New York
For Black Women, Adrienne Adams Is More Than Just Another Candidate
As Adrienne Adams officially kicked off her mayoral campaign on Saturday, she urged potential voters at a rally in Jamaica, Queens, to view her as an alternative to the city’s two most recognizable candidates, Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
But many of her supporters see her candidacy as something else: an opportunity for Democrats to elect a qualified Black woman to lead the country’s largest city, less than a year after the bruising loss of Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to lead a major party presidential ticket.
Wearing a pink pantsuit, Ms. Adams entered to cheers at the Rochdale Village Shopping Center in southeast Queens and danced with supporters as “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross played.
“No drama, no scandal, no nonsense, just competence and integrity,” Ms. Adams said at the rally, summing up her candidacy.
Ms. Adams, the City Council speaker and a Queens native, faces a tough path to the mayor’s office amid a crowded primary field and her own considerable fund-raising lag. But to the city’s most steadfast Democratic voting bloc, Black women, Ms. Adams’s candidacy represents more than a litany of messaging and policy promises.
If elected, Ms. Adams would be the first woman to become mayor of New York City. So far, one other woman in the June 24 primary is vying for the job — Jessica Ramos, a Queens-based state senator who, if elected, would also be the city’s first Latino mayor.
Ms. Adams enters the race with roughly $200,000 in her campaign account, well behind the other candidates, who have been fund-raising for several months. She will need to quickly raise enough money to meet the threshold for matching funds. She will also need to rush to garner signatures before the city’s April 3 deadline for securing a place on the ballot.
But her allies say she may have a powerful lifeline in the city’s influential network of politically engaged Black women. Several prominent Black female Democrats, including Letitia James, the state attorney general, are supporting her campaign.
Ms. James, who made calls to influential labor and civic leaders and elected officials to gauge interest in Ms. Adams’s candidacy, said she was inspired to do so after hearing her speak at Albany Caucus Weekend.
The crowd broke out into a chant of “Run, Adrienne, run!”
“I could feel it,” Ms. James said. “Especially in the aftermath of the loss of Kamala Harris.”
Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, a group of Black women in New York City who had worked to elect Ms. Harris and were mourning her defeat began channeling their energy into assembling a wish list of Black women who could run for mayor.
They wanted Ms. James to run. They noted, however, that she had begun collaborating with attorneys general from across the country to file lawsuits against the Trump administration’s policies, including the mass firing of federal employees and the freezing of billions in congressionally approved payments to states, and did not want to take her away from that work.
Another person the women considered was Jennifer Jones Austin, the chief executive of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies. In an interview, Ms. Jones Austin celebrated Ms. Adams’s entrance into the race, but added a word of caution about the pragmatism of Black voters.
Most of the city’s Black female voters will consider candidates’ policies and electability over their demographics in deciding whom to vote for, she said. Still, pointing to the unsuccessful campaigns of Ms. Harris and Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights who ran in 2021 to be the city’s first Black woman mayor, there remains an active base for Ms. Adams to court, Ms. Jones Austin said.
“I don’t think that because in both instances the women did not ultimately prevail means that Black women are disconnected, disenchanted or now apathetic in any way,” said Ms. Jones Austin, who is remaining neutral in the primary.
Three other Black women have run for mayor of New York City before Ms. Adams, including Ms. Wiley; C. Virginia Fields, a former Manhattan borough president; and Dianne Morales, a nonprofit executive who identifies as Afro-Latina.
Yet, in many ways, Ms. Adams finds herself in a situation similar to that of Ms. Harris. She was drafted into the race as an alternative to Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo, both of whom, like Mr. Trump, have a history of ethical issues and allegations of sexual misconduct, which both men have denied.
That point was driven home by Althea Stevens, a councilwoman from the Bronx who referred to Ms. Harris’s defeat in her speech at Ms. Adams’s campaign launch.
“The last time a Black woman ran a couple of months ago, we didn’t listen, and now we are dealing with the consequences,” Ms. Stevens said.
A recent Quinnipiac poll found Mr. Cuomo leading with 31 percent of support from Democratic voters and Mr. Adams far behind in second with 11 percent. Ms. Adams, who is not related to the mayor, trailed with 4 percent, but the poll was taken last week before she entered the race, and she was still polling above some candidates who had been running for months. Ms. Ramos also had 4 percent.
Ms. Adams has a record of standing up to the mayor on the budget and even leading the Council to override two of his vetoes on public safety bills, the first time that had been done in two decades. She has notably dropped her last name from her campaign literature, making it just “Adrienne, Democrat for NYC Mayor.”
“I plan to build a winning coalition by appealing to New Yorkers who want a city government that has restored trust and effectiveness for every single community,” Ms. Adams said in an interview.
