Howard Golden, who for a quarter-century as Brooklyn borough president pushed to strengthen the borough economically and defended it against slights real or perceived in the years before it underwent a gentrifying revival, died Wednesday at his home in the Kensington neighborhood in Brooklyn. He was 98.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Michele Golden.

A brash, blunt and smart product of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, Golden, whose clipped and gravelly tone often delivered biting criticism of those who crossed him, also served as leader of the Democratic Party in Brooklyn for seven of his 25 years as borough president.

The party post made him a linchpin in determining who would get the party's support in legislative and judicial primaries in Brooklyn, a heavily Democratic borough where winning the Democratic nomination usually came down to getting elected.

Midway through Mr. Golden's term, a reduction in the powers of city presidents occurred as a result of a municipal reorganization approved by voters in 1989. The change abolished the Board of Estimate, one of the city's two main policymaking bodies. together with the city council, which consisted of the mayor, the chairman of the council, the city controller and the five district presidents.

The board, along with the city council, had the authority to approve the city budget and, without the council, determine the use of city property and enter into contracts on behalf of the city. Having a voice in these important decisions had given the borough presidents most of their governing power.

Mr. Golden was fierce in his opposition to the abolition of the board, which was proposed by a committee appointed to recommend revisions to the city charter.

When the committee held a public hearing in Brooklyn to discuss its proposals, Mr. Golden did not mince his words. “As a courtesy, I welcome you to Brooklyn,” he told the commissioners. “I must say that your visit here today is not helpful.”

However, there was no question that changes needed to be made in the way the city was governed. The United States Supreme Court had ruled that the Board of Estimate's voting structure was unconstitutional because it violated the one-person, one-vote principle by granting one vote to each borough president, even though the boroughs' populations varied strong in size.

Mr. Golden argued unsuccessfully that the solution should be to weight the votes of borough presidents based on the population of the boroughs. Brooklyn had the largest.

Another charter revision banned senior city officials from simultaneously holding party positions, forcing Mr. Golden to choose between his paid job as city president and his unpaid position as party leader. He chose to remain district president.

The abolition of the council reduced the power of the city presidents, but Mr. Golden believed that the office remained important and was not, as some reformers argued, a useless relic that should be abolished.

“We are the spokespersons for the boroughs,” he said in a 1996 interview with The New York Times. “If they were to abolish the position of district chairman, there would be no one to fight for the district as a whole.”

Mr. Golden continued his busy routine of meeting with community and business groups, dedicating buildings and lobbying against some city proposals, such as the construction of a sludge composting plant in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. He also promoted steps to strengthen the borough's economy and its aging downtown commercial center.

The 1980s saw the beginning of a major revitalization of downtown Brooklyn, including the start of construction on the MetroTech Center, a ten-block complex of high-rise office buildings. A 1988 Times editorial said Mayor Edward I. Koch and Mr. Golden deserved credit for “pursuing these developments by orchestrating city capital funds, land depreciation, tax and energy cuts and federal subsidies.”

The revival created a forest of expensive high-rise apartments and hotels and drew young, single professionals and upper-middle-class families to Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other Brooklyn neighborhoods.

But with that came clashes over gentrification and the efforts, or lack thereof, to deal with the poor and middle-income people who were displaced.

The Koch-Golden relationship, however, was far from blissful. It was also marked by bitter feelings over Mr. Koch's policies on building shelters in Brooklyn for the homeless and his support of a rival of Mr. Golden for Brooklyn's Democratic leader. Mr. Koch complained that Mr. Golden had used personal epithets against him; Mr. Golden accused Mr. Koch of “a lack of leadership.”

In later years, Mr. Golden feuded with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. He accused Mr. Giuliani of favoring Lower Manhattan over Downtown Brooklyn because of economic development incentives, and was particularly incensed by the mayor's plan to bring professional baseball back to Brooklyn in the form of a minor league team. Mr. Golden claimed that such a team was beneath the dignity of the neighborhood where the Dodgers once lived.

