A woman was hit by a subway train in Manhattan and had both feet amputated after her boyfriend pushed her onto the tracks during an argument, police said.

The man, Christian Valdez, 35, was charged with attempted murder and assault for pushing the 29-year-old woman at the Fulton Street station where she was struck by a southbound No. 3 train Saturday morning, police said . Officers responding to a 911 call just before 10:30 a.m. found the woman on the tracks, conscious and responsive.

The woman, who police have not named, was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where her feet were amputated, according to police and a law enforcement official.

Mr. Valdez had previously served time in prison for dismembering a woman and her child.

The incident occurred three days after Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, announced she would assign 750 National Guard troops and 250 state troopers and Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees to patrol the subway and conduct random bag searches. The move, which she said is intended to reduce transit crime, drew heavy criticism from New Yorkers, police and members of both political parties.

According to police and MTA officials, overall crime on public transit fell last year, while the number of daily riders rose 14 percent. This year, major transit crime increased by about 13 percent between January 1 and March 3, according to police data.

Felony assaults have contributed to the increase. From January 1 to March 3, there were 97 crimes on public transport, compared to 84 in the same period last year – an increase of 15.5 percent.

In 2017, Mr. Valdez was charged with assault, burglary, intimidation and acting in a manner harmful to a child for breaking into a Bronx apartment and dismembering a 37-year-old woman and her 3-year-old daughter , the police said. . He was paroled from Sing Sing Correctional Facility last year, according to police and state prison records.

His last known address is a homeless shelter in downtown Brooklyn, according to police and city records. His arraignment in Manhattan is pending.

Metro safety has become a focus for Ms Hochul after the perception of crime during the pandemic deterred some people from taking the train.

Shortly after her initial announcement of the National Guard deployment, she appeared to take note of the criticism and issued a directive that National Guard members would be prohibited from carrying long guns during bag searches. Soldiers who do not carry out these searches will probably be allowed to wear them.

The husband of a Long Island doctor who died of a severe allergic reaction after eating at a Disney World restaurant is suing the Walt Disney Company and the restaurant, saying his wife was fed allergens despite assurances that she was not would do.

The doctor, Kanokporn Tangsuan, died in October after dining with her husband, Jeffrey Piccolo, at the restaurant, the Raglan Road Irish Pub, in a section of the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, according to Mr. Piccolo. lawsuit, which was filed on February 22.

Dr. Tangsuan, 42, of Carle Place, NY, was a family medicine specialist affiliated with NYU Langone Hospital Long Island. According to the lawsuit, she and Mr. Piccolo were visiting Disney World with Mr. Piccolo’s mother when Dr. Tangsuan died.

Brian R. Denney, attorney for Mr. Piccolo, said in a statement that Dr. Tangsuan’s death was “completely preventable.” The couple, Mr. Denney said, “trusted that Disney’s Raglan Road would follow the proper protocols and deliver on their repeated commitments to serve food that was allergen-free.”

Questions sent to Disney and the restaurant seeking comment were not immediately answered.

As described in the lawsuit, the events leading up to Dr.’s death unfolded. Tangsuan conducted themselves as follows:

She, Mr Piccolo and Mr Piccolo’s mother went to the Raglan Road pub for dinner on October 5. Dr. Tangsuan was severely allergic to dairy and nuts, and she and her husband chose the restaurant because, based on advertisements in which Disney indicated that accommodating people with food allergies was a priority at its resorts, they believed there would be the necessary safeguards in place to protect people with such allergies.

When a waiter came to their table, the couple told him about Dr.’s food allergies. Tangsuan, said she needed allergen-free food and asked if several menu items contained allergens.

The waiter left to discuss with the chef whether certain foods could be made allergen free, returned to the table, said this was possible and guaranteed that Dr. Tangsuan would be served food that would be allergen-free.

The couple questioned the waiter a few more times to confirm that the food Dr. Tangsuan ordered it was allergen-free, and was “unequivocally” assured that it would be.

