Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Sunday signed the certificate of incorporation creating a new Business Improvement District in Coney Island with a first-year operating budget of up to $1 million.
Speaking on the boardwalk, Mamdani called the move the start of a new chapter for the waterfront neighborhood.
“The launch of the Coney Island Business Improvement District marks a new era of investment in this beloved community,” he said.
The mayor said the BID would bring supplemental sanitation, marketing and business support to the neighborhood ahead of the 2026 summer season, when officials say the area draws more than 5 million visitors each year.
Coney Island will become Brooklyn’s 24th BID and the city’s 78th overall, according to the Department of Small Business Services.
Mayor Mamdani launches $1M Coney Island Business Improvement District
‘I could not stay silent’: Palestinian prisoner tells of sexual abuse in Israeli jail
Sami al-Saei said he heard the Israeli prison guards who raped him laughing through the assault, before they left him lying blindfolded, handcuffed and in agony on the floor to take a cigarette break.
At least one of the group knew a crime was being committed and intervened, not to stop the torture but to prevent its documentation. Al-Saei said he heard the man warning others “don’t take a photo, don’t take a photo” as they attacked.
He bled from his rectum for more than three weeks after the assault, which happened soon after he was detained in February 2024. He described sexual torture that lasted more than 20 minutes including beatings on his buttocks, a guard applying extreme pressure to his genitals, and forced anal penetration with two different objects.
“I tried to prevent them by clenching my muscles (in my anus), but I could not. They forced it in very deep, it was extremely painful,” he said in an interview about his ordeal. “I don’t know how loudly I screamed from the pain.”
It left him in so much pain that he collapsed twice when ordered to stand up and walk afterwards. Moved to an overcrowded cell, al-Saei said he received no medical treatment and was forced to use wads of toilet paper to staunch the blood.
The 47-year-old father of six was held without charge or trial until June 2025. About 40 days after his release, he posted a video on TikTok detailing the attack, defying the extreme social stigma and Israeli warnings against going public about abuse in jails.
“I could not stay silent. I have a moral responsibility to say what happened to me and other prisoners,” he said.
Israeli prisons 'begin preparations to apply death penalty' for Palestinians
The Israeli Prison Service has begun preparations to introduce the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners, Israeli media reported on Sunday.
According to Israel's Channel 13, preparations include the creation of a facility dubbed "Israel's Green Mile", where executions will take place.
Training and procedural preparations have also started, while a delegation from the prison service is expected to visit an East Asian country to study the legal and regulatory framework for implementing capital punishment, the report added.
The move follows the Knesset’s approval of the death penalty bill in its first reading last year, with 39 MPs in favour and 16 against.
The bill must pass two further readings before becoming law.
The report added that executions will be carried out by hanging, with three guards pressing the trigger simultaneously.
Specialist teams, composed entirely of volunteers, will be assigned to the task.
An Israeli source told the channel that death sentences will be carried out within 90 days of the final verdict.
Blindfolded, beaten, humiliated: How Israeli forces abused Palestinians returning to Gaza
Huda Abu Abed feared only long waits and Israeli checks when she was told she could return to Gaza after two years in Egypt.
The 57-year-old Palestinian heart patient expected delays at the Rafah crossing, but she never imagined being blindfolded, interrogated for hours, witnessing her daughter beaten, and having her belongings confiscated.
Abu Abed had been evacuated to Egypt during the genocide for urgent medical treatment, accompanied by her daughter.
She was among the first group of Palestinians contacted by the Palestinian embassy in Egypt to return on Monday, following the partial reopening of the Rafah crossing – the first since May 2024.
The crossing reopened under heavy Israeli restrictions and monitoring, limiting the number of people allowed to enter or exit, and subjecting returnees to physical searches at a checkpoint in Rafah.
At least 12 Palestinians killed and several hurt in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza
At least 12 Palestinians were killed and several more injured across the Gaza Strip on Sunday as the Israeli military said it carried out airstrikes in response to ceasefire violations by Hamas.
The Gaza civil defence agency said five people were killed and several others hurt when an airstrike targeted a tent sheltering displaced people in the northern city of Jabaliya.
According to the agency, which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authorities, five more people were killed and several injured in a separate early morning strike in the southern city of Khan Younis. It said one more person was killed after Israeli shelling in Gaza City, while one person was killed by Israeli gunfire in Beit Lahia.
Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesperson in Gaza, accused Israel of committing a new massacre against displaced Palestinians, calling it a serious breach of the ceasefire days before the first meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.
