#administration

#administration

In the days after Eric Adams was elected mayor of New York, several of his supporters approached him with some uncomfortable advice.They urged him not to hire his closest ally, Ingrid P. Lewis-Martin, for his administration, according to six people with knowledge of the conversations.It was an audacious suggestion.

Talk of federal indictments, classified documents and anything related to the president's predecessor are out.Bridge repair, junk fees and prescription drug prices are in.As President Biden ramps up his re-election campaign, his team is focused not on the various investigations into former President Donald J. Trump but rather on spotlighting the ways, however mundane, his administration can assist Americans in their daily lives.

For the third time in less than two weeks, a group of Latin American asylum seekers on Wednesday was sent abruptly to California, the latest episode in a monthslong political protest by the Republican governors of Florida and Texas against Democratic immigration policies.Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said in a statement that his administration had orchestrated the relocation, in which at least 42 migrants, including children and toddlers, were bused from Texas to Los Angeles.

Standing on a stage decorated with rainbows and speaking to a crowd that included survivors of gay nightclub shootings and transgender rights advocates, President Biden on Saturday said his administration would work to counter a recent series of Republican-led bills and laws targeting the L.G.B.T.Q.

President Biden and his top aides in the West Wing, along with members of his administration and re-election campaign at all levels, are executing a carefully crafted strategy in response to the federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump: Say nothing.Mr. Biden has always insisted that he would never interfere with the independence of the Justice Department.

Written on a dry-erase board in Jennifer Siebel Newsom's office overlooking the dome of the California Capitol are two phrases: "gender equity" and "support for survivors."As a feminist and documentary filmmaker, Siebel Newsom has been on a mission to tell women's stories and upend the gender imbalance that permeates life in America.

(John G. Mabanglo / Associated Press)

It's hard to take Gov. Gavin Newsom's construction streamlining proposals seriously.Last month, the governor convened a splashy news conference on the site of a future solar farm in the Central Valley to unveil the state's "most ambitious permitting and project review reforms in a half-century."

With just over a week to go until election day, Municipal Affairs Reporter Shawn Jeffords weighs in on some key questions about where the race to become Toronto's next mayor is going in the final days.What's the last week of this thing going to look like?We'll see more campaign announcements and a shift to rallies where candidates can project confidence and a sense of momentum ahead of election day.

Last week, in response to another weekend of shootings, Mayor Brandon Johnson pushed back on critics of Chicago's violence, saying, "What I find disingenuous is, where were these individuals when schools were being shut down and closed?"This latest rhetorical gem builds on what already qualifies as a pattern of deflection by distraction by the new administration.

Few countries in the Western Hemisphere have evoked for Americans the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine as much as has Cuba.For years, the Soviets used the island nation 103 miles off the coast of Florida as a listening post, and, in 1962, they brought the world to the brink of existential conflict by secretly placing nuclear ballistic missiles on the island.

Volunteers were disappointed by a lackluster city response at a meeting Monday nightto their request to enter temporary city-run shelters starting this week, following months of not being able to get inside the buildings that house nearly 10,000 migrants who have come to Chicago since August.Collaboration efforts between volunteers and city officials came to a head when the city hosted a closed meeting to respond to a letter sent by the Police Station Response Team, a network of volunteers providing support and resources to migrants sleeping on the floors of police stations as they wait for placement in shelters.

"The subtle choice of adverbs such as 'whereby,' 'wherein,' and 'to' holds the power to shape the fate of patents, determining their validity, patentability, and scope."Patent drafting relies on the precise and strategic use of language to protect innovative ideas.A subtle misuse of adverbs can render a patent vulnerable to attacks on its validity.

"Honeywell held that 'unexpected properties may cause what may appear to be an obvious composition to be nonobvious,' not that unexpected mechanisms of action must be found to make the known use of known compounds nonobvious." - Federal Circuit
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled in a precedential decision Wednesday that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) was correct to affirm a United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) examiner's finding that the claims of U.S. Patent Application 15/131,442 were obvious in view of the prior art.

