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A political war on the Hudson erupted Monday over New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and the MTA’s controversial $9 congestion toll. The MTA can now begin collecting the first-in-the-nation congestion fee on Sunday, Jan. 5, to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street — following a federal judge’s ruling in Newark. While Judge Leo Gordon said environmental mitigation concerns on the Jersey side of the Hudson have to be addressed, he chose not to issue a preliminary injunction to block implementation of the toll in his 72-page ruling. “The decision does not interfere with the program’s scheduled implementation this coming Sunday,...

She’s no longer the teacher’s’ pet. The head of the Big Apple’s most powerful teachers’ union flunked Gov. Kathy Hochul and “tone deaf” Democrats Thursday for socking working class New Yorkers with a $9 congestion toll — a week after the election where the party took a drubbing. “It’s not what I expected to see Democrats doing a week after the election. It’s insane! Stop screwing the working class!” United Federation of Teachers President Mike Mulgrew told The Post, saying he will continue to press his active lawsuit to stop the congestion pricing plan. Aside from Hochul, Mulgrew blamed Democrats...

NYC congestion pricing plan shelved indefinitely The first-in-the-toll nation program was expected to be a financial windfall for the cash-strapped MTA. By Andrew Siff and Jennifer Millman The MTA announced Wednesday it will indefinitely pause its plans to implement a first-in-the-nation congestion pricing system amid concerns about current economic conditions in the city and the pace of midtown Manhattan’s recovery. News 4’s Romney Smith reports. What to Know The MTA is pushing "pause" indefinitely on New York City's first-in-the-nation congestion pricing plan, according to an official briefed on the plans. The toll program, years in the making, had been set...

The concept of tolling drivers entering the state of Massachusetts has angered some Americans - including local politicians. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, 49, was among those to speak out, after the idea was floated last week by Bay State Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt. The Republican slammed the prospective guidance as ' yet another way to unnecessarily take [citizens'] money,' this time by taxing them at the state border.

The MTA’s latest congestion pricing scheme: Charge runners for crossing the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The transit agency is waging war against the organizers of the New York City Marathon, demanding $750,000 to make up for toll revenue lost during the iconic race. And if New York Road Runners doesn’t pay up, the agency is threatening to restrict use of the bridge, potentially reducing the number of runners who can compete in the wildly popular event each November, the New York Times reported Wednesday, citing internal memos. During hardball negotiations, the MTA initially said runners — who start the marathon on Staten...

New York’s controversial congestion pricing toll has yet another high profile critic — Whoopi Goldberg. The 68-year-old joined the chorus of opponents when she ripped the contentious plan to hit drivers with a $15 toll to enter Midtown Manhattan during Gov. Kathy Hochul’s appearance on ABC’s “The View” on Wednesday. “This is a huge deal because I can afford it, don’t get me wrong, I can afford it, but a lot of my friends who drive in every day, who left here because they couldn’t afford to live here anymore, can’t,” Goldberg randomly said at the tail-end of the governor’s...

Hudson Valley commuters ripped into the MTA’s congestion toll in a town hall in Ulster County Saturday, begging the Big Apple and Albany to put the controversial pricing plan on-hold. The event was sponsored by battleground congressional district Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), who regularly excoriates his fellow Democrats who are pushing for the Manhattan fares. “I think this is an absolutely unacceptable and ridiculous plan,” Ryan told the crowd crammed into a meeting room in the Castleton-on-Hudson Village Hall on Saturday. The proposed congestion pricing toll would charge drivers $15 a day to enter midtown Manhattan south of 60th Street....

Drivers who evade the controversial $15 congestion pricing toll to enter Midtown Manhattan will be treated like criminals under legislation introduced by Gov. Kathy Hochul. Hochul included a “toll fraud” proposal in her $233 billion state budget plan. The measure would allow cops to charge drivers with Class A misdemeanor toll theft — defined as fraudulently attempting to obtain a credit, discount or exemption from tolls. Scammers who evade paying tolls valued at more than $1,000 could get slapped with a Class E felony and a Class D felony for pocketing tolls valued at more than $3,000.

Just on 15 million people have lost their lives in the two years the Chinese coronavirus pandemic has stalked the globe, statistics released Thursday by the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) detail. That grim figure is some 13 percent higher than might normally be expected for the corresponding 24-month period. More men (57 percent) have died directly or indirectly as a result of coronavirus than women (43 percent) worldwide, the W.H.O. data shows.

On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said that the “massive fiscal and monetary response” to the coronavirus pandemic has “taken a toll” on inflation. Host Bret Baier asked, [relevant exchange begins around 3:30] “When somebody says to you, what are Democrats doing to address inflation, what do you say?”

