Tag Archives: New York

New York leaders plea for coordinated U.S. response to coronavirus

By Maria Caspani

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York officials pleaded with the Trump administration on Monday to coordinate a national response to the coronavirus outbreak, saying patchwork measures enacted by state and local authorities were insufficient to confront a national emergency.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats, called for bold federal action involving the U.S. military and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The U.S. death toll from the outbreak rose to 65 over the weekend, prompting fears U.S. hospitals will soon be overrun similar to medical centers in Italy.

More than 30 U.S. states have closed schools and at least five states have shuttered bars. Other localities have shut down cinemas, theaters and concert venues.

President Donald Trump, a Republican, declared a national emergency on Friday and has championed his government’s response. Democratic leaders have criticized him for downplaying the crisis and issuing misleading or false statements.

“This should be a reality where the United States is put on a war footing, where the federal government mobilizes all the resources necessary – and it begins with testing,” de Blasio told MSNBC.

“We’re going to have to set up emergency ICUs in hospitals, not only all over New York City, all over America. We’re going to need the United States military to come in with their substantial logistical and medical capacity,” De Blasio said.

Cuomo said the federal government needs to draw up uniform measures for all states to follow, rather than have each state act independently. He warned of a looming crisis as the U.S. healthcare system will get overwhelmed with patients.

“In an emergency, someone has to take charge,” Cuomo told CNN. “You have to have consolidated centralized authority. It makes no sense for all these states to be doing different things.”

Many localities are following the recommendation of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against large gatherings for two weeks.

At least 33 states have decided to close public schools, which combined with district closures in other states has shuttered least 64,000 U.S. schools, according to Education Week.

There were further calls for urgency from within the Trump administration. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said it was important to react aggressively to combat the spread of the virus.

“We are at a critical inflection point in this country,” Adams said in an interview with Fox News.

“We are where Italy was two weeks ago in terms of our numbers and we have a choice to make as a nation: Do we want to go the direction of South Korea and really be aggressive and lower our mortality rates or do we want to go the direction of Italy?”

Italy is the second worst hit country in the world after China, where the illness first emerged late last year, and the outbreak has shown no signs of slowing, with 24,747 cases and 1,809 deaths by Sunday.

South Korea has been widely praised for its strict measures to control the virus.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Monday he was preparing to bring an executive order to Trump that would help relocate medical supply chains from overseas to the United States during the coronavirus outbreak.

Navarro, in a CNBC interview, also said Trump’s push for a payroll tax cut would provide enough stimulus to help combat the economic damage from the coronavirus.

(Reporting Susan Heavy, Doina Chiuca, Maria Caspani and Rama Venkat; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by David Gregorio)

U.S. coronavirus death toll rises; New York, Los Angeles region confirm new cases

By Steve Gorman and Laila Kearney

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Two more people have died of the new coronavirus in the United States, bringing the toll to 11 and new confirmed cases were reported on Wednesday around the two most populous cities: four near New York and six in Los Angeles.

The first California death from the virus was announced by health officials as an elderly adult with underlying health conditions. It was also the first coronavirus death in the United States outside of Washington state.

Placer County’s public health department said in a statement that the patient tested presumptively positive on Tuesday at a California lab and was likely exposed from Feb. 11-21 on a Princess cruise ship to Mexico from San Francisco.

“Preliminary understanding from the contact investigation is that this patient had minimal community exposure between returning from the cruise and arriving at the hospital by ambulance on Feb. 27,” the statement said.

The person was the second confirmed case of the respiratory disease called COVID-19 in Placer County in Northern California.

In the greater Seattle area, the total number of coronavirus cases climbed to 39 on Wednesday, including 10 deaths, up from 27 cases and nine deaths a day earlier, the Washington State Health Department announced.

The Seattle area has the largest concentration of coronavirus cases detected to date in the United States. Several cases were connected to a long-term care facility for the elderly in the Pacific Northwest state.

