In a triumph that blends millennial savvy with old-school populism, Zohran Mamdani has emerged from relative obscurity to claim the mayoralty of the world’s financial capital, marking a seismic shift in the governance of America’s largest city.
The 34-year-old state assemblyman, born in Uganda to Indian parents and a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, secured a decisive 50.4% victory Tuesday night over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s independent bid (41.6%) and Republican Curtis Sliwa‘s distant third (7.1%), amid the highest turnout for a mayoral election in over 50 years—more than 2 million ballots cast, including a record 735,000 early votes. Mamdani’s ascent, fueled by viral social media mastery, laser-focused economic messaging, and opponents hobbled by scandals and fatigue, catapults him into history as New York’s youngest mayor since 1892, its first Muslim leader, and the first of South Asian descent born in Africa.
For a city synonymous with Wall Street excess and unyielding ambition, Mamdani’s win feels like a plot twist in a Scorsese film—equal parts inspiring and unnerving. His campaign, launched with scant name recognition and no party machine muscle, harnessed TikTok memes and Instagram reels to mobilize young voters and outer-borough families crushed by housing costs (median rents at $3,400 against $6,640 household incomes, per Census data). Pledges for rent freezes on 1 million stabilized units, fare-free buses, and taxing millionaires resonated in a post-pandemic landscape where affordability topped AP VoteCast concerns for 6 in 10 New Yorkers. “Tonight, against all odds, we made it happen,” Mamdani declared to roaring crowds in Brooklyn, where Bad Bunny blasted amid tearful embraces and fluttering campaign flags. “New York, you’ve delivered a mandate for change, for a new politics, and for a city we can actually afford.”
Yet, as confetti settled, Mamdani’s honeymoon looms short. Critics, including President Trump (who branded him a “communist” and vowed funding cuts), warn his agenda risks stifling the innovation that powers the city’s $1.8 trillion economy.
Cuomo’s concession—”a caution flag… down a dangerous road”—echoed elite anxieties, while Sliwa vowed Guardian Angels mobilization against “socialism.” Mamdani’s retort? A cheeky nod to Trump: “Turn the volume up!” In his first post-victory presser at Flushing Meadows’ iconic globe, the mayor-elect outlined a five-woman transition team—led by Elana Leopold (de Blasio alum) and featuring ex-Deputy Mayor Melanie Hartzog, FTC Chair Lina Khan, United Way CEO Grace Bonilla, and Maria Torres-Springer—signaling a blend of expertise and gender equity. He’ll retain NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a nod to his evolved stance on policing after 2020 “defund” barbs he now calls “criticism, not abolition.”
Mamdani’s trajectory is a masterclass in grassroots disruption. Elected to the Assembly in 2020 as a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member—joining a network of 100,000 nationwide—he entered the race with “next to no name recognition, little money, and no institutional party support,” as one early strategist quipped. A son of filmmaker Mira Nair and Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, he immigrated young, naturalized in 2018, and honed his voice as a Queens renter railing against inequality. His platform—universal childcare, green jobs, a “Department of Community Safety” for mental health calls—echoed DSA icons like Bernie Sanders (a symbolic anchor) and “The Squad” (AOC, Rashida Tlaib), but with laser focus on wallet issues over cultural flashpoints.
Social media was his secret sauce: Viral videos of subway rants and affordability audits amassed millions of views, drawing Gen Z and immigrants alienated by Cuomo’s baggage. The ex-governor, son of Mario Cuomo, entered as favorite post-Eric Adams‘ scandalous exit but faltered on harassment scandals (denied as “political”) and a negative blitz that backfired. Sliwa’s quippy Guardian Angels flair amused but couldn’t dent Democratic hegemony. Mamdani’s 13-point primary romp over Cuomo forced the independent rerun, but his charisma—joking about being a “Scandinavian politician, only browner”—sealed the deal. “The conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate… I refuse to apologize,” he thundered, channeling Sanders’ 2016 energy that netted 13.2 million votes.
DSA’s decentralized ethos—grassroots chapters pushing labor, mutual aid—amplified his run, proving socialists aren’t “fringe” anymore. Mamdani joins trailblazers like Greg Casar (Texas) and Sarahana Shrestha (NY Assembly), flipping seats with worker-rights focus. Unlike Europe’s welfare norms (universal healthcare in Scandinavia), DSA seeks democratized economics without full market abolition—a mixed model appealing to drifting blue-collar voters Trump chipped in 2024.
Mandate Met with Hurdles: Governing the ‘Capital of Capitalism’
Mamdani’s “mandate for change” arrives amid headwinds. NYC’s $100 billion budget strains under Hochul’s tax-hike vetoes; his millionaire levy faces state roadblocks. Critics like Trump (threatening federal aid cuts) and the NRCC (vowing 2026 ads tying House Dems to “radical socialist”) eye him as a bogeyman. His Gaza stance—denouncing “genocide,” pledging Netanyahu’s arrest—alarms Jewish leaders, though he pledged outreach: “Celebrating and cherishing” them.
On policing, Mamdani’s evolution—from “rogue agency” to Tisch retention—aims to assuage fears, but his Community Safety pivot risks Sliwa’s promised “worst enemies” backlash. Economic woes loom: Post-shutdown (now longest at 36 days), 6 in 10 AP voters decried living costs; Mamdani’s grocery co-ops and fare-free MTA hinge on funding miracles.
Yet opportunities abound. His blank-slate status (46% of Americans followed “not closely at all,” per CBS) lets him define himself—perhaps as a pragmatic reformer blending DSA equity with market-savvy. Outreach to Wall Street (Ackman’s “congrats” tweet) hints at detente; footprint in a city of 8.8 million immigrants offers global resonance.
National Echoes: A DSA Blueprint or Democratic Divide?
Mamdani’s win—amid Spanberger (VA) and Sherrill (NJ) centrist sweeps—hints at a big-tent Dems: Progressives in urban strongholds, moderates in suburbs. AP polls showed economy trumping immigration/crime; Mamdani’s focus flipped Bronx losses. Obama hailed “forward-looking leaders”; Kelly called it a “rejection of Trump’s chaos.”
For Republicans, it’s fodder: NRCC’s “surrender to far-left mob.” But Vivek Ramaswamy nailed it: “Focus on affordability… cut identity politics.” As midterms loom, Mamdani tests DSA’s viability—electable in blues? His “working people” bind could unify, or fracture under scrutiny.
Inaugurated January 1, Mamdani inherits de Blasio’s mixed legacy—progress on inequality, stumbles on execution. “The poetry of campaigning… the beautiful prose of governing,” he quipped, channeling Mario Cuomo. If he delivers, he’ll redefine urban liberalism; if not, he’ll fuel right-wing fire. New York, the universe’s center, watches—and America follows.
Dick Cheney, America’s most powerful modern vice president and chief architect of the “war on terror,” who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war on faulty assumptions, has died, according to a statement from his family. He was 84.
“His beloved wife of 61 years, Lynne, his daughters, Liz and Mary, and other family members were with him as he passed,” the family said, adding that he died due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.
“Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing,” the family added.
“We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”
The 46th vice president, who served alongside Republican President George W. Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009, was for decades a towering and polarizing Washington power player.
Bush described Cheney in a statement Tuesday as a “decent, honorable man.” “History will remember him as among the finest public servants of his generation – a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position,” Bush said.
In his final years, Cheney, still a hardline conservative, nevertheless became largely ostracized from his party over his intense criticism of President Donald Trump whom he branded a “coward”and the greatest-ever threat to the republic.
In an ironic coda to a storied political career, he cast his final vote in a presidential election in 2024 for a liberal Democrat, and fellow member of the vice president’s club, Kamala Harris, in a reflection of how the populist GOP had turned against his traditional conservatism.
Cheney was plagued by cardiovascular disease for most of his adult life, surviving a series of heart attacks, to lead a full, vigorous life and lived many years in retirement after a heart transplant in 2012 that he hailed in a 2014 interview as “the gift of life itself.”
Cheney, a sardonic former Wyoming representative, White House chief of staff and defense secretary, was enjoying a lucrative career in the corporate world when he was charged by George W. Bush with vetting potential vice-presidential nominees. The quest ended with Cheney himself taking the oath of office as a worldly number two to a callow new president who arrived in the Oval Office after a disputed election.
While caricatures of Cheney as the real president do not accurately capture the true dynamics of Bush’s inner circle, he relished the enormous influence that he wielded from behind the scenes.
Cheney was in the White House, with the president out of town on the crisp, clear morning of September 11, 2001. In the split second of horror when a second hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center in New York, he said he became a changed man, determined to avenge the al Qaeda-orchestrated attacks and to enforce US power throughout the Middle East with a neo-conservative doctrine of regime change and pre-emptive war.
