Category World News

Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City to Zohran Mamdani by significant margins and is now contesting as an independent, is second in the race to clinch the mayor’s title in the largest city in the United States.

Mamdani won on a message of affordability, but Cuomo has slammed his plans as extreme and not feasible. Al Jazeera did an analysis of Cuomo’s economic policies to see what he has to offer for New Yorkers.

Housing

Cuomo – who only moved into New York City in September 2024 after living in Westchester, a suburban community north of the city – has promised to build over the next decade half a million new apartments, two-thirds of which will be “affordable”. The plan offers tax incentives to private developers to build more residential developments. It also says it will loosen zoning laws to promote office-to-residential conversions.

However, much of what he’s touting is already city policy.

New York launched an office-to-housing programme in 2020 under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, followed by reforms last year to speed up conversions under incumbent Eric Adams.

According to a report from City Comptroller Brad Lander, who also ran in the primaries but has since endorsed Mamdani, those initiatives have already produced 44 conversions. Projects finished or under way are expected to create as many as 17,400 units citywide – mostly studios and one-bedroom apartments – including one of the largest office-to-housing conversions in the country in Lower Manhattan.

Cuomo’s plan to expand housing options across the city also taps into publicly owned land, including vacant lots, to allow for development of new housing and mixed-use development – the same as both other leading candidates, Mamdani, a former State Assembly member, and Adams.

Cuomo wants to pump $2.5bn into public housing over the next five years, which would be a 75 percent increase from the city’s current funding. For housing protections, he wants to add more lawyers in the city’s housing court system to help renters with issues like tenant harassment and unlawful eviction and provide more housing vouchers to help address homelessness.

However, Cuomo’s history says otherwise. When he was governor, he pushed the state to cut funding for a rental voucher programme called Advantage. The cuts from Albany, the state capital, left City Hall no choice but to cut the programme altogether.

One of the few new ideas from Cuomo, who has been US secretary of housing and urban development in the past, is called “Zohran’s Law”, a jab at the most likely next mayor of New York. The new law would put in place income limits on those who are seeking rent-stabilised apartments across the city, which account for about half of the rental housing stock.

Cuomo said the law would not penalise those who see their incomes increase while already living in a rent-stabilised unit.

New York City’s rent-stabilisation programme was never designed with certain income levels in mind. It was intended to regulate the broader housing market and protect residents from rent price surges that market-rate apartments face in times of housing scarcity.

“I think that’s been the playbook all along, kind of pick a fight, steal an idea, deliver less ambitiously than New Yorkers really need or deserve,” Adin Lenchner, founder of the New York based political consultancy Carroll Street Campaigns told Al Jazeera.

Transit

Cuomo’s most ambitious proposal is to bring New York City’s transit system under the control of the city itself. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which oversees subways, buses and commuter railroads, has been under state jurisdiction since the agency was created in 1968. That structure gives the governor disproportionate power over the operations of the nation’s largest transit system.

Shifting control to City Hall would be a steep challenge because much of its funding comes from state-collected taxes and revenues. And even if it were to happen and Cuomo would want to increase the city’s tax rate to pay for it, he would still need a buy-in from the governor, who either accepts or denies the city’s proposed tax rate.

That funding dynamic is a key reason why Mamdani’s free-bus proposal has drawn scepticism. Implementing it would demand coalition-building and leverage in Albany, which critics have said are best used for other pressing issues like universal childcare.

As a state lawmaker, Mamdani was able to help champion a free-bus pilot programme, but expanding such an initiative citywide would be far more complicated from the mayor’s office without control of the MTA, a key weakness in the Mamdani campaign that Cuomo has tried to capitalise on.

Cuomo, on the other hand, is not pushing for free transit quite like Mamdani but has suggested he would consider some free routes. He also said he would expand access to what is called the fair fares programme, which offers discounted rates to low-income New Yorkers.

Cuomo’s push to claim city control of the MTA also comes with a fairly chequered political history.

During his time as governor, he was frequently accused of weaponising the state’s authority over transit against then-Mayor de Blasio, taking credit for successes while deflecting blame for service breakdowns onto City Hall. The tug-of-war over responsibility for transit performance has long been a point of contention between Albany and City Hall.

Cuomo does have a track record of delivering on major transportation projects. Under his watch, a subway line expanded, the long-delayed construction of another subway line began and Penn Station, one of the city’s largest transit hubs, began a substantial revitalisation. He also oversaw the rebuilding of LaGuardia Airport.

Lencher pointed out that Cuomo proudly took credit for those wins but when the city’s subway system faced widespread delays in 2017 during the construction – colloquially referred to as the summer of hell, in which there were constant equipment failures and the worst on-time performance of any mass transit system in the world – Cuomo said it was “the city’s MTA”.

