate and climbing to 6.5 percent under the first phase of the plan. A second phase, set for the 2028, 29 tax year, will change how the levy is calculated, details the city has not yet made public.

The policy's supporters frame it as a way to make billionaire absentee owners pay their share. But the brokers who move these properties every day describe something different: a market recoiling from a tax that adds hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual carrying costs to units that already generate enormous revenue for the city treasury.

A Madrid buyer walked away from an $8.9 million condo in eleven days.

Read more...

Mamdani: "We should reconcile and repair this legacy of slavery, stolen wealth and discrimination.”

Mamdani Won’t Rule Out Cash Reparations For New Yorkers

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is leaving the door wide open to taxpayer-funded reparations for slavery in America’s largest city.

The democratic socialist mayor refused to rule out cash payments when pressed during an interview with The Root’s Charles Blow, instead saying he would wait for the recommendations of an ongoing city study.

Blow asked Mamdani directly whether he would support cash reparations if the commission endorsed them.

“First, I want to say that I stand by what I submitted. It’s the truth. It’s not a personal assessment,” Mamdani responded, according to an official City Hall transcript.

“We often think about slavery and the complicity in slavery as being exclusively to certain geographic areas of the country,” he continued. “Here in New York City, we were very complicit. And so I look forward to whatever those findings are.”

Read more...

A Cart of Anti-ICE Signage and a Bucket of Gasoline

Tom Homan Stopped Democrat Attackers Cold After the NYC Firebombing With One Warning for Mayor Mamdani

A man armed with axes, a machete and gasoline tried to burn down the federal building that houses ICE in New York City Monday.

Tom Homan skipped past the axes and the gasoline and blamed the people who armed that man with an excuse.

Andrew Arrabaca showed up outside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan Monday morning hauling a cart marked with anti-ICE signage. He lit a firework packed inside a canister, fired five to seven rounds from an airsoft rifle at the building, then dumped a bucket of gasoline and set the entrance ablaze.

Federal investigators later found two axes, a machete, three knives and a hammer stashed in his gear.

PJ Media reported Homan has spent recent weeks warning on air that the hostility built up against ICE was about to boil over into real violence.

"There's still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted," Homan told Fox News before the NYC attack even happened.

Read more...

Homeless camps growing in NYC

12 blocks of Homeless encampments in Manhattan

A homeless encampment stretching roughly 12 blocks along Manhattan's West Side, from the Intrepid Museum to the Jacob Javits Center, continues to grow while Mayor Zohran Mamdani offers vague promises and the NYPD waits for permission to act.

The sprawl of tents, trash, and reported illegal activity sits in one of the most visible corridors in New York City, steps from tourist attractions and a major convention center, and it exists in large part because the mayor made dismantling such camps harder the moment he took office.

Mamdani campaigned on a promise to stop encampment sweeps. He kept that promise. Then, facing public pressure, he introduced a revised policy requiring seven days of outreach by city workers before any encampment can be cleared.

The result, on full display along 11th Avenue between West 34th and West 46th Streets, is a 12-block stretch of disorder that residents, workers, and visitors say has made the area unrecognizable.

The mayor told reporters the site "has been noticed and it will be cleared." But he declined to say when the seven-day clock actually starts, a detail that matters when the encampment keeps expanding.

"The NYPD has not been given the green light to clean this encampment up, but we are ready to do so." 

That single sentence captures the dysfunction. The officers are willing. The authority hasn't come. And so the camp grows while the mayor's outreach teams visit the site and, by Fox News Digital's account, primarily collect trash.

Mamdani is destroying NYC

Going uptown/downtown (north-south), 12 blocks is roughly 0.6 miles (20 blocks equal 1 mile).

Mamdani wants to arrest Netanyahu 🤡

Mamdani Can't Arrest Netanyahu. But He Is Targeting All Jews.

On Saturday, the mayor of New York said the prime minister of the Jewish state belongs in a jail cell. Zohran Mamdani told the New York Times that Benjamin Netanyahu "belongs in the Hague." 

He called him "a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court," and confirmed that his administration is working out whether it can arrest the Israeli leader when he comes to New York for the United Nations in September.

Netanyahu's office answered on Sunday. The ICC is "a kangaroo court that has no jurisdiction over Americans or Israelis," it said, and the warrant is "bogus."