In New York state, three family members and a neighbor of an infected man have tested positive, bringing the total in the state to six, officials said. About 1,000 people in the New York City suburb of Westchester County where the family lives were under self-quarantine orders because of possible exposure to the virus, Governor Andrew Cuomo said.

“We are, if anything, being overcautious.” Cuomo said.

Los Angeles officials announced six new confirmed travel-related cases in Los Angeles County, including three people who had been to Northern Italy, one of the areas hardest hit in the global outbreak.

Of the six, only one has been hospitalized. The other five are recovering in home isolation.

Los Angeles County declared a local emergency and a public health emergency intended to expand and hasten preparedness efforts.

EMERGENCY FUNDS

In Washington, D.C., U.S. lawmakers reached bipartisan agreement on an $8.3 billion emergency bill to help fund efforts to contain the virus, a congressional aide said. The bill was expected to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives later on Wednesday.

Once the full House approves the bill, the Senate is expected to act quickly so President Donald Trump can sign the measure into law, putting funds into the pipeline to fight the virus.

More than $3 billion would be devoted to research and development of coronavirus vaccines, test kits and therapeutics. There are currently no approved vaccines or treatments for the fast-spreading illness.

In a bid to also help control the spread of the virus outside the United States, $1.25 billion would be set for international efforts, the aide said.

The administration is working to allow laboratories to develop their own coronavirus tests without seeking regulatory approval first, U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar said.

The latest data https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) listed 129 confirmed and presumed cases in the United States, up from the previous 108. They were 80 reported by public health authorities in 13 states plus 49 among people repatriated from abroad, according to the CDC website.

Those figures do not necessarily reflect Wednesday’s updates from three states.

CLASSES CANCELED

On Tuesday, officials said a man in his 50s who lives in a New York City suburb and works at a Manhattan law firm tested positive for the virus, the second identified case in the state.

The four new cases include three family members of the man, who is hospitalized, and a neighbor. Health authorities said one of his children was a student at Yeshiva University, which canceled classes as a precautionary measure.

The hospitalized patient had not traveled to countries with large numbers of cases. The outbreak began in China in December and is now present in nearly 80 countries and territories, killing more than 3,000 people. The first New York case, reported last week, was in a woman who had returned from Iran, where at least 92 people have died.

Governor Cuomo said about 300 students from New York’s college systems, the State University of New York (SUNY) and the City University of New York (CUNY), were being recalled from five hard-hit countries – China, Italy, Japan, Iran and South Korea – and would be flown on a chartered plane and then be quarantined for 14 days.

(Reporting by Maria Caspani, Laila Kearney and Hilary Russ in New York, David Morgan and Richard Cowan in Washington; Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; writing by Grant McCool; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Third person tests positive for new coronavirus in New York

(Reuters) – The number of people ill with the new coronavirus has risen to six in New York state, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday.

New York’s Yeshiva University said one of its students had tested positive for COVID-19, and it was canceling all classes on Wednesday at one of its four New York City campuses as a “precautionary step” while it worked with authorities on how to best prepare and keep its students safe.

On Tuesday, officials said a man in his 50s who lives in a New York City suburb and works at a Manhattan law firm tested positive for the virus, the second identified case in the state. Health authorities said one of his children was a student at Yeshiva.

The man has severe pneumonia and is hospitalized, officials said. The patient had not traveled to countries hardest hit in the coronavirus outbreak, which began in China in December and is now present in nearly 80 countries and territories, killing more than 3,000 people.

Of the six cases of people with coronavirus in New York, only one is hospitalized, Cuomo said at a news conference.

The four new cases include three family members of the hospitalized man, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio said in a statement. The fourth was a neighbor, according to media reports.

“There are going to be many, many people who test positive. By definition, the more you test, the more people you will find who test positive,” Cuomo said.

New York wants to get the state’s capacity for testing for the virus to up to 1,000 a day, he said.

“The people who we are most concerned about, who are most vulnerable are senior citizens, people with immune comprised situations. What we’re worried about: nursing home setting, senior care setting. That’s what we’ve seen in other places and that’s where the situation is most problematic.”

