Subway shutdown is chance to try new transportation strategies

New York has always been congested, but lately, worsening transit delays and gridlock on streets have left New Yorkers fed up. Transportation has gotten so unreliable that when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority recently installed Wi-Fi in subway stations, instead of being excited, riders took the opportunity to complain about the trains.

Trailblazing Hasidic woman judge: ‘It’s the American dream’

In this Thursday, Dec. 29, 2016, photo, Rachel Freier looks up from her phone while posing for pictures at her law office in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, N.Y. In some ways, Freier has an ordinary background for a newly elected civil court judge: She’s a real estate and commercial lawyer who volunteers in family court and in her community, where she even serves as a paramedic. But then there’s all the extraordinary about Freier, who starts work in a Brooklyn courthouse Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2017, as apparently the first woman from Judaism’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community to be elected as a judge in the United States.