2,905,611 VISITORS VISIT 8,324,077 TIMES 3 TIMES EVERY DAY IN ONE YEAR. HIGHEST ACTIVITY IN WPCNR HISTORY.White PlainsCitizeNetReporter lifted its worldwide visits from unique visitors to wpcnr.com to 8,324,077,a 1,306,419 increase in visits in one year from 7,017,658 visits to the site last year which covers White Plains and Westchester County. The 8,324,077 visits were made by 2,005,611 unique visitors who visited wpcnr an average of 3 visits a day. ON JULY 20- -2026 visitors have accessed wpcnr and made 3,072 visits an average of 1.6 visits. In the last week 33,495 individual vistors made 54,458 visits, averaging 1.6 visits. In the last month, 152,940 visitors recorded 229,338 visits (1.5 visits)
We are writing to seek your help on a new project. Mandate Masks NY is putting together a guide to businesses, museums, and other public spaces in NYC and surrounding areas that are still requiring masks and other COVID-19 prevention efforts to protect people, including high-risk staff, customers, and visitors.
We would love your help on this project! Do you know of any businesses or other public spaces that are still requiring masks and other COVID-19 prevention efforts in NYC and surrounding areas? And/or can you help us find out?
To collect info, we have an online form here- https://forms.gle/eKsgsQy4FV9SRcNNA . Please fill this out with any businesses or other public places that you know of that are still requiring masks and other COVID prevention efforts. (ex: grocery stores, bookstores, museums, pharmacies, banks, laundromats, etc). We are currently focused on NYC and the surrounding areas, but may expand at a later date.
We would love your help in finding more places to add to our list! More info and tips about contacting businesses are on the form. For those on Instagram, we have been highlighting and thanking businesses that are still requiring masks on our page at @MandateMasksNY.
We have already had some businesses we reached out to reinstate their mask mandate after we contacted them about this!
If you are interested in getting more involved with the project and helping to organize, please send us an email.
Mordechay Malka and Matityau Malka Convicted of Scheme to Kidnap 14-Year-Old Girl and 12-Year-Old Boy From Their Mother
WPCNR FBI WIRE. From the Federal Bureau of Investigation. June 6, 2022:
Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Michael J. Driscoll, Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced that MORDECHAY MALKA and MATITYAU MALKA were convicted in White Plains federal court of kidnapping following a three-week jury trial.
The defendants, members of an extremist Jewish sect called Lev Tahor, participated in a scheme to kidnap a 14-year-old girl (“Minor-1”) and a 12-year-old boy (“Minor-2”) from their mother in Woodridge, New York in December 2018.
The kidnappers then smuggled the children across the U.S. border to Mexico, where they reunited Minor-1 with her adult “husband,” who she had religiously “married” when she was 13 years old.
After the children were recovered and returned to their mother, the defendants and their co-conspirators tried to kidnap the children a second time in March 2019.
Two co-conspirators, Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner, were previously convicted of kidnapping and sexual exploitation charges in connection with this case after an October 2021 trial and have each been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
According to the allegations contained in the Superseding Indictment, other court filings, and the evidence presented at trial:
MORDECHAY MALKA and MATITYAU MALKA are U.S. citizens and members of Lev Tahor, an extremist Jewish sect that has been located in several different jurisdictions, including New York, Israel, Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala.
In or about October 2018, the mother of Minor-1 and Minor-2 escaped from Lev Tahor’s compound in Guatemala and arrived in the United States in early November 2018.
Also in November 2018, a Brooklyn family court granted her sole custody of the children and prohibited the children’s father, a leader within Lev Tahor, from communicating with the children.
After the mother fled and settled in New York with her children, MORDECHAY MALKA and other Lev Tahor members devised a plan to return Minor-1 and Minor-2 to the Lev Tahor community. Then, in December 2018, the kidnappers took the children in the middle of the night from a home in upstate New York and transported them through various states and, eventually, to Mexico.
MORDECHAY MALKA and his co-conspirators used disguises, aliases, drop phones, fake travel documents, an encrypted application, and a secret pact to execute on their kidnapping plan. At the time of the kidnapping, Lev Tahor leadership was seeking asylum for the entire Lev Tahor community in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Following a three-week search involving hundreds of local, federal, and international law enforcement officers, Minor-1 and Minor-2 were recovered in Mexico and returned to their mother in New York.
Then, in March 2019, members of Lev Tahor again tried to kidnap the children. The leader of Lev Tahor, Nachman Helbrans, attempted another kidnapping of the children while incarcerated in Westchester, New York. MATITYAU MALKA acted as the operative on the ground to execute the attempted kidnapping.
* * *
MORDECHAY MALKA, 27, of Guatemala, and MATITAU MALKA, 30, of Guatemala, were convicted of one count of conspiring to commit international parental kidnapping, to unlawfully use a means of identification, and to enter by false pretenses the secure area of an airport, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. MORDECHAY MALKA was also convicted of two counts of international parental kidnapping, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison for each count. MATITYAU MALKA was also convicted of one count of attempted international parental kidnapping, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison for each count.
The maximum potential sentences in this case are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendants will be determined by the judge.
Mr. Williams praised the outstanding work of the FBI, United States Customs and Border Protection, the Department of State, the Transportation Security Administration, the New York State Police, the Rockland County Sheriff’s Department, the Sullivan County District Attorney’s Office, the Village of Spring Valley Police Department, Special Agents with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and our law enforcement partners in Mexico, Guatemala, Canada, and Israel.
This case is being handled by the Office’s White Plains Division. Assistant United States Attorneys Sam Adelsberg, Jamie Bagliebter, Jim Ligtenberg, and Daniel Tracer, and paralegal specialist Shannon Becker, are in charge of the prosecution.