At least one school in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City closed on Tuesday. The SAR Academy and SAR High School remained closed on Wednesday, but online classes were taking place, according to a man with a child at the school.

A synagogue in New Rochelle, New York, where the family of the hospitalized man lives said on Tuesday it was halting “all services immediately and for the foreseeable future.”

The latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) listed 108 confirmed and presumed cases in the United States. That tally consists of 60 reported by public health authorities in 12 states plus 48 among people repatriated from abroad, most of them from an outbreak aboard the Diamond Princess cruise liner in Japan.

Nine people have died in the Seattle area, health officials said. Washington state in the Pacific Northwest has the largest concentration of coronavirus cases detected to date in the United States with 27 people infected as of Tuesday.

(Reporting by Maria Caspani, Laila Kearney and Hilary Russ in New York; writing by Grant McCool; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Second coronavirus case confirmed in New York state, U.S. cases top 100

By Maria Caspani

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A man who lives in a New York suburb and works in Manhattan tested positive for the novel coronavirus, bringing the total confirmed cases in the state to two, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Tuesday.

The 50-year-old man had an underlying respiratory illness and is hospitalized, Cuomo said at a news conference. He added that the patient had not traveled to countries considered the epicenter of the outbreak but had visited Miami recently.

Cuomo disclosed the second case after an Orthodox Jewish school in New York City canceled classes on Tuesday to allow for precautionary measures after a suspected case of coronavirus turned up within its community.

The SAR Academy and SAR High School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx borough said it was in touch with the city’s Department of Health and following its guidelines.

“At this time it important to remain calm,” a statement from school officials said.

The co-educational school, which describes itself as “modern Orthodox,” urged people to follow steps to prevent and minimize the spread of the infection, which had led to the reported deaths of six people in the United States as of Monday evening, all of them in Washington state.

About 100 people nationwide have tested positive for the virus, including the two people in New York, according to health officials.

There are more than 90,000 cases of the new coronavirus globally, with more than 80,000 of them in China. China’s death toll is 2,943, with more than 75 deaths elsewhere as 77 other countries and territories have reported the respiratory disease.

The man who tested positive remains hospitalized in serious condition, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement, adding that the confirmation was made by the New York City Public Health Laboratory on its first day of testing.

“With the results confirmed within a number of hours, we were immediately able to take next steps to stop the spread of this virus,” de Blasio said. “We have said from the beginning that it is likely we will see more positive cases of the coronavirus.”

Previously all testing was conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a process that created in a delay of several days before the result was known.

The U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Tuesday in an emergency move designed to shield the world’s largest economy from the impact of the coronavirus. The Fed said it was cutting rates by a half percentage point to a target range of 1.00% to 1.25%.

(Reporting by Maria Caspani in New York; writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by David Gregorio and Grant McCool)

Six dead of coronavirus in Seattle area, U.S. officials scramble to prepare for more cases

By Steve Holland and Michael Erman

(Reuters) – Six people in the Seattle area have died of illness caused by the new coronavirus, health officials said on Monday, as authorities across the United States scrambled to prepare for more infections, with the emphasis on ratcheting up the number of available test kits.

Dr. Jeff Duchin, chief health officer for Seattle and King County Public Health agency, announced the increase in fatalities from the previous two in Washington state. He told a news conference that the county was not recommending school closures or cancellation of any events at this point, but they do expect the increase in cases to continue.

The total number of cases in Washington state was now at 18. Five of the deaths were in King County and one from Snohomish County, also in the Puget Sound region just north of Seattle.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose state has one confirmed case, welcomed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) allowing New York to test for the virus that has killed more than 3,000 people worldwide since it emerged in China in December.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio deliver remarks at a news conference regarding the first confirmed case of coronavirus in New York State in Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., March 2, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

“I would like to have a goal of 1,000 tests per day capacity within one week because again the more testing the better,” Cuomo said at a briefing on Monday.

Federal health officials have said the number of test kits for coronavirus would be radically expanded in coming weeks. The United States appeared poised for a spike in cases, partly because there would be more testing to confirm infections.