Jobs

Cuomo has pitched a jobs plan that he has called the $1.5bn Five-Borough Economic Transformation Capital Fund, which would fund projects all over the city. He is also proposing an innovation hub that would give grants to start-ups and offer them tax exemptions if they can prove they can provide job growth opportunities to the city.

He is also adding a 90-day “fast-track regulatory review”, a promise to cut red tape for business development. Both of his competitors have made similar promises, but Mamdani’s is focused on the small-business economy.

Cuomo’s plan for workforce training and development programmes includes expanding existing training and apprenticeship programmes for people who want to pursue jobs in fields like healthcare.

While he has offered to promote more training programmes that would help with “preparation for jobs that don’t require a college degree”, he hasn’t offered any details about what that would be. Representatives for Cuomo did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for more details.

Taxes

In 2021, Cuomo was behind one of the biggest tax increases on the ultrawealthy in New York state’s history. His administration raised the corporate tax rate by 0.75 percent. He also raised the taxes for those making $1m to $2m to 9.65 percent from 8.82 percent and built in two new tax brackets: For those making $5m to $25m, it was 10.3 percent, and 10.9 percent for those making more than $25m annually.

His new plan as mayor includes no tax on tips for restaurant workers and eliminating income tax for New Yorkers making at or less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level – $31,300 annually for a single-person household and $64,300 for a family of four.

For wealthy New Yorkers, he said he would increase the threshold for the mansion tax, an additional tax for a real estate transaction, to $2.5m, up from its current level of $1m.

His planned tax cuts are raising questions among experts about how he would pay for his proposals.

Unlike Mamdani, Cuomo has not provided a detailed plan on how he intends to pay for his platform, and Adams has his own existing record to point to, including increased tax collections and decreased spending.

“They [Mamdani’s campaign] always get asked how are you going to pay for it [Mamdani’s policy proposals]. Cuomo and people to the right of him don’t face that same line of questioning,” Kaivan Shroff, a New York State delegate for the Democratic National Committee and senior adviser to the Institute for Education, told Al Jazeera.

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Microsoft has announced that it has withdrawn some of its services from the Israeli army, following an investigation that raised concerns that Israel may be violating the company’s terms of service by using its artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services to spy on millions of Palestinians throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

The decision on Thursday followed a joint investigation by the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper and Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call, which revealed in August that the Israeli army was using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians amid Israel’s brutal onslaught on Gaza, which has killed more than 65,000 people in less than two years.

Microsoft has, in recent months, fired or reported several employees to the police over protests about the use of its software by the Israeli army in Gaza. In August, four employees were fired. Several others have quit the company in protest over Microsoft’s ties to the Israeli army, which they said were enabling the devastation in Gaza.

The tech company consistently denied those claims, but, following the investigation, it announced it had commissioned an external review of its communications on Israel by Washington, DC law firm, Covington & Burling LLP, and another, unnamed technical consulting firm.

Here’s what we know:

What has Microsoft announced about its AI services in Israel?

In a blog post directed to employees on Thursday, Microsoft’s vice chairman and president, Brad Smith, revealed that an external review of the company’s communication records and financial statements had prompted Thursday’s decision, as elements supporting its findings were found to be true. Smith did not detail the specific evidence, but stated that it related to the Israeli army’s use of Azure and Microsoft’s AI services.

“We therefore have informed IMOD of Microsoft’s decision to cease and disable specified IMOD subscriptions and their services, including their use of specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies,” Smith wrote, referring to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

“We have reviewed this decision with IMOD and the steps we are taking to ensure compliance with our terms of service, focused on ensuring our services are not used for mass surveillance of civilians,” he added.

This marks a major shift in Microsoft’s stance on this issue. In May, following similar findings reported by The Associated Press news agency that the Israeli army’s spy agency, Unit 8200, was using Microsoft services for mass surveillance in Gaza, the company said it had conducted internal reviews of its records.

While it acknowledged that advanced AI and cloud computing services had been sold to the Israeli military to aid in its efforts to locate and rescue Israelis captured by Hamas on October 7, Microsoft said it found no evidence its services were being used to target or harm people in Gaza.

In his statement on Thursday, Smith said the review of its services to the Israeli military was ongoing, but that the decision to restrict some services had been made because Microsoft’s terms of service “prohibit the use of our technology for mass surveillance of civilians”.

Why has Microsoft changed its stance on this issue now?

Simply, the company says it did not know what the Israeli military was using its services for.

Smith said the August news report had revealed information that Microsoft itself had not been privy to because of customer privacy regulations.

The company has reiterated several times that it had no way of knowing how the Israeli army was deploying Microsoft technology due to these privacy policies.

Which AI or Surveillance technologies have been withdrawn?

Smith said only specific Microsoft service subscriptions had been blocked from the Israeli military, and that Israel would still be able to use other Microsoft products for the country’s own cybersecurity.

He did not specify which particular products were disabled, or if specific units in the Israeli military had been barred from using them.