Progressive Texas organizers hail shock win as far-right Republicans left reeling
Chris Tackett started tracking extremism in Texas politics about a decade ago, whenever his schedule as a Little League coach and school board member would allow. At the time, he lived in Granbury, 40 minutes west of Fort Worth. He’d noticed that a local member of the state legislature, Mike Lang, had become a vocal advocate for using public money for private schools – despite the fact that Lang campaigned as a supporter of public education.
With a little research, Tackett found that Lang had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the Wilks brothers and Tim Dunn, billionaire megadonors whose deep pockets and Christian nationalist views have consumed the Texas GOP. Tackett published his findings on social media, and soon enough, people started asking him to create pie charts of their representatives’ campaign funds. These charts evolved into the organisation See It. Name It. Fight It.
“There’s so many people out there that are so busy with their daily lives, they’re walking past and not even seeing some of these bad things going on,” he says. “So that’s the first step: you have to see this thing.”
Tackett and his wife Mendi, the organisation’s sole members, now live in Fort Worth, where they’re part of a scrappy community of progressives and anti-extremist organizers who are building momentum amid their town’s deeply embedded Christian nationalism. Tarrant county, in which Fort Worth is the largest city, provided a chilling preview of Texas’s gerrymandering efforts, and the county is widely regarded as a hotbed for far-right actors. But most recently, the county was the site of a Democratic victory that sent the Texas Republican party reeling.
‘I was so scared’: US trial witnesses allege Alexander brothers worked together to rape women
In their time as real estate brokers, the Israeli-American Alexander brothers – twins Alon and Oren and older brother Tal – were known as “closers”, the salesmen who could a get a sale over finish line, often to wealthy hedge funders who were then making hay in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Their technique, one real estate expert explained outside the 26th floor of the federal court house in lower Manhattan last week, was based on the sense that the property salesmen “were just like their clients” – young, eager and successful. Kim Kardashian and then-husband Kanye West, Jared and Ivanka Trump were clients.
And like many, they were party animals. Nightclubs in Manhattan, the Hamptons, Miami, Aspen, Tulum and Ibiza were seasonal stops. Tal and Oren, 38, were profiled in the New York Times on “How Two Luxury Real Estate Agents Spend Their Sundays”. The Wall Street Journal followed on the family’s $31m sale of their Miami beach home. US Vogue featured Oren’s wedding to a Brazilian model.
But a far nastier picture of their high life has been on display in court for the past few weeks, where the three brothers are on trial for sex trafficking. Prosecutors have accused each of the three brothers of violent, forcible rape of at least 10 women each and in some cases of threatening them if they spoke of their experiences.
Gaza’s Nasser Hospital condemns MSF decision to suspend most services
One of Gaza ’s last functioning large hospitals condemned the decision by Doctors Without Borders to pull out of operations over concerns about armed men, claiming on Sunday that the facility had installed civilian police for security.
The rare public friction between two well-known health care providers in Gaza came as the Palestinian death toll since the current ceasefire surpassed 600. At least 11 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in the last 24 hours, hospitals said.
Doctors Without Borders, also known by its acronym MSF, said in a statement Saturday that all its noncritical medical operations at Nasser Hospital were suspended due to security breaches that posed “serious” threats to its teams and patients. MSF said there had been an increase in patients and staff seeing armed men in parts of the compound since the U.S.-brokered October ceasefire was reached.
Nasser Hospital said Sunday the increase in armed men was due to a civilian police presence aimed at protecting patients and staff and said MSF’s “allegations are factually incorrect, irresponsible and pose a serious risk to a protected civilian medical facility.”
Hundreds of patients and war-wounded have been treated daily at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, and the facility was a hub for Palestinian prisoners released by Israel in exchange for Israeli hostages as part of the current ceasefire deal.
Chicago teen who called for father's release from ICE detention dies
Ofelia Giselle Torres Hidalgo, 16, died on Friday, Feb. 13, from stage 4 alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, according to a statement from the family's spokesperson. Torres Hidalgo had been diagnosed with the rare and aggressive form of soft tissue cancer in December 2024.
The teenager was undergoing cancer treatment and had been home visiting her family for the weekend when her father, Ruben Torres Maldonado, was arrested in October 2025 at a Home Depot store in suburban Chicago, a GoFundMe page set up for the family states. He was detained during the Trump administration's "Operation Midway Blitz," a major immigration enforcement campaign that brought a surge of federal agents to the Chicago area.
Following his arrest, Torres Hidalgo posted a video on social media calling for his release. She described her father as a hardworking immigrant who cared for her younger brother while she stayed at the hospital for treatment.
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