Based on that guarantee, Dr. Tangsuan onion rings and items labeled ‘Sure I’m Frittered’, ‘Scallop Forest’ and ‘This Shepherd Went Vegan’.

When the waiter returned with Dr. Tangsuan, some items did not have a flag stating that they were allergen-free. Dr. Tangsuan and Mr. Piccolo asked again about the presence of allergens, and the waiter again said that Dr. Tangsuan was allergen-free.

Dr. Tangsuan, Mr. Piccolo and Mr. Piccolo’s mother ate their meal. When they were done, the two women went shopping nearby, and Mr. Piccolo returned to their hotel with the leftovers from their meal.

About 45 minutes later, Dr. Tangsuan suffered a severe allergic reaction after entering the Planet Hollywood store. She developed severe breathing difficulties, collapsed to the floor and used an EpiPen. Someone soon called 911 and Dr. Tangsuan was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

An autopsy by the District 9 medical examiner’s office in Orlando, Florida, determined the cause of death was anaphylaxis, or a severe allergic reaction. The autopsy report mentions Dr. Tangsuan’s history of dairy and peanut allergies and said she had used an EpiPen before becoming unresponsive. The manner of death was accidental, the report said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2021 that 6.2 percent of U.S. adults age 18 and older had food allergies, although deaths from such allergies are rare. For example, according to a study published in The Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, there were 24 deaths from food allergies in New York City between 2000 and 2014, including four from peanuts.

Claire Fahy reporting contributed.

Lawyers representing Jeffrey Epstein's victims sued two of the financier's disgraced advisers on Friday, accusing them of “aiding, abetting and facilitating” his sex trafficking of young women and teenage girls.

The civil suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, seeks class-action status on behalf of Mr. Epstein's many victims. It comes just a few months after two major banks agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Mr. Epstein's victims to settle lawsuits alleging the banks enabled his activities.

The latest lawsuit seeks monetary damages from Mr. Epstein's longtime personal attorney, Darren Indyke, and his longtime accountant, Richard Kahn. The lawsuit alleges that the two men helped build “the complex financial infrastructure” that Mr. Epstein relied on to sexually abuse hundreds of young women and teenage girls for at least two decades.

The complaint was filed on behalf of an unidentified female victim of Mr. Epstein and a woman, Danielle Bensky, who said she was an aspiring dancer in 2004 when Mr. Epstein sexually assaulted her. Over time, the complaint said, Ms. Bensky was “forced into a cult-like life controlled and manipulated by Epstein” and she feared he would harm her.

According to the lawsuit, Mr. Indyke and Mr. Kahn were instrumental in setting up their former employer's many companies that were involved in funneling millions of dollars in cash payments and wire transfers to the victims. The lawsuit also said the men contributed to a “sham same-sex marriage scheme” that Mr. Epstein orchestrated to help some of his female aides with their immigration status.

Mr. Indyke and Mr. Kahn, who also serve as executors of Mr. Epstein's estate, “were lavishly compensated” by Mr. Epstein, including being named as beneficiaries of a trust that Mr. Epstein used to raise money to hand out to people who worked for him. The complaint said the same Butterfly Trust had also paid out money to “young women with Eastern European surnames” and Ghislaine Maxwell, a former business associate and confidante of Mr. Epstein, who was convicted in 2021 on federal charges of conspiracy in his sex trafficking ring. operation.

Ms. Maxwell was indicted by federal prosecutors in Manhattan on federal sex trafficking charges about a year after Mr. Epstein's arrest in July 2019. A month later, Mr. Epstein committed suicide in a federal prison in Manhattan. Ms. Maxwell is the only person in the United States associated with Mr. Epstein to have been convicted of a crime.

The lawsuit against Mr. Indyke and Mr. Kahn argued that, given their long tenure with Mr. Epstein, they should have known that their legal, accounting and business services enabled his activities. Mr. Indyke began working for Mr. Epstein in 1995, and Mr. Kahn began working as his internal accountant in 2005.