By Chris Holman
In re Couvaras, 2023 WL 3984753 (Fed.Cir.June 14, 2023)
A prima facie obvious combination of prior art chemical compounds can sometimes be deemed nonobvious if the result of the combination is sufficiently surprising, such as when a combination of pharmaceutical active ingredients results in an unexpected synergy.

If Commissioner Keechant Sewell, head of the nation's largest police force, wanted to promote an investigator to first-grade detective, she had to clear it with City Hall, according to her former top uniformed officer.When she was selecting someone to run the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division, her choice was blocked by members of Mayor Eric Adams's administration, according to several current and former officials.

After not even 18 months in office, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City has lost one top official after another from his administration, a troubling and unusual exodus as the city is confronted by multiple major challenges.Last month, the mayor's chief housing officer, Jessica Katz, announced her resignation, leaving the city without the architect of its housing agenda.

Developers hoping to snap up big city real estate often persuade local officials to shower them with taxpayer-funded incentives to seal the deal and prevent them from taking their business elsewhere.But a new film studio set to go up on a Midtown Manhattan pier stands out as an especially sweet deal, at an especially difficult time for New York.

New Yorkers have grown accustomed to being inundated with well-intentioned warnings from city and state leaders, for everything from incoming snowstorms to virus outbreaks.But as the skies darkened dramatically over New York City on Tuesday evening, the air suddenly rich with acrid smoke, Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul made no public appearances about the worsening conditions, limiting their communications to news releases and posts on Twitter.

The public image of President Biden's Union Joe persona rests largely on his longtime affiliations with labor unions representing police officers, firefighters and building-trade workers.But the modern labor movement that is gathering Saturday in Philadelphia to endorse Mr. Biden's 2024 re-election campaign is younger, more diverse and has far more women than the union stereotype Mr. Biden has embraced during the decades he was building his political identity.

Four major environmental groups endorsed President Joe Biden's 2024 reelection for president on Wednesday night, ahead of his speech at a League of Conservation Voters dinner in the nation's capital.LCV Action Fund, NextGen PAC, the Sierra Club, and the NRDC Action Fund endorsed Biden together at the dinner, which is honoring former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

House Republicans took their most concrete and public step this week toward pursuing the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.But behind the scenes, supporters of the effort are still working to convince key holdouts to get on board with the potentially divisive plan.House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green on Wednesday outlined a five-phase investigation into Mayorkas and his handling of the border, accompanied by a preliminary report and a hearing focused on framing Mayorkas' dereliction of duty, which starts a roughly three-month countdown for House Republican leadership and their allies to get the House GOP conference in alignment.

The US military is set to launch a formal investigation into a drone strike in Syria in early May, six weeks after the operation and following reports it killed a civilian rather than a senior al-Qaeda leader as first claimed, three defense officials familiar with the matter told CNN.The anticipated opening of the more formal inquiry, known as a 15-6, is the clearest sign yet that US Central Command may have botched the drone strike in northwest Syria on May 3. In the immediate aftermath of the strike, Gen. Erik Kurilla, the commander of Central Command, and his staff had high confidence that they had targeted and killed a senior al-Qaeda leader.

Former President Donald J. Trump visited Little Havana in Miami on Tuesday immediately after his arraignment, his latest attempt to cast himself as a man persecuted by his political enemies.It was a not-subtle attempt to seek the sympathies of Latinos, in Florida and beyond.Mr. Trump's visit to Versailles Restaurant, a landmark that is emblematic of the Cuban diaspora, came as Republicans have increasingly likened his indictment to corruption and political oppression in Latin American countries.

The indictment of Donald Trump on charges of retaining government documents brought with it the inevitable false equivalencies of the conduct of Trump's chief political rival.But the actions of the two men are as different as deliberately driving your car into a crowd of people and committing a fender-bender.