Mr. Giuliani, on his weekly radio show, urged listeners to tell Mr. Golden to “get his head examined.” And he prevailed: The team, the Cyclones, a Mets affiliate, began playing in 2001 at a Coney Island ballpark.

Some critics said Mr. Golden was too close to the developers, citing the significant campaign contributions he received from many of them. His supporters spoke of his efforts on behalf of low-income housing and the borough's cultural institutions. He handily won re-election five times, from 1981 to 1997; after that, he was unable to run for office again due to term limits for elected city officials established in the 1990s.

Howard Golden was born on November 6, 1925 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He grew up in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, where his parents, Jack and Dorothy (Bereso) Golden, both Jewish immigrants, ran a delicatessen.

The family faced tragedy during Howard's childhood: the deli burned down and they moved to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. While working there, Jack Golden fell out of a truck, hit his head and died. Howard was 16. His mother had to start a new career doing administrative work for the city's social services department.

During World War II, Howard was a Navy medic and took part in the D-Day invasion.

After being discharged, he gave up admission to Harvard College to stay in the city and support his family. He enrolled at New York University and sold men's clothing to make money. He became a lawyer after graduating from Brooklyn Law School.

In the late 1950s, he attended a party hosted by Aileen Wolsky in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn. They were married within six months, in 1958. In addition to their daughter Michele, his wife survives him, along with another daughter, Dana Golden Moses, and two grandchildren.

Mr. Golden's career in politics developed as he rose in the Democratic clubhouse in Brooklyn. He served as a Borough Park councilor for seven years before being elected to temporarily fill the post of borough president when it became vacant on January 3, 1977. Later that year he won elections for his first full term in office. Its 25-year run ended on December 31, 2001.

Mr. Golden remained a champion of Brooklyn throughout his life and his pride in the borough was unwavering. In a speech in 2000, he said, “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are from Brooklyn, and those who would like to be.”

Kellina Moore And Alex Traub reporting contributed.

Leon Wildes, a New York immigration attorney who successfully fought the U.S. government's attempt to deport John Lennon, died Monday. in Manhattan. He was 90.

His death at Lenox Hill Hospital was confirmed by his son Michael.

For more than three years, from early 1972 to the fall of 1975, Mr. Wildes (pronounced WY-ulds) fought tenaciously against attacks by the Nixon administration and immigration officials on Mr. Lennon, the former Beatle and his wife Yoko Ono . , which collected a series of legal arguments that exposed both political chicanery and a hidden U.S. immigration policy.

By uncovering classified data through the Freedom of Information Act, he showed that immigration officials can in practice exercise broad discretion over whom to deport, a revelation that continues to resonate in immigration law. And he revealed that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and outspoken critic of President Richard M. Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.

Mr. Wildes was ultimately vindicated by the sharp decision of a federal appeals court in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not tolerate selective deportation on secret political grounds,” and which ended the attempt to get Mr. Lennon out of jail. country.

The Beatles had broken up in 1970, and the following year Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono moved to New York. Mr. Lennon had been convicted of marijuana possession in London in 1968; that record would normally have barred him from entering, but he had been granted a waiver. The exemption expired and the Lennons received an eviction notice.

“It was a very scary moment,” Ms. Ono said in the 2007 documentary “The USA vs. John Lennon.”

When the Lennons hired Mr. Wildes to represent them, he had barely heard of his celebrity clients. In his book on the case, 'John Lennon vs. the USA,” published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he was vaguely aware of the Beatles – it was almost impossible not to be – but that the names of the Beatles members had escaped him.

“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he recalled to his wife after meeting them at their apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.

In the 2007 film, Mr. Lennon tells reporters about Mr. Wildes: “He is not a radical lawyer. He's not William Kunstler.'

Mr. Lennon had publicly opposed the Vietnam War — he recorded the anti-war song “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 — and had been involved in protests on behalf of New Left figures, who campaigned against the war.

Nixon administration officials feared that he would have outsized influence among the young, who would vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. White House, that was enough for administration officials and their allies, most notably conservative Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, to go after Lennon.