The lawsuit was filed by attorneys at Boies Schiller Flexner, who were part of a group of lawyers who previously sued JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank on behalf of Mr. Epstein's victims. Those lawsuits alleged that the banks ignored warning signs about Mr. Epstein's sex trafficking because the institutions generated high fees for handling hundreds of millions of dollars in money transfers for him. JPMorgan paid $290 million to settle the lawsuit, and Deutsche paid $75 million to resolve a similar lawsuit.

Daniel Weiner, a lawyer for the estate and for Mr. Indyke and Mr. Kahn, said in a statement that both men “emphatically reject the allegations of misconduct” and called the claims “baseless and legally frivolous.”

David Boies, a lawyer for the victims, said Mr. Epstein's sex trafficking would not have lasted as long as it did “without the support and assistance of key associates.”

In the course of the lawsuit with JPMorgan, Mr. Kahn said in a statement that he only learned of Mr. Epstein's worst activities after the death of his former employer in August 2019. In the confidential statement, previously reported by The New York Times, Mr. Kahn said that none of Mr. Epstein's female “assistants” had ever complained to him about Mr. Epstein's behavior.

After Mr. Epstein's death, Mr. Kahn and Mr. Indyke created a lawsuit that has yielded about $155 million in restitution to more than 125 victims. These settlements often included broad releases for some individuals associated with Mr. Epstein. It is not clear how this release of the settlement could complicate the claims against the two men.

Mr. Weiner said in his statement that Mr. Boies had a hand in negotiating some of these releases and agreed at the time that they provided “indisputable legal protection” to Mr. Kahn and Mr. Indyke.

The Legal Aid Society on Wednesday sued Mayor Eric Adams for failing to enforce new laws aimed at addressing rising homelessness and the influx of tens of thousands of migrants.

In the coming days, the City Council is expected to join the association, after voting last week to approve a lawsuit.

The move comes as a homelessness crisis overwhelms shelters and the city's budget and tensions grow between Mr. Adams and the Council over how to manage them.

The laws in question are a package of bills the Council passed last year to make more people eligible for a housing voucher program as record numbers of homeless people entered city shelters. Mr. Adams vetoed the legislation, saying it would be too expensive.

The Council voted overwhelmingly in July to override the mayor's veto. But since then, the administration has failed to expand eligibility for the vouchers, the lawsuit said. While outside groups often sue the city, legal action by the City Council against the board is more rare.

Legal Aid, a group that represents New Yorkers and others with low incomes in a variety of legal matters, filed their lawsuit as a class action on behalf of those who qualify for the vouchers, known as CityFHEPs.

“The Adams Administration's refusal to implement the law is unacceptable, and the city must take immediate action to ensure that the thousands of New Yorkers who are homeless or on the brink of homelessness and who now qualify for CityFHEPS safe, long-term and affordable housing,” said Robert Desir, staff attorney at Legal Aid.

The voucher program is one of the city's most important ways to combat homelessness. Eligible renters typically spend no more than 30 percent of their income on rent, with the rest paid by the city.

The mayor made a number of changes to the voucher program by executive order, including eliminating a rule that requires people to stay in a homeless shelter for 90 days before becoming eligible, a change that homelessness advocates have long sought.

However, the package of laws adopted by the Council went further. The legislation would, among other things, ensure that tenants are eligible for a voucher after receiving a request for unpaid rent from their landlord. Previously, people typically had to prove through housing court that they were facing eviction.

City Council President Adrienne Adams has said the mayor's efforts fall short of what the law requires.

“Just as you have to comply with the law, I have to comply with the law, and the administration has to comply with the law as well,” Ms. Adams said last week.

Lately, Mr. Adams and the City Council have also been at odds on other issues. Last month, the Council voted to override Mr. Adams' vetoes of bills that would require police officers to record the race, age and gender of most people they stop and that would end solitary confinement in prisons of the city.

The mayor has said the changes to the voucher program would cost billions of dollars more than the city can afford.

In 2023, the city spent nearly $500 million on the program, nearly double what it spent in 2021, according to the city's Independent Budget Office. The city says vouchers will help about 36,000 households pay rent.

