Manhattan: With no sports to watch, I’m relying on my memory for gratification. My greatest sports memory happens to coincide with the great moment in New York Knicks’ history, which happened 50 years ago today, on May 8, 1970, when the team won its first championship.

The monster who started it, Hitler, was dead, with a coward’s bullet to the head. Also gone was FDR, the man who mobilized a nation and built a worldwide coalition to defeat Germany. As were millions of men who fought in the second war to end all wars to crush an insane regime that had murdered millions of civilian men, women and children, Jew and gentile. Churchill, who stood sometimes alone against the threat, would soon be turned out by the voters.

As much as Mayor de Blasio wants to pretend these arrests are just a drop in the bucket, from the point of view of those being constantly dropped in the bucket, the city’s heavy-handed coronavirus crackdown is just more of the same.Same profiling. Same brutality. Same disrespect.

Last Feb. 14, Gov. Cuomo signed the Child Victims Act into law. He did it in the newsroom of the Daily News, because it was this paper that, over many years, spotlighted the wrenching cases of people abused as children, perversely prevented from seeking justice as adults.

Add Dr. Rick Bright to the list of coronavirus whistleblowers silenced or sidelined for trying to push truth over politics as we battle this deadly scourge. He was just ousted from his post as director of the HHS agency working on a COVID-19 vaccine for what he claims was his refusal to support a “game-changing” supposed cure President Trump and friends have been touting. CDC chief Robert Redfield suffered a similar rebuke for warning of a second wave of the virus next winter, contradicting the more rosy picture the president wants trying to paint. Not fired (yet), but clearly pressured to toe the line, truth and science be damned.

Time has been extremely kind to Checketts' Knicks tenure.

Former NBA guard Shannon Brown was arrested recently after shooting a rifle in a mixup at his home.

Time has been extremely kind to Checketts' Knicks tenure.

Lysacek, originally from Naperville, took a loss on the two-bedroom condo.

Like anyone who has ever spruced up their home, Melania Trump will have a few new touches to showcase Friday when guests visit the White House for only the second state dinner of the Trump presidency.

A private island in Islamorada on the Florida Keys is for sale for $17 million. The island is called Terra's Key, after its owner John Terra, and has historical significance dating back to the 1800s.

Most of the Georgia mall heavily featured in the latest season of Netflix's "Stranger Things" is going up for sale.

More Americans signed contracts to buy homes in September, a sign that the housing market is still benefiting from lower mortgage rates.

The Reserve Roastery Chicago opens Friday, transforming the former Crate & Barrel space into five floors of coffee wonderland.

The developer of a 23-story tower near Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach envisions a project with 320 condo style rentals and a 140-room hotel.

Major players in commercial real estate, construction and organized labor are teaming up with the United Way to try to place thousands of and minorities into trade careers in Chicago, where there is both a shortage of skilled labor and a dearth of jobs in swaths of the city.

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

The Cheltenham horse racing festival should probably not have been allowed to go ahead last month shortly before Britain went into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Horse Racing Ireland CEO Brian Kavanagh has said.

Ruby Walsh believes enforcing social distancing should not prove too much of an issue when racing eventually resumes.

Rangers have accused the Scottish Professional Football League executive of withholding vital information before clubs voted to end the lower-league season and potentially the Premiership campaign.

European soccer leagues got a glimpse of what the future might hold after football finally returned with the start of the South Korean K-League on Friday.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The victim, believed to be in her 40s, was hit at the intersection of Atlantic Ave. and Pennsylvania Ave. in East New York about 4:30 a.m., cops said.

Instead of waking up to wish his daughter the best on her 23rd birthday, Collin Dixon got the phone call every parent dreads.

The city withheld explosive allegations of racism against two high-ranking NYPD cops accused of demanding arrests of black and Hispanic people, an attorney charged Friday.

The 33-year-old woman was shot in the chest and leg by the man in an apartment on Rockaway Pkwy. in Brownsville.

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

The suspects jumped one of the victims near Herkimer St. and Nostrand Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant about 3 a.m. Dec. 21.

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.

Sometime after 911 was called, the 63-year-old victim — whose name has not been released — went into his bedroom to put out the fire. He soon passed out amid the smoke and flames, officials said. Responding firefighters and EMTs pulled him out of the apartment. "He was badly burned," said a neighbor.

The defendants were linked in a 15-page Manhattan court filing with a cornucopia of crimes committed between 2010-19, from murder to robbery, wire fraud to kidnapping, and drug dealing to identity theft.

A Brooklyn woman was slashed in the face with a knife by an enraged passenger after her child threw up on a city bus.

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.

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.

Judge Jack Weinstein on Monday moved to inactive status, closing out a 53-year career. A highlight of his law career was working with Thurgood Marshall on the legal arguments that led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was illegal. He was named a federal judge in 1967, and on his retirement was the last appointee of President Lyndon Johnson still on the bench.

Aleksey Tsvetkov, 40, blew up while an Assistant U.S. Attorney recited his criminal history during his sentencing hearing in Brooklyn Federal Court on racketeering charges..

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.

Folks in the neighborhood where the 7-year-old was struck and killed 24 hours earlier couldn’t help but notice the new arrivals Friday: Two guards positioned at the intersection near a homemade memorial honoring the lost and lovable child.

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.

Ruthie Ann Miles, a Tony winner who is now a regular on the CBS series “All Rise,” shared the happy news on Instagram.

Disturbing videos posted online paint a grim picture on how hospitals seem to be struggling to deal with bodies as they battle against the wave of coronavirus patients.

Suspect Donte West, 28, broke into a side door of the shoe store on Pitkin Ave. near Bristol St. in Brownsville about 8:45 a.m. Saturday and loaded up a Chevy Trailblazer with more than three dozen pairs of sneakers and nearly 40 baseball caps as cops arrived, police said.

The last thing Jorge Cruz ever did was ask for a cup of hot tea. By the time it was cool enough for a sip, he was dead -- apparently from coronavirus.

Inmates were coughing and sneezing, and guards wore no personal protective equipment, said Hassan Chunn, 46, who fears the disease is spreading through the Metropolitan Detention Center.

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.

An 83-year-old man was punched and had a gun put to his head by two masked men in Brooklyn, according to video released by police.

When Deirdre Von Dornum and the others arrived at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal Bureau of Prisons staffer wearing no gloves or mask greeted them in the lobby, according to the email.