Politics
Mamdani’s howler
NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has spent much of the last month displaying his intense soccer fandom, just said during a press conference on security plans for a busy July Fourth weekend that France and Norway would be playing. He corrected himself after Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said something to him in an aside: In fact it will be Brazil and Norway facing off at the Meadowlands on Sunday. France played Sweden there yesterday and Norway in Boston last Friday.
“Who needs Democrats when you have your own party derailing the Trump agenda,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said Tuesday…
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OAKLAND, California — Thousands of soccer fans from around the world will funnel around the windy San Francisco Bay area by train, bus, and light rail to watch the United States take on Bosnia and Herzegovina in an elimination game at Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium. But operators of the region’s interlocking mass transit systems are more likely to be concerned with the opinion of local riders than visiting ones.
In November, voters across San Francisco Bay Area counties will vote on a ballot measure that serves as something of an existential political referendum on the sometimes maligned but widely utilized public networks that knit together one of the United States’ most transit-dependent regions.
The measure would increase local sales-tax rates by up to a full percent to provide a stable funding source for BART, Muni, Caltrain and AC Transit, and the San Francisco Bay Ferry — all of which have faced lower ridership and declining fare revenues since the COVID-19 pandemic. Should it fail, transit agencies have warned of dramatic cuts to service that could lead to less ridership, even less fare revenue, and the end of the system altogether.
The Connect Bay Area campaign behind the ballot measure is already working overtime to convince voters that they do in fact hold a deep and abiding love for public buses, trains and boats, embarking on what local press has referred to as a “charm offensive,” through transit-sponsored speed dating, anime festivals, and even a 1980s prom-themed party at a train station east of San Francisco.
The campaign did not schedule the World Cup match but is hoping the high-profile encounter involving the U.S. national team will serve as a very public test of the systems’ function and ability to remind both regular and infrequent users of their value.
“It’s an opportunity to remind people of what public transit means on a large scale,” said Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for the ballot-measure campaign funded largely by a coalition of business groups and labor unions. “You can’t welcome 100,000 people if you don’t have a way to get them around — these big, celebratory events just don’t happen if we don’t have public transit.”
LONDON — U.K. ambassadors from missions across the world have returned and are watching the England-Democratic Republic of Congo match with their London-based opposite numbers in the Gold Room of Lancaster House, the U.K. Foreign Office’s opulent mansion in Westminster. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is due to attend.
Britain’s ambassador to the DRC is watching the match alongside the Congolese ambassador to the U.K. They swapped jerseys from their two nations at the start.
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