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Penthouse once owned by critic Richard Roeper sells for $1.21 million

A three-bedroom duplex in River North that Roeper owned from 2005 until 2014 sold Jan. 7 for 13% less than what Roeper got for it.




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‘They slap lipstick on a pig’: What Chicago real estate experts think of the HGTV effect and ‘Windy City Rehab’ woes

Chicago real estate experts bust myths portrayed by home improvement shows, from actors subbing in as buyers to unrealistically low renovation costs.




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Former quarterback Michael Vick lists South Florida home | Photos

Former NFL quarterback Michael Vick is selling his Plantation home, listed at $2.399 million.




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Canceled open houses and virtual home tours. Realtors pivot amid pandemic to keep selling homes

Locally, the housing market got off to a great start at the beginning of the year, and all signs seemed to point to a bright spring season. And then the coronavirus struck.




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3D office tours grow in popularity as coronavirus brings in-person visits to a halt

Truss, a Chicago-based real estate technology firm, is seeing increased interest in its 3D virtual office tours during the coronavirus pandemic.




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‘Be prepared for the Wild West’: As real estate’s busy season winds up, here’s how to buy or sell a home during the coronavirus pandemic

Real estate data suggests the market took a downturn in March that might already be rebounding. Here's what experts predict.




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Galway Races 2020 will not be open to public

The organisers of the Galway Races have announced that this year's festival will not go ahead in its traditional form, in light of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.




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New dates announced for French Classics

France Galop has announced rescheduled dates for the French Classics, with the Guineas meeting set to be staged on June 1 at ParisLongchamp and the French Derby and Oaks to follow on 5 July at Chantilly.




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Japanese Guineas whet appetite for European Classics

The Flat racing calendar in the northern hemisphere remains mired in uncertainty, but in one jurisdiction the first Classics of the season have been staged as the coronavirus pandemic rages.




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Wicklow jockey Jackson cheered on to biggest career win

Irish jockey Shane Jackson achieved the biggest win of his eight-year Australian stint with victory in the Grand Annual Steeplechase at Warrnambool on Tuesday.




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Hanover card kicks off German racing's return

Majestic Colt landed the first Listed prize of the German season as racing sparked back to life at Hanover on Thursday.




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French racing to return with magnificent Monday card

Victor Ludorum heads eight declarations for Monday's Prix de Fontainebleau at Longchamp.




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Son proves a sharpshooter during national service

Tottenham forward Son Heung-min will return to London next week after completing a three-week stint of national service in South Korea, where his aim with a rifle proved just as good as accurate as his shooting on the field.




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A Multi-Risk SIR Model with Optimally Targeted Lockdown -- by Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Iván Werning, Michael D. Whinston

We develop a multi-risk SIR model (MR-SIR) where infection, hospitalization and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young”, “the middle-aged” and the “old”. Our MR-SIR model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy similar to those already developed in the context of the homogeneous-agent SIR models. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group. For example, for the same economic cost (24.3% decline in GDP), optimal semi–targeted or fully-targeted policies reduce mortality from 1.83% to 0.71% (thus, saving 2.7 million lives) relative to optimal uniform policies. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the most vulnerable group both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. We also study the impacts of social distancing, the matching technology, the expected arrival time of a vaccine, and testing with or without tracing on optimal policies. Overall, targeted policies that are combined with measures that reduce interactions between groups and increase testing and isolation of the infected can minimize both economic losses and deaths in our model.




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Inequality of Fear and Self-Quarantine: Is There a Trade-off between GDP and Public Health? -- by Sangmin Aum, Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee, Yongseok Shin

