Latest news with #RocklandCounty
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
When The Journal-News, during Watergate, offered a 'few words' about the role of the press
The Republican president was furious with the press, attacking journalists by name for casting his administration in an unfavorable light. Sound familiar? This particular president, though, was Richard M. Nixon, who had three journalists on his "enemies list," targeting them with IRS audits and worse, according to a 1970 memo from White House Counsel John Dean on "how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration." Or, Dean wrote: "Stated a bit more bluntly, how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." That was years before the Watergate break-in, the act of political subterfuge that would consume the divided nation and lead to Nixon's resignation in August 1974. In the midst of that scandal, on March 13, 1973 — the day the initial Watergate burglary trial began — the Journal-News in Rockland County and its sister papers across Westchester published a full-page, full-throated defense of the press. Under the headline, "Time to say a few words about the press," the text came from Franklin and Lincoln and Washington and from the judge in the Pentagon Papers case, among others. Their words were surrounded by pen-and-ink portraits, painstakingly rendered by the paper's resident artist, Frank Becerra. Frank Becerra was a fixture at the papers for 38 years and his sons, photographer Frank Jr. (still on staff) and graphic artist Billy, followed him into the business. His art ranged from political and sports cartoons to courtroom sketches. He was a calm presence in the middle of a daily-newspaper storm, a gentleman as polite as he was generous. Frank retired from the Gannett newspapers in 1992 and settled into life doting on his wife, Isabel, and the family they made: six children and nine grandchildren at the time of Frank's death on May 25, 2009. Here's the full text of the illustration, which was reprinted repeatedly in the paper in the years to follow. "Let the people know the facts and the country will be free." Abe Lincoln "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Thomas Jefferson "In the First Amendment the founding fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people." Justice Hugo Black "... the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter." George Washington "A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right men prize." Winston Churchill "The security of a nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." Judge Murray Gurfein, in the Pentagon Papers ruling "Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all other liberties." John Milton "That endless book, the newspaper, is our national glory." Henry Ward Beecher "All I know is what I read in the papers." Will Rogers "Given a free press, we may defy open or insidious enemies of liberty." Daniel Webster "Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of the press." Ben Franklin "Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." Napoleon I Reach Peter D. Kramer at pkramer@ This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: When the NY Journal-News defended the press during Watergate in 1973
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Queens College ‘cleans house' of Jewish accounting professors after ‘antisemitic hate' erupts on campus: lawsuit
Queens College purged its accounting department of Jewish adjunct professors after 'antisemitic hate speech and violence' erupted on campus following the Hamas terror attack on Israel, according to a lawsuit. Adjunct accounting professor Helen Schwalb says the City University of New York school declined to reappoint her in May 2023 — along with five Jewish colleagues — as part of an effort to 'clean house of its Jewish staff,' she claimed in court papers. The school 'kept younger, non-Jewish educators with lower performance ratings,' Schwalb, 66, contended. 'The only remaining Jews in the [accounting] department are those with tenure who are in their 70s and 80s and will likely retire soon,' she said in the Brooklyn Federal Court lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages. Schwalb, of Rockland County, taught two or three classes each semester as well as summer classes at the school since 2012 and had high performance ratings, she said. The school claimed there was a shortage of enrollment and budget issues, but Schwalb said in court papers the two classes she was slated to teach were fully enrolled and given to other, less qualified educators. Queens College has been accused of 'repeatedly' failing to stop a 'barrage of antisemitic hate speech and violence that emerged on campus since the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by Hamas,' she said in the litigation. Enrollment in the school's accounting department is down 39% between 2020 and 2024, the school told The Post, with an 18% drop between 2022 and 2023. Queens College declined comment on the lawsuit.