Big Cherry Council Chamber set. Too real for comfort.
WPCNR STAGE DOOR.Theatre Review by John F. Bailey. June 6, 2022:
It is so appropriate that I am writing this piece on the night the White Plains Common Council is holding its monthly meeting in public at 55 Main Street, City Hall.
However because I saw The Minutes at Studio 54 Saturday afternoon, I can never watch a Common Council Meeting or a town hall fact-finding community zoom again and take them seriously.
I took a reporter’s holiday Saturday to see The Minutes the upstart play reveals the truth hidden beneath the pretense, patronizing, sentimentality and traditions of city councils across this land.
Playwright Tracy Letts has captured the essence of town and county governing principles (or lack of principles), as they are practiced in communities in a play that once seen you will never forget.
That’s what inspired plays do. The Minutes is one of those. It crackles!
The Steppenwolf Theatre Company production at the majestic Studio 54 Theatre is a grandiose and pompous “governmental” environment fitting venue for a meeting of the fictional, but all too real Big Cherry Council meeting. The Big Cherry Council is insightful, satiric, ultimately devastating commentary on how governing bodies work, not just in America, (where it’s go along to get along, maybe, but never results) but everywhere.
You as the live attendees of the City Council meeting take seats in the Chamber with the Sousa classic Stars and StripesForever playing in the impressive still empty “City Council Chamber of the Town of Big Cherry” (set meticulously real by David Zinn) for one night.
It is about to be called to order by Tracy Letts, the writer of the crackling, fraught with fear and zinged with bolts of truth and consequences council meeting like no other you’ve seen.
But in reality you have.
Tracy Letts, playwright and lead actor is the facilitating orchestrating dominating Mayor Superba conducting his city council of actors, spot-on mimicking the foibles and Roberts Rules of Order, ordinances and explanations for “missing minutes” raised by new councilperson Mr. Peel, played by insistent self-righteous and relentness Noah Peel of “Schitt’s Creek.” Councilman Peel who did not attend the previous Council session and wonders where the minutes are.
As this realistic portrayal of a typical City Council meeting unfolded, I laughed so hard, a little too loudly having seen far too many similar real life exchanges at Council meetings the last twenty two years– this was like Down Memory Lane
As Mayor Letts called the meeting order, there was the elderly councilman Oldfield played with hilarious timing by Austin Pendleton in opening remarks drawing attention to the now vacated City Hall parking space and when it would be assigned. Mr. Pendleton’s “Councilman Oldfield” loses track of the items being discussed with hilarious inattentive questions. The audience loved him.
First up is a presentation of a design for a new fountain for the town square by Councilman who has researched designs and wishes to use the design of his sister for the fountain who is disabled, and have the fountain accessible. This was so reminiscent of every council presentation of a project – especially the old Fountain presentation years ago.
Councilman Carp’s design was sharply criticized for costs and making the fountain handicapped accessible. Wow! I thought I had stepped back in time. I have seen so many of those presentations. All that was missing were the lawyers. Councilman Carp should have called the usual lawyer experts to handle Council to finesse objections.
Then attention turns to renaming the Big Cherry Festival, suggested by K. Todd Freeman, the lone black councilman who feels the festival should be renamed Lincoln Smackdown to reflect more of the black experience that raised the Mayor Superba’s incredulous protest, “You feel Lincoln did not do enough for black people,” one of Mr. Letts’ best written sequences.
This leads to the new councilman Peele (who supports the fountain what was so important about the Big Cherry Festival and the play bursts into the City Council reenacting the famous rescue of a pioneer family from Indians that is part of the town lore.
As this winds down…the city council audience has no idea about what is to come.
Blair Brown as Ms. Innes, the City Clerk is continually asked by Mr. Peel about the missing minutes. Ms. Brown with the aplomb of City Clerks everywhere keeps explaining they were not ready. Ms. Brown in an interview said she was a city clerk at one time. She is so realistic totally unflustered and official in the attitude City Clerks have, it is in their DNA.
Then it appears, Ms. Brown under close questioning by the relentless upstart Councilman, Mr. Peel, reveals there were notes.
After a tense vote, (fraught with the drama characterizing many a key White Plains Common Council vote), the Big Cherry council votes to hear Clerk Innes read the notes contain the testimony of the resigned member of the council who arrives to recite his remarks and the real story of why the minutes were missing.
The question after the minutes are read, reenacted by the missing Councilmember Carp (Ian Bradford) in a compelling story of discovery is — what does the council do about the truth? What does Mr. Peel do after he learns the truth?
The council audience in the theatre sees what the City Council decides to do.
The ending is to be expected.
The City Council does what every council does.
They do the right thing for the cityl
The Minutes is a limited engagement through July 24.
Critic Warning Disclaimer: Thinking, introspection raised if you chose to attend this meeting of the Big Cherry City Council.
Persons viewing the shocking ending of this work will be subject to thoughts as to what would you do? What should the City Council do? What would be best for the city? Could you live with the City Council decision? How would you vote? Could you stay true to your principles?
The play is Shakespeare in impact
Mr. Letts weaves in the issues of self-perception, staying true to oneself and betraying oneself.
It is realistic in how a city council or governing body hides a lot of the truth to the public and never admits mistakes.
It is unflinching in portraying strengths (assuming there are some) and weaknesses (which are starkly revealed in this play, fear is one) of many representative panels making decisions.
It is unrealistic in one glaring respect, this is a city council that asks a lot of questions. Most councils do not.
One total inaccuracy
The Big Cherry Council lasted 90 minutes.
If you are ever even thinking about running for City or Common Council, Townboard anywhere, Americans, this play will cure you! It is acid reality.