More than 800,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus – another grim pandemic milestone reached Tuesday as the country remains on edge over the new Omicron variant. The mark coincides with the end of a year that began in the US with a COVID-19 death toll of about 350,000. Over the same period of time the country has also experienced a roller coaster of emotions as optimism reigned with the rollout of vaccines, but fear lingered with the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants. Many communities lifted mask mandates last spring when the number of cases dropped, only...

The U.S. death toll from the Chinese coronavirus under President Joe Biden’s administration will soon surpass the death toll recorded during former President Donald Trump’s administration, and in less time — despite vaccines being available under Biden and not under Trump. Approximately 378,955 people in the United States have died from the Wuhan virus in Joe Biden’s first ten months in office, according to statistics provided by Johns Hopkins University.

The global death toll attributed to the coronavirus pandemic has topped four million and is still climbing, according to figures released Thursday by Johns Hopkins University. A live tracker of the virus collated by the university outlined 4,001,791 people have died and more than 185 million have been infected during the pandemic. UPI reports some 40 percent of those deaths can be attributed to the three countries of the United States, Brazil and India. The U.S. leads the world in deaths with 606,218 million followed by Brazil with 528,540 and India with 405,028 million. While the U.S. missed President Joe...

LOS ANGELES - Despite data indicating that the pandemic is improving in the U.S. and other parts of the world, the global death toll this year from the novel coronavirus has already eclipsed 2020’s. As of June 20, more than 3.8 million people around the world have died from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Globally, approximately 1.8 million people were killed by the virus in 2020. So far this year, more than 1.9 million people have already lost their lives to the deadly disease as of June 20.

WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that had he known a year ago what the death toll from Covid-19 would be, "it would have shocked me completely," and blamed the politicization of safety measures and "mixed messages" out of Washington for the high number of fatalities. In an interview on NBC’s “TODAY” show on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus outbreak being declared a global pandemic, host Savannah Guthrie noted that Fauci said exactly one year ago that 27 people in the U.S. had died from Covid-19 and asked what he would have thought then of today's death toll...

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday said the US reaching 200,000 coronavirus deaths is “very sobering, and in some respects, stunning,” while adding that Americans should trust medical experts despite at times conflicting signals from the highest levels of government. “The idea of 200,000 deaths is really very sobering, and in some respects, stunning,” the nation’s top infectious doctor told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta during the Citizen by CNN conference shortly before the US reached the grim milestone late Tuesday morning. “We do have within our capability — even before we get a vaccine, which we will get reasonably soon — we...

The number of people in the US killed by the coronavirus surpassed 150,000 on Wednesday, according to new data. Americans account for nearly a quarter of the more-than 660,000 people killed by the virus worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. Brazil has the second-highest number of coronavirus deaths — around 88,500 — followed by the United Kingdom, which has almost 46,000 fatalities. The US nationwide death toll is more than three times the number of Americans killed in World War I.

A FOX 5 staff member driving on Interstate 495 found a sign showing the toll for the Express Lanes starting from nearby the Tysons Corner area to the I-395/95 exit would cost a whopping $30! Using the lanes to I-66 would be just shy of $10. -snip A spokesperson for Transurban, the company that manages the Express Lanes, said from around 4:30 p.m. to 5:10 p.m. Thursday, two salt and plow trucks were working on the southbound Express Lanes on I-495 and I-95, causing traffic to slow and increasing the toll on those lanes. The company said there is no...

Toll gates at the Big Apple’s bridges and tunnels will disappear next year as a cashless system is rolled out, Gov. Cuomo announced Wednesday. The new system will be set up beginning in January at the Queens-Midtown and Hugh Carey tunnels, and then throughout the year at the Rockaway, RFK, Verrazano-Narrows, Throgs Neck and Bronx-Whitestone bridges. The system will collect money from drivers using E-ZPass. Those without E-ZPass will get their license plates recorded and receive a bill within 30 days. They will have 30 days to pay. All license plates will be scanned and scofflaws will be ticketed immediately....

BERLIN — German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt’s political future is tied to the success of imposing a toll on foreign drivers using the country’s autobahns, and despite being slapped down by the European Commission he isn’t giving up on the idea.“The tolls are coming,” Dobrindt told the Bild newspaper on Friday, following news that the EU and Germany are about to settle their dispute over introducing the payments. “I am confident that we will be able to close negotiations with the EU Commission on a positive note in November.”Dobrindt told reporters he expected tolls to come into effect after national...