A strong and longstanding bipartisan consensus in Congress around providing huge sums to aid Ukraine's war effort is beginning to fray as a pivotal counteroffensive against Russia is underway, and as Republicans bent on slashing federal spending gain traction in their efforts to limit or block future military assistance for Kyiv.

For activists defending press freedom and human rights in Guatemala, Wednesday looms as a key gauge of the country's wobbly democratic health.In a courtroom in the country's capital, a verdict is expected in the trial of one of Guatemala's most high-profile journalists, a case widely seen as another sign of the deteriorating rule of law in the Central American country.

China is planning to build a facility in Cuba that U.S. officials are concerned could be capable of spying on the United States by intercepting electronic signals from nearby U.S. military and commercial facilities, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the agreement.Beijing has built listening outposts elsewhere and has a military presence in Cuba, but an eavesdropping station could give China a foothold about 100 miles from the Florida coastline, from which it could potentially conduct surveillance operations against the United States.

To those familiar with the fraught battle lines around one of society's most emotive issues, the reaction of anti-abortion campaigners in the hours after a woman was jailed for procuring a late abortion appeared muted.Key voices from major anti-abortion groups were conspicuously absent in the coverage, while pro-choice campaigners' calls for decriminalisation were tempered by the insistence that they were not calling for freely available abortion at any stage of a pregnancy.

The parties are already campaigning and people in the constituency are telling us they just want the limbo to be over, but still we wait for Conservative MP Nadine Dorries to formally stand down from her safe seat in Mid Bedfordshire.She made the move at a similar time to two other Tory MPs stepping down - former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Uxbridge & South Ruislip in west London, and Nigel Adams in Selby & Ainsty in North Yorkshire.

Rishi Sunak was on visit in Harrow this morning here he witnessed an immigration raid.Asked about the privileges committee report into Boris Johnson, he said he had not seen it yet and that it would not be right to comment.Asked if he would give an interview later, after he had had time to read it, Sunak replied: You are talking about a report that I haven't seen and that no one else has seen.

Woking council plans to sever ties with the Northern Irish developer behind a skyscraper venture that helped tip the tiny Surrey local authority into effective bankruptcy.Amid ballooning costs and delays, a dramatic plunge in the value of the council's Victoria Square development which is 52% owned by Moyallen, a business from Dungannon, County Tyrone is at the centre of the local authority's financial meltdown.

The world has moved on from Boris Johnson, a senior cabinet minister has said, as he sought to quell the intensifying row among Tory MPs about the former prime minister's decision to quit parliament.Despite Johnson resigning on Friday in a fit of rage over the results of an inquiry into Partygate, the energy secretary, Grant Shapps, slapped down claims the privileges committee conducting the inquiry was biased or that Johnson had been forced out by the establishment.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker's administration will close enrollment for a state-funded health insurance program for immigrants under 65 who are in the country without legal permission, and cap enrollment for those 65 and older, after ballooning costs forced last-minute compromises on the state budget.The move drew a swift rebuke from Latino legislators and an immigrant health care advocacy group that blasted it as "immoral and fiscally short-sighted."

After a tour boat capsized in a tunnellike cavern in western New York this week, killing a man and injuring nearly a dozen others, officials said they were investigating when the boat had last been inspected.The answer, it turns out, is most likely never.The 300-foot canal in the dimly lit cavern, the Lockport Cave in Lockport, N.Y., is privately owned and is not a navigable body of water.

A lawyer representing the families of two teenage girls murdered by Paul Bernardo has sent a letter to the head of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) demanding that the serial rapist and killer be returned to a maximum-security prison."We urge you to restore public confidence in the correctional system and the administration of justice by rescinding the transfer order," Timothy Danson, counsel for the families of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, wrote in a letter sent to CSC commissioner Anne Kelly on Friday.