The number of cases in the United States as of March 1 had risen to 91, according to the CDC. There has been a jump in presumed cases reported by the states to 27 from seven. The CDC will confirm the tests sent by states with their own diagnostics. So far, 10 states including California and New York have confirmed or presumed coronavirus cases.

Protective gear and test kits were being distributed to U.S. military facilities with a priority on distribution to the Korean Peninsula, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said at a briefing.

South Korea is one of the hardest hit countries with 4,335 cases and 26 deaths.

U.S. government military laboratories were working to develop a vaccine, Milley said.

President Donald Trump said his administration has asked pharmaceutical companies to accelerate work on the development of a coronavirus vaccine, but provided no details.

Top U.S. health officials have said any vaccine is up to 18 months away and there is no treatment for the respiratory disease, although patients can receive supportive care.

Trump and his task force on the outbreak will meet with drug company executives on Monday afternoon. Executives from GlaxoSmithKline Kline Plc, Sanofi SA , Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer Inc will attend the meeting, according to representatives for the companies.

The White House is also expected to meet this week with top executives from U.S. airlines and the cruise industry over the impact of the virus to their businesses, two people briefed on the matter said.

There have been more than 87,000 cases worldwide and nearly 3,000 deaths in 60 countries, the World Health Organization said. The global death toll was up to 3,044, according to a Reuters tally.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the infectious diseases unit at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said he was concerned the number of U.S. cases could jump in coming weeks.

“When you have a number of cases that you’ve identified and they’ve been in the community for a while, you’re going to wind up seeing a lot more cases than you would have predicted,” he told CNN.

The U.S. Congress is expected to take up a spending measure in coming days that could allocate billions more dollars for the virus response.

World stock markets, after a week-long slide, on Monday regained a measure of calm amid hope of a possible stimulus, while U.S. stocks were up around 3%. [MKTS/GLOB]

(Reporting by Steve Holland, David Shepardson, Susan Heavey, Lisa Lambert, Makini Brice, David Morgan, Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart in Washington, Michael Erman and Caroline Humer in New York and Manas Mishra in Bengaluru, Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Writing by Grant McCool; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Washington state confirms second U.S. coronavirus death; New York reports first case

By Brad Brooks and David Shepardson

(Reuters) – Health officials in Washington state said late Sunday that a nursing home resident had died after contracting coronavirus, while New York’s governor confirmed his state’s first positive case, as the virus moved out of its West Coast foothold.

The coronavirus, which emerged in China late last year, has decimated global markets as it quickly moves around the world. It appeared poised for a spike in the United States, in part because of more testing to confirm cases.

Florida late Sunday declared a public health emergency as it confirmed its first two cases.

Trump administration officials worked Sunday to soothe nerves and calm fears that a global recession was looming, arguing that the public and media were over-reacting and saying that stocks would bounce back because the American economy was fundamentally strong.

The total number of confirmed cases in the United States is more than 75 with two reported deaths, both in Washington state. Globally there have been more than 87,000 cases and nearly 3,000 deaths in 60 countries, according to the World Health Organization.

In the United States, a cluster of cases is centered on a nursing home near Seattle.

The Seattle and King County public health department confirmed late Sunday that a man in his 70s who was a resident of the LifeCare long-term care facility in Kirkland and had coronavirus had died the day before.

A sign at the entrance to Life Care Center of Kirkland, the long-term care facility linked to the two of three confirmed coronavirus cases in the state, is pictured in Kirkland, Washington, U.S. March 1, 2020. REUTERS/David Ryder

On Saturday, the department had reported the first death of a coronavirus patient in the United States, a man in his 50s who was living in Kirkland – the same city where the nursing home is located. Six of the 10 confirmed coronavirus cases in Washington state have been residents or workers at LifeCare.

State officials said an additional 27 residents of the nursing home and 25 staff members were reporting symptoms of the virus, which can be similar to that of the common flu.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo confirmed on Twitter his state’s first coronavirus case, a woman in her 30s who caught the virus during a recent trip to Iran and was now in home quarantine.

