Friday's changes, made under Local Law 145, require employers to make an additional 32 hours of unpaid protected time off available immediately upon hire and again at the start of each calendar year. It also expands the reasons employees may use protected time off to include childcare, caring for a family member with a disability, attending benefits or housing appointments or hearings, staying home during declared public emergencies, and addressing needs related to workplace violence.
The Biden administration Federal Trade Commission alum has hit the ground running with announcement after announcement - clearing a backlog of cases left to collect dust under former Mayor Eric Adams, forcefully demanding app companies comply with new worker-protection laws, and pledging to hold corporations and their CEO's accountable to the law. Levine's worker and consumer protection agency has emerged in recent years as a key regulatory force against the fast-growing delivery app industry, which has huge consequences for the city's public realm.
"The problem with a lot of these older town centres, which traditionally have offered free parking, is you get all-day parking - people who are commuters or not actually customers of the shopping centre itself, or very often the retailers and the staff themselves," he said. "To actually free up the spaces, to manage the spaces and ensure a quick turnaround for short-term visitors, the introduction of parking charges is the best way to achieve this." He added: "There's no such thing as free parking - someone has to pay somewhere for maintenance, security, shopping centre management.
Only one prosecution for illegal wood burning has been made in the past year despite 15,195 complaints across England, data shows. Additionally, just 24 fines were issued by local authorities between September 2024 and August 2025, responses to freedom of information requests by the campaign group Mums for Lungs revealed. In smoke control areas alone, 9,274 complaints were made a 65% increase on the previous year.
In August, the New York State Department of Financial Services reached agreement with Healthplex, Inc., a licensed insurance agent and independent adjuster, to pay a $2 million civil penalty after a hacker executed a phishing attack on an employee's email and gained access to the private health data and sensitive nonpublic information of tens of thousands of Healthplex consumers. Eight years in the making, the final phase of New York's groundbreaking Cybersecurity Regulation Part 500 takes effect Nov. 1.
A report from DCC's Halloween working group, made up of representatives from the public domain, community development and housing departments, along with gardaí, told councillors it was using "authorised drone flights" to monitor the city. "This has proved effective in identifying large-scale storage in previous years," it said. Any identified material will be removed by the group in co-ordination with gardaí, with the public encouraged to report suspected stockpiling to the council.
Toll and fare evasion cost the MTA an estimated $1 billion in 2024, though the agency and partners are now reversing the upward trend, according to a report published Thursday by a financial civic group in NYC. Despite the astounding financial loss, the Citizens Budget Committee's (CBC) report, No Fare: The Costs of MTA Fare and Toll Evasion, found that the MTA is starting to stem evasion with the help of the NYPD and state officials.