We construct a quantitative model of an economy hit by an epidemic. People differ by age and skill, and choose occupations and whether to commute to work or work from home, to maximize their income and minimize their fear of infection. Occupations differ by wage, infection risk, and the productivity loss when working from home. By setting the model parameters to replicate the progression of COVID-19 in South Korea and the United Kingdom, we obtain three key results. First, government-imposed lock-downs may not present a clear trade-off between GDP and public health, as commonly believed, even though its immediate effect is to reduce GDP and infections by forcing people to work from home. A premature lifting of the lock-down raises GDP temporarily, but infections rise over the next months to a level at which many people choose to work from home, where they are less productive, driven by the fear of infection. A longer lock-down eventually mitigates the GDP loss as well as flattens the infection curve. Second, if the UK had adopted South Korean policies, its GDP loss and infections would have been substantially smaller both in the short and the long run. This is not because Korea implemented policies sooner, but because aggressive testing and tracking more effectively reduce infections and disrupt the economy less than a blanket lock-down. Finally, low-skill workers and self-employed lose the most from the epidemic and also from the government policies. However, the policy of issuing “visas” to those who have antibodies will disproportionately benefit the low-skilled, by relieving them of the fear of infection and also by allowing them to get back to work.




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Which Workers Bear the Burden of Social Distancing Policies? -- by Simon Mongey, Laura Pilossoph, Alex Weinberg

What are the characteristics of workers in jobs likely to be initially affected by broad social distancing and later by narrower policy tailored to jobs with low risk of disease transmission? We use O NET to construct a measure of the likelihood that jobs can be conducted from home (a variant of Dingel and Neiman, 2020) and a measure of low physical proximity to others at work. We validate the measures by showing how they relate to similar measures constructed using time use data from ATUS. Our main finding is that workers in low-work-from-home or high-physical- proximity jobs are more economically vulnerable across various measures constructed from the CPS and PSID: they are less educated, of lower income, have fewer liquid assets relative to income, and are more likely renters. We further substantiate the measures with behavior during the epidemic. First, we show that MSAs with less pre-virus employment in work-from-home jobs experienced smaller declines in the incidence of `staying-at-home', as measured using SafeGraph cell phone data. Second, we show that both occupations and types of workers predicted to be employed in low work-from-home jobs experienced greater declines in employment according to the March 2020 CPS. For example, non-college educated workers experienced a 4ppt larger decline in employment relative to those with a college degree.




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Electricity and Firm Productivity: A General-Equilibrium Approach -- by Stephie Fried, David Lagakos

The lack of reliable electricity in the developing world is widely viewed by policymakers as a major constraint on firm productivity. Yet most empirical studies find modest short-run effects of power outages on firm performance. This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model to study the long-run general equilibrium effects of power outages on productivity. The model captures the key features of how firms acquire electricity in the developing world, in particular the rationing of grid electricity and the possibility of self-generated electricity at higher cost. Power outages lower productivity in the model by creating idle resources, by depressing the scale of incumbent firms and by reducing entry of new firms. Consistent with the empirical literature, the model predicts that the short-run partial-equilibrium effects of eliminating outages are small. However, the long-run general-equilibrium effects are many times larger, supporting the view that eliminating outages is an important development objective.




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NYPD tow truck driver’s death in Brooklyn crash blamed on medical problem

The on-duty driver was heading south on Flatbush Ave. near Avenue R in Marine Park around 6 p.m. when he lost control of his truck, said police.




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Gambino capo, 10 cohorts picked up on federal racketeering conspiracy, loansharking, bribery charges

Veteran captain Andrew Campos, 50, was arrested only months after a search warrant uncovered multiple photos of the mobster and co-defendant Richard Martino making prison visits to imprisoned Mafioso Frank LoCascio, once the underboss to the infamous “Dapper Don” Gotti.




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South Brooklynites are fed up with spotty R and D train service: report

The survey of more than 700 people in Sen. Andrew Gounardes’ district — which stretches from Bay Ridge to Manhattan Beach — found that half of those who take the subway to work need to transfer at least once during their commutes.




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Suspect with knife captured on video in sleeping man’s home may have also slipped into Brooklyn building: police

Cops are looking into the possibility a man who stalked through a Brooklyn home with a knife may have trespassed through another nearby location the night before.




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Brooklyn teen accused of swiping more than $1 million from dozens of victims in cryptocurrency scam

Yousef Selassie, 19, pleaded not guilty to first-degree grand larceny, identity theft and other charges at his Manhattan Supreme Court appearance for the lucrative scheme that operated from January through May this past year.