Cuomo did not say where the woman lived, but the New York Times reported she was in the Manhattan borough of New York City, citing state officials.

“The patient has respiratory symptoms, but is not in serious condition and has been in a controlled situation since arriving in New York,” Cuomo said.

Stock markets plunged last week, with an index of global stocks setting its largest weekly fall since the 2008 financial crisis, and more than $5 trillion wiped off the value of stocks worldwide.

A key energy conference in Houston that brings together oil ministers and energy firms was canceled on Sunday with the organizers of CERAWeek noting that border health checks were becoming more restrictive and companies had begun barring non-essential travel to protect workers.

A world economy conference with Pope Francis due to take place in Italy later this month was also canceled.

‘WE’RE READY’

Trump said on Sunday that travelers to the United States from countries at high risk of coronavirus would be screened before boarding and on arrival, without specifying which countries.

Delta Air Lines Inc said on Sunday it was suspending until May flights to Milan in northern Italy, where most of that country’s coronavirus cases have been reported. Flights will continue to Rome. American Airlines Group Inc announced a similar move late on Saturday.

The United States has 75,000 test kits for coronavirus and will expand that number “radically” in coming weeks, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

Vice President Mike Pence, appointed last week to run the White House’s coronavirus response, said the government had contracted 3M Co to produce an extra 35 million respiratory masks a month. He urged Americans not to buy the masks, which he said were only needed by healthcare workers. Honeywell International Inc is the other major U.S. mask producer.

He also told Fox News that clinical trials of a coronavirus vaccine would start in six weeks but that a vaccine would likely not be available this season.

Democrats, who will challenge Trump for the presidency in the Nov. 3 election, have criticized his administration for downplaying the crisis and not preparing for the disease to spread in the United States.

Pence said Americans should brace for more cases but that the “vast majority” of those who contracted the disease would recover.

“Other than in areas where there are individuals that have been infected with the coronavirus, people need to understand that for the average American, the risk does remain low. We’re ready,” Pence told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Austin, Texas; David Shepardson and Andrea Shalal in Washington; and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Lisa Shumaker, Daniel Wallis and Peter Cooney)

Fake flyers and face-mask fear: California fights coronavirus discrimination

By Andrew Hay and Maria Caspani

(Reuters) – A flyer in Los Angeles’ Carson area, with a fake seal of the World Health Organization, tells residents to avoid Asian-American businesses like Panda Express because of a coronavirus outbreak. A Los Angeles middle schooler is beaten and hospitalized after students say he is as an Asian-American with coronavirus.

And over 14,000 people sign a petition urging schools in the Alhambra area to close over coronavirus risks, even though there is only one case of the virus in Los Angeles County, with its population of 10.1 million.

These are some of the hoaxes, assaults and rumors Los Angeles authorities spoke out against on Thursday to stamp out anti-Asian bigotry bubbling to the surface in California, where over half of the 15 U.S. coronavirus cases are located.

Bullying and assaults of Asian-Americans are being reported from New York to New Mexico, sparked by unfounded fears that they are somehow linked to a virus that originated in China.

With by far the largest Asian-American population of any U.S. state, officials in California are aggressively trying to get ahead of such hate crimes before they spread.

“We’re not going to stand for hate,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis told reporters, flanked by law enforcement officials. She urged residents to report crimes to a special 211 number.

Existing prejudice against Asians has combined with media images from China to create fears that Asian-Americans are more likely to be virus carriers. The discrimination could get worse given chances the virus may spread in U.S. communities in the weeks and months ahead, said Robin Toma, head of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.

Face masks commonly warn by Asians to protect against germs or prevent their spread have become a flashpoint, with wearers insulted or attacked out of fears they have the virus, he said at the news conference.

“We need you to step up and speak out when you see it happening to others,” he said.

FACE MASKS A TRIGGER

Anti-Asian sentiment emerged in 2003 during the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, which also originated from China. That was before the emergence of social media platforms like Twitter, where racism, hoaxes and slurs get amplified.