However, he did mention that there were issues relating to how the Israeli army uses its Azure storage servers based in the Netherlands, as well as Microsoft’s AI services.

What is Microsoft’s Azure, and how has it been used in Gaza?

Microsoft’s Azure platform provides a host of cloud-based services, including near-limitless digital storage and powerful AI capabilities that, among many things, allow for compiling, transcribing, translating and analysing vast numbers of phone calls.

The Azure platform was the main subject of the August news investigation, which revealed that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Yossi Sariel, the then-head of Israel’s military spy agency, Unit 8200, in late 2021 at the company’s headquarters in Seattle to discuss collaborating on the storage of large volumes of ‘”sensitive” Israeli intelligence, using Azure.

Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s elite cyberwarfare unit responsible for clandestine operations, including collecting signal intelligence and surveillance. Sariel has driven the unit’s use of AI, and was awarded by the Israeli military in 2018 for his work on an “artificial intelligence and anti-terrorism” project.

After the Seattle meeting, Unit 8200 built a mass surveillance tool that it has used to sweep, record and store millions of phone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since 2022, according to the authors of the investigative report. Sariel resigned in September 2024 over the unit’s failure to predict the October 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.

While Israel has long intercepted calls in the occupied Palestinian territory, the new AI-powered system bolstered that tactic immensely, allowing intelligence officers to capture and store millions of phone calls and texts and for a much longer period, the news investigation revealed.

The AP, earlier in February, also reported that the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft products surged after October 7. The Israeli military used gigabytes of cloud storage and huge amounts of AI-enabled language translation services for mass surveillance, cross-checked with in-house AI systems to decide on who should be targeted in air attacks, the AP reported.

Did Microsoft really not know what Azure was being used for?

Although Microsoft’s position is that it had no knowledge of how Israel was using Azure, leaked Microsoft documents and interviews with 11 Microsoft sources showed that Unit 8200 was storing Palestinian communications on the platform, the joint expose noted.

Sources from Unit 8200 also told the reporters that those capabilities have helped the Israeli army to target people in deadly air attacks on Gaza and in its military operations in the West Bank. The Israeli military tracked “everyone, all the time”, one Unit 8200 source was quoted as saying in the investigation.

“The whole arrangement from the beginning, from 2021 … was between the head of 8200, a unit that is known for doing surveillance on Palestinians, and the very top officials of Microsoft,” journalist Meron Rapoport, who was involved in the investigation, told Al Jazeera on Friday.

How significant is Microsoft’s decision to withdraw its services?

Tech analysts are sceptical about how much Microsoft’s decision will affect Israel’s surveillance operation in Gaza and the West Bank. It is unclear how Microsoft will ensure that the Israeli army, as a whole, no longer has access to Azure, its AI services or other Microsoft products that could be used to continue mass surveillance and conduct deadly attacks or other operations.

Hossam Nasr, one of the more than a dozen Microsoft employees who were fired or arrested for protesting the company’s involvement in the Gaza war, told AP on Thursday that the recent move was an “unprecedented win”, but ultimately not enough.

“Microsoft has only disabled a small subset of services for only one unit in the Israeli military,” said Nasr, an organiser with the group No Azure for Apartheid, which includes other former Microsoft employees. “The vast majority of Microsoft’s contract with the Israeli military remains intact.”

How have Israeli and US officials responded?

Responding to Microsoft’s move, an unnamed Israeli official was quoted by AP as saying the decision would do “no damage to the operational capabilities” of the Israeli army.

How has Israel surveilled Palestinians in the past?

Al Jazeera has documented the adverse physical and mental impacts of constant Israeli surveillance on Palestinians, including the use of CCTV and a facial recognition system called Red Wolf that is deployed in parts of the occupied West Bank.

The programme is used at military checkpoints in Hebron and occupied East Jerusalem, where Israeli settlers have moved to scan the faces of Palestinians and add them to a database, without their consent. The system aids the Israeli military in its discriminatory policies of banning Palestinians from using certain road networks that are only open to settlers.

Similar tactics have been deployed by the Chinese government to surveil Uighur Muslims, rights defenders noted.

Palestinians have long claimed that Israel, which produces and sells spyware to several countries, uses them to test its products. Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group came in for widespread criticism in 2021 over its flagship software Pegasus, which clients were using to target opposition political members, activists and journalists – including some working for Al Jazeera, according to a media investigation.

Clients of the spyware were not revealed, but they included governments and were reportedly clustered in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In May 2023, Amnesty International concluded that Israel was increasing its surveillance in Hebron and East Jerusalem, and was using Red Wolf to “entrench” its system of apartheid.

“This surveillance is part of a deliberate attempt by Israeli authorities to create a hostile and coercive environment for Palestinians, with the aim of minimising their presence in strategic areas,” the rights organisation said.