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Angry customer broke glass door at Junior’s Restaurant in Brooklyn, then fled in BMW: police

An angry man broke a glass door at Junior’s restaurant in Brooklyn before fleeing in a BMW, police said Wednesday.




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Vision uh-oh: Two more pedestrians killed by vehicles in Manhattan and Brooklyn, capping off deadly three days across NYC

The Friday morning deaths capped off a deadly three days across the city.




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Former Mexican security chief linked to Sinaloa Cartel held without bail by Brooklyn federal judge on multi-million dollar bribery charge

Garcia Luna, accused of turning a blind eye toward murderous drug overlord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman while serving as Mexico’s secretary of public security from 2006-12, arrived in Brooklyn Federal Court with his attorney for a Friday afternoon hearing.




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Church desecration suspect in custody after Brooklyn priest, altar are splashed with juice during Sunday morning service

A 14-second video captured the unsettling scene inside St. Anthony of Padua Church in Greenpoint as the Rev. Jossy Vattothu presided over the 9:30 a.m. Mass, with the man strolling casually inside the house of worship with a container of juice in his right hand.




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Brutal ‘Bushwick Crew’ member pleads guilty to murdering thieves who tried to rob drug stash

The last suspect in the grisly gang-related Brooklyn murders of two men whose bodies were burned after they were tortured and killed pleaded guilty Friday.




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Staten Island man, 72, files Child Victims Act suit over alleged 1960s abuse by Poly Prep teachers

Rubin, now a genteel 72-year-old Staten Island resident, alleges in a newly-filed Child Victims Act lawsuit that he was sexually abused on a weekly basis between 1960-65 by a cabal of five predatory teachers at the prestigious school.




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Man wrongly convicted in 1995 Brooklyn gang murder sues the state for $100 million

Christian Pacheco, 42, was wrongly convicted in the racially-motivated Latin Kings killing of Lemuel Cruz, who died in December 1995 at a Brooklyn club called El Sabor Latino. Pacheco was nabbed by cops as he was trying to save Cruz's life. “I don’t regret helping him — honestly, I don’t. That’s the kind of person that I am," Pacheco told reporters Thursday.




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19-year-old Brooklyn stabbing victim asked for his mom in his last breaths

Mamadou Bah, 19, an immigrant from Senegal who dreamt of playing pro basketball, died after he stumbled into Gentlemen’s Quarters Salon on Church Ave. near Ocean Ave. in Flatbush just before 10 p.m. Tuesday.




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Mom wants justice for Mexican son shot by ICE on vacation visit to Brooklyn

“Those people shot him to kill him. It’s a miracle that my son is alive,” Carmen Cruz said of the Feb. 6 incident in which her son, 26-year-old Erick Diaz-Cruz, was wounded in a confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Gravesend.




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Boy, 7, walking to Brooklyn school with mom killed in crosswalk by driver with suspended license — sixth NYC pedestrian death in five days

The 8:15 a.m. crash at Pennsylvania and Blake Aves. in East New York happened just paces from three neighborhood schools and about two miles from where a 10-year-old girl was fatally struck by a school bus Tuesday, officials said.




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Brooklyn man whose murder conviction was overturned will be retried for 1992 killing

Emmanuelle Cooper, 54, spent 27 years in prison for the 1992 murder of MTA employee Andres Barretto, who was fatally shot in an East New York subway station after two men forced their way into a booth and robbed the token clerks inside.




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‘This is a celebration of homecoming.’ Mourners gather for funeral of 7-year-old boy fatally struck by unlicensed driver in Brooklyn

More than 200 mourners filed into the Love Fellowship Tabernacle church in East New York Thursday night for Payson Lott’s wake and funeral. The youngster was struck and killed by an unlicensed driver as he crossed a street in his neighborhood.




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Brooklyn Supreme Court worker tests positive for coronavirus, officials say courthouse will remain open

The employee, who works at 320 Jay St. in Downtown Brooklyn, tested positive for the illness Thursday night, prompting the Vera Institute to tell a majority of their employees to work from home.




