Plainview native Omer Neutra, who was previously believed to be alive and held hostage by Hamas, was announced dead this morning by the IDF.
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The family of Omer Nuetra, the Plainview resident and Israeli Defense Force soldier killed in the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack, finally received his body, officials announced on Nov. 2.
The 21-year-old dual citizen’s body was one of three that the terrorist organization Hamas returned on the same day — 759 days after the attacks — to Israel, where the soldier’s family is planning final arrangements.
“Our Omer is on Israeli soil,” his father, Ronen Neilutra, told The Times of Israel in a statement. “Finally — so much pain and so much relief!
Nuetra’s return comes after Hama returned 17 bodies to Israel since an Oct. 10 ceasefire was reached on Oct. 10, but 11 more remain in Gaza. The last 20 surviving hostages were returned upon the agreement.
The Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when terrorists stormed Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, making it the deadliest days for Jews since the Holocaust during World War II.
Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, most of them Palestinians, during the war as the hostages’ prolonged captivity continued to bring daily anguish to their families, friends and supporters across the world.
President Donald Trump told reporters that he spoke with Neutra’s family.
Allleged Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann, center, inside courtroom at Suffolk County Court in Riverhead on Thursday, June. 6, 2024. His attorney, Michael J. Brown, is at left. (James Carbone/Newsday via Pool)
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Rex Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect charged with murdering six women over a 31-year span, is scheduled to appear Wednesday in Suffolk County court for his latest pretrial hearing.
The 60-year-old architect from Massapequa Park has pleaded not guilty to the murders of four women known as the Gilgo Four found dead in 2010, a woman whose remains were scattered near Gilgo and in Manorville, and a woman found in the Hamptons in 1993. His attorney Michael Brown has said he is seeking to have the cases tried separately.
Heuermann has been held without bail at Suffolk County jail in Riverhead since he was arrested near his Manhattan office in July 2023, when he was charged with killing Megan Waterman, Amber Lynn Costello, and Melissa Barthelemy. In January, he was charged with the murder of the fourth Gilgo victim, Maureen Brainard-Barnes.
The Suffolk grand jury that indicted the suspect in those cases additionally indicted him in June on charges of murdering Jessica Taylor and Sandra Castilla. Taylor’s dismembered remains were found in Manorville in July 2003 and her skull and limbs were found near Cedar Beach in 2010 during an expanded search of the Gilgo sparked by the discovery of the Gilgo Four. Castilla was found brutally stabbed in a wooded area in North Sea near Sag Harbor.
Suffolk County District Attorney Raymon Tierney has said the Gilgo Beach Homicide Investigation Task Force is continuing to examine evidence in the murders of five other victims found dead in the Gilgo area. Tierney has said Heuermann is the prime suspect in the murder of Valerie Mack, whose remains were also found in Manorville in 2000 and near Gilgo in 2010.
Last month, investigators released an updated composite sketch of an unidentified Asian male victim found in 2010 in the brush off Ocean Parkway. Last year, prosecutors also revealed that authorities identified Karen Vergata, the victim who had been known as Fire Island Jane Doe. Her remains were found near Davis Park in 1996 and near Tobay Beach in 2010.
And the task force is continuing to investigate whether Heuermann may also be responsible for the murders of the unidentified victim known as Peaches, whose remains were found near Hempstead Lake State Park in 1997, and her daughter, who was found near Cedar Beach in 2010.
While Greenwich Village provided the kind of bohemian culture and vibe that served as the perfect atmosphere for protest music in the early ‘60s, Gerde’s Folk City proved to be ground zero for that era’s soundtrack. Folk City: The Musical, a production based on the club’s history and inspired by former Long Island Press Editor-in-Chief Robbie Woliver’s 1986 book Bringing It All Back Home, clearly struck a nerve when it ran at the Theater for the New City in New York City in 2016 followed by a 2018 run at the Brunish Theater in Portland, OR.
Written by Woliver and Bernadette Contreras, Folk City: The Musical wound up winning 10 out 10 Broadway World awards for which it was nominated, including “Best Musical.” But when the show was set to return to New York City, the brakes were slammed on it being staged thanks to the pandemic effectively shutting down the theater world. But rather than let this production die on the vine, Woliver pivoted and decided to record a double-CD studio cast album of the same name consisting of all-original material versus filling it out with the famous songs from the original production. Next, a movie adaptation was signed with award-winning filmmaker Jane Spencer set to direct.
“We were originally using songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind,’ ‘Sounds of Silence,’ ‘For What’s It’s Worth,’ and ‘California Dreaming’ in the original show,” Woliver explained. “It was not only expensive and prohibitive [to license them], but time-consuming. I realized that a lot of shows like Hamilton and Hades Town were being propelled by their soundtracks, and that was another reason to go in this direction. Plus, it’s more meaningful and more credible having an original score”
It’s all personal for Woliver, whose connection to Folk City goes back to 1977, when he, wife Marilyn Lash, and Joseph Hillesum took over the booking duties before buying the club from Mike Porco. And it was during the trio’s stewardship that billings expanded from the venue’s original eclectic mix of folk (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez), jazz (Larry Coryell), blues (Muddy Waters), gospel (Sweet Honey In the Rock), and psychedelic rock (Jimi Hendrix) to embrace newer alternative acts (Sonic Youth, X, The Replacements, 10,000 Maniacs) and comedians (Adam Sandler, Chris Rock). Being involved with the club also tapped into his red diaper baby progressive roots growing up in Plainview, where folk music took root in being a major creative inspiration.