A mayor cannot arrest a foreign head of government, and Mamdani knows it. He said so himself in the next breath, promising he "won't be writing our own laws." The warrant he wants to serve comes from a court his own party's president called outrageous, and it was written by a prosecutor the court is voting to remove this week. Of every leader on earth, he reached for the one who runs the world's only Jewish state.

The United States is not a member of the ICC. A mayor cannot arrest a prime minister.

Foreign leaders who come to New York for the United Nations are protected by the 1947 treaty that lets the U.N. operate on American soil. A sitting head of government carries immunity. And a city has no power to override the federal government on foreign affairs, which is why the whole idea falls apart the moment anyone reads the law.

Even his own party sees it. Fetterman called the threat a stunt: "He's just a clown 🤡 to even say that.

Read about it...

Mamdani's Rental Ripoff Report

NYC Mayor Mamdani faces backlash after speaker at news conference calls eviction a form of 'violence'

A speaker at a New York City news conference hosted by Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared that evictions constitute "violence", a claim that drew swift and pointed mockery from conservatives, political commentators, and elected officials who called the event a spectacle unworthy of the nation's largest city.

Antonia Marrero, a member of the Housing Organizers for People Empowerment (HOPE) Tenant Union, made the remarks Thursday while Mamdani stood behind her, visibly smiling. The moment, captured on video and circulated widely on X, became an instant flashpoint in the ongoing debate over the socialist mayor's aggressive housing agenda.

The news conference was staged to promote Mamdani's "Rental Ripoff Report," a 23-proposal policy document that the mayor's office says addresses everything from AI-altered rental listings to code enforcement modernization and formal recognition of tenant unions.

But the policy rollout was overshadowed almost immediately by Marrero's rhetoric, and by the mayor's grinning reaction to it.

Read more...

Mamdani's rip-Off Report:

New York's Fraud Numbers Are in a Class of Their Own

Donald Trump Sent Federal Agents Into New York After Kathy Hochul Let Fraudsters Steal 2 Million Dollars a Day

Kathy Hochul watched Nigerian crime rings and foreign syndicates drain $507 million from New York's unemployment system in 2025. Now Trump's elite strike force is on the ground in Albany – and Hochul has some explaining to do.

The Department of Labor just embedded federal agents inside New York State's own unemployment office to hunt down every fraud lead and build criminal cases from the inside.

New York isn't just bad at stopping unemployment fraud. It's the worst in the country – by a wide margin. The state carries a 15% fraud rate and a 23% improper payment rate – both the highest in the nation.

Of the $507 million in overpayments paid out in 2025, New York has clawed back just 25%. The national average is 69%.

That gap isn't incompetence. That's a state government that stopped trying.

Read about it...

Sanctuary NYC Zohran has Selective Recognition

NYC Mayor Mamdani faces backlash after Little Italy left off city immigrant-neighborhood map

New York City's first socialist mayor is catching heat from Italian American leaders after Little Italy, one of the most storied immigrant neighborhoods in American history, was left off a city-produced map of "immigrant enclaves" which was promoted ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

The "New York City Immigrant Enclaves" map lists 30 neighborhoods. It includes well-known areas like Chinatown and lesser-known designations such as Little Palestine and Little Haiti. But the neighborhood where generations of Italian immigrants settled, opened shops, raised families, and built churches doesn't appear anywhere on the graphic.

The Italian American Civil Rights League fired back with a blistering statement accusing Mayor Zohran Mamdani of deliberately erasing Italian Americans from the city's heritage.

The omission has become the latest flashpoint in a pattern of cultural and political friction surrounding Mamdani's young administration, and it raises a pointed question about which communities City Hall considers worth celebrating.

The map names 30 neighborhoods. Fox News Digital identified Chinatown, Little Palestine, and Little Haiti among them. Little Italy is absent. So are any Jewish or Irish neighborhoods, communities whose contributions to New York's identity are woven into the city's very foundation.

NYC Immigrant Map

Mamdani's rent freeze, tax hikes a 'one-two wealth destruction punch

Google Pioneer Who Escaped Soviet Socialism Just Took a Huge Loss Running From NYC’s Version of It

New York City's socialist mayor just froze rents on a million apartments

Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Sells NYC Rent-Stabilized Stake at Massive Loss Amid Rent Freeze.