New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The ‘American Dirt' Backlash Nearly Stopped Jeanine Cummins From Writing
By most measures, Jeanine Cummins's 2020 novel 'American Dirt' was a colossal success. A propulsive story about a Mexican mother and son who flee to the United States to escape a drug cartel, the novel sold for seven figures. It was an Oprah book club pick, won endorsements from best-selling authors like Stephen King and John Grisham, and became a runaway hit, selling more than four million copies in nearly 40 languages. In other ways, though, 'American Dirt' was a disaster. Cummins, who grew up in Maryland and is of Irish and Puerto Rican descent, was widely condemned for what some claimed was an insensitive and clichéd depiction of Mexican migrants. To critics of the book, she became the embodiment of the publishing industry's racial blind spots, and the main character in a caustic debate about whether, and how, authors should write outside of their own cultural experience. Cummins thought her career was over. She wasn't sure if she'd be able to write again, or if she even wanted to. But a few years ago, the idea for a new novel started to take shape — a story that grew out of the experience of having her cultural identity debated. 'In the aftermath of publishing 'American Dirt,' I was doing a lot of soul searching and self-reflection on how did I get here, how did this happen?' Cummins said during an interview at the public library near her home in Rockland County, N.Y. 'So I started thinking a lot about my own identity, which I'd been thinking about my entire life privately, but had never had to grapple with publicly before.' Those questions led Cummins to trace her roots in Puerto Rico, which fed into her new novel, 'Speak to Me of Home.' The narrative follows a family's turbulent history across several generations. Rafaela Acuña y Daubón, who is based on Cummins's grandmother, moves from San Juan to Trinidad to work on a U.S. naval base as a secretary — a job she's forced to take after her father's business collapses and the family's wealth evaporates. She meets a handsome Irish American man and marries him, despite his father's bigoted objections to her background. They move to St. Louis, where Rafaela feels isolated and presses their children to assimilate, hoping to protect them from the discrimination she faces. Rafaela's daughter, Ruth, feels cut off from her Puerto Rican roots, until her own daughter, Daisy, moves to San Juan and discovers a momentous family secret. Much of the narrative was mined from Cummins's own family, she said. When her paternal grandmother Maria was still a teenager, her family lost its fortune and sent her to work on a naval base in Trinidad, where she met Cummins's Irish American grandfather and eventually married him and moved to St. Louis. While interviewing relatives to research the novel, Cummins learned that her grandfather's family had objected to him marrying a Puerto Rican woman, and that Maria, who thought of herself as upper class, was shocked to encounter pervasive racism in Missouri. In incidents that Cummins repurposed in the novel, Maria was forbidden from using the ladies' locker room at a country club, and urged her children not to identify as Puerto Rican. Cummins's father, who died in 2016, grew up traveling between St. Louis and Puerto Rico, but he rarely brought up his Puerto Rican heritage, she said. Growing up, she knew more about her roots in Ireland, where she lived for two years after college, bartending and writing poetry. Her first two novels, 'The Outside Boy' and 'The Crooked Branch,' were works of historical fiction set in Ireland. With 'American Dirt,' which drew early comparisons to 'The Grapes of Wrath,' Cummins seemed poised to break out. But pretty quickly, the hype was drowned out by those who argued the novel was full of harmful stereotypes about Mexico, depicting it as a violent, corrupt country overrun by drug cartels. Others seized on Cummins's author's note, in which she said she hoped to counter misconceptions about migrants as a 'helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass,' and that she wished that someone 'slightly browner than me' had written the novel. When Winfrey announced 'American Dirt' as her book club selection, the backlash was swift. A group of 141 authors signed an open letter asking Winfrey to drop the novel, which they said was 'exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed, too often erring on the side of trauma fetishization.' Winfrey decided to highlight the debate. Instead of the usual format, Cummins was brought on to discuss the book alongside three Latina writers — Julissa Arce, Esther Cepeda and Reyna Grande — who were critical of the novel. 'I wasn't able to respond in that moment — there was nothing I could say,' Cummins said. 'I wasn't able to defend myself.' She recalls feeling like a magnet for people's pent-up frustrations. 'I was sort of the lit match to dry kindling,' she said. 'It was incredibly disconcerting that I was the person who became the example of the white supremacy problem in publishing, as a part Puerto Rican woman from a working-class background.' She was particularly stung when people who had initially supported the book withdrew their endorsements, 'in ways that did not feel genuine, that were entire self-serving and dare I say cowardly,' she said. In hindsight, Cummins acknowledges some positive outcomes from the controversy, which brought attention to how the book business often fails to promote works by writers of color, while heaping money and acclaim on white authors. 'The conversation that did happen around 'American Dirt' was long overdue, though I would have preferred not have been in the cross hairs of it,' Cummins said. Cummins said she does not regret writing 'American Dirt,' though she wishes the debate about the novel had centered on the humanitarian crisis at the border. Still, she was unable to write for a year after the controversy. Once she began, she was terrified of the scrutiny she might face and had a couple of false starts, she said. 'She was trying to find her sea legs,' said the novelist and bookseller Ann Patchett, who was among the prominent fans of 'American Dirt' and was steadfast in her praise of the book as the backlash built. When she read 'Speak to Me of Home,' Patchett said she was struck by how Cummins navigated questions about cultural identity and belonging, some of the same issues that became a flashpoint with 'American Dirt.' 'She found a way to make art out of her experience, but she made it into something loving instead of something full of rage,' she said. 'Speak to Me of Home' has drawn mixed pre-publication reviews. Publishers Weekly called it 'engrossing'; Kirkus Reviews said Cummins was 'more nuanced' in her treatment of issues like colorism and class, but argued that she 'still indulges in tired tropes.' Holt released the novel on May 13. Pamela Klinger-Horn, the events coordinator at Valley Bookseller in Stillwater, Minn., said she saw no signs that readers were put off by the 'American Dirt' controversy. 'What I've heard from readers is that they liked 'American Dirt' and they're excited to read something new by her,' she said. At Bethany Beach Books in Delaware, pre-orders for Cummins's new novel have been strong, and the store has sold more than 70 tickets for an upcoming event for the book, said Zandria Senft, the store's manager. 'A lot of people want to support her and hear her speak about her new book,' Senft said. 'It's so refreshing that she didn't back down and that she put herself back out into the world.' The reaction Cummins cared about the most was from her own extended family and her relatives in Puerto Rico, she said. 'Because this was dicey and a lot of it comes from our family history and it covers a lot of themes that we don't talk about in my family, I wasn't sure how they were going to feel about it,' she said. Cummins sent copies to her father's siblings and cousins and their children, and recently the family gathered over Zoom to discuss the book. To her relief, their reactions were positive, and the conversation later turned to her cousin Carolina Quixano's recent appearance on 'The Bachelor.' Cummins is now restarting her public life as an author, after a five-year hiatus, and is preparing for an eight-city book tour. While she doesn't relish rehashing the debate over 'American Dirt,' she finally feels able to talk about it. 'It's not my favorite subject,' she said. 'But I'm not afraid of it.'