Survivors of farm schools where British children suffered physical and sexual abuse are imploring the King to intervene after they were told his charity, the Prince's Trust, had insufficient monies to adequately pay compensation.The Prince's Trust became liable for the Fairbridge Society in 2012 when it absorbed the charity which for 70 years had sent tens of thousands of British children to farm orphanages in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the former Rhodesia, where they suffered cruelty, mistreatment and sexual abuse.

President Joe Biden on Friday is marking one year since the passage of the first major gun safety legislation in a generation during a summit in Connecticut, as gun violence reaches record levels in the United States and additional congressional action remains stalled.Last year, Biden signed legislation called the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law a significant breakthrough on one of the most contentious policy issues.

Some years ago, a psychiatrist named Wendy Dean read an article about a physician who died by suicide.Such deaths were distressingly common, she discovered.The suicide rate among doctors appeared to be even higher than the rate among active military members, a notion that startled Dean, who was then working as an administrator at a U.S. Army medical research center in Maryland.

"If the administration and Congress are concerned about U.S. competitiveness, they need to push back." - ITIF
Earlier this week, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) released a report that offers a rebuttal to nine claims it identifies with the "anti-IP progressive orthodoxy."

Former President Donald Trump delivers remarks during an event following his arraignment in Bedminster, New Jersey, on June 13.Amr Alfiky/Reuters Former President Donald Trump made numerous false and misleading claims in a speech he delivered Tuesday night following his afternoon arraignment in Miami federal court to face charges of illegally retaining classified documents and obstructing the federal investigation into his conduct.

Some of the fiercest attacks against Donald Trump's handling of classified documents came from Trump himself, especially in barbs aimed at Hillary Clinton.That's why in the indictment, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith cited some of Trump's own speeches from his 2016 election campaign to show in easy-to-grasp form how seriously - or unseriously the former president took the task of keeping the nation's official secrets secret.

A bipartisan group of American lawmakers has asked the Biden administration to punish South Africa for what they see as the country's support of Russia's war in Ukraine by moving a major trade conference scheduled to be held in South Africa this year to another country.The request, made in a letter sent last week, is the first concrete effort at retaliation by members of the U.S. government over the growing view in Washington that South Africa's relationship with Russia is moving in a direction that threatens America's national interests.

Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams New York City is making around 20 miles of its streets car-free on various Saturdays this summer as part of its Summer Streets initiative expansion, Mayor Eric Adams announced in Queens on Monday.The initiative, which was first launched in 2008, will see large sections of roadways in each borough blocked off from vehicular traffic on five Saturdays over the course of July and August.

Sign up for our amNY Sports email newsletter to get insights and game coverage for your favorite teams As thousands of asylum seekers continue to pour into the Big Apple each week, Mayor Eric Adams on Monday announced his administration is opening two new so-called Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs) spread across three college dormitories on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

The Justice Department and Minneapolis officials have agreed to negotiate toward a deal on a court-enforced consent decree.A consent decree in this case, between the Department of Justice and a state or local governmental agency, such as a police department, is a court-approved agreement that creates and enforces a road map for changes and overhaul within the agency where the Justice Department has found evidence of abuse and misconduct.Typically, a federal judge, along with an independent monitor, is appointed to oversee the changes and enforce the agreement.

It was a prime opportunity for a Philadelphia developer that had won a contract for a $55 million project in Providence, R.I., to show off what it could do.But even before two Rhode Island state officials arrived for a tour of a building that the company had redeveloped, one of them made some highly unorthodox demands.

Zackey Rahimi, a drug dealer in Texas with a history of armed violence, is hardly a model citizen, a federal appeals court judge wrote in March, with considerable understatement.But the court vacated Mr. Rahimi's conviction under a federal law that makes it a crime for people subject to domestic-violence orders to possess guns, ruling that the law violated the Second Amendment.