Now the man who fled the Soviet Union as a child has made his move. And what Sergey Brin accepted to get out of this city will stun you. Brin Got Six Cents on the Dollar and Called It a Win.

Brin's family office, Amphitheatre LLC, quietly sold its stake in a New York apartment fund late last year – a fund managed by A&E Real Estate controlling nearly 5,900 rent-stabilized units scattered across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

He did not get his money back.

A&E bought out Brin's position for roughly six cents on every dollar of his original equity investment. On paper, his stake carried a gross property value of approximately $79 million.

He took what he could get and left. That was a man who has seen this movie before, who knows exactly how it ends, and who decided that getting out cheap was better than waiting to see if America's biggest city learns the lesson the Bronx tried to teach it fifty years ago.

Google billionaire Sergey Brin exits NYC real estate

Tyranny in New York City

Mamdani's NY

Mamdani called for abolishing ICE

DHS Chief Just Called New York Mayor a Socialist Communist With Zero Respect

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani publicly called for abolishing ICE and declared federal enforcement operations "cruel and inhumane."

Seventy percent of ICE arrests nationwide involve illegal aliens with criminal convictions.

Now the man in charge of the entire Department of Homeland Security just responded on national television.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin went on Fox News and said he has "zero respect" for Mamdani – and explained exactly why New York's refusal to cooperate with ICE is putting Americans across the country in danger.

Mullin Named Him Directly...Appearing on Fox News Channel's America Reports Wednesday, Secretary Mullin didn't mince words when asked about the mayor's defiance.

Mamdani – a self-described democratic socialist born in Uganda who became New York City's first Muslim mayor – has spent his first months in office signing executive orders to block ICE from city property and publicly calling for the agency to be abolished entirely.

"Mamdani is a socialist communist that I have zero respect for," Mullin said. "He's running a great city by allowing lawless activity to continue to run rampant on the streets."

The House Oversight Committee confirmed that pattern in a March 2026 report, finding that sanctuary cities function as staging areas for illegal immigrant criminals whose violence spills into neighboring jurisdictions that cooperate with federal authorities.

Read more...

Mamdani's ideological New York Transformation

NYC Mayor Mamdani pledges $15 million in taxpayer funds for transgender healthcare, calls it just the beginning

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used a Tuesday evening Pride Month celebration to announce a $15 million taxpayer-funded investment in gender-affirming care, and made clear he views the spending as only a down payment on a far larger commitment to come.

The mayor called New York City a "haven" for people with alternative gender identities and framed the new spending as a direct response to what he described as ongoing threats against LGBTQ+ communities. The announcement landed as the New York City Council continues to weigh a record-setting $125 billion budget for fiscal year 2027, raising immediate questions about where the money will come from and who, exactly, will receive it.

As Fox News Digital reported, the mayor doubled down on promises he first made during his campaign, when his website outlined a plan to spend $65 million to "explicitly support and expand access to Gender Affirming Care" in New York City. Of that larger figure, up to $57 million was earmarked for public hospitals, community clinics, health centers, and nonprofits capable of performing procedures.

Mamdani framed the $15 million as a moral imperative, not a policy choice open to debate. In his remarks Tuesday, he linked the spending to what he called the protection of trans New Yorkers.

The mayor established what he called New York City's first-ever Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs, a new bureaucratic layer inside city government.

The phrase "first step" is worth pausing on. If the campaign's $65 million plan remains the destination, New York taxpayers can expect substantially more spending in the years ahead, with no public accounting yet of how the initial $15 million will be allocated, which providers will receive it, or what oversight mechanisms will govern its use.

Fox News Digital noted it remains unclear where the $15 million request is being allocated from or how the funds will be disbursed. That is not a minor administrative detail. It is the kind of question city council members and taxpayers deserve answered before the money moves.

Read more... about Mamdani's personal moral decisions.

The Williams Institute estimates that well over 700,000 LGBTQ+ adults live in the New York metropolitan area (which includes NYC, Long Island, Newark, and Jersey City), making it the highest total LGBT population in any U.S. metro area.City Estimates: Independent historical studies and demographic tracking from organizations like the NYC Comptroller's Office have indicated an underlying trans population of more than 50,000 across the five boroughs.

Statewide Demographics: Data from the New York State Department of Health shows that transgender, gender non-conforming, non-binary, and intersex adults collectively make up about 1.4% of New York's adult population.