Jeff Lewis

A deal was reached over the weekend that put an end to New York’s three-week prison strike by corrections officers, but not before 2,000 still-striking officers were fired. Published reports said the employees were to return to work yesterday and while many did, others did not. New York Assemblyman Karl Brabenec of the 98th district, covering western Ramapo and parts of Orange County, says one of the issues at the heart of the strike was the suspension of the HALT Act…         

Part of the most recent agreement includes pausing parts of the HALT Act for 90 days. Meanwhile, the state is investigating two high-profile deaths of inmates recently, one that happened late last month in upstate New York. The New York Times reported 22 year-old Messiah Nantwi was beaten unconscious by multiple correction officers at the Mid-State Correctional Facility in Marcy shortly before he died. Six guards have been charged with murder in the death last December of 43 year-old Robert Brooks, an inmate at Marcy Prison across the street from Mid-State. The incident was caught on body-worn cameras.

Stocks took a beating yesterday as fears of a recession and saber-rattling over tariffs continued to give Wall Street the jitters. The tech-heavy Nasdaq saw a drop of four percent for its worst session since September 2022. The S&P 500 dropped 2.7 percent, hitting its lowest level since last September. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 900 points, or just over two percent. WRCR market analyst Ken Mahoney of Mahoney Asset Management says there’s going to be a lot of pain in the short-term, something unexpected from a pro-business, anti-regulation administration…

Leading the declines Monday in the tech space, Tesla tumbled fifteen percent for its worst day since 2020, Alphabet and Meta, the parent companies of Google and Facebook, each fell more than four percent, and AI company Nvidia lost five percent.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is expecting mass layoffs as early as June, cutting more than 80,000 workers from the agency. That’s according to Reuters, which reported the department’s HR team will review the agency’s operations and eliminate thousands of civil service positions. Marc Carlo is the Director of Veteran Services at Bridges’ Joseph P. Dwyer Peer Support Program, and a former U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant. Carlo says there are sometimes non-veterans working at the VA who don’t quite understand veterans’ issues…

The campaign by the Trump administration has reportedly pushed more than 100,000 people out of the 2.3 million-member federal civilian workforce. The VA provides services to around 16 million U.S. veterans.

Two deaths in New Mexico and Texas are now linked to the measles, which is seeing a resurgence in the country and around the world lately. Rockland County Executive Ed Day says the experience of having gone through a measles outbreak back in October 2018 that lasted nearly a year has prepared the county well for any potential resurgence here, which so far, hasn’t been seen…

Day says the measles is a powerful virus that can be highly transmissible if precautions aren’t taken. Children who don’t get vaccinated risk serious illness, particularly those under age five, who are at highest risk for severe complications including pneumonia, encephalitis and death. Measles can also put children at higher risk for other potentially fatal childhood diseases by causing their immune systems to break down. For more information, click the links below.

https://www.rocklandcountyny.gov/departments/health/communicable-diseases/measles

https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/measles

www.Vaccine.gov