The issue is not isolated to California.

New York City designer Yiheng Yu works in an office where many colleagues have recently returned from China and where she and others wear face masks as a precaution.

On one occasion when she wore a mask outside her office she was accosted by a woman.

“She started yelling, ‘Are you Crazy? Get the heck out of here,” said Yu, 34. “I realized it was because I was wearing a mask.”

Even coughs can provoke fear, said Ron Kim, a New York state assembly member representing a Queens district with a large Asian and Asian-American population.

“I had a staff member who was in the Albany train station and she was coughing a little bit and someone approached her asked if she had the virus,” said Kim, who on Feb. 7 established the Asian American Health Advisory Council to educate New Yorkers about the virus.

“We live in a very fear-driven society as it is, so if we add an extra layer it’s bound to happen, people are going to be ugly,” he added.

Manjusha Kulkarni, head of A3PCON, which represents Los Angeles County’s more than 1.5 million Asian-American and Pacific Islander residents, saw an urgent need for information to separate coronavirus fact from fiction.

“Businesses and restaurateurs have seen a steep decline in their patronage,” Kulkarni said of Asian proprietors. “We only have one case of the coronavirus here in LA.”

(Reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico and Maria Caspani in New York; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Leslie Adler)

New York Guardian Angels patrol a Jewish neighborhood on edge

By Peter Szekely and Daniel Fastenberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) – On a windy January night in Brooklyn, a young Jewish woman wary of rising anti-Semitism in her city threw a man who had confronted her to the sidewalk.

It was Ariana Gold’s first night of training with the Guardian Angels, a volunteer neighborhood patrol group that has started patrolling the borough’s Crown Heights section, where attacks against ultra-orthodox Jews have risen in recent months.

“I think a lot of people are afraid and I think rightly so,” Gold said. “We’ve seen a lot of attacks in the Jewish communities.”

Gold, 28, who lives in a different Brooklyn neighborhood and is not ultra-orthodox, is among the first group of local Jewish women to sign up with the Guardian Angels, which was born in New York during the high-crime late 1970s and now has branches in dozens of cities across the country and around the world.

The defense techniques she was shown on her first night are designed to “bring a person into submission without really hurting them,” said martial arts master Milton Oliver, 51, a construction supervisor and Guardian Angel since 1982.

Gold, a New York native who has been boxing for exercise for five years, found her way to the Guardian Angels after spotting a recruitment poster in the subway.

“I believe in community engagement and working with communities, I believe in martial arts and self-defense, I believe in volunteerism and taking care of the people around you,” said Gold, who works at a non-profit organization. “So, this kind of combined all of those traits.”

The Guardian Angel patrols in Crown Heights, home to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement and many of its followers, come after high-profile mass shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego in the past 16 months.

In New York, police reported a 26% jump in anti-Semitic hate-crimes last year. While most of the city’s 234 incidents involved graffiti, they also included attacks on Lubavitchers in Crown Heights, which has a history of occasionally strained relations between Jews and blacks that flared into rioting in 1991.

Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa said community leaders asked his group to resume patrols for the first time since the riots after a mass stabbing attack on Hanukkah celebrants last month in suburban Monsey, New York, about 40 miles (64 km) away, as well as several assaults in Crown Heights.

Patrols were also launched in some other ultra-orthodox Brooklyn neighborhoods, he said.

Although the incidents prompted an increased police presence, Sliwa said residents still need to take charge of their own safety.

“You can’t depend on a political figure or the police,” he said. “You’ve got to self-help, you have to use self-defense, you have to fight back, you have to be aggressive.”

The Guardian Angels have started training 40 to 50 mostly ultra-orthodox Jews to defend themselves and make citizens’ arrests, Sliwa said. By late summer or early fall, he said they should be able to staff their own neighborhood patrols.

Meanwhile, Sliwa and a handful of Guardian Angel volunteers patrol the streets about three times a day in their signature red berets and jackets, often drawing handshakes, selfies and thanks from local residents in traditional Lubavitcher garb.