The Justice Department on Thursday took the legally and politically momentous step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, accusing him of mishandling classified documents he kept upon leaving office and then obstructing the government's efforts to reclaim them.

(John G. Mabanglo / Associated Press)

Democrats leading California's Senate and Assembly on Monday announced a legislative state budget deal, but they remain at odds with Gov. Gavin Newsom over his sweeping plan to streamline major infrastructure projects and reduce environmental litigation delays.

The King's connection to the Fairbridge farm schools where British children suffered physical and sexual abuse is in the spotlight again after administrators for his charity informed survivors they would receive a tiny portion of the compensation pay-out they were promised.Here, the PA news agency looks at the connection of Charles and his charity, the Prince's Trust, to the organisation which sent hundreds of thousands of British children to its colonies where they experienced physical and sexual abuse: What is the King's connection to Fairbridge?

After months of intense debate over how to best spend tens of millions of dollars on the city's homelessness crisis, San Jose has decided to move roughly $12.3 million away from affordable housing to support interim solutions millions less than Mayor Matt Mahan sought.The wrangling came to a head Tuesday evening amid heated budget discussions, with Councilmembers Dev Davis and David Cohen leading the charge to help all sides reach a compromise.

Millions of borrowers may learn soon whether they could receive up to $20,000 in debt relief under President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program.The fate of the unprecedented debt cancellation program lies with the Supreme Court, which is expected to decide to either uphold or strike down the proposal in late June or early July.

NEW: White House spokesman Jay Carney denies the change is related to midterm elections Health officials want to give insurers, consumers and IT pros more time to learn from mistakes The delay won't affect 2014 coverage or sign-ups President Obama's approval rating has taken a beating over the glitches in the Affordable Care Act White House spokesman Jay Carney denied Friday that next year's midterm elections are the reason behind the administration's decision to postpone the 2014 opening date for 2015 enrollment in Obamacare from October 15 to November 15.

It's a dynamic that could force Biden to keep acting officials in some top jobs, which Trump took to extremes and elicited Democratic criticism.But the Biden administration, congressional Democrats and the nominees themselves are realizing some fights aren't even worth having.Take Ann Carlson, who Biden tapped to run the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration.

Zach Mercer and Danny Care have been selected in England's first World Cup training squad of the summer.Number eight Mercer, who will move to Gloucester from Montpellier next season, last played Test rugby in 2018.But Exeter back-row forward Sam Simmonds signed by Montpellier as Mercer's replacement has ruled himself out of World Cup selection following discussions with England head coach Steve Borthwick.

When Chief Justice John Roberts began reading his decision in a voting rights dispute from the Supreme Court bench on Thursday, few would have expected the significant turn he was about to take favoring Black voters in Alabama.Here was the author of a 2013 decision that had eviscerated a crucial safeguard of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a jurist who had repeatedly criticized specific efforts to protect Black and Latino voters in redistricting, or as he once called it, a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden welcomed LGBTQ Americans to the White House on Saturday for a picnic and concert to commemorate Pride Month.You are loved.You are heard.You are understood.And you belong, Biden said in his remarks on the South Lawn to a cheering crowd.The president praised the extraordinary courage of LGBTQ Americans, while acknowledging the discrimination and violence the community faces.

The National Archives is pushing back on claims made by former President Donald Trump, his lawyers and his allies over his retention of classified documents, for which he now faces a federal indictment.On Friday, the Archives took the rare step of releasing a public statement rebuking claims suggesting that Trump was allowed to keep classified materials under the Presidential Records Act.

SPRINGFIELD - Employees at a troubled downstate mental health center repeatedly covered up staff misconduct even as the facility was under state scrutiny following allegations that residents were abused and neglected, according to a state government watchdog report released Friday.Gov. J.B. Pritzker in March laid out a multiyear "repurposing" plan for the Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center in Anna in partnership with the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine that was designed to improve conditions and offer residents the option to move to other facilities.