“At that moment, you knew this was a deliberate act. This was a terrorist act,” he recalled of that day in an interview with CNN’s John King in 2002.
Cheney reflected in later years on how the attacks left him with overwhelming sense of responsibility to ensure such an assault on the homeland never happened again. Perceptions however that he was the sole driving force behind the war on terror and US ventures into Iraq and Afghanistan are misleading.
Contemporary and historic accounts of the administration show that Bush was his own self-styled “The Decider.”
From a bunker deep below the White House, Cheney went into crisis mode, directing the response of a grief-stricken nation suddenly at war. He gave the extraordinary order to authorize the shooting down of any more hijacked airliners in the event they were headed to the White House or the US Capitol building. For many, his frequent departures to “undisclosed” locations outside Washington to preserve the presidential chain of succession reinforced his image as an omnipotent figure waging covert war from the shadows. His hawkishness and alarmist view of a nation facing grave threats was not an outlier at the time – especially during a traumatic period that included anthrax mailings and sniper shootings around Washington, DC, that exacerbated a sense of public fear even though they were unrelated to 9/11.
The September 11 attacks unleashed the US war in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, which was harboring al Qaeda, though the terror group’s leader Osama bin Laden escaped. Soon, Cheney was agitating for widening the US assault to Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, whose forces he had helped to eject from Kuwait in the first Gulf War as President George H.W. Bush’s Pentagon chief.
The vice president’s aggressive warnings about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction programs, alleged links to al Qaeda and intent to furnish terrorists with deadly weapons to attack the United States played a huge role in laying the groundwork for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Congressional reports and other post-war inquiries later showed that Cheney and other administration officials exaggerated, misrepresented or did not properly portray faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction programs that Iraq turned out not to possess. One of Cheney’s most infamous claims, that the chief 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, met Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, was never substantiated, including by the independent commission into the September 11 attacks.
But Cheney insisted in 2005 that he and other top officials were acting on “the best available intelligence,” at the time.
While admitting that the flaws in the intelligence were plain in hindsight, he insisted that any claim that the data was “distorted, hyped, or fabricated” was “utterly false.”
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan also led the US down a dark legal and moral path including “enhanced interrogations” of terror suspects that critics blasted as torture. But Cheney – who was at the center of every facet of the global war on terrorism – insisted methods like waterboarding were perfectly acceptable.Cheney was also an outspoken advocate for holding terror suspects without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – a practice that critics at home and abroad branded an affront to core American values.
Cheney became a symbol of the excesses of the anti-terror campaigns and the fatally false premises and poor planning that turned the initially successful invasion of Iraq into a bloody quagmire. He left office reviled by Democrats and with an approval rating of 31%, according to the Pew Research Center.
To the end of his life, Cheney expressed no regrets, certain he had merely done what was necessary to respond to an unprecedented attack on the US mainland that killed nearly 3,000 people and led to nearly two decades of foreign wars that divided the nation and transformed its politics.
“I would do it again in a minute,” Cheney said, when confronted by a Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2014 that concluded enhanced interrogation methods as brutal and ineffective and responsible for damaging US standing in the eyes of the world.
Of the Iraq war, he told CNN in 2015: “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then and I believe it now.”
Cheney’s aggressive anti-terror policies fit into a personal doctrine that justified extraordinary presidential powers with limited congressional oversight. That was in line with his belief that the authority of the executive branch had been mistakenly eroded in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of his first presidential boss, President Richard Nixon.
Yet in his final years, Cheney emerged as a fierce critic of a man who had an even more expansive view of the powers of the presidency than he did – Trump. Cheney had supported Trump in 2016 despite his criticism of Bush-Cheney foreign policies and his transformation of the party of Reagan into a populist, nationalist GOP. But the ending of the president’s first term, when his refusal to accept his 2020 election defeat led to the January 6 insurrection, caused Cheney to speak out, in a rare, public manner.
The former vice president’s daughter, then-Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, meanwhile, sacrificed a promising career in the GOP to oppose Trump after his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. In an ad for his daughter’s unsuccessful campaign to fight off a pro-Trump candidate’s primary challenge in 2022, Dick Cheney – who was, by then, rarely seen in public – looked directly into the camera from under a wide brimmed cowboy hat and delivered an extraordinary direct message.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said.
“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know.”
Richard Bruce Cheney was born January 30, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska. While living in the small mountain town of Casper, Wyoming, he met his high school sweetheart and future wife Lynne Vincent. Cheney was accepted to Yale University on a scholarship, but he struggled to fit in and maintain his grades. By his own admission, he was kicked out.
He returned West to work on power lines and was twice arrested for driving under the influence. In a turning point for Cheney, he was given an ultimatum from Lynne, who had “made it clear she wasn’t interested in marrying a lineman for the county,” he told The New Yorker. “I buckled down and applied myself. Decided it was time to make something of myself,” he told the magazine.
Cheney went back to school and earned a bachelor’s and master’s in political science from University of Wyoming. The couple was married in 1964.
Cheney is survived by Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary Cheney and seven grandchildren.
A veteran Washington power broker
Cheney began honing his inside power game – at which he became a master – as an aide to Nixon.
He was later picked by Donald Rumsfeld as his deputy White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford and then succeeded his mentor and close friend in the job in 1975 when Rumsfeld departed to become defense secretary. Cheney was instrumental in reviving their partnership in 2001 when he recalled Rumsfeld from the political wilderness to return to the Pentagon. The pair formed an extraordinary backroom alliance in the Bush administration throughout the war on terror and the Iraq war – much to the frustration of more moderate members of the administration including then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice – who took over from Powell in the second term.
While Democratic President Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Cheney decided to run for Congress and was elected to Wyoming’s sole US House seat in 1978. Cheney served six terms, rising to become House minority whip, and racked up a very conservative voting record.
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush, who had served with Cheney in the Ford administration, tapped him to serve as his defense secretary, calling him a “trusted friend, adviser.” He was confirmed by the Senate in a 92-0 vote.
As Pentagon chief, Cheney showed considerable skill in directing the US invasion of Panama in 1989 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991 to push Iraq’s troops out of Kuwait. Following his stint as defense secretary, Cheney briefly explored a run for president in the 1996 election cycle but decided against it.
During Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidency, Cheney joined Dallas-based Halliburton Co. serving as its chief executive officer.
It wouldn’t be until the younger Bush decided to run for office that Cheney was chosen to lead the Republican candidate’s search for a running mate and, after initially turning down the job, ended up being added to the GOP ticket.
“During the process, I came to the conclusion that the selector was the best person to be selected,” Bush said in the 2020 CNN film “President in Waiting.”
Cheney brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to areas where critics complained Bush was weak. As a former Texas governor, Bush had no elected experience in Washington and little military and foreign policy background compared with Cheney.
Early in Bush’s presidency, Cheney led a task force to develop the administration’s energy policy and sought to keep its records secret in a fight that lasted Bush’s first term and went all the way to the US Supreme Court.
He was, however, at odds with Bush over the issue of same-sex marriage, saying that it should be left to the states to decide. In a 2004 town hall, he noted his daughter Mary’s sexual orientation reportedly for the first time publicly, according to The Washington Post. “With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People … ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to,” he said, the Post reported.
His relationship with Bush was complicated in later years, including by Bush’s refusal to pardon Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, who had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in 2007 after a probe into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative. Libby was eventually pardoned by Trump in 2018.
In one of the most notorious moments in his personal life, which added to his grizzled legend in 2006, Cheney accidentally shot a hunting partner in the face with birdshot, causing relatively minor wounds.
Cheney’s health issues began in 1978, when he had his first heart attack at age 37 while running for Congress. Three more followed in 1984, 1988 and November 2000, just a few days into the Florida presidential ballot recount that resulted in a Bush-Cheney win.
Cheney at the time said that he’d be the “the first to step down” if he learned he’d be unable to do the job and had a resignation letter in case he was deemed incapacitated. Cheney completed both terms under Bush, attending Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 in a wheelchair.
A year after a fifth heart attack in 2010, Cheney received a heart pump that kept the organ running until his transplant in 2012.
After leaving office, Cheney returned to private life, penning two memoirs — one about his personal and political career and the other about his struggles with heart disease as well as a book with his daughter, Liz. He became one of the most strident GOP critics of President Barack Obama, who had based his election campaign on promises to end the wars and other changes from what he called failed policies of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Years later, Cheney was decrying his own party — especially its leadership’s response to the attack on the Capitol — when he returned to the US Capitol with then-Rep. Liz Cheneyon the one-year anniversary of January 6, 2021.
“I am deeply disappointed at the failure of many members of my party to recognize the grave nature of the January 6 attacks and the ongoing threat to our nation,” he said in a statement.
In a remarkable moment, Democrats lined up to greet the former Republican vice president and shake his hand. Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hugged Cheney. The former vice president slammed Republican leaders in Congress, saying they do not resemble the leaders he remembered from his time in the body.
