New York City Mayor Eric Adams was slated to attend an event in Queens next week featuring a prominent far-right Hindu activist, according to the event’s organizers, before withdrawing yesterday, a day after New York Focus sent inquiries about his attendance.

The event, a dinner at an Indian cultural center in Fresh Meadows, Queens, will feature Indian Hindu nationalist activist Kajal Shingala, whose speeches frequently feature calls for violence against Muslims in India and boycotts of non-Hindu businesses.

“She is one of the most prolific Hindu far-right orators,” said Raqib Hameed Naik, who runs an organization tracking hate speech in India that has catalogued dozens of Shingala’s speeches. “She has been at the forefront of promoting anti-Muslim, anti-Christian hate, bigotry, and speeches that incite violence.”

A spokesperson for Adams, Zachary Nosanchuk, said that while Adams’s attendance at the event was requested by organizers, “he never planned to attend and it was never on the Mayor’s public schedule.”

Harshad Patel, president of the Gujarati Samaj of New York, which is hosting the dinner, and other event organizers told New York Focus that the mayor’s team had confirmed his attendance.

As negotiations over President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” came down to the wire last week, renewable energy developers were holding their breath. Until the eleventh hour, it looked like Congress was ready to make good on Trump’s promise of “terminating” key subsidies for wind and solar virtually overnight.

In the end, the industry breathed a small sigh of relief after the Senate reached a compromise that would, at least in principle, give new projects a slim window to go ahead. Under the final law, only wind and solar projects that begin construction by July 4 of next year are eligible for the full federal tax credits. Halfway through that window, a new requirement kicks in: Projects that begin construction after January 1, 2026, can only keep the tax credits if they follow restrictions on the use of Chinese materials.

Developers now have less than a year to start digging if they want the subsidies. The impending deadline is lighting a fire under the industry — and, developers hope, under New York’s leaders, too.

New York’s top leaders will need to make tough decisions in the coming months as they confront billions in lost federal funding for the state’s largest and oldest safety net programs.

Last week, Congressional Republicans pulled an all nighter to narrowly pass the sweeping “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” enacting a series of lucrative tax breaks for America’s richest at the expense of its poorest.

Some changes would take effect in a matter of months, forcing the state to quickly pivot and either cover the shortfall or slash benefits. New York would also need to quickly build a new system for closely tracking benefit recipients, an undertaking that Governor Kathy Hochul’s office estimated could cost $500 million alone.

County social service departments — which oversee Medicaid and SNAP locally and are already short-staffed — will need to ramp up their hiring and training to comply with a host of onerous new paperwork requirements. Individual counties could also be on the hook for up to millions of dollars in annual SNAP administrative costs no longer covered by the federal government.

“This is beyond the capacity of the local tax base, this is beyond the capability of the local workforce,” said Stephen Acquario, executive director of the New York State Association of Counties. “We have not been briefed by the state and we don’t know what their plans are at this point in time.”

Last week’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary saw a dramatically reshaped electorate power state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani to victory.

Multiple factors may have contributed to the surge in turnout — Mamdani’s innovative social media strategy, his volunteer army, his personal charisma, and his platform centered on delivering a more affordable city. That platform is composed of three major planks: creating free universal childcare, making buses fast and free, and freezing rents for around 2.4 million rent-stabilized tenants.

That last point may have been particularly important. Analysis of first round election results shows that areas with the most rental units, many of which supported Eric Adams four years ago, proved decisive to Mamdani’s victory. The districts with the most homeowners, meanwhile, swung heavily for former Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Amy Albenda Hill wanted to power her Hudson Valley home in Tarrytown with green energy — solar panels on the roof, a geothermal heating system underground, and an electric vehicle in the driveway. She knew the initial investment would be expensive, but went ahead after her husband Adam discovered that federal tax credits would lower the cost by 30 percent.

“It would have been completely out of the question without the tax credits,” Adam said.

The Hills are among the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have taken advantage of tax breaks for eco-friendly home improvement projects under President Joe Biden’s signature 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The credits make it cheaper to install energy-efficient insulation, new windows, skylights, heat pumps, or solar panels — projects that reduce heating and cooling costs and help mitigate climate change.

Photo collage of President Donald Trump standing in front of several windmills. Faded in the background, the text of the executive order reading, "Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects."

Now, Republicans in Congress are poised to gut those clean energy tax credits, which President Donald Trump has called a “giant SCAM.” On Tuesday, the US Senate passed a giant tax and spending bill that includes phasing out the tax credits, sending it back to the House, which passed its own version of the bill in May and worked through Wednesday night with the aim of approving the final package by Trump’s July 4 deadline.

Related: Trump Throws Wrench Into Offshore Wind, Putting New York’s Clean Energy Plans In Doubt