“I grew up listening to the music of The Weavers, Harry Belafonte and Odetta,” Woliver explained. “Odetta is really the first vocalist I remember hearing. It just changed my life and made me fall in love with music. And then becoming friends with her. Folk City — there are no words for it. She sang at our wedding. I also ended up meeting and befriending some of the same people I grew up listening to.”
Suffice it to say that while the framework of Folk City: The Musical was in place, rebooting the score with all-original songs proved to be a Herculean effort. Thirty new songs replaced the original jukebox score while tapping into 12 songwriters, eight vocalists, seven producers, and recording in 14 studios in 10 different states. And it was all done while scheduling around the participants’ COVID-19 outbreaks.
For Woliver, who started out as a songwriter, finding creative partners found him reaching into his past and networking to find newer talent. Among the allies he tapped were former Folk City soundman and Lemon Twigs partner Ronnie D’Addario (“He knew the scene and was perfect to that because he is multi-dimensional in his influences as well as being an extraordinary musician and a great songwriter who wrote half the songs”).
Other major contributors included multi-instrumentalist Filippo De Laura (“He is really brilliant and plays every weird and exotic instrument. He was able to bring in all those sitars and tablas for the psychedelic songs”), famed blues artist Tracy Nelson, whose signature song “Down So Low” was used in the original production and jazz/folk singer-songwriter Lili Añel.
“She was one of my favorite artists at Folk City,” Woliver said. “I had a lyric that ran true to me and I’d hear Lili’s voice singing it. We’re still friends and I asked her if she wanted to co-write this song. She’s not a collaborator—she writes her own songs. It clicked with her and it turned out to be one of my favorite songs on the album and one of the standout songs on the album.”
Given the breadth of genres the club presented from one night to the next, the musical’s characters represent that diversity from the doo-wop-obsessed club regular Tony D’Angelo and acerbic Beatnik poet Jazz to African-American vocalist/waitress Karen Fairchild and folk-blues troubadour Dean Graham.
The music convincingly conveys the original club’s vibe thanks to gems ranging from the subtle psychedelic-kissed “Stars, Baby” and its delicate use of sitar and harmony-soaked ‘60s pop of “Love at Third Sight” to the gritty slide-guitar ballad “My Baby’s the Groove” and the British Invasion earworm “It’s a Shot,” featuring a vocal originally recorded by late Smithereens founding member Pat DiNizio back in 2013.
And while Woliver was able to bring back the male cast that had performed in prior Folk City: The Musical productions, the hunt was on for female vocalists.
“We couldn’t get our female cast from the shows, who are really, really outstanding,” Woliver said. “They were ending up in other shows and couldn’t do this.”
Among Woliver’s vocal saviors were former student Emily Blount, who sings as jazz (“She sent me a demo that completely blew me away, not only because I loved it, but because it was the character”) and former Tommy Boy Records recording artist Paula Brion, who provided the Karen Fairchild vocal.
“There was a specific bring-down-the-roof voice that we needed for her,” Woliver said. “We were already auditioning a lot of people and it just wasn’t clicking. Paula is a vocal coach and I asked her to give me some of these people she was mentoring and dealing with. She sent me tapes and nothing was cooking. I told Paula to sing me the song and send me the demo and I told her she was it.”
The sweat equity poured into this double-CD release that’s set for release on Oct. 11 via Jay Records in association with Cherry Red Records and MVD Entertainment led to For Your Consideration Grammy entries in seven different categories.
“Getting this soundtrack pulled together has been a very intense period,” Woliver said. “But I’m proud of how we were able to navigate through these different incarnations of the show. And now we get to have this new version out there with these newer songs being the music that’s going to be in the movie.”
Donald Trump speaks at Grumman Studios in Bethpage on Wednesday, April 6, 2016 (Long Island Press photo)
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Former President Donald Trump has scheduled a rally at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale on Wednesday as campaign season enters the final weeks before Election Day, the Republican candidate’s campaign announced.
The rally plans were released on Sept. 11, a day after Trump faced Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris in a debate that aired on WABC-TV — a debate in which Harris suggested everyone go to Trump’s rallies to witness supporters leave early out of boredom.
“Nassau County has also felt the dangerous effects of Kamala Harris’ open border bloodbath,” Trump’s campaign posted online while inviting supporters to attend the rally. “The flood of illegal immigrants into nearby ‘sanctuary,’ New York City has unleashed crime and chaos into their community.”
The rally is the third Trump has held on Long Island in his three bids for the White House. During the 2016 campaign, he held rallies in Bethpage and Patchogue, but did not return in 2020 before he was unseated by Democratic President Joe Biden, who is not seeking a second term.