It was a scene that would have been unthinkable two decades earlier and an illustration of how the extraordinary changes in American politics wrought by Trump had made former bitter political foes find common cause in the fight for democracy.
“It’s not leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years,” Cheney said at the Capitol in 2022.
Cheney continued his criticism of Trump in the following years and went as far as to endorse then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat and Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential campaign. He said he would vote for Harris because of the “duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.” Cheney emphasized his disdain for Trump at the time and warned that he “can never be trusted with power again,” though Trump would go on to win the presidency a couple of months later.
On the eve of Election Day in America’s most dynamic metropolis, President Donald J. Trump delivered a pragmatic gut punch to the radical left’s ambitions, throwing his weight—however grudgingly—behind Andrew Cuomo to stave off what he rightly calls a “communist” takeover of New York City. In a blistering Truth Social post Monday evening, Trump urged voters to rally around the former governor, framing the choice as a no-brainer: Back the battle-tested Democrat or watch socialist Zohran Mamdani dismantle the Empire State from City Hall. “Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job,” Trump declared. “He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”
This eleventh-hour intervention isn’t blind loyalty—it’s the mark of a leader prioritizing results over ideology. Trump, a Queens native with deep roots in the city, knows the stakes: Mamdani’s democratic socialist fever dreams threaten to turn the Big Apple into a West Coast knockoff of San Francisco’s tent-city nightmare. Polls show Mamdani clinging to a narrow lead—46% to Cuomo’s 33% and Republican Curtis Sliwa’s 15%, per Quinnipiac—but record early voting (over 735,000 ballots, a fourfold surge from 2021) signals a turnout battle Trump aims to tip. With five million registered voters hitting the polls today—post offices, banks, and shipping humming along as usual—Trump’s endorsement could be the firewall New York needs to avoid fiscal Armageddon.
Trump’s backing, previewed in a Sunday 60 Minutes interview, drips with the candor only he can muster: “I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if it’s gonna be between a bad Democrat and a Communist, I’m gonna pick the bad Democrat all the time.” It’s classic Trump—blunt, unfiltered, and laser-focused on winning. Cuomo, the ex-governor who clashed with Trump over COVID policies yet delivered infrastructure wins and economic growth, emerges as the adult in the room. Mamdani? The 34-year-old assemblyman, poised to be NYC’s first Muslim mayor and youngest in over a century, peddles rent freezes, free buses, and “equity” schemes that gut gifted programs and embolden criminals.
Cuomo, running as an independent after Mamdani’s stunning June primary upset, welcomed the nod with characteristic steel: “He’s not endorsing me. He’s opposing Mamdani.” During a WABC radio call-in, he pivoted: “The president is right. A vote for Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani.” Trump echoed that, dismissing Sliwa (sans beret quip) as a spoiler: “A vote for Curtis Sliwa… is a vote for Mamdani.” Even Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, piled on via X: Support Cuomo to block the “lunatic.” And Elon Musk, no stranger to Cuomo’s 2014 Buffalo solar deal (despite its job shortfalls), chimed in: “VOTE CUOMO!”—a rare tech titan-Trump alignment against the socialist surge.
From a conservative perspective, this cross-aisle calculus is genius. Cuomo’s record—building affordable housing as HUD secretary, navigating the pandemic (despite nursing home scrutiny he calls politicized smears)—positions him as the firewall against Mamdani’s de Blasio 2.0. Trump nailed it on 60 Minutes: Mamdani would make “de Blasio look great.” The self-described “Scandinavian politician, only browner” rejects the communist label but embraces policies that scream big-government overreach: Arresting Netanyahu, defunding cops, and redistributing wealth from hardworking New Yorkers to the grievance industry.
Trump’s endorsement came laced with a signature threat: Slash federal aid to NYC if Mamdani prevails. “It is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required,” he posted, echoing Sunday’s 60 Minutes vow: “It’s gonna be hard for me… to give a lot of money to New York. Because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money.” New York City guzzles $7.4 billion in federal dollars yearly—funds for subways, schools, and security that Mamdani’s utopia would squander on virtue-signaling giveaways.
Mamdani fired back: “I will address that threat for what it is: it is a threat. It is not the law.” But Trump’s history speaks louder—deploying National Guard to blue cities for crime crackdowns, yanking funds from sanctuary jurisdictions. It’s not pettiness; it’s protecting taxpayers from subsidizing socialism. Cuomo, who “fought Donald Trump” as governor, now touts that grit: “When I’m fighting for New York, I am not going to stop.” In a Democratic stronghold where Trump polls poorly, this “anybody-but-Mamdani” strategy could peel off moderates weary of the assemblyman’s anti-Israel barbs and cop-bashing past.
GOP Groundswell: Cross-Party Coalition Crushes the Commie
Trump’s move ignited a Republican revolt against Sliwa, with heavyweights crossing lines. Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) endorsed Cuomo on Fox: “There’s no doubt in my mind he would be a far superior mayor than a communist.” Rep. Mike Lawler called him the “lesser of two evils” on WABC. Even disgraced ex-Rep. George Santos urged: “Vote for Andrew Cuomo… it is the only solution.” Not all GOPers fold—Rep. Nicole Malliotakis backs Sliwa as the “ONE… who has NOT contributed to the demise of our city”—but the tide turns toward pragmatism.
Mamdani’s mockery? A tweet jabbing Cuomo: “Congratulations… I know how hard you worked for this,” with a mock “Trump endorses” graphic. He spun Trump’s support as proof Cuomo’s a “puppet and parrot,” but it reeks of desperation: “The MAGA movement’s embrace… is reflective of Donald Trump’s understanding that this would be the best mayor for him.” Mamdani vows an “alternative” to Trump’s “mirror image”—dignity for all—but conservatives see a recipe for decline: “The answer… is not to create its mirror image here in City Hall.”
With early voting shattering records—151,212 on Sunday alone—today’s turnout could decide if NYC rebounds under Cuomo’s competence or crumbles under Mamdani’s collectivism. Trump, owning property in the city he loves, isn’t just meddling—he’s safeguarding his birthplace from the radicals who nearly wrecked it under de Blasio. Banks, UPS, and FedEx roll on; polls close at 9 p.m. But the real closure? Slamming the door on socialism before it bankrupts the greatest city on Earth.
As Trump quipped on 60 Minutes about Mamdani comparisons: “I think I’m a much better looking person.” Humor aside, his endorsement is a masterstroke: Unite behind Cuomo, or watch New York fall. Voters, the choice is yours—pragmatism or peril.
He thought it was serendipity—a chance encounter at a bustling tech conference in Palo Alto, where amid the hum of venture capitalists and AI demos, she approached him with a disarming smile and probing questions about his startup’s quantum encryption algorithms. She was poised, multilingual, with a LinkedIn profile touting a role at a Shanghai-based venture firm. Over coffee that turned into dinners, then weekends in Napa, she became his confidante, his partner—even his fiancée. It was only after a routine security audit at his firm flagged anomalous data transfers to overseas servers that the truth unraveled: She wasn’t an investor. She was an operative, deployed by Beijing’s Ministry of State Security to burrow into his life and exfiltrate the crown jewels of American innovation.
This isn’t the plot of a Tom Clancy novel; it’s the stark reality of “sex warfare,” a resurgent espionage tactic where Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies are allegedly weaponizing romance to pilfer Silicon Valley’s secrets. Attractive female operatives—trained in seduction, psychological manipulation, and tech fluency—are infiltrating the Valley’s open ecosystem, seducing engineers, executives, and researchers. In some cases, they’ve gone nuclear: marrying targets, bearing children, and embedding for decades to ensure a steady drip of intellectual property (IP). The economic toll? Up to $600 billion annually in U.S. IP theft, with China fingered as the prime culprit. As one counterintelligence veteran put it, “It’s the Wild West out there.”
Our investigation, drawing on interviews with former spies, U.S. intelligence officials, and tech security experts, plus declassified FBI reports and recent congressional briefings, reveals a threat that’s not just escalating—it’s evolving. From LinkedIn lures to honeypot marriages, these operations exploit the Valley’s collaborative ethos, where trust is currency and NDAs are as flimsy as a post-hack apology. With Elon Musk quipping on X, “If she’s a 10 and suddenly interested in your boring job, run,” the alarm bells are ringing from Capitol Hill to Sand Hill Road. But as threats spread beyond California to nascent hubs in Austin and Boulder, the question looms: Can America’s tech fortress hold?
The Honey Trap 2.0: Seduction as a Strategic Asset
The playbook is as old as Mata Hari, but the targets and stakes have skyrocketed. Since the 1970s, foreign agents have eyed U.S. tech for its golden goose—semiconductors, AI, biotech. But post-Cold War, the game shifted from brute-force hacks to “soft” economic espionage, where human vulnerabilities are the backdoor. Enter “sex warfare”: a term coined by U.S. counterintelligence pros to describe state-sponsored romantic entanglements designed for long-haul intel harvesting.