Renter and homelessness advocates have argued that moving more people into permanent housing would help alleviate pressure on the city's shelter system caused by an influx of migrants over the past two years. More than 66,000 migrants are currently in the city's care.

During the fiscal year ending in June 2022 — just before the arrival of migrants sent costs soaring — the city shelter system was paid $136 per night, or nearly $50,000 per year, to house one adult. It cost $188 a night, or almost $70,000 a year, to house a family with children.

Christine Quinn, former City Council President and CEO of WIN, a network of shelters for women and children, said the city could save hundreds of millions of dollars and prevent tens of thousands of people from becoming homeless by enacting the voucher reforms.

Mr. Adams has also said the city simply does not have enough housing to house everyone with a voucher. The vacancy rate in apartments renting for less than $2,400 was less than 1 percent in 2023, according to data released by the city last week.

““Idealism is constantly clashing with realism,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference on Tuesday, adding that increasing the number of voucher holders would only “worsen the problem. “The realism is that we don't have the inventory.”

He said the council had “good intentions” but suggested the program could be abused and called for the focus to be shifted to building more homes.

“The way out of this,” Mr. Adams said, “is No. 1: build more.”

Pierina Sanchez, a Bronx councilwoman and sponsor of two parts of the legislative package, called the mayor's focus on housing supply short-sighted and his implication that the vouchers could be abused “poverty shaming.”

In her district, where the median income is much lower than the city's, Ms. Sanchez often has residents who struggle to stay in their homes.

“We have to do things differently to meet the demands of this moment,” Ms. Sanchez said. “Part of doing it differently means expanding access and stabilizing our lowest-income New Yorkers.”

Andy Newman reporting contributed.

When Sarah Hernandez joined the Enfield, Conn., Board of Education in 2017, she had a goal: to ensure that schools met the needs of students with disabilities. She was one of the first openly autistic candidates elected to public office in the country and saw her victory as a sign that her town was open to her perspective.

But if voters were, her colleagues on the school board were not: They consistently denied her the accommodations she needed to do her job, according to a discrimination lawsuit she filed against the school board and the city of Enfield, 20 miles north of Hartford. The accommodations she requested — both because of her autism and because she is hard of hearing — included asking board members to communicate by text or email instead of by phone, and to look at her while speaking to her .

The trial over the lawsuit, which accused the board and city of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, lasted more than four years. Last month, a jury sided with Ms. Hernandez and awarded her damages.

The amount? $10.

The nominal damages were the result of a 2022 Supreme Court decision, said Stewart J. Schwab, a labor law professor at Cornell University. In the case of Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, the court ruled that people who sued under the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits organizations that receive federal funds from discriminating against people with disabilities, could not recover damages for emotional distress.

Because the jury did not believe that Ms. Hernandez had concretely demonstrated that her experience had physically damaged her, she was denied a substantive award.

“The nominal damages, I'm incredibly proud of it,” said Ms. Hernandez, 44. “But it almost feels like they're saying the mental health damage isn't real.”

Despite the size of the settlement, the legal victory was significant, Mr. Schwab said. Discrimination lawsuits like this are often settled out of court, he said, because “these cases are difficult to win.”

Ms. Hernandez prefers emails and text messages to phone calls and group conversations because of her auditory processing problems, and she finds long meetings taxing. To address these and other challenges, she requested a printed outline of what to expect in advance at confidential meetings so she could prepare and follow better, and also asked if she could pass notes to other board members if she needed anything. clarified.

Initially, board members seemed receptive. Timothy Neville, the Democratic minority leader on the board, emailed Ms. Hernandez after her election and congratulated her for “turning what many consider a disability into a skill.” And in a Facebook comment in 2019, Ms. Hernandez said the board seemed willing to “brainstorm the issue” to accommodate her requests for accommodations.

But according to court documents, members of the board declined to communicate with Ms. Hernandez in writing, out of concern that messages could be “taken out of context” and used against them. Board members also believed, their lawyers said in court filings, that Ms. Hernandez was “portraying herself as a victim.” Attorneys for the school board and Enfield City Council declined to comment.