“Anthony D’Esposito must be in an awful lot of trouble if he’s bringing Donald Trump’s abortion-banning, billionaire-loving, autocrat-enabling, incoherent circus to Nassau County,” Battleground New York said in a statement, referring to congressman who represents the district in which the coliseum is located. “We’re looking forward to seeing what kind of bizarre mess Trump leaves for D’Esposito to clean up after.”
The rally is scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 18, with doors opening at 3 p.m.
The average New York Times reader, as the Times sees it, checks their push notifications first thing in the morning, scrolls through the internet while making coffee, then puts in their headphones to listen to something as they cook, clean, commute, or walk the dog. Stephanie Preiss, a Times executive in charge of the paper’s audio business, has thought about this routine a lot. She keeps a chart of it—the day in the life of a “smart, curious person”—above her desk at home. The paper has long had the news alerts covered, and it’s all over social media and news aggregators, but “what does it look like for the Times to have embedded itself deeply into every single moment?” asked Preiss. “How do we get every second of your day?” The Times is betting on a new app, New York Times Audio, launching Wednesday, after nearly a year and a half in a private beta.
The app is a home for the Times’ growing audio empire, from new shows across the news and opinion sections, to Serial, which the company acquired in 2020, to its purchase of Audm, the service that turns news articles into audio, to establishing a strategic partnership with This American Life. The Times intends to maintain its audience at the top of the podcast publisher charts as well as its wide distribution and the advertising business that it runs on the backs of all of that. “But we believe that—kind of similar to what we’ve done in text journalism, if you will—we can start to move our most engaged users into our own apps and platforms,” Preiss said.
Courtesy of The New York Times.
Still, it’s a weird time to get into a podcast app business. The age of “There’s an App for That” feels squarely a bygone of the aughts. And this one has debuted to the public at a precarious time for the audio industry. “Podcast Companies, Once Walking on Air, Feel the Strain of Gravity,” read a recent headline in the Times. “The dumb money is gone, the easy money has slowed down, and the smart money has seen some pullback,” podcast guru Eric NuzumtoldVanity Fair. NPR and Spotify both laid off staff and canceled shows.
“Obviously we’re not immune to macroeconomic trends and headwinds affecting the digital media landscape broadly,” said Preiss, “but we do experience that differently.” She cites the Times’ success at the top of the charts with “a fraction of the number of shows” of competitors, and its dual advertising and subscription business. Even now, the Times is seeing “increased demand for new ad products,” Preiss said, and “historic new audience heights,” with many Times shows, including The Daily, seeing “their highest audience ever, including during the insane peaks of early COVID,” in Q1. The only way to access the app is if you subscribe to the Times in some way (either for news or in a bundle with its other features). For now, the Times is not selling the New York Times Audio app as a standalone subscription, though it is sunsetting the Audm app and folding it into the new program.
Though not everyone is buying into this rosy picture. “I am very suspicious of the claim that the Times is seeing increased demand for new ad products on the audio side, when the evidence is clear that’s not the case,” one veteran podcast producer told me, noting that “many of their ad spots are empty, or only filled with New York Times ads.” Advertising for podcasts is dropping across the industry significantly, they said. Semafor recently pointed out that The Daily has been running without a full slate of paid ads in recent months. Preiss rejected the notion, noting that for years it has been running “consumer messaging” related to the Times’ other offerings.
The NYT Audio app will have exclusives, including a new daily news show called The Headlines, hosted by veteran journalist Annie Correal; it’s a roughly eight-minute sister program to The Daily—though with less “handholding,” as Correal put it—spotlighting about three items, and the reporters behind them, per episode. Unsurprisingly, research has shown that shorts are consistently among the most popular content, pushing the Times to go even smaller than its breakout 20- to 25-minute morning show, which inspired copycats at outlets like Vox and The Washington Post—and which the paper has been interested in building off of for years, kicking around ideas like an afternoon show that hasn’t come to fruition. Headlines, says director of audio Paula Szuchman, “is really the first, I would say, expansion of the Daily universe.” The app will also be home to sub-10-minute stories about what to cook, read, watch, and more; a recent one featured Times Food reporter Priya Krishna sharing her secret to making perfectly cooked rice in the microwave.
I’ve been playing around on the app the past few days, and it does, at risk of sounding too woo-woo, feel like diving into the Times universe. On Tuesday, I hit play on the playlist curated each weekday morning and was taken from the day’s Headlines, on bank collapses and the war in Ukraine, to The Daily, where Mexico bureau chief Natalie Kitroeff was reporting from the southern border on the day Title 42 ended, to a “reporter reads,” in which publishing reporter Alexandra Alter read a piece she cowrote with Elizabeth Harris about an author who was asked by Scholastic to delete references to racism from her book, to a short by This American Life. “We hope that this will expand the universe of subscribers, but I think that we are very interested in making sure that Times subscribers have a better experience of audio, and one that is an introduction to Times journalism, than they would if they were just to start searching