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New York City Tag

When competition drags down your product, the smart thing to do is to fix your product and make it better than your competition. Right!? Instead of doing that with the taxi services in New York City, the city council placed a cap on ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft and froze "new licenses for one year while it studies the fallout from the booming industry."

A couple of weeks ago, we covered New York City mayor Bill de Blasio's "two-pronged plan" to "diversify" NYC's elite public high schools.  These schools are considered elite not only for exceptional academic rigor but because they accept only those who excel on a standardized test. De Blasio's plan requires that these schools reserve 20% of their seats for students from low-income minority middle schools who do not pass the test, let alone excel on it.  Instead, the schools are required to admit these particular students if they manage to almost score the lowest possible passing score.  The second part of his plan is to eliminate the standardized test altogether.

Thursday, New York's Attorney General Barbara Underwood sued President Trump, his three oldest children, and the Trump Foundation. Underwood alleges the Trumps intermingled funds, using the foundation as a "checkbook" for other business and non-profit ventures. She's requesting more $2.8 million in restitution (not including penalties), dissolution of the foundation, and bar Trump and other board members from serving on charitable boards in New York.

It's on. It's off. It's on again? That's basically been the status of the summit between the U.S. and North Korea this past week. It looks like North Korea wants the summit to happen since dictator Kim Jong Un has sent an ex-spy chief to America to help revive the summit.

Back in January 2017, after President Donald Trump took office, Greg Piatek, an accountant from Philadelphia visited the Happiest Hour Bar in New York City's West Village. Piatek wore a Make America Great Again hat, which prompted staff to ask Piatek and his friends to leave. He sued and claimed the staff "offended his sense of being American." His lawyer made a case for religious discrimination to no avail.

The new millennium is turning out to have a lot more in common with the 21st century B.C. than I would have originally forecast! It appears that not only are the streets of San Francisco laden with disease, but researchers have now found that 25 percent of the mice inhabiting New York City carry bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
Tests conducted by a team from Columbia University on 416 mice collected in seven New York City-area locations in just over a year revealed house mice are "carriers of several gastrointestinal disease-causing agents," including C. diff, E. coli and Salmonella, among others, according to a study published in the American Society for Microbiology on Tuesday.

A prominent LGBT rights attorney, David Buckel, committed suicide by setting himself on fire in New York's Prospect Park.  Buckel, who was involved in the Brandon Teena murder case made famous by the film Boys Don't Cry, left suicide notes and mailed copies to various media outlets. Buckel wrote that his final act of "early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves” and expressed his hope that his suicide will serve others in some way.

On Thursday night, a fire raged through a building in the Bronx, which killed 12 people, including four children. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the city's deadliest fire in more than a quarter-century likely started because of children playing with a stove in a first floor apartment.

There used to be a stereotype about people with delusions of grandeur believing they were Napoleon Bonaparte. In Bill de Blasio's case, he thinks he is Edison, Henry Ford and Gandhi all rolled into one.