Witnesses told the court that Ms. Hernandez looked as if she could participate in her administrative duties without modification, according to Ms. Hernandez's attorney, Anthony May.

These types of misconceptions are why autism is considered an “invisible disability,” according to Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge.

Autistic people “may have a lot of stress under the surface, or confusion or overwhelm, but on the outside, to other people, it seems like they're just the same as everyone else,” Mr Baron-Cohen said. “So a change in mentality is needed.”

Significant progress has been made in understanding the psychology and neuroscience of autism over the past two decades, Mr Baron-Cohen said. General awareness of the disability has also increased, he added, and the concept of neurodiversity, or the understanding that people's brains work differently, has gained momentum.

But autistic people still have high levels of anxiety and depression, suggesting the support systems they need are not in place, Mr Baron-Cohen said.

John Elder Robison, who is autistic and advised the National Institutes of Health on neurodiversity from the George W. Bush administration into the Biden years, said it can be especially challenging to serve on a committee like a school board when only a or two of its members are autistic, because the other members will want a different pace.

But he said the treatment Ms. Hernandez requested would likely have benefited others as well. He expects that accommodations for autistic people will one day be as widespread as those for people with other disabilities, such as ramps for wheelchair users.

“It's hard for people to come up with the idea of ​​creating accommodations for people with disabilities,” Mr Robison said. “But I think over history, disability housing has become mainstream expectations.”

Mr. Robison added that it is likely that a number of currently serving politicians are autistic, noting that one in seven people in the United States is neurodivergent, a term that includes all people with brain differences, including people with ADHD, dyslexia and other diagnoses. .

“We need to recognize that neurodiversity is for all of us,” he said. “It's not like we have neurodivergent people applying for jobs or running for Congress or the school board. They are already here.”

Although autism manifests differently from person to person, this is one of the most common characteristics special interests, or an intense focus on one or two topics. One of Ms. Hernandez's special interests is democracy, something she says she is “fixated on with joy.”

Ms. Hernandez said that when she was elected, she was proud to be part of what she saw as a “paradigm shift” toward positive representation of people with disabilities in government.

And although the lengthy court battle left her feeling isolated from the city she has called home for nine years, her court victory has given her courage.

Ms. Hernandez's lawyers filed an injunction last week that would require Enfield to implement a policy allowing housing for elected officials and those running for office.

“I should be on the city council, and it should include people who look like me, and I am unrelenting.”
she said. “I hope that simply remaining determined will be enough to empower and encourage other individuals, with and without disabilities, to join me in being relentless.”

New York State's attorney general sued Citi on Tuesday, accusing the company of failing to stop scammers from stealing an unspecified amount of money from customer accounts and saying the bank must pay fraud victims compensate for any losses.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court, exposed several ways Citi customers were fooled into releasing sensitive information that allowed hackers to access their accounts and steal millions of dollars. In what is known as phishing fraud, some of the cases involved Citi customers receiving text messages or emails that purported to be from Citi but were actually from criminals.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said Citi should have been suspicious when large transfers were requested from customer accounts that had had no such activity for decades — and had their passwords changed only minutes before.

In one case, when a customer called her local Citi branch concerned about a phishing message she had clicked, she was told by the bank, “Don't worry about it; it happens all the time.” Three days later, more than $40,000 was withdrawn from her account, the lawsuit said. Citi later denied her request for a refund, saying it was her fault for clicking on the scammer's message.

The lawsuit holds Citi responsible under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act of 1978.

“There is no excuse for Citi's failure to protect millions of dollars and prevent them from being stolen from customers' accounts,” said Ms. James, who, like attorneys general before her, is seeking a higher function.

A Citi spokeswoman, Danielle Romero-Apsilos, said the bank was not obligated to refund customers who were victims of fraud. “Citi closely monitors all laws and regulations regarding wire transfers and works extremely hard to prevent threats from impacting our customers and to help them recover losses where possible,” she said in a statement.