Good afternoon! It was Round II of the world’s strangest bromance yesterday as Mayor Zohran Mamdani traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Trump, just two days after the president called the mayor a “communist” and a “nice guy” in his State of the Union speech.
The focus of the meeting was housing. The mayor pitched Trump on a plan to construct a platform over Sunnyside Yard — an Amtrak-owned rail yard in Queens — that would support 12,000 units of affordable housing. Mamdani is looking for $21 billion in federal grants to help finance the project.
“I had a productive meeting with President Trump this afternoon,” the mayor wrote on X. “I’m looking forward to building more housing in New York City.”
To help motivate Trump, Mamdani brought along two printouts of Daily News headlines. One showed a historic headline from 1975 that read “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” published when then-President Gerald Ford refused to bail out New York City amid a fiscal crisis. The second was an invented headline reading “Trump to City: Let’s Build.” It was a playful gesture designed to appeal to the president’s well-documented love for real estate, headlines and his own name.
The mayor also made a direct appeal to President Trump to release Columbia student Elmina Aghayeva, who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this week after agents allegedly lied about a warrant to gain access to the university housing. The arrest set off a wave of demonstrations. Aghayeva, an undergraduate student from Azerbaijan, was released shortly after the meeting.
The meeting was commemorated with a snappy picture of the mayor alongside the president as he held up the newspaper printouts and beamed.
The first “Rental Ripoff Hearing” was held in Downtown Brooklyn last night. Tenants aired problems, including broken elevators in a 27-story building, no heat or hot water since December and security concerns.
A candle sparked a fire in a third-floor apartment in East Flatbush, injuring three people.
A construction worker died and another was injured after a trench collapsed at a residential job site in Bushwick on Thursday morning.
Almost half the State Attorneys General in the U.S. joined a coalition urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject President Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship.
A queer- and Latino-owned cannabis dispensary on Metropolitan Avenue is positioning itself as a safe space for immigrants and LGBTQ+ New Yorkers.
Loyal customers of the former Fifth Avenue restaurant Schnitzel Haus in Bay Ridge showed support for the restaurant's future location at 114 Bay Ridge Ave.
A brick townhouse in Brooklyn Heights sold for $14.99 million, making it Brooklyn’s highest residential sale of the year so far.
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ISTANBUL — World-renowned mosque that had its beginnings as a church: Muslim worshippers perform Friday prayers during the holy fasting month of Ramadan at the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, Friday, Feb. 27, 2026.
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The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating, it’s the erosion of learning itself
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Public debate about artificial intelligence in higher education has largely orbited a familiar worry: cheating. Will students use chatbots to write essays? Can instructors tell? Should universities ban the tech? Embrace it?
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For the Road
Snowman contest: Following the blizzard that caused up to 22 inches of snow in parts of Brooklyn on Feb. 23, Councilmember Inna Vernikov held a snowman building contest for residents of District 48. See photos from the contest and read about the winners.
Happy Birthday to singer-songwriter Josh Groban!
On This Day in 1916, the Eagle reported: “Forty-one years ago this month the East River was solidly frozen over with a bridge of ice, and thousands of Brooklynites crossed over to the New York shore on foot.”
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