James Mulvenon, chief intelligence officer at Pamir Consulting—a firm that schools U.S. companies on China risks—has seen the uptick firsthand. “I’m getting an enormous number of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young Chinese woman,” he told The Times in a bombshell exposé this week. “It really seems to have ramped up recently.” Mulvenon, a 30-year FBI counterspy alum, recounts gatecrashing a Virginia conference on Chinese investment perils: Two poised Chinese women, armed with attendee lists and badges, tried to slip in. “We didn’t let them,” he said. “But they had all the information.”
It’s not paranoia. A former U.S. counterintelligence officer, speaking anonymously to NDTV, detailed a chilling case: A “beautiful” Russian operative, fresh from a Moscow “soft-power school” and modeling academy, wed an aerospace engineer on a classified drone project. Posing as a crypto analyst, she infiltrated military-space circles. “Showing up, marrying a target, having kids with a target—and conducting a lifelong collection operation—it’s very uncomfortable to think about, but it’s so prevalent,” the officer said. The marriage yielded not just cover, but cover stories: Family outings masked dead drops, bedtime chats doubled as debriefs.
China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Russia’s SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) are the maestros. MSS runs “drafting” ops—snapping up stakes in DoD-funded startups to choke U.S. access—while SVR leans on “illegals”: deep-cover agents posing as expats. Both recruit “sparrows,” female agents trained in the KGB’s honeypot arts, now augmented with digital tradecraft. “They have an asymmetric advantage,” Mulvenon warns. “U.S. culture and laws tie our hands in countermeasures.”
Even allies play. South Korea and Israel have been caught quietly hoovering intel at Valley mixers, per declassified docs. But Beijing and Moscow dominate: FBI stats show China-linked IP theft hit 80% of cases in 2024, up from 60% in 2020.
Confessions from the Shadows: Ex-Spies Spill the Secrets
To understand the machinery, we turn to defectors. Aliia Roza, a 45-year-old Kazakh-Tatar émigré now training “seduction for self-esteem” in the U.S., broke her silence on iHeart’s To Die For podcast this year. Born to a Soviet general, Roza was funneled into a KGB successor program at 18, plucked from 350 cadets for “sexpionage” training. “We weren’t just seducing—we were mastering communication,” she told host Neil Strauss. “Dress, makeup, how to make targets believe you’re their soulmate.”
Her lavish lifestyle is a far cry from the ‘corrupt’ regime in the Russian military
She now lives in a $20 million mansion in Beverly Hills with her 11-year-old son.
Pay? A measly $100 monthly for six-day weeks of martial arts and psyops drills. But the rush? “At the end of the day, when I saved someone’s life [by extracting intel], I felt good,” Roza recalled. She balanced missions with motherhood, but the toll mounted. “I saw these other female agents hit 56—miserable, lonely. No private lives, no families.” Brainwashed as a “master manipulator,” Roza fled Moscow over two decades ago with her son, resurfacing on Instagram with 1M+ followers peddling empowerment tips. “It’s not just sex—it’s the art of making them believe,” she says now. Her story, echoed in Fox News Digital interviews, underscores the human wreckage: Agents discarded like spent cartridges.
Then there’s Anna Chapman, the flame-haired “Black Widow” whose 2010 FBI bust—Operation Ghost Stories—exposed a Russian sleeper ring in New York. Deported in a spy swap that freed poison victim Sergei Skripal, Chapman, now 43 and rebranded Anna Romanova, has pivoted to propaganda. This month, Putin tapped her to helm the SVR’s shiny new Museum of Russian Intelligence near Moscow’s Gorky Park—a hall of mirrors celebrating espionage “achievements.”
In her 2024 memoir BondiAnna: To Russia with Love, Chapman gloats: “Nature endowed me with a slim waist, full chest, cascade of red hair… I didn’t try too hard to please. And it worked like magic.” From London hedge funds (nabbed via strip poker, she claims) to Manhattan real estate fronts beaming secrets via laptop, her toolkit was charm laced with code. Post-deportation, she’s a pro-Kremlin TV star and mom, but her museum gig signals SVR’s unrepentant flex. “It’s history in the making,” SVR chief Sergey Naryshkin purred at the unveiling, per The Sun.
Silicon Valley isn’t just code—it’s a $1.8 trillion GDP engine, per 2025 CBRE data. But espionage is a silent tax. IP theft siphons $225-600B yearly, fueling China’s “Made in 2025” push to dominate AI and EVs. Startups, hungry for funding, pitch to Chinese VCs at U.S.-hosted contests—only to watch prototypes vanish overnight. “Share your plan, lose your edge—or relocate to Shenzhen,” warns Jeff Stoff, ex-NSA analyst.
Take the unnamed tech giant from our lead: In 2024, its security team swept in amid vanishing files—millions in R&D poached, traced to a VP’s “fiancée.” Or the aerospace case: Russian-sourced drone specs allegedly fast-tracked Moscow’s hypersonic program, costing Raytheon $2B in lost contracts.
Broader ripples? Venture funding dipped 15% in Q3 2025, per PitchBook, as firms mandate “espionage audits.” NVIDIA stock wobbled 3% post a leaked chip blueprint tied to a “romantic entanglement.” Musk’s X post amplified the chill: “Silicon Valley sex warfare? If she’s a 10, she’s probably a 10 on the MSS payroll.” Even allies fret: UK’s MI5 flagged similar ops targeting Cambridge quantum labs.
It’s not confined to hoodies and hackathons. China’s ops span political infiltration—recruiting Cali pols via units like the one exposed in Politico‘s Rose Pak saga, where SF’s power broker funneled influence to Beijing. Recall the 2008 Torch Run: MSS mobilized 10,000 U.S. students to quash protests, per FBI memos.
Russia’s post-2017 consulate closure? No sweat—proxies via crypto bros and VC scouts. “Oklahoma land rush,” quips a DNI report: A frenzy for biotech in Boston, autonomy tech in Detroit.
As hubs sprout—Boulder’s quantum corridor, Austin’s chip fabs—vulnerabilities multiply. Underreporting plagues: 70% of breaches go dark, per Verizon’s 2025 DBIR, fearing spooks or stigma.
FBI’s upping ante: Operation Honeyguard trains agents in reverse honeypots, while CISA pushes “trust but verify” for execs—backgrounds, alibis, even polygraphs for fiancées. Congress eyes the Espionage Modernization Act, mandating disclosures for foreign ties.
But experts like Mulvenon caution: “The Valley’s openness is our superpower—and Achilles’ heel.” Roza, from her L.A. studio, urges empathy: “These women are tools, too. Break the cycle by seeing the human cost.”
In a firewall of flirtations, Silicon Valley’s innovators must armor up. The next pitch? Vet the pitcher. Because in sex warfare, love’s the Trojan horse.
In the shadow of Windsor Great Park’s ancient oaks, Royal Lodge stands as a Georgian jewel—a sprawling 30-room mansion once beloved by queens and now at the epicenter of a brewing royal scandal. For more than two decades, Prince Andrew, the disgraced Duke of York, has called this Grade II-listed estate home, sharing its opulent halls with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson. But a bombshell lease document, unearthed and scrutinized this week, has ignited bipartisan outrage: Andrew hasn’t paid a penny in rent since 2003. Instead, he’s handed over a symbolic “peppercorn” annually—if demanded at all—while taxpayers foot the bill for lost revenue estimated at over £5 million.
The revelations, first detailed by The Times and corroborated by the Crown Estate’s own records, come amid fresh waves of scrutiny over Andrew’s ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Just days after Andrew relinquished his Duke of York title and military honors—moves seen by some as a desperate bid to salvage his fading royal status—Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl hit bookshelves, reigniting allegations of sexual abuse that Andrew has vehemently denied for years. Politicians from across the spectrum are now demanding answers, investigations, and even eviction. “The public are sick of him,” thundered Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “It’s about time Prince Andrew took himself off to live in private and make his own way in life.”
This is no mere tabloid tittle-tattle; it’s a flashpoint for broader questions about royal privilege in an era of austerity. As King Charles III navigates a slimmed-down monarchy, the optics of his brother’s taxpayer-subsidized luxury are toxic. With parliamentary committees gearing up for probes and campaigners calling for compensation, Andrew’s grip on Royal Lodge—secured by a 75-year lease running until 2078—may finally be loosening. But as our investigation reveals, evicting him could cost the public purse dearly, thanks to a little-known compensation clause buried in the contract.
The Peppercorn Deal: A Royal Bargain or a Public Slight?