Their case revolved around the London marijuana conviction. But appeals court judge Irving Kaufman ultimately ruled that the crime was insufficient to make Lennon an “excludable alien.”

The real reasons for Mr. Lennon's quixotic pursuit, Mr. Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to demonstrate thanks to his relentless digging through the documents. In early 1972, Mr. Thurmond had drafted a letter recommending Mr. Lennon's deportation, which Attorney General John N. Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency then responsible for visas. Of particular interest was the fact that Mr. Lennon had performed at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who was jailed on marijuana charges.

“If Lennon's visa is revoked, it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.

Ten days later, “a telegram went to all immigration offices in the United States instructing that the Lennons should not be granted an extension of their time to visit the United States,” Mr. Wildes wrote in his book.

Over the next three years, the government continued to press its case, in efforts that increasingly fizzled as public support for Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono grew. In letters and testimonials, many of the era's cultural luminaries spoke up for them, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the artist Jasper Johns and authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller, as well as Mayor John V. Lindsay from New York.

“The sole reason for deporting the Lennons was President Nixon's desire to remove John and Yoko from the country before the 1972 election and give the vote to a new, much younger electorate,” Mr. Wildes wrote. “To ensure his hold on power, all 'dirty tricks', including the abuse of the immigration process, were acceptable.”

All the while, the FBI kept a close eye on Mr. Lennon. “The surveillance reports on him amounted to literally hundreds of pages,” Mr. Wildes wrote.

When Mr. Lennon learned of the deception, he was furious. “They even change their own rules because we are peace-minded,” he said in a television interview.

The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. He was killed five years later in front of the Dakota, the Upper West Side building where he and Mrs. Yoko lived.

In another breakthrough, Mr Wildes found that immigration officials had the discretion to deport or not, depending on whether there were extenuating circumstances. The revelation of this policy continues to help immigration attorneys fighting the deportation of non-citizens today.

“As part of his legal strategy, Wildes conducted groundbreaking research into the 'non-priority' program and ultimately applied for 'non-priority status' for Lennon,” wrote immigration expert Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia in her book 2015, 'Beyond Deportation'. “Wildes discovered that for years the INS had granted 'non-priority' status to prevent the deportation of non-citizens with sympathetic cases, but the INS had never publicly disclosed this practice.”

While Mr. Wildes acknowledged the all-consuming task of representing the Lennons, he kept a bemused and friendly eye on his famous clients, sometimes meeting them, as he did others, in what he called the “beautiful upright bed” in their mentioned bank. Street apartment.

“You could meet half the world around that bed,” he wrote – “radical types like Jerry Rubin or Bobby Seale, eccentric musicians like David Peel, poets like Allen Ginsberg, actors like Peter Boyle, television personalities like Geraldo Rivera, or even political figures. agents like the deputy mayor of New York.”

Leon Wildes was born on March 4, 1933 in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, a small mining town near Scranton. His father, Harry, was a clothing and dry goods merchant, and his mother, Sarah (Rudin) Wildes, worked in his store. Mr. Wildes was educated in Olyphant public schools and received a bachelor's degree from Yeshiva University in 1954 and a law degree from New York University in 1958.

He soon turned his focus to immigration law, working for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a refugee aid organization, and helping two Americans who had gone to Israel establish their American citizenship. He founded the immigration law firm Wildes & Weinberg in 1960 and went on to write numerous law review articles on immigration law and teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

In addition to his son Michael, he is survived by another son, Mark; his wife, Alice Goldberg Wiles; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Immigration law had “biblical significance for him,” Michael Wildes, who is also a lawyer, recalled in a telephone interview. “My father found value in helping others achieve their American dream, as he had done: the golden grail of a green card, or citizenship.”

Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer who rose to fame for his defense of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and for his emotional public testimony describing the attack, announced Friday that he was running for Congress in the Third District of Maryland.

“On January 6, 2021, I did my duty as a police officer and as an American and defended our nation’s Capitol from violent insurrectionists,” Mr. Dunn said in a statement. “Today I am running for Congress because the forces that incited this violent attack are still at work, and as a patriotic American it is my duty to defend our democracy.”