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Rockland's lone local radio station WRCR AM sold to NYC media group
Rockland's lone local radio station is being sold to a New York City media conglomerate that owns the talk radio station 77 WABC. As a result, the channel for WRCR AM 1700 will broadcast programming from WABC hosts until a new format is introduced, according to the pending new ownership, Red Apple Group. "Yes, for the time being, the station will simulcast WABC and plans to have local programming serving the community," said Emily Panklow, the general counsel for the Manhattan-based Red Apple. The Red Apple Group is buying WRCR from Alexander Broadcasting, Inc. One of the corporation's co-owners is Dr. Alexander Medakovich, a physician and president of WRCR Radio. The Red Apple owner is billionaire John Catsimatidis, a media maven who also owns real estate and other businesses, such as supermarkets. Catsimatidis also has dabbled in politics, running for office in New York City and supporting candidates like President Donald Trump and the Cuomos. Local radio's history in Rockland: Rockland: What's the future of local radio? While Catsimatidis and Rita Cosby host an hourly show, WABC is known for its conservative commentators, focusing on national, New York City, and international issues. The station's hosts include Curtis Silwa, Mark Levin, Roger Stone, Bill O'Reilly, Brian Kilmeade, Sid Rosenberg, and Dominic Carter of Rockland. WRCR and its predecessors' formats focused on local issues and news for more than 50 years in Rockland, offering weekly radio time to elected officials and local activists. WRCR reported on staples like sports and weather, along with reports on finance, real estate, and county history. One of WRCR's predecessors was WRKL AM 910, which was bought out in 1999 and became a Polish-interest and Polish-language station. WRCR, which had been broadcasting from the Palisades Credit Union Park in Ramapo, switched to an Internet-only format in November 2016. By February 2017, the station revisited its past with the return of Stony Point's Steve Possell's morning show. Possell has since retired. Steve Lieberman covers government, breaking news, courts, police, and investigations. Reach him at slieberm@ Twitter: @lohudlegal Read more articles and bio. Our local coverage is only possible with support from our readers. This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Rockland NY lone local radio station WRCR AM sold to NYC media group
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Yahoo
Caregiver convicted of forcing Pearl River man, 78, at knifepoint to sign checks
NEW CITY -- A Rockland County Court jury convicted a live-in home care worker of forcing a Pearl River senior citizen at knifepoint to sign five personal checks in her name, totaling $18,592. The jury, after a week-long trial, found Delores Anderson, 60, of the Bronx guilty on Thursday, May 8, of five felony counts of second-degree grand larceny, the Rockland District Attorney's Office said on Friday, May 9. Anderson is scheduled for sentencing by Judge Kevin Russo on Aug. 27. A single count of second-degree grand larceny carries a maximum prison term of 15 years. Sentencing is at the discretion of the judge. Anderson cared for a 78-year-old man living in a Pearl River senior assisted living complex from December 2022 through August 2023. She was a live-in home care worker. She forced the man to sign five checks by threatening him with a kitchen knife, "instilling fear in him, that if he did not comply and author these checks, she would cause him a physical injury," the District Attorney's Office said in a news release. On May 5, 2023, Anderson forced the man for the first time to sign two personal checks payable to her, the release states. The checks totaled $4,082 each. On July 25, 2023, Anderson held the same kitchen knife to the victim's stomach and demanded that he write three more checks. Two of the checks amounted to $3,603 each, and the third totaled $3,602. She later withdrew $18,972.00 from her account, the release said. Orangetown police investigated and arrested Anderson in March 2024. Senior assistant district attorneys Allyson White and Brittany Richardson prosecuted. District Attorney Thomas Walsh said Anderson preyed upon a vulnerable person. 'This defendant not only violated a position of trust in this theft but threatened this elderly victim with a knife in his own home," Walsh said. "Our senior citizens can be assured that the Rockland County District Attorney's Office is committed to protecting them from violence and abuse and will vigorously prosecute any offenders." Steve Lieberman covers government, breaking news, courts, police, and investigations. Reach him at slieberm@ Twitter: @lohudlegal Read more articles and bio. Our local coverage is only possible with support from our readers. This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Caregiver forced Pearl River NY man to sign checks at knifepoint