The story begins in the balmy summer of 2003, when Prince Andrew, then a roving trade envoy with a penchant for high-flying diplomacy (and higher-flying controversies), inked a deal that would secure his family’s foothold in Windsor’s gilded enclave. Fresh from Sunninghill Park—another grace-and-favor gift from his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II—Andrew shelled out £1 million upfront for a 75-year lease on Royal Lodge. In return, he committed to a staggering £7.5 million refurbishment, transforming the then-weathered estate into a modern palace fit for a fallen prince.
But here’s the kicker: since those initial outlays, Andrew’s annual rent has amounted to precisely nothing. The lease stipulates “one peppercorn (if demanded)” per year—a legal relic from feudal times, symbolizing nominal payment without actual cash changing hands. Market estimates peg the property’s true rental value at £260,000 annually, meaning the Crown Estate—whose profits flow directly to the Treasury—has foregone millions in potential revenue. Andrew, in exchange, shoulders all maintenance costs, a burden that reportedly runs into hundreds of thousands yearly for the 98-acre grounds alone.
The Crown Estate, an independent body managing £15 billion in royal assets, defends the arrangement as standard for historic properties requiring “close management control.” A 2005 National Audit Office (NAO) report, commissioned post-refurbishment, deemed it “appropriate,” noting that without Andrew’s investment, taxpayers would have footed the renovation bill. Downing Street echoed this on Tuesday, with a No. 10 spokesman insisting: “An independent evaluation concluded that the transaction… was appropriate.”
Yet critics smell favoritism. The NAO report itself conceded that the “over-riding need” for royal oversight “constrained the Crown Estate’s ability to realise the highest market value.” And lurking in the fine print? A compensation clause: If Andrew surrenders the lease early, the Crown Estate must pay him £558,000—equivalent to £185,865 annually until 2028. Eviction, it seems, isn’t just politically fraught; it’s financially punitive.
Political Firestorm: ‘Disgraceful’ Subsidy or Sovereign Right?
The lease’s exposure has supercharged a cross-party backlash. Robert Jenrick, the Conservative shadow justice secretary, didn’t mince words on Today: “He has disgraced himself, he has embarrassed the royal family time and again. I don’t see why the taxpayer, frankly, should continue to foot the bill at all.” Jenrick, a vocal monarchist who has praised King Charles’s “great respect and admiration” for handling the crisis, argued Andrew should “vanish from public life” entirely—no more luxury pads on the public dime.
Labour’s Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Commons Treasury Committee and a 20-year MP veteran, signaled parliamentary muscle: “Where money flows, particularly where taxpayers’ money is involved… Parliament has a responsibility to have a light shine upon that, and we need to have answers.” Her Public Accounts Committee counterpart is poised to join a joint scrutiny, potentially hauling Crown Estate executives before MPs by year’s end.
The Liberal Democrats, ever the fiscal watchdogs, went further. Cabinet Office spokeswoman Lisa Smart demanded Andrew “show some contrition by returning every penny of rent that he’s not paid while disgracing his office.” “Andrew has failed our King and Royal Family and betrayed the values of the British people,” she added, framing the saga as an “insult” to public decency.
Even as voices unite against Andrew, the palace remains tight-lipped. Buckingham Palace sources, speaking anonymously to the BBC, admitted “more days of pain ahead” but insisted the lease is a private matter. King Charles, who slashed Andrew’s £1 million annual allowance last year and yanked his £3 million security detail, is reportedly “at the end of his tether,” per royal insiders. Yet Andrew digs in, buoyed by his “cast-iron” contract and a personal fortune estimated at £1.5 million—bolstered by the controversial £15 million sale of Sunninghill Park in 2007 to a Kazakh oligarch’s son-in-law.
Shadows of Epstein: Giuffre’s Ghost and Unfinished Reckonings
No discussion of Andrew’s woes is complete without revisiting the Epstein specter. The financier’s 2019 suicide left a trail of shattered lives, with Andrew at its painful nexus. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025 at 41, accused Andrew of sexually abusing her three times as a 17-year-old—once in London, once in New York, and once on Epstein’s Little St. James island. Andrew settled her 2022 civil suit for an undisclosed sum (rumored at £12 million) but never admitted liability.
Nobody’s Girl, co-written by Amy Wallace and published posthumously per Giuffre’s wishes, peels back layers of trauma. Extracts in The Guardian describe Giuffre’s recruitment at Mar-a-Lago: “An apex predator… spotted me like fresh meat.” Wallace, in ITV News interviews, defended Giuffre’s hazy timelines—”I may not remember particular dates… but I remember that face”—and lambasted Andrew’s inaction: “He was in the houses, he was on the jets… he could come forward and help investigators.” She hailed his title surrender as a “victory,” a “step in the right direction” toward accountability, though “his life is being eroded… as it should be.”
The memoir’s timing—mere days after Andrew’s title drop—has amplified calls for justice. Giuffre’s brother and sister-in-law, Sky and Amanda Roberts, urged Channel 4 News to press the Metropolitan Police to reopen its probe, or failing that, involve the Independent Office for Police Conduct. “Virginia wanted all the men… held to account,” Wallace told BBCNewsnight. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted procurer, emerges as the “more ghastly” villain—a woman who “used her gender to lure young girls into this den of hell.”
Andrew’s denials persist: “I have never intended to… meet Virginia Giuffre,” he stated post-settlement. But emails unearthed in U.S. court filings show post-2001 contact with Epstein, contradicting his infamous 2019 Newsnight claim of a clean break. Ferguson, too, faces fallout—stripped of seven patronages after a groveling Epstein email surfaced.
A Storied Seat: From Queen Mother’s Haven to Andrew’s Holdout
Royal Lodge’s history mirrors the monarchy’s own: humble origins as a 17th-century farmhouse, rebuilt in 1830 by King William IV as a hunting retreat for George IV. By the 1930s, it became a sanctuary for the abdication-scarred House of Windsor. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) raised their daughters there, Elizabeth II frolicking in her gift “Wendy House”—Y Bwthyn Bach, a thatched play cottage still on the grounds.
The Queen Mother held court until her 2002 death at 101, overseeing lavish updates. Andrew’s 2003 arrival marked a shift: He, Ferguson, and daughters Beatrice and Eugenie transformed it into York family HQ. Interiors boast seven bedrooms, a grand saloon, and a private chapel amid manicured gardens. Yet whispers of a “secret palace” in Abu Dhabi—rumored as an Andrew bolt-hole—add intrigue, with Daily Mail investigations probing Gulf ties.
Andrew’s finances remain opaque. With his allowance axed, he leans on a £20,000 naval pension, Pitch@Palace residuals (now suspended), and opaque Gulf/Chinese ventures. The Sunninghill windfall endures scrutiny for its £3 million markup and buyer’s Kazakh links. Security? Self-funded at £3 million yearly, per palace edict.
But the real sting is opportunity cost. Over 22 years, forgone rent could have swelled Treasury coffers by £5.7 million—enough for 1,000 NHS nurse salaries or climate adaptation projects. As Jenrick put it: “He shouldn’t have any taxpayer subsidies going forward.”
As autumn leaves carpet Windsor’s paths, Royal Lodge’s future hangs in balance. Andrew, 65 and isolated, shows no sign of budging—his lease a fortress against familial pleas. Yet with Giuffre’s words echoing (“This is about a system of powerful… people hurting people who aren’t”), and MPs sharpening their quills, the pressure is unrelenting.
King Charles, ever the modernizer, faces a dilemma: Enforce eviction and risk a £558,000 payout, or let the “embarrassment” linger? For taxpayers weary of royal excess, the verdict is clear: Time’s up for the Peppercorn Prince. As Wallace warns, the “fetishisation of young girls” didn’t die with Epstein—nor, it seems, has Andrew’s unyielding grip on privilege.
Monday’s widespread outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) AMZN -1.95% ▼ served as a stark wake-up call. For millions of users across the United States and beyond, the internet ground to a halt, rendering popular platforms like Reddit, Roblox, Snapchat, and even critical services such as online banking inaccessible for hours. The disruption, which began late Sunday night and lingered into the afternoon, exposed the vulnerabilities in our increasingly centralized online infrastructure. As AWS, the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Amazon, finally declared the issue resolved by late Monday, questions lingered about the reliability of the systems that power much of the modern web.
The outage, described by experts as one of the most significant in recent years, affected over 2,000 companies and services worldwide. From social media giants to gaming empires and financial institutions, the ripple effects were felt far and wide. “This kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swath of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year,” said Daniel Ramirez, director of product at Downdetector by Ookla, in an interview with CNET. “They probably are becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services and their data architectures are designed to make the most out of a particular cloud platform.”
