If you’re planning on building a home with a gas boiler in New York, time is running out. Starting on January 1 next year, most new buildings across the state are required to be all electric.

Or at least that’s what state law says. But the mandate has yet to trickle down to most municipalities, which are in charge of approving permits for new construction.

That’s because New York has not updated its statewide building code — which sets minimum construction standards — to reflect the all-electric buildings law passed nearly two years ago.

The State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council is tasked with updating the code every five years to comply with new laws and safety standards. (The current edition dates back to November 2019.) The council was due to meet in early December to vote on a draft of the updated rules, but members never received the new draft and the meeting was postponed, twice. It is now scheduled for this Friday, February 28.

When Chaim Fishman left his Brooklyn-based secondary school at 16, he’d never heard of Mozart or Shakespeare.

“We were never taught about science or history or geography or civics,” let alone English or math, which were considered “ethically wrong,” said Fishman, who attended an ultra-Orthodox secondary school for boys — called a yeshiva — in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and is now a 26-year-old software engineer.

More than 50,000 male students are enrolled in New York’s yeshivas, and a New York Times investigation found that many provided little instruction in core subjects, received some of the lowest standardized test scores in the state, and left their students unable to converse easily in English or find jobs after graduating. Even still, they received more than $1 billion in government funding over a recent four-year period.

A new state law set to take effect at the end of June seeks to hold these schools accountable by withholding millions in taxpayer funds if they don’t provide an education ״substantially equivalent” to what’s taught in the public schools. Ultra-Orthodox community leaders who have long advocated for autonomy are vowing to fight the new mandate.

And in a surprise move last week — well in advance of its June deadline for compliance — the state Education Department announced that after a six-year investigation it had pulled funding for two Brooklyn-based Hasidic yeshivas for failure to meet new secular education standards.

This article was published in collaboration with Bolts.

Central New York’s Tompkins County, home to Ithaca, found itself in the federal government’s crosshairs last month when the Trump administration made the county a focal point of the president’s push to force localities to dedicate resources to mass deportations.

Sheriff Derek Osborne did something routine: He released a man from jail after he’d served his sentence. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted Osborne to hold the man, an undocumented immigrant, past his release date so the federal agency could arrest and deport him.

The US Department of Justice is now investigating and threatening to prosecute the sheriff for failing to cooperate with ICE, though it’s not clear what the department would charge him with.

The threats show how far the Trump administration is willing to go to pressure local police to work with ICE and may serve as a test case for whether federal officials can successfully spook local officials into compliance.

The New York state prison system is teetering on disaster as guards have staged an unsanctioned wildcat strike at almost all of its 42 facilities. Governor Kathy Hochul has deployed the National Guard and, on Wednesday, obtained a court order mandating that corrections officers return to work.

While striking officers have been mostly mum to the press, Assemblymember Scott Gray, who visited picket lines outside three northern New York prisons and went inside two this week, told New York Focus that they’re determined to wrest concessions from the state and from their employer, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.

“The members seem to be resolved in their determination to hang tight until some sort of corrective action is taken,” he said. To facilitate negotiations, the picketers are working on paring down their original list of 13 demands, Gray said.

The guards will likely stick to their guns on pay and staffing issues. They also appear resolute on one of their most ambitious demands: repealing a four-year-old solitary confinement reform law. That would likely require action by the slow-moving and relatively progressive state legislature, though both Gray and the union’s executive vice president have told New York Focus that officers are asking the governor to explore what authority she has to chip away at the law.

Roughly 150 prison officers huddled around burn barrels across the street from Clinton Correctional Facility in northern New York as they staged a work stoppage Tuesday afternoon. An hour’s drive south, about three dozen guards used a grove of pine trees to shield themselves from the single-digit cold as they picketed in front of the medium-security Adirondack Correctional Facility.

Clinton, Adirondack, and at least 23 other New York state prisons saw guards walk off the job Tuesday — part of an unsanctioned wildcat strike that began at two western New York facilities this week and quickly spread to over half the prison system. Guards are demanding that the prison agency address chronic understaffing and that the state overturn a solitary confinement reform law.

While guards haven’t mentioned it, the strike also acts as a counter to recent pressure to rein in officers: Since the state released video of guards beating an incarcerated man to death in December, state legislators, advocates, and Governor Kathy Hochul have pushed to increase scrutiny on prison officers and hold abusive guards to account.