After Eric Adams on Thursday morning became the first sitting New York City mayor in over 150 years to face criminal charges, he was quick to brush off any suggestion that he might resign. If he stands firm, there are two players who can force him from office. The first is a committee of city officials. The second is a friend: Governor Kathy Hochul.

No governor has used that power before. Hochul called the indictment “shocking in its scale,” but declined to comment further until her office had a chance to fully review it. (Her office did not immediately reply to a request for further comment.) If she were to remove Adams, it would be a sudden fall from grace for a mayor whom Hochul, just months ago, called a “strong friend.”

Though Hochul has not indicated her next move, she vouched for the mayor just last week, as federal raids and resignations continued to plague his administration: “​​No matter what anyone says about our current mayor, he has done some good things,” she told the New York Post. She has also repeatedly bragged about their working alliance. “We’re just working together in a way that was unprecedented but comes very natural to the two of us,” she said in May. In March, Hochul thanked Adams for reinforcing “the depth and the strength of our relationship.”

At Bedford Hills, New York’s only maximum-security prison for women, implementing the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act has been an uphill battle. My own experience as a prisoners’ rights advocate and jailhouse lawyer currently incarcerated at Bedford Hills, together with accounts by other women and a former employee, illustrate how the prison, as well as the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) administration, have circumvented both the spirit and the letter of the law.

A planned highway expansion in the Catskill region championed by Governor Kathy Hochul would save drivers one to six minutes at a cost of at least $1.3 billion, according to a new study from the state Department of Transportation, or DOT.

The project is slated for New York’s Route 17, which stretches about 30 miles from the Woodbury Common shopping center past Legoland New York and serves tens of thousands of drivers each day. The state is considering one proposal that would expand the existing two-lane highway at three locations and another that would add a lane in each direction along about half of the 30-mile stretch. The proposals would reduce crashes on the road, according to the study, which also found that it’s possible to achieve that safety benefit without widening the highway.

Does anyone care how long people stay in prison? That’s what Carol Shapiro wants to know.

In 2017, the longtime criminal justice reform advocate was appointed to New York state’s Board of Parole, which decides whether people who’ve served their minimum prison sentences should be released. She was eager to join the board because she wanted to reconfigure the gears of its “conveyor belt justice” — her term for the rapid, impersonal churn of cases in which a person’s freedom can be decided in mere minutes.

Shapiro ultimately found the task impossible. The ideology behind the board’s decision-making was too entrenched for one person to change. She left in 2019.