According to AWS’s official status updates, the trouble began at 11:49 p.m. PT on Sunday, when the company first noticed increased error rates for services in its US-East-1 region—a massive data center hub in northern Virginia that supports operations across the US and Europe. By 12:26 a.m. PT, engineers had pinpointed the initial culprit: DNS resolution issues affecting regional endpoints for DynamoDB, AWS’s managed NoSQL database service.
DNS, or Domain Name System, acts as the internet’s phonebook, translating user-friendly web addresses like “reddit.com” into the numerical IP addresses that computers use to connect. When DNS fails, it’s like losing the map to your destination—services are still there, but users can’t reach them. “It’s always DNS!” is a common refrain among tech professionals, as noted in reports from BBC News, highlighting how such seemingly mundane errors can cascade into widespread havoc.
As the night wore on, AWS resolved the DNS problem, but new challenges emerged. Network connectivity issues persisted, forcing the company to implement throttling—temporarily limiting the power and performance of certain operations—to stabilize the system. “Over time we reduced throttling of operations and worked in parallel to resolve network connectivity issues until the services fully recovered,” AWS stated in its final update. By 3:01 p.m. PT on Monday, all services were back to normal, with full resolution announced at 3:53 p.m. PT.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Issues appeared largely contained as the East Coast started its workday, but reports surged dramatically after 8 a.m. PT when the West Coast came online. Downdetector, an outage-tracking platform owned by Ziff Davis, recorded a staggering 9.8 million user reports globally, with 2.7 million from the US alone. The UK followed with over 1.1 million, and significant numbers came from Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. At its peak around 10 a.m. PT, approximately 280 services were still experiencing lingering problems.
Among the hardest hit were consumer favorites: Reddit went dark until around 4:30 a.m. PT, Roblox and Fortnite left gamers frustrated, Snapchat users couldn’t send snaps, and even Amazon’s own Ring doorbells and e-commerce site faced intermittent failures. Financial services like Venmo and various online banking platforms were disrupted, as were the PlayStation Network, Verizon communications, and YouTube. In the UK, banks such as Lloyds and Halifax reported issues, while government services like HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) were affected, per BBC reports.
At the heart of the disruption lies AWS’s outsized role in the digital ecosystem. As the world’s leading cloud provider, AWS underpins roughly a third of the internet, offering scalable computing, storage, and database services that allow companies to outsource their infrastructure needs. This model saves businesses from maintaining expensive on-premise servers, but it also creates single points of failure. When AWS sneezes, the internet catches a cold.
Comparisons to past incidents abound. Similar to the 2021 Fastly content delivery network outage and the 2024 CrowdStrike cybersecurity glitch, Monday’s event underscored the fragility of our interconnected web. “The reliance on a small number of big companies to underpin the web is akin to putting all of our eggs in a tiny handful of baskets,” explained a The NY Budgets analysis. “When it works, it’s great, but only one small thing needs to go wrong for the internet to fall to its knees in a matter of minutes.”
The root cause, as later detailed by AWS at 8:43 a.m. PT, was traced to “an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.” This subsystem’s failure amplified the initial DNS glitch, leading to degraded performance across services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides virtual servers in the cloud.
Experts like Luke Kehoe, an industry analyst at Ookla, emphasized the need for better resilience strategies. “The lesson here is resilience,” Kehoe told The NY Budgets. “Many organizations still concentrate critical workloads in a single cloud region. Distributing critical apps and data across multiple regions and availability zones can materially reduce the blast radius of future incidents.”
Alternatives to AWS exist, but few match its scale. Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform are the primary competitors, with smaller players like IBM, Alibaba, and even European upstarts such as Stackit (launched by Lidl’s parent company) vying for market share. Yet, AWS remains dominant, prompting calls from some quarters—particularly in Europe and the UK—for greater investment in sovereign cloud infrastructure to reduce dependency on US-based giants. As one anonymous government source confided to BBC reporters, discussions about a UK equivalent to AWS have surfaced, only to be dismissed with, “We already have AWS, over there.” Incidents like this, however, reveal why such complacency might be shortsighted.
Amid the speculation, AWS and experts alike have ruled out a cyberattack as the cause. DNS issues can stem from malicious activities like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, but there’s no evidence here. Instead, it appears to be a technical fault—possibly human error in configuration or a maintenance mishap at the northern Virginia facility, AWS’s oldest and largest data center.
That said, outages like this can create opportunities for bad actors. Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN, warned in a statement to CNET that hackers might exploit the chaos. “This is a cybersecurity issue as much as a technical one,” he said. “True online security isn’t only about keeping hackers out, it’s also about ensuring you can stay connected and protected when systems fail.” He advised users to be vigilant against phishing scams, such as fake emails urging password changes in the wake of the outage.
Cloudflare’s CEO, in a light-hearted jab reported by BBC, summed up the relief felt by competitors: “AWS had a bad day.” For Amazon, however, the incident adds to a string of high-profile stumbles, raising questions about accountability in an industry where downtime can cost businesses millions.
From a business perspective, the outage couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time for Amazon, with its third-quarter earnings report slated for October 30, 2025. Despite the disruption, Amazon’s stock (AMZN) showed resilience, closing Monday at $216.48—a 1.61% gain from the previous session. This outperformed the S&P 500’s 1.07% rise, the Dow’s 1.12% increase, and the Nasdaq’s 1.37% climb.
However, the broader picture is mixed. Over the past month, AMZN shares have dipped 7.97%, underperforming the Retail-Wholesale sector’s 5.23% loss but lagging behind the S&P 500’s 1.08% gain. Analysts remain optimistic, with Zacks Consensus Estimates projecting full-year earnings of $6.83 per share (a 23.51% year-over-year increase) and revenue of $708.73 billion (up 11.09%). For the upcoming quarter, EPS is forecasted at $1.60 (11.89% growth), with revenue at $177.96 billion (12.01% rise).
Recent analyst revisions have been positive, with the consensus EPS estimate rising 1.1% over the last 30 days, earning Amazon a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy). Valuation metrics show a Forward P/E of 31.2—above the Internet-Commerce industry average of 21.03—and a PEG ratio of 1.41, slightly higher than the sector’s 1.38. The industry itself ranks in the top 24% of Zacks’ 250+ sectors, suggesting strong fundamentals despite occasional hiccups.
Investors will be watching closely for any mention of the outage in Amazon’s earnings call, particularly regarding AWS’s growth trajectory. As the cloud division contributes significantly to Amazon’s profitability, ensuring uptime will be key to maintaining investor confidence.
Monday’s AWS outage wasn’t just a technical blip; it was a reminder of our collective vulnerability in a cloud-dependent world. As more businesses migrate to platforms like AWS for efficiency and cost savings, the potential for widespread disruption grows. While the internet has bounced back—for now—the event prompts a reevaluation of diversification strategies, regional redundancies, and even geopolitical dependencies in tech infrastructure.
As the Big Apple’s mayoral race barrels toward its November climax, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani is surging ahead with a platform that promises to upend the city’s status quo—free buses, rent freezes, and a war on “inequity” that could spell doom for proven educational programs like gifted and talented classes. But while Mamdani’s populist pandering has captivated the outer boroughs’ disaffected youth, it’s sending shockwaves through Manhattan’s elite corridors, where hedge fund titans and real estate moguls are whispering in Pilates studios and over caviar: “How dare he?” The city’s 1% are realizing their once-ironclad influence is slipping away, and in a town built on ambition and opportunity, that’s a bitter pill to swallow. “It’s hard to be chill and relaxed,” one Upper East Side podcaster lamented, encapsulating the unease among New York’s wealthiest as they brace for a potential Mamdani mayoralty that could hike taxes, embolden criminals, and dismantle the merit-based systems that made the city a global powerhouse.
From a conservative vantage, this isn’t just a local election—it’s a referendum on whether New York will cling to the free-market principles that fueled its resurgence under leaders like Rudy Giuliani or slide into the failed socialist experiments of Bill de Blasio’s era. Mamdani’s lead in polls—46% to Andrew Cuomo’s 33% and Curtis Sliwa’s 15%, per a recent Quinnipiac survey—highlights a troubling divide: a candidate who once called to “defund” and “dismantle” the NYPD now backpedaling with apologies, while vowing to phase out gifted programs in the name of “equity.” Meanwhile, battle-tested conservatives like Sliwa hammer home the basics: more cops, less crime, and real accountability. As billionaires like Bill Ackman rally against the tide, pouring millions into anti-Mamdani PACs, the question looms: Can the city’s engines of prosperity halt this leftward lurch before it’s too late?
Fiery Debate Exposes Mamdani’s Outsider Gamble
The sparks flew October 16 at 30 Rockefeller Center, where Mamdani, independent Andrew Cuomo, and Republican Curtis Sliwa clashed in a debate co-hosted by POLITICO, NBC 4 New York, and Telemundo 47—the first since Mayor Eric Adams bowed out amid scandals on September 28. With the city’s cost-of-living index at a staggering 148.2—second only to Honolulu—and housing prices 1.5 times the national average, affordability dominated the night.
