By Bob Hennelly

It was just after 4 p.m. on Oct. 8, in the Marble Hill section of The Bronx with school just getting out and the streetscape was filled with kids and parents. It was in that setting that 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, in his Honda CR4, was confronted by masked ICE agents including one with a long gun.

By Joe Maniscalco

A recent Work-Bites Instagram post teasing a story about the EMS crisis facing New York City has garnered 12,949 views at the time of this writing—not an insignificant amount.

But because the Mayor’s Office has refused to acknowledge repeated requests for comment, that’s 12,949 times readers interested in learning Mayor Mamdani’s views, thoughts, and feelings about what happened at St. Francis Preparatory High School in Queens on the morning of Sept 28—were denied that right.

By Joe Maniscalco

This week’s Labor and Healthcare Confidential show featured advocates from both the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Tenants Against Demolition coalition—and the Ain’t I a Woman Campaign fighting to end the 24-hour workday in New York City’s home care industry.

Over the course of the lively hour-long interview with host Marianne Pizzitola we learned once again that the battle to save public housing from privatization and the “No More 24” fight to end round-the-clock shifts for home care workers—as well as the ongoing struggle to protect New York City municipal retiree healthcare from diminishment—are not disparate issues.

By Bob Hennelly

The Guardian is reporting that in the US-Israel's war of choice on Iran, the US has dispatched a third aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East, as President Trump once again threatens that country with annihilation just weeks ahead of the US midterm elections.

By Joe Maniscalco

On Sept. 28, a 14-year-old student at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens with a known heart condition waited so long for an FDNY EMS ambulance to arrive after suffering a medical emergency that his mother reportedly had to bundle him into a car and rush him to the hospital herself.

By Joe Maniscalco

After numerous street actions, including two separate hunger strikes and sit-ins, New York City home care workers fighting to end round-the-clock shifts and institutionalized wage theft in the industry will return to City Hall on Oct. 8 to continue the struggle.

By Joe Maniscalco

Donald Trump received an uncharacteristic bit of pushback after banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House, and he deserves to get a helluva lot more. He still defended his naked authoritarianism standing outside Gracie Mansion this week alongside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, rambling on about how he has an “obligation” to keep fake news out of the White House.

By Bob Hennelly

This week, the Mamdani administration announced a landmark $131 million settlement with DoorDash that systematically underpaid 260,000 delivery workers out of their wages.

Unionized healthcare workers took to the streets of New York City on Sept. 24 to call on the Trump administration to reinstate Temporary Protective Status [TPS] for Haitian immigrants in danger of being deported without it.

By Joe Maniscalco

Public housing tenants staring down the wrecking ball in Chelsea and their allies effectively shut down another NYCHA Board Meeting on Wednesday morning in opposition to ongoing city plans to demolish the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea [FEC] Houses on Manhattan’s West Side.

By Joe Maniscalco

Working class NYCHA tenants fighting eviction and the ultimate privatization and demolition of their tree-lined communities in Chelsea have a pair of important hearings coming up in the next two months that will go a long way to determining their struggle.

By Bob Hennelly

As the world's nations come together in New York City for the UN General Assembly, the Guardian is reporting that European intelligence spy agencies are warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin is planning more decisive action against NATO. The newspaper reported that French president Emmanuel Macron summoned all of the contenders in that nation's 2027 presidential elections for an emergency meeting on what Macron believes is the growing threat from Russia which looms as the war between Russia and Ukraine continues to intensify. 

By Joe Maniscalco

This week marked the 15th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. But just a small band of activists, many of whom were at the Zuccotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan that sparked the whole movement back in 2011, were on hand Sept. 17 to actually mark the occasion.

Jerry Ashton, “unintended activist” and proud son of a union trucker out of the state of Oregon, was one of them.

By Steve Wishnia

Ninety-six staffers in the City Council’s central office who joined the Association of Legislative Employees late last year are in negotiations demanding that they be added to the union’s contract covering about 500 other Council staff.

By Bob Hennelly

The Guardian is reporting this week that oil prices are spiking to over $107 a barrel as Iran aligned rebel Houthis in Yemen targeted  Saudi Arabia's east west crude pipeline. As President Trump's war of choice in Iran has continued, the entire Mideast has been destabilized with oil at one point hitting $126 dollars a barrel. 

By Joe Maniscalco

From the time he was 12 until he was 21-years-old, Author John Hanson grew up hearing first-hand accounts about the 1934 Minneapolis general strike from his dad, an old-time Wobbly and member of IBT Local 574’s Committee of 100 tasked with guiding the historic worker uprising to ultimate victory.

By Joe Maniscalco

Sixty-two-year-old Queens resident Marlene Urquhart spent seven years working round-the-clock shifts for a home care agency located on Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn called 1st Help HomeCare.

The mother of four quit in March 2025 alleging 1st Help Home Care and its owner Rita Cohen owed her more than $260,000 in unpaid wages following the death of Urquhart’s primary patient that same year.

By Joe Maniscalco

What’s wrong with this picture?

Members of the largest and arguably most powerful public sector union in the City of New York can no longer afford to live in the city they serve—but the strongest opposition they face getting a contract they can live with this fall isn’t coming from the Office of Labor Relations [OLR].  

It’s coming from their own union leadership. 

By Jessica Peralta

Community Sentinel

IRVINE, CA — UCI MIND’s laboratory has 15 freezers and five refrigerators. They are packed — but not with food. 

About 1,200 brains are currently stored in those freezers and fridges.

Each sample represents a person who donated their brain to science with the hopes of helping future generations overcome neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease

By Steve Wishnia

Twenty-five years have passesd since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, but the maladies caused by the resulting poisonous dust continue to linger, and the survivors are aging.