Cultural infrastructures, such as libraries, museums, theaters, and galleries, support learning, civic life, health, and local economies, yet access is uneven across cities. We present a novel, scalable, and open-data framework to measure spatial equity in cultural access. We map cultural infrastructures and compute a metric called Cultural Infrastructure Accessibility Score (CIAS) using exponential distance decay at fine spatial resolution, then aggregate the score per capita and integrate socio-demographic indicators. Interpretable tree-ensemble models with SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) are used to explain associations between accessibility, income, density, and tract-level racial/ethnic composition. Results show a pronounced core-periphery gradient, where non-library cultural infrastructures cluster near urban cores, while libraries track density and provide broader coverage. Non-library accessibility is modestly higher in higher-income tracts, and library accessibility is slightly higher in denser, lower-income areas.

One humid afternoon in July, José Ramírez-Garofalo drove his large Toyota truck through the lush new hills, valleys, and meadows of Freshkills Park, a twenty-two-hundred-acre green space that the city is constructing on Staten Island. Ramírez-Garofalo, a young man with dark hair, large forearms, and the beginnings of a goatee, drove and talked fast. "It's an impermeable geotextile membrane," he said, referring to the thick plastic that was used, starting in the mid-nineties, to cap the four giant trash mounds of the old Fresh Kills landfill. "On top there is playground soil." The process of capping and terraforming the four mounds that once made up the country's largest dump is complete, but the park won't be fully open until at least 2036.

Fox News correspondent Nate Foy breaks down what witnesses are saying about the drones flying over New Jersey on'Your World.' Officials in New Jersey say they're taking mystery drone sightings, now reported in 10 counties across the state, "seriously," with the suspicious aircraft recently confirmed to have been spotted near the state's largest reservoir. The reason for the drones' presence near the Round Valley Reservoir in Hunterdon County, near the Garden State's border with Pennsylvania, is unclear, according to NJ.com. Similarly unclear are any potential connections to other drones spotted in the recent onslaught of suspicious activity that's taken the state by storm, the outlet continues. The drone sighting near the reservoir wasn't the only recent one in Hunterdon County – another was reported near its 911 Center in Flemington. "There have been reports of single drones hovering over people's houses for hours at a time," Hunterdon County Commissioner John Lanza noted at a Tuesday board meeting.

Officials are still investigating unusual drone activity that has been reported in recent weeks in New Jersey. The FAA set temporary restrictions above Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster in response. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he spoke with state and federal officials about unusual drone activity in parts of the region, including the vicinity of President-elect Trump's Bedminster golf club, but stressed there was no threat to public safety. In a Thursday post on X, Murphy said he convened a briefing with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, senior officials from DHS, the state police and state Homeland Security and Preparedness, as well as New Jersey's congressional delegation. "We are actively monitoring the situation and in close coordination with our federal and law enforcement partners on this matter," he wrote.

The shortest-path, commute time, and diffusion distances on undirected graphs have been widely employed in applications such as dimensionality reduction, link prediction, and trip planning. Increasingly, there is interest in using asymmetric structure of data derived from Markov chains and directed graphs, but few metrics are specifically adapted to this task. We introduce a metric on the state space of any ergodic, finite-state, time-homogeneous Markov chain and, in particular, on any Markov chain derived from a directed graph. Our construction is based on hitting probabilities, with nearness in the metric space related to the transfer of random walkers from one node to another at stationarity. Notably, our metric is insensitive to shortest and average path distances, thus giving new information compared to existing metrics. We use possible degeneracies in the metric to develop an interesting structural theory of directed graphs and explore a related quotienting procedure. Our metric can be computed in $O(n^3)$ time, where $n$ is the number of states, and in examples we scale up to $n=10,000$ nodes and $\approx 38M$ edges on a desktop computer. In several examples, we explore the nature of the metric, compare it to alternative methods, and demonstrate its utility for weak recovery of community structure in dense graphs, visualization, structure recovering, dynamics exploration, and multiscale cluster detection.

Maureen Donnelly took a job with Amazon when the retail goliath opened a fulfillment center on Staten Island in September 2018. The 46-year-old Staten Islander quit after just one month. Last week, more than 100 workers and their supporters gathered outside the same 855,000-square-foot packing plant to protest working conditions and spotlight newly released data showing the rate of worker injury there was three times higher than the national average for similar warehouse work. Here Donnelly tells Post reporter Dean Balsamini what it was like to work for Jeff Bezos' Amazon, which the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health included on its 2019 "Dirty Dozen" list of the nation's most dangerous employers. Amazon did not immediately return comment. I've been a waitress, a newsroom clerk, an EMT and spent summers on a dairy farm in Ireland.

With over 600,000 bridges across the United States, nearly 8% of which are deemed structurally deficient, monitoring and maintaining our country's infrastructure is critical to ensuring the safety of American motorists. Dynamic Infrastructure, a New York- and Tel Aviv-based startup, is currently implementing an innovative artificial intelligence system that allows infrastructure operators to observe condition changes in real time. The system provides live, cloud-based, 3-dimensional images of the bridge or tunnel, while detecting and alerting the operators to any observed change before it results in a collapse. "The world faces an infrastructure crisis," said Saar Dickman, co-founder and CEO of Dynamic Infrastructure. "Specifically, deficient bridges and tunnels represent a severe infrastructure challenge in the U.S. and worldwide and their poor condition leads to life losses and millions in unplanned expenditures."

Hundreds of orange robots zoom and whiz back and forth like miniature bumper cars -- but instead of colliding, they're following a carefully plotted path to transport thousands of items ordered from online giant Amazon. A young woman fitted out in a red safety vest, with pouches full of sensors and radio transmitters on her belt and a tablet in hand, moves through their complicated choreography. This robot ballet takes place at the new Amazon order fulfillment center that opened on Staten Island in New York in September. In an 80,000 square-meter (855,000 square-foot) space filled with the whirring sounds of machinery, the Seattle-based e-commerce titan has deployed some of the most advanced instruments in the rapidly growing field of robots capable of collaborating with humans. The high-tech vest, worn at Amazon warehouses since last year, is key to the whole operation -- it allows 21-year-old Deasahni Bernard to safely enter the robot area, to pick up an object that has fallen off its automated host, for example, or check if a battery needs replacing.

As Amazon's workforce has more than doubled over the past three years, workers at Amazon fulfillment center warehouses in the United States have started organizing and pushing toward forming a union to fight back against the company's treatment of its workers. Amazon's global workforce reached more than 613,000 employees worldwide according to its latest quarterly earnings report, not including the 100,000 temporary employees the company hired for the holiday season. Just a few months after Amazon opened its first New York-based fulfillment center in Staten Island, workers announced on 12 December the launch of a union push with help from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. "Amazon is a very big company. They need to have a union put in place," said an Amazon worker who requested to remain anonymous.

Holly Bonner, of Staten Island, says she lost most of her eyesight five years ago and it has made annual holiday egg hunts difficult to do with her children. WCBS-TV reports she heard of a "beeping egg hunt" in Alabama, and asked her regional ATF office for help in bringing the concept to Staten Island.