Mamdani, the 33-year-old Queens assemblyman and son of acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, leaned hard into his “everyman” credentials: “I have the experience of being a New Yorker, someone who has actually paid rent in the city before I ran for mayor,” he quipped, touting his $2,300 rent-stabilized apartment. But critics see hypocrisy—there’s no income test for such units, and Mamdani’s pledge to freeze rents on over a million stabilized apartments could cripple landlords and exacerbate the housing crunch conservatives warn about.
Cuomo, the battle-scarred ex-governor who resigned in 2021 amid unproven harassment claims he calls “political and false,” countered with gravitas: “I built affordable housing all across this nation. I know how to get it done.” Promising 5,000 more NYPD officers with “revenue neutral” funding, Cuomo admitted learning from his primary loss to Mamdani—beefing up his TikTok game—while insisting, “I am the Democrat.”
Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder and 2021 runner-up to Adams, embodied the no-nonsense conservatism New York needs: “I will hire the very brightest and best… We don’t have enough cops,” he thundered, citing a same-day robbery of an elderly woman on 86th Street. Despite a 5.7% drop in major crimes year-over-year, Sliwa’s call for law-and-order resonates in a city weary of progressive leniency.
Mamdani’s “free buses” pitch—replacing MTA revenue to cut assaults on drivers—sounds appealing but reeks of fiscal fantasy to right-lean observers. A second debate looms next week, but with Mamdani eyeing history as the first Muslim and Indian American mayor, conservatives fear a socialist stranglehold unless voters wake up.
Apology Tour: Mamdani’s NYPD Mea Culpa Rings Hollow
In a calculated pivot, Mamdani appeared on Fox News’ “The Story with Martha MacCallum” Wednesday, issuing his first broad apology to the NYPD for 2020 rants labeling them “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and demanding to “defund” and “dismantle” the force. “Absolutely, I’ll apologize to police officers right here,” he said, blaming the rhetoric on post-George Floyd “anger and frustration.” Now, he claims, representing Queens has taught him to “deliver safety” alongside justice.
But Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry wasn’t buying it: “Elected leaders’ words matter, but their actions matter more.” Hendry spotlighted assaults on officers and rights trampled by the Civilian Complaint Review Board—issues Mamdani’s plan to slash overtime and disband the Strategic Response Group would exacerbate. Conservatives see this as election-year theater: Mamdani still vows a “Department of Community Safety” for mental health calls, a soft-on-crime Trojan horse that could hamstring cops.
In the same interview, Mamdani stared down the camera at President Trump—who’s threatened to yank federal funds and even arrest him: “I want to speak directly to the president… I’m ready to speak at any time to lower the cost of living.” Trump, per a spokesperson, wasn’t watching, but the gesture underscores Mamdani’s national ambitions amid his anti-Israel stances, including pledging to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.
DEI Overdrive: Mamdani’s Assault on Gifted Education
Adding fuel to the fire, Mamdani is reviving Bill de Blasio’s failed bid to scrap NYC’s gifted and talented programs, deeming them “highly segregated” and pledging to phase them out for “equity.” This aligns with a leftist trend nationwide—scrapping merit-based classes because they enroll too many white and Asian students, opting for “broader enrichment” that dilutes standards.
Critics like Erin Wilcox of the Pacific Legal Foundation call it “racial balance… just a word for discrimination,” potentially violating the 14th Amendment. In districts like Montgomery County, Md., and Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High, similar tweaks tanked Asian enrollment and school rankings—Thomas Jefferson plummeted from No. 1 to 14 nationally.
Cuomo counters with expansion: more gifted classes in every borough and eight new specialized high schools. Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Michael J. Petrilli blasts Mamdani’s disdain for early assessments: “If Mamdani really cares about ‘equity,’ he would work to expand gifted education… not work to end it.” To conservatives, this is cultural Marxism run amok—punishing excellence to appease identity politics, robbing bright kids of opportunities in a city that thrives on merit.
Elite Panic: Billionaires Brace for the Guillotine
The real story? Mamdani’s rise has New York’s elite in full meltdown. From Upper East Side Pilates chats to Tribeca dinners, the 1% are plotting escapes to Miami or Bedford, fearing tax hikes and chaos. Ackman and Elon Musk have blasted him; one ad mocking lobster-munching socialists went viral in wealthy ZIP codes, eliciting “how dare he?” fury.
A venture capitalist confessed ignorance of youth anger until Mamdani’s primary win; a retired banker quipped, “it’s not as if the guillotine is being rolled into Central Park.” Yet, some cynics root for him, betting failure swings voters right. Mamdani’s overtures—like trimming bureaucracy—fall flat; his giveaways mean someone pays, and it’s not the Hamptons crowd.
As polls tighten, conservatives urge a Cuomo-Sliwa surge to block Mamdani’s utopia. Trump’s shadow looms—federal aid cuts could cripple his plans. If elected, Mamdani’s tenure could be short-lived chaos, but at what cost to the city that never sleeps? New York deserves leaders who build, not redistribute. The elite’s panic? A wake-up call that socialism’s siren song threatens all.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday ordered 200 Oregon National Guard troops to be deployed under federal authority while the state filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s move to send military forces into the Democratic-run city of Portland.
The Republican president on Saturday announced plans to send troops into Portland, saying they would be used to protect federal immigration facilities against “domestic terrorists” and that he was authorizing them to use “full force, if necessary.”
Trump’s deployments of military forces into other municipalities led by Democrats, including Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have spurred legal challenges and protests.
Oregon’s suit was filed against Trump, Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in federal court in Portland on Sunday by Democratic Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield. The suit accused Trump of exceeding his powers.
“Citing nothing more than baseless, wildly hyperbolic pretext – the President says Portland is a ‘War ravaged’ city ‘under siege’ from ‘domestic terrorists.’ Defendants have thus infringed on Oregon’s sovereign power to manage its own law enforcement activity and National Guard resource,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit stated that protests against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Portland have been small and relatively contained since June.
Trump’s planned deployment caught many at the Pentagon by surprise, six U.S. officials told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. On Sunday, Hegseth signed a memo ordering 200 Oregon National Guard troops deployed under federal authority. The memo was made public as an attachment to Oregon’s lawsuit.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Sending in 200 National Guard troops to guard a single building is not normal,” Rayfield said in a statement, apparently referring to an ICE facility.
Violent crime in Portland has dropped in the first six months of 2025, according to preliminary data released by the Major Cities Chiefs Association in its Midyear Violent Crime Report. Homicides fell by 51% compared to the same period a year earlier, according to these statistics.
Since returning to the presidency in January, Trump has made crime a major focus of his administration even as violent crime rates have fallen in many U.S. cities.
In 2020, protests erupted in downtown Portland, the Pacific Northwest enclave with a reputation as a liberal city, following the killing in Minneapolis of a Black man named George Floyd by a white police officer. The protests dragged on for months, and some civic leaders at the time said they were spurred rather than quelled by Trump’s deployment of federal troops.
It was unclear whether Trump’s warning that U.S. troops could use “full force” on the streets of Portland meant he was somehow authorizing lethal force and, if so, under what conditions. U.S. troops are able to use force in self-defense on domestic U.S. deployments.
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, like other Oregon officials, learned of Trump’s order from social media on Saturday.
The Situation in Portland
Many in Trump’s own Pentagon were caught off guard.
“It was a bolt from the blue,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the military was previously focused on carrying out prudent planning for potential deployments of troops by Trump into cities such as Chicago and Memphis.
There have been growing tensions in major U.S. cities over Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown days after a shooting targeting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas left one detainee dead and two others seriously wounded.
Portland, Oregon — Echoes of 2020 reverberated through the streets of Portland this weekend as President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of 200 National Guard troops to the city, igniting a fierce legal and political showdown with Oregon’s Democratic leadership. The move, aimed at safeguarding federal properties like an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility amid ongoing protests, has drawn swift condemnation from state officials who filed a lawsuit Sunday to block what they call an “unlawful” and unnecessary intrusion. As tensions simmer, with at least one reported clash between protesters and federal agents, the episode highlights Trump’s aggressive stance on domestic security in Democratic strongholds during his second term.