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Brooklyn man suspected of murdering love triangle rival and burning corpse took victim’s seat in church

The murder may have happened outside the city.




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Brooklyn judge, three others test positive for coronavirus in borough’s courts: officials

The judge, whose name was not released, was last in the courthouse on Mar. 12, officials said.




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State pulls liquor license of Queens restaurant that flouts governor’s no dining in order

The operators of the New Oriental Guyana Restaurant on Liberty Ave. in Jamaica shut its front gates — but in a Prohibition-era move, they let dozens of customers in through an alley door so they could wine and dine the night away, the State Liquor Authority said.




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Patients denied take-home doses at packed Brooklyn methadone clinic, sparking fears of coronavirus transmission

Patient Jessica Ellision recalled how she broke down and sobbed Monday when she finally received her medication after a three-hour wait — much of it in the crowded hallway where she feared the other patients might be infected. “It was so intense and so stressful, and you feel like you worked so hard not to be sick, but this is it now — this is how it happens,” said Ellison, 39, of the Bronx.




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SEE IT: Crooks steal cash register from Brooklyn bistro: police

A pair of crooks broke into a Bushwick bistro and swiped the cash register during an early-morning robbery over the weekend, police said Tuesday.




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Beloved Brooklyn pastor dies from coronavirus at age 49 — first Catholic priest killed by disease in the U.S., officials say

The beloved 49-year-old priest, born in Mexico City, passed away Friday evening at the Wyckoff Medical Center in Brooklyn, the diocese said. Father Jorge, as he was known to worshippers, served as the diocesan coordinator of the ministry for Mexican-Americans among his other duties.




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Charges tossed against Brooklyn nail salon workers in broomstick beatdown

Two Brooklyn nail salon workers who pummeled a customer with brooms in a viral video had assault charges against them dismissed at trial – and a defense attorney says they were victims of a mob mentality fueled by elected officials.




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No coronavirus release for former Mexican top cop Garcia Luna, accused of taking millions in bribes from cartels

A Brooklyn federal magistrate denied Genaro Garcia Luna release from prison due to coronavirus, saying he was a flight risk.




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Members of NYC’s running clubs run errands for needy during coronavirus pandemic

Runners are using their legs for deliveries now.




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Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams calls for express supermarket lanes for first responders, with Foodtown already onboard

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams called Saturday for all New York supermarkets to offer express lane treatment for those heroic New Yorkers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.




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Cops break up Brooklyn funeral for coronavirus victim as mourners ignore social distancing

The funeral was held for Rav Yosef Kalish, 63, an Amshinover rebbe who was hospitalized with COVID-19 last week and died Sunday morning, The Associated Press reported.




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SEE IT: Burglar in surgical mask robs Brooklyn church twice in 5 days

The crook first targeted Grace Baptist Church on New Jersey Ave. near Liberty Ave. in East New York around 8 p.m. March 31, cops said. He forced open a side door and made off with a wad of cash.




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HOMETOWN HELPERS: Brooklyn hospital X-ray technologist uses mental prep routine to 'amp up’ for hectic shifts on the coronavirus front line

Gina Torres, radiologic technologist at Wyckoff Heights Hospital in Brooklyn, knows the amount of stress waiting inside as coronavirus patients pour in day after day.




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Coronavirus pandemic rages at NYC’s federal jails — and numbers back lawyers’ and staffers’ claims that management has a poor grip on the problem

Staff at New York City’s two federal jails, defense attorneys and inmates interviewed by the Daily News say the official numbers of COVID-19 cases obscure the magnitude of the crisis behind bars.




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Pair of armed NYC muggers in medical masks use coronavirus pandemic to launch violent crime spree: cops

The heartless bandits with hidden faces are wanted for a violent robbery spree across Brooklyn and the Bronx over the past five weeks that includes beating an 83-year-old man, pistol-whipping a woman and shooting a bread deliveryman who survived a bullet to the pancreas.