Black women have often been hailed as the “backbone” of the Democratic Party, a nod to their long track record of supporting Democratic candidates en masse. More than nine in 10 Black female voters cast a ballot for Ms. Harris in November and Black women make up a larger portion of the city’s Black Democratic base.
Ms. Adams, as a representative of that group and a product of Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, could have an inside track to galvanizing their support.
She has focused her tenure as speaker on issues such as maternal health, restoring budget cuts to libraries, community mental health and college access, and has cultivated a natural base of support, said Yvette Buckner, a Democratic strategist and co-chairwoman of the New Majority NYC, a group dedicated to electing women to the City Council.
“She understood the assignment,” Ms. Buckner said.
But Mr. Cuomo also understands the importance of Black women voters. Since he announced his candidacy last weekend, he has rolled out a steady stream of endorsements from Black women elected officials. Hours before Ms. Adams’s campaign kickoff, he announced that another Black councilwoman from Brooklyn had endorsed him.
For Black women in New York who are still feeling the sting of Ms. Harris’s loss, Ms. Adams’s entry into the mayoral race could be reinvigorating. Mr. Trump has interjected himself into the city’s affairs, seeking to cancel congestion pricing and calling for the dismissal of the federal corruption charges against Mr. Adams.
“We do think that this is a time where our leadership is needed,” said Waikinya Clanton, founder of Black Women for Kamala Harris. “Especially at the local level.”
This summer’s World Cup will bring millions of soccer lovers to stadiums across North America. But whether it lives up to organizers’ lofty expectations could come down to fans like Brett Shields and John Milce of New South Wales, Australia.
Both men are longtime supporters of the Socceroos, their country’s men’s national soccer team, and both have traveled to the World Cup before. But only one is planning to go to this year’s tournament, which runs from June 11 to July 19 in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Mr. Shields, 59, is coming. He already has the proper travel authorization from past visits to see his daughter, who lives in San Francisco. He plans to stay with her and attend Socceroos matches there and in Seattle.
Mr. Milce, 76, who has been to six World Cups since 1966, is staying home. He said he had made comments online about President Trump’s policies and feared that he could be denied entry at the border because of the administration’s proposed social media checks and broader immigration crackdown.
“I’m not a poor man, but with the costs involved, it was too much to risk,” Mr. Milce said.
With the first kickoff less than 60 days away, tourism and hospitality leaders in the 11 U.S. host cities are watching international fans closely. The United States was the only major nation to register a decline in international tourism in 2025, and hints of lackluster demand have anxiety running high.
The research firm Tourism Economics projects that more than 1.2 million international visitors will travel to the United States for the World Cup. That includes nearly 750,000 who would not have otherwise come, amounting to a roughly 1.1 percentage point increase in international arrivals.
Still, the firm this month revised down its forecast for the rate of recovery from last year’s drop in tourists. Visa restrictions, fears of immigration agents (including at World Cup matches), an increase in phone searches at borders and, for fans, the exorbitant costs of match tickets and transportation are just some of the barriers keeping people away.
Mr. Shields said that if he didn’t already have his travel authorization and a free place to stay, “I doubt whether I’d probably travel over to the World Cup in the current climate.”
Safety Concerns and Travel Bans
The World Cup, which drew 3.4 million spectators in Qatar in 2022, is a blockbuster pretty much by definition, and organizers expect a large share of bookings, both domestic and international, to come in the final two months.
The U.S. Travel Association said this month that the World Cup has “extraordinary potential to deliver major economic gains” across the United States, but added that “safety concerns, policy perceptions and entry barriers could limit America’s ability to fully capitalize on the opportunity.”
In Seattle, the number of expected domestic World Cup visitors has grown by 30 percent since 2024, said Michael Woody, the chief engagement officer for Visit Seattle. At the same time, the expected number of international visitors has fallen by 17 percent, driven by a particularly sharp drop-off in Canadians.
Fans coming from countries like Haiti and Iran, on a list of 19 countries whose citizens Mr. Trump has barred from entering the United States, won’t be able to attend their national teams’ group stage matches at all. Supporters of soccer powerhouses like Ivory Coast and Senegal, among the 14 African nations whose citizens face tight visa restrictions, could be forced to post bonds of up to $15,000 to enter the country.
Adem Asha, 32, a Turkish citizen who lives in Slovakia, obtained a U.S. visa last year in order to watch Lionel Messi, of Argentina, and Cristiano Ronaldo, of Portugal, in what could be their last World Cup. But Mr. Asha, who was born in Syria, worried he could still be targeted by immigration agents. He decided this spring to call off his trip, a conclusion that left him “disappointed but also relieved.”