Dunn, 40, will enter a crowded Democratic primary field to replace Rep. John Sarbanes, the retiring 17-year incumbent. Five state lawmakers have already announced their campaigns to represent Maryland’s central district, which snakes between Washington and Baltimore. Whoever emerges from the primary in the predominantly Democratic district will almost certainly win the general election.

Mr. Dunn, a member of the Capitol Police for 15 years, was one of four officers who testified at the first public hearing of the House committee investigating the pro-Trump mob’s attack on the Capitol, where lawmakers had gathered to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. He described how fellow officers bled in battle and how rioters used racial slurs against him.

“I sat down on a couch with a friend of mine, who is also a Black Capitol police officer, and told him about the racial insults I had suffered,” Mr. Dunn recalled during a memorable portion of the testimony. He added that he “became very emotional,” wondered how something like this could happen and shouted, “Is this America?”

“I started sobbing and officers came over to comfort me,” he said.

In 2023, President Biden awarded Mr. Dunn the Presidential Citizens Medal in recognition of his role in protecting the Capitol.

Mr. Dunn grew up in the Washington suburbs of Prince George’s County, Maryland, and graduated from James Madison University in Virginia, where he played football and helped lead the team to its first national title.

He has written a book entitled ‘Standing My Ground’.

The Toronto Blue Jays axed pitcher Anthony Bass, 35, on Friday after he received backlash and boos from fans for reposting a video to Instagram calling Target and Bud Light “evil” and “demonic” for being LGBTQ-friendly. community supported.

The Blue Jays announced on Friday they designated Bass for assignment, effectively removing him from the team just hours before he was scheduled to catch a ceremonial first pitch to kick off the team. Proud weekend for a series against the Minnesota Twins.

Last month, Bass reposted a video on Instagram calling for a boycott of both Target and Bud Light, which have recently drawn the ire of conservatives, Bud Light for including a transgender influencer in a social media promotion, and Target for promoting its Pride collection, which includes clothing and books for children. The video, which came from a biblical-themed Instagram page, was briefly posted by Bass on his Instagram story in late May.

After the post caused backlash, Bass told reporters he apologized for sharing the post because it was “hurtful to the Pride community.” Bass said he would work with the team to “make better decisions in the future”.

“The ballpark is for everyone,” said Bass. “We involve all fans on the ballpark and we want to welcome everyone.”

The backlash against Bass was the latest example of a Major League Baseball team getting into trouble with the LBGTQ community. Last month, the Los Angeles Dodgers were called out by some fans after the team, under pressure from Catholic critics, dropped the Sisters of Perpetual Indulggence at Pride Night’s pregame ceremony. The Dodgers later reversed that decision after multiple LGBTQ groups pulled out of the event.

Last year, the Tampa Bay Rays faced questions after the team allowed several players to refrain from wearing the team’s Pride Night uniforms.

The fallout in Toronto seemed to have settled down until Thursday when, speaking to reporters, Bass defended the message in the post he shared.

“I stand by my personal beliefs,” Bass told reporters. “And everyone is entitled to their personal beliefs, right? I also mean no harm to any group of people.

When asked if he thought the post he shared was hateful, Bass said, “I don’t.”

“That’s why I originally posted it,” Bass told reporters Thursday. “Looking back on it, I can see how people would see it that way and that’s why I apologized.”

Toronto general manager Ross Atkins told reporters on Friday that the move to eliminate the replacement pitcher was mainly prompted by his performance this season.

In 22 games this season, Bass threw 20 innings, with a mediocre run average of 4.95. In 2022, he recorded a 1.54 ERA in 73 games, both career bests.

“There are a lot of variables and performance is usually the driving force,” Atkins said. “Performance was an important aspect of this decision. Distraction was a small part of it, and something we had to reckon with.

Since making his major league debut in 2011, Bass has bounced from team to team. In 2016, he left MLB to pitch professionally in Japan, before returning to the United States.

By designating Bass for assignment, the Blue Jays now have seven days to either trade him or permanently fire him.