NEW YORK: New Yorkers will pick a new mayor on Tuesday after an unpredictable race that has drawn attention from far beyond the largest city in the United States, with President Donald Trump branding frontrunner Zohran Mamdani “a communist.”
Breakout Democratic Party candidate Mamdani, a naturalized Muslim American who represents Queens in the state legislature, leads former governor and sex assault-accused Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent after losing his party’s primary contest to Mamdani.
The Republican party candidate polling in third place is Curtis Sliwa, 71, who has a colorful past as founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante group, a prolific broadcaster and cat lover.
The latest Quinnipiac University poll conducted October 23 to 27 gives Mamdani 43 percent of the vote, followed by Cuomo on 33 percent and Sliwa on 14 percent.
The race has centered on cost of living, crime and how each candidate would handle Trump, who has threatened to withhold federal funds from the city.
“Mamdani is an unusual political figure and really captures the spirit of the moment. This is a moment where a loud anti-Trump voice in America’s biggest city is going to get news,” Lincoln Mitchell, a politics professor at Columbia University, told AFP.
“Frankly, a Muslim candidate for mayor of New York is an enormous story.”
Mamdani, 34, has attacked his opponents for Islamophobic rhetoric and smears, calling out both Republicans and Democrats for “anti-Muslim sentiment that has grown so endemic in our city.”
NYC Board of Elections data showed 275,006 registered Democrats had cast ballots, as had 46,115 Republicans, along with 42,383 voters unaffiliated with any party in the first five days of early voting, which ends November 2.
Mamdani’s ascent has highlighted the gulf between the left and center-right of the Democratic Party.
New York’s state governor Kathy Hochul, a centrist, appeared at a Mamdani rally on October 26 but was drowned out by “tax the rich” chants, an AFP correspondent saw.
Hochul has been critical of Mamdani’s proposals to impose a two-percent income tax on New Yorkers making more than $1 million.
Mamdani’s rise
Mamdani’s unlikely ascent has been fired by young New Yorkers canvassing for him, with his campaign claiming 90,000 people have volunteered.
“It really comes back to people speaking to other New Yorkers about the city that we all love,” Mamdani told The Daily Show.
Teenager Abid Mahdi, a Queens native who leads canvasses for Mamdani, told AFP that “when I think of Zohran, I think of what Bernie Sanders was to many Americans in 2016 and 2020. He is my Bernie Sanders in a lot of ways.”
Mamdani appeared with leftist standard-bearer Senator Bernie Sanders at a Queens rally on October 26.
“I’m 15 right now, I’ll be an adult and paying taxes at 18, right? The majority of laws will apply to me in about three years. So, why should I start caring then?” added Mahdi.
Underscoring the importance of older voters who typically turn out in greater numbers than youngsters, Mamdani attended a “paint and pour” session at an elder care home in Brooklyn Thursday.
Torrential rain at the end of the week slowed canvassing, with the three leading candidates touring TV studios in a final push to woo wavering voters.
Ahead of the vote, Sliwa appeared in a surreal conservative rap video wearing a suit and his signature red beret.
Cuomo, 67, sought Thursday to court Black and Muslim voters, campaigning in Harlem with current mayor Eric Adams, a corruption-accused Democrat who bowed out, eventually endorsing his former foe Cuomo.
There was a stir in the week when a British newspaper published what claimed to be an interview with former mayor and Mamdani backer Bill de Blasio in which he appeared to question the affordability of the Democratic socialist’s spending plans.
But the article was removed after the former mayor denied speaking to the journalist.
Mamdani leads dramatic NY mayoral race going into voting day
https://arab.news/vwmfh
Mamdani leads dramatic NY mayoral race going into voting day
- New Yorkers will pick a new mayor on Tuesday after an unpredictable race that has drawn attention from far beyond the largest city in the United States
Power outages hit Ukraine and Moldova as Kyiv struggles against the winter cold
- Outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova
- Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions
KYIV: Emergency power cuts swept across several Ukrainian cities as well as neighboring Moldova on Saturday, officials said, amid a commitment from the Kremlin to US President Donald Trump to pause strikes on Kyiv as Ukraine battles one of its bleakest winters in years.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova.
The failure “caused a cascading outage in Ukraine’s power grid,” triggering automatic protection systems, he said.
Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions, in the center and northeast of the country respectively. The outage cut water supplies to the Ukrainian capital, officials said, while the city’s subway system was temporarily suspended because of low voltage on the network.
Moldova also experienced major power outages, including in the capital Chisinau, officials said.
“Due to the loss of power lines on the territory of Ukraine, the automatic protection system was triggered, which disconnected the electricity supply,” Moldova’s Energy Minister Dorin Junghietu said in a post on Facebook. “I encourage the population to stay calm until electricity is restored.”
Weaponizing winter
The large-scale outage followed weeks of Russian strikes against Ukraine’s already struggling energy grid, which have triggered long stretches of severe power shortages.
Moscow has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat, light and running water over the course of the war, in a strategy that Ukrainian officials describe as “weaponizing winter.”
While Russia has used similar tactics throughout the course of its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine, temperatures throughout this winter have fallen further than usual, bringing widespread hardship to civilians.
Forecasters say Ukraine will experience a brutally cold period stretching into next week. Temperatures in some areas will drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
Trump said late Thursday that President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns amid the extreme weather.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week during this ... extraordinary cold,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Putin has “agreed to that,” he said, without elaborating on when the request to the Russian leader was made.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a query seeking clarity about the scope and timing of any limited pause.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed Friday that Trump “made a personal request” to Putin to stop targeting Kyiv until Sunday “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations.”
Talks are expected to take place between US, Russian and Ukrainian officials on Feb. 1 in Abu Dhabi. The teams previously met in late January in the first known time that officials from the Trump administration simultaneously met with negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia. However, it’s unclear many obstacles to peace remain. Disagreement over what happens to occupied Ukrainian territory, and Moscow’s demand for possession of territory it hasn’t captured, are a key issue holding up a peace deal, Zelensky said Thursday.
Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on social media Saturday that he was in Miami, where talks between Russian and US negotiators have previously taken place.
Russia struck Ukrainian energy assets in several regions on Thursday but there were no strikes on those facilities overnight, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday.
In a post on social media, Zelensky also noted that Russia has turned its attention to targeting Ukrainian logistics networks, and that Russian drones and missiles hit residential areas of Ukraine overnight, as they have most nights during the war.
Trump has framed Putin’s acceptance of the pause in strikes as a concession. But Zelensky was skeptical as Russia’s invasion approaches its fourth anniversary on Feb. 24 with no sign that Moscow is willing to reach a peace settlement despite a US-led push to end the fighting.
“I do not believe that Russia wants to end the war. There is a great deal of evidence to the contrary,” Zelensky said Thursday.