“I really don’t feel like going there, or spending that much money to go there, and then being denied at the port of entry,” said Mr. Asha, who said he did not consider going to Canada or Mexico because the matches he wanted to see, and the other sites he hoped to visit, were all in the United States.
Banking on Late Bookings
U.S. host cities are pinning their hopes on last-minute travelers. Zane Harrington, a spokesman for Visit Dallas, said he expected “a majority” of fans heading to the city to book their stays in the two months remaining before kickoff — or even during the tournament as teams advance out of the group stage.
Martha Sheridan, the chief executive of Meet Boston, the city’s marketing and tourism organization, said ticket sales for Gillette Stadium’s seven matches were “robust,” and that they were split roughly in thirds among New Englanders, domestic visitors from the rest of the country and international travelers.
Demand for hotels in Boston in June is up about 11 percent compared with the same period last year, she said. That increase was smaller than what her team had expected to see by this point when it began planning in 2024, she added, but she felt “very optimistic” that bookings would continue to rise in the coming weeks.
FIFA in recent weeks released blocks of thousands of hotel rooms across the three host countries, while local host committees downsized fan festivals in locations including New Jersey, San Francisco and Seattle, fueling discussion over whether demand was falling short of expectations.
But Jamie Lane, the chief economist and senior vice president for analytics at AirDNA, a company that collects and analyzes short-term-rental data, said it was common practice for major event hosts to scale back their room blocks as they make final preparations for staffing and sponsorships, and that the changes were not a sign of sluggish demand.
A spokesman for FIFA said the changes to fan festivals were not made in response to demand, noting that some of the events will now take place in several neighborhoods rather than in a large central location.
A Bigger, Less Predictable Event
Data published this month by AirDNA shows a rise in short-term-rental bookings, to varying degrees, in every host city. Bookings on group stage game days were up the most in Monterrey, Mexico, rising 564 percent, on average, compared with the same dates last year.
Bookings were up 209 percent in Mexico City, 171 percent in Kansas City, 152 percent in Miami and 52 percent in Toronto, according to AirDNA.
A range of factors, including which teams are competing and to what extent cities regulate short-term rentals, influence those figures. In San Francisco, where short-term-rental bookings were up 28 percent on group stage game days, Anna Marie Presutti, the chief executive of the San Francisco Travel Association, said she thought demand didn’t rise to its full potential because the war in Iran is complicating travel for fans from Jordan and Qatar, two teams that are playing there.
In New York, where short-term rentals are tightly restricted, hotel bookings during the World Cup period are “more or less the same” compared with the same period last year, said Vijay Dandapani, the chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City.
International travelers generally stay longer and spend more money than Americans, giving them an outsize economic impact. An analysis published by Airbnb in February found that non-Americans coming to the United States for the World Cup planned to visit more destinations and travel three nights longer, on average, than Americans.
Sylvia Weiler, the president of global destinations at the travel marketing and data company Sojern, said the revamped structure of this World Cup — spread across three countries and featuring a record 48 teams — made it hard to project how travel patterns would play out as the tournament approached.
“We talk about what was expected,” Ms. Weiler said. “I would always put a slight caveat, because we did not know what to expect.”
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2026.
A 76-year-old man died on Friday after being shoved down the stairs at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan, and the police arrested a suspect who had been arrested multiple times in recent months and had been discharged from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward just hours before.
The victim, Ross Falzone, landed on his head at the bottom of the stairs and suffered a traumatic brain injury, a fractured spine and a fractured rib after a stranger rushed forward and pushed him, the police said.
Mr. Falzone had been walking north on Seventh Avenue toward the subway station in the Chelsea neighborhood on Thursday evening, said Brad Weekes, assistant commissioner of public information for the Police Department. Walking about 30 yards behind him was the stranger, according to surveillance footage from the scene, Mr. Weekes said. As Mr. Falzone reached the station, the man rushed forward and pushed him down the stairs. He was taken to Bellevue where he died shortly before 3 a.m. on Friday.
The death sparked outrage at City Hall. Mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly called for an investigation into how Bellevue handled the discharge of the suspect and suggested that institutional problems at the hospital might have led to the random attack.
“I am horrified by the killing of Ross Falzone and the circumstances that led to it,” Mr. Mamdani said in a news release on Friday, in which he ordered “an immediate investigation on what steps should have been taken to prevent this tragedy.”
Police identified the suspect as Rhamell Burke, 32.
In the three months preceding the attack, Mr. Burke was arrested four times, Mr. Weekes said, including an arrest on Feb. 2 in connection with an assault on a Port Authority police officer.