When Gold is fully trained, she said she will patrol “wherever they send me,” adding, “I’m pretty flexible.”

(This story has been refiled to correct typographical error in byline)

(Reporting by Peter Szekely and Dan Fastenberg; Editing by Dan Grebler)

New York Hanukkah machete attack suspect to face federal hate crime charges

(Reuters) – The man accused of stabbing at least five people in a machete rampage at the home of a Hasidic rabbi during a Hanukkah celebration is due to face federal hate crime charges in White Plains, New York, on Monday.

A federal grand jury indicted Grafton Thomas, 37, late last week with additional counts of hate crimes for the Dec. 28 stabbing of members of the Orthodox Jewish community in Monsey, New York, bringing the number of federal charges he faces to 10.

Each count carries a maximum prison term of life.

One of the victims, a 72-year-old man who suffered devastating machete blows to his head, arm and neck, is comatose and unlikely to recover, according to family members.

Federal prosecutors have said Thomas targeted his victims because of their Jewish faith. In a criminal complaint filed last month, they cited journals they seized from the suspect’s home containing references to Adolf Hitler, Nazi culture and the Black Hebrew Israelites movement, identified by experts in extremism as an anti-Jewish hate group.

Thomas also faces state charges for the attack, which his attorney, pointing to his client’s long history of mental illness, has said was likely an expression of psychosis rather than bigotry.

The attack in Monsey capped a string of incidents in which Jews have been physically attacked or accosted in the New York metropolitan area in recent weeks, including a shooting at a kosher supermarket in New Jersey that left two members of the Hasidic community dead.

One of the suspects in that attack had also expressed interest in the Black Hebrew Israelites. He died in the attack.

The most recent national numbers from Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found 780 anti-Semitic incidents reported to or detected by the organization in the United States in the first half of 2019, compared to 785 incidents reported for the same period in 2018.

(Reporting by Maria Caspani; Editing by Scott Malone and Tom Brown)

Murders in New York City rose in 2019, defying long-term decline in crime rate

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York experienced a 7.8 percent jump in murders last year, though the number of homicides in the country’s largest city remained low on an historical basis as the overall major crime rate extended a decades-long drop, authorities said on Monday.

The number of murders rose in 2019 to 318, the most since 2016, the New York Police Department said in its annual crime statistics report. Robberies, felony assaults and shootings also rose modestly in 2019, while the number of rapes and subway crimes declined.

Officials said most of last year’s increase in murders and shootings was the result of statistical fluctuations, reflecting in part the reclassification of more than two dozen homicides, some of which occurred in other years.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio insisted that the downward trend in the city’s crime rate was irreversible.

“Not only are we going to sustain that progress, we’re going to build upon that progress, and we are never going back to the years when this city wasn’t safe,” he told more than 500 recruits at the city’s police academy.

The overall rate of major felony crimes dropped again in keeping with a long-term trend, slipping 0.9% last year to a record-low of about 95,500 incidents, the report said. Burglary and grand larceny accounted for more than half of the total.

Since 1990, major crimes have fallen 81.9% in a period that spanned the administrations of four mayors, both Republican and Democratic, including Michael Bloomberg, who switched from being a Republican to an independent during his three terms in office.

Despite last year’s jump, murders were still 85.9% below 1990 levels.

The declining crime rate and expectations that it will continue figured prominently in de Blasio’s decision nearly two years ago to close the troubled Rikers Island jail complex within 10 years.

Bucking the downward trend was a jump in hate crimes last year, led by a surge in anti-Semitic incidents, which rose 26%. About three-quarters of the incidents involved graffiti, usually painting swastikas on the walls of buildings and vehicles, officials said.

The number of reported rapes, which had soared by 24% in 2018, declined by 2.5% last year to 1,760. The NYPD had attributed the 2018 increase mostly to heightened awareness and a higher reporting rate inspired by the #MeToo movement. Since 1990, rapes were down by 43.7%.

Crime in the city’s subway system and on buses declined by 3.4% in 2019, after a modest increase a year earlier.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by Frank McGurty)