The drama unfolded rapidly over the weekend. On Saturday, Trump took to Truth Social to announce he had directed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to dispatch “all necessary Troops to protect war-ravaged Portland, and any other ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.” Hegseth followed through Sunday with a memo federalizing 200 members of the Oregon National Guard under Title 10 authority, stationing them in Portland for 60 days to shield federal assets where “protests are occurring or likely to occur.” This legal maneuver allows the president to commandeer state Guard units during perceived national emergencies, bypassing local consent—a tactic Trump employed earlier this year in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Oregon’s response was immediate and unified. Governor Tina Kotek, Attorney General Dan Rayfield, and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson—all Democrats—jointly sued the administration in federal court, arguing the deployment violates federal law and is based on a “baseless, wildly hyperbolic pretext.” “Oregon communities are stable, and our local officials have been clear: we have the capacity to manage public safety without federal interference,” Rayfield stated. Kotek, who spoke directly with Trump before the order, emphasized at a news conference in Tom McCall Waterfront Park: “Our city is a far cry from the war-ravaged community he has posted on social media. There is no insurrection, there is no threat to national security and there is no need for military troops in our major city.”
The lawsuit echoes a similar challenge from California in June after Trump’s Los Angeles deployment, which remains unresolved. In that case, a federal judge ruled that while Trump could federalize troops, their activities were constrained by the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting military involvement in domestic law enforcement without explicit congressional approval or under the Insurrection Act. Legal experts warn that invoking the Insurrection Act—last used controversially in the civil rights era—could escalate matters further, as it allows broader military intervention in civil unrest. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice noted that such deployments have historically required governor requests or overwhelming crises, conditions not evident in Portland.
On the ground, federal agents arrived over the weekend, leading to immediate friction. Video from local station KATU-TV captured an ICE officer shoving a protester outside the South Portland ICE facility on Friday, with another demonstrator detained amid confrontations. Protests at the site have persisted for months, largely peaceful but marked by arrests, with federal officials accusing demonstrators of threatening officers. Hundreds gathered Sunday night, chanting in opposition to the troops, as captured in social media footage showing tense standoffs.
Local reactions are mixed. Some residents, like David Schmidt near the ICE building, expressed frustration with ongoing protests: “Every night, there’s tons of protesters basically being vagrants on the street… They are making noise constantly.” Others, such as Ocean Hosojasso, fear a repeat of 2020’s unrest: “I’m just worried that we’re going to see things blow up like they did in 2020.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) advised protesters to avoid direct clashes, suggesting the federal presence aims to provoke conflict. Representative Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) decried it as a “gross abuse of power.”
Business leaders joined the chorus of criticism. Vanessa Sturgeon of the Portland Metro Chamber stated: “Portland is a city on the rise. We are working to tackle our biggest challenges together… and it does not need federal troops.” Social media buzzed with the hashtag #WarRavagedPortland, featuring ironic posts of serene city scenes to counter Trump’s narrative.
The administration defends the action as essential protection. Senior aide Stephen Miller highlighted summer protests at the ICE facility, while a Department of War spokesperson declined comment on the litigation. Trump’s broader strategy includes similar deployments, like an impending one in Memphis with Tennessee’s GOP governor’s consent. Even some Republicans, like Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), express reservations about troops in cities but acknowledge a federal role in protecting assets.
As Oregon seeks an emergency injunction, the clash tests the boundaries of presidential power in an increasingly polarized nation. Neighboring officials, including Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and Washington AG Nick Brown, planned a Monday press conference to address the trend. California AG Rob Bonta voiced solidarity: “The National Guard is not Trump’s personal police force.” With the lawsuit pending, Portland braces for what could become another flashpoint in America’s ongoing debate over federal overreach and local autonomy.
NEW YORK – In a stunning turn of events that could reshape the Big Apple’s political landscape, Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani fired back at what he perceives as interference from President Donald Trump and his wealthy supporters, insisting that the New York City mayoral race remains “not for sale” following incumbent Mayor Eric Adams‘ abrupt withdrawal from the contest.
Adams, who had been mounting an independent bid since April, released a video on social media Sunday announcing the end of his reelection campaign – just three weeks after defiantly vowing to press on. The move comes amid reports of a meeting earlier this month between Adams and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff, sparking speculation about a potential role for the mayor in the Trump administration. While Adams’ spokesperson emphasized that he will serve out his term without any confirmed post-office plans, the decision has ignited a firestorm of reactions from the remaining candidates, highlighting deep divisions in a race already fraught with ideological clashes.
Mamdani’s Vision for New York City
Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman who clinched the Democratic nomination over the summer with a decisive victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others, wasted no time framing Adams’ exit as part of a broader scheme orchestrated by Trump and his billionaire backers. Appearing on MSNBC Sunday evening, Mamdani declared, “Donald Trump and his billionaire donors may be able to determine the actions of Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo, but they will not dictate the results of this election.” He doubled down on this sentiment in a video posted to social platform X, warning Cuomo: “You got your wish. You wanted Trump and your billionaire friends to help you clear the field. But don’t forget. You wanted me as your opponent in the primary too, and we beat you by 13 points.”
From a conservative vantage point, Mamdani’s rhetoric smacks of the kind of far-left paranoia that has alienated moderate voters in cities across America. As the youngest and most progressive candidate in the field, Mamdani’s campaign promises to slash living costs in one of the world’s priciest metropolises through aggressive policies that critics argue could stifle economic growth and empower socialist-leaning agendas. His attacks on Trump – a president who has championed deregulation and tax cuts to boost urban economies – seem designed to rally the Democratic base but risk turning off independents and working-class New Yorkers weary of progressive experiments that have led to rising crime and fiscal woes in the past.
Cuomo, running as an independent centrist, welcomed Adams’ departure as a game-changer that sharpens the race into a clearer ideological showdown. Speaking to reporters outside a campaign event in Queens Sunday night, Cuomo praised Adams’ “selflessness” and warned that a Mamdani victory should terrify New Yorkers. “I believe Mayor Adams is 100% sincere. I applaud his selflessness… He said, ‘I’m going to put my personal ambition aside for the good of the city,’ because he’s afraid of the result if Mr. Mamdani would win the election, and we should all be afraid of the result,” Cuomo said. He dismissed Mamdani’s primary win as irrelevant in the general election, noting, “This is now a much larger election where more New Yorkers will vote. And I am telling you, and I’m out there every day, New Yorkers do not support what Mamdani supports.”
Cuomo’s comments underscore a pragmatic, results-oriented approach that resonates with right-leaning voters disillusioned by the city’s leftward drift under progressive leadership. Denying any direct conversations with Trump – despite a New York Times report suggesting otherwise – Cuomo positioned himself as the steady hand capable of steering New York away from what he sees as Mamdani’s radicalism. He also brushed off Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa as non-viable, though he expressed interest in speaking with Adams “whenever appropriate.”
Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder and GOP standard-bearer, has faced his own pressures, revealing last week that unnamed wealthy New Yorkers – possibly Trump donors, though unconfirmed – offered him money to bow out. Undeterred, Sliwa’s spokesperson issued a statement affirming his staying power: “Curtis Sliwa is the only candidate who can defeat Mamdani. Our team, our resources, and our funding are unmatched. Most importantly, we have the best solutions to help working people afford to stay in New York City and feel safe.” Trump’s recent jab at Sliwa as “not exactly prime time” hasn’t helped, but in a fragmented field, Sliwa’s tough-on-crime stance could siphon votes from disaffected Democrats and independents who prioritize public safety over progressive platitudes.
Polling data adds intrigue to the post-Adams landscape. A Suffolk University City View survey released last week showed Mamdani leading with 45% support, followed by Cuomo at 25%, Sliwa at 9%, and Adams at 8%. With Adams out, his centrist supporters – many of whom overlap with Cuomo’s base – could consolidate behind the former governor, potentially closing the gap. However, Mamdani remains unfazed, telling Eyewitness News that the race hasn’t fundamentally shifted: “It’s a race between us and the failed politics that we’ve seen, whether it’s Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams… We’re going to show that they can’t dictate the outcome of this race.”
Mamdani elaborated on Trump’s involvement, suggesting the president’s interest stems from fear of a genuine affordability agenda: “Donald Trump will do what Donald Trump wants to do, but the important thing is to understand why he’s so interested. He ran a campaign speaking about cheaper groceries and a lower cost of living. That’s the campaign that we ran. The difference is that he has shown no interest in delivering on that agenda, instead just persecuting his supposed political enemies.”
Conservatives might counter that Trump’s economic policies have delivered real wins for urban America, from opportunity zones to criminal justice reform, and that his donors’ involvement reflects a healthy interest in preventing New York from sliding further left. Mamdani’s dismissal of such influence as nefarious ignores the reality that big-money politics cuts both ways – progressive billionaires like George Soros have long meddled in local races with far less scrutiny.
As the November election approaches, Adams’ name will still appear on the ballot, alongside longshot Jim Walden, who suspended his campaign last week and endorsed Cuomo. The mayor’s exit could indeed boost Cuomo, but it also amplifies the stakes in a contest pitting progressive idealism against centrist pragmatism and conservative grit. New Yorkers, battered by high costs and urban challenges, will decide if Mamdani’s vision aligns with their aspirations – or if it’s time to reject the left’s grip on the city that never sleeps.
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