Mr. Burke’s most recent interaction with the police began at around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, when he approached a group of N.Y.P.D. officers outside the 17th Precinct station house on East 51st Street, Mr. Weekes said. He grabbed a stick from a pile of garbage on the street and approached the officers, who told him to drop the stick. When he did, officers placed Mr. Burke in a police vehicle and drove him to Bellevue, where he was admitted to the emergency room at around 3:40 p.m., Mr. Weekes said. Mr. Burke was taken to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program for evaluation and treatment, Mr. Weekes said, and was released from the hospital one hour later.
He was just a mile and a half from the hospital when he encountered Mr. Falzone at around 9:30 p.m. Thursday.
On Friday afternoon, police officers found Mr. Burke in Penn Station, where they arrested him. He was in custody on Friday evening. It was unclear Friday if Mr. Burke had a lawyer.
The mayor said he had requested help from the New York State Department of Health, which will investigate the decision to release Mr. Burke from Bellevue and conduct a review of similar cases at the hospital. The state agency also will investigate psychiatric evaluation and discharge procedures across NYC Health and Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, according to the news release.
Mr. Falzone was a retired high school teacher who lived alone for many years in an apartment building on the Upper West Side. His friends were in shock on Friday about his death. They shared memories of an affable but private man who rarely spoke about his family or personal life.
Mr. Falzone had been recovering from a recent surgery and seemed more mobile and happy, said Marc Stager, 78, Mr. Falzone’s next-door neighbor on a tree-lined block of West 85th Street. He was known as a cheerful “yapper,” said Briel Waxman, a neighbor. He was the kind of New Yorker who enjoyed chatting with neighbors about historical details of his building and seeing performances at Lincoln Center with friends.
“He was always out and about,” said Ms. Waxman, 35, who often returned to her apartment at midnight or 1 a.m. to find Mr. Falzone arriving home at the same time. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m proud of you or embarrassed of myself,’” she remembered telling him.
Mr. Falzone had wide taste in music — opera, classical, jazz, pop — and neighbors could tell he was home when they heard notes escaping from under his apartment door, Mr. Stager said.
He was “a helpless old guy,” said Mr. Stager, who added that he was “disappointed and shocked, frankly, that somebody could do such a thing” as shove such a defenseless person down the stairs.
When Ms. Waxman moved into the building five years ago, Mr. Falzone was among the first people to welcome her, she said. He once brought a package to her door that had been delivered to the wrong unit and shared that what is now a blank wall in her apartment had once been a fireplace.
Ms. Waxman sat in her living room on Friday and cried as she talked, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She remembered Mr. Falzone as “just overall, nice, talkative, genuine human.”
A suicide note purported to be written by the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein while he was in jail in 2019 uses language that in some cases echoes his past writings to friends and family.
One phrase found in the apparent suicide note — “No Fun” — also appears on a handwritten page found in Mr. Epstein’s jail cell at the time of his death, as well as in emails he sent over the years.
And another saying in the suicide note — “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin!!” — appears in emails that Mr. Epstein had written to people close to him.
A cellmate claimed that Mr. Epstein left the suicide note before he was found unresponsive in their cell weeks before his death. The New York Times reported on the note last week and successfully asked a federal judge to unseal it.
If authentic, the note gives a view into Mr. Epstein’s mind-set before he was found dead at age 66 in August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
‘NO FUN’
A different handwritten note was found in Mr. Epstein’s cell when he died, and investigators believed it was written by him. In that document, Mr. Epstein complained about jail conditions — burned food, giant bugs and being kept in a locked shower. He concluded it with the underlined phrase, “NO FUN!!”
Mr. Epstein also used the phrase in emails when describing things he was unhappy about, or situations that had not gone his way.
‘watcha want me to do — bust out cryin’
Mr. Epstein used the phrase “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin” with friends, and in messages to his brother, Mark Epstein.
Like the note released by the judge, Mr. Epstein’s emails were often short, with staccato phrases and erratic punctuation. The emails were contained in millions of pages of documents the Justice Department released in response to a law passed last year requiring disclosure of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
-
Michigan18 seconds agoMichigan Lottery Daily 3, Daily 4 results for May 9, 2026
-
Massachusetts6 minutes agoThe Massachusetts beach towns better than Cape Cod, per Condé Nast
-
Minnesota12 minutes agoGame Four Preview: San Antonio Spurs vs. Minnesota Timberwolves
-
Mississippi18 minutes agoRyan McPherson injury update, Mississippi State star hurts ankle, exits Auburn game
-
Missouri24 minutes ago
Missouri Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 winning numbers for May 9, 2026
-
Montana30 minutes agoMontana Vista residents question impacts of proposed Pecos West energy project
-
Nebraska36 minutes ago
Nebraska Lottery results: See winning numbers for Powerball, Pick 3 on May 9, 2026
-
Nevada42 minutes ago“We lost a true champion”: Educators, lawmakers remember Joyce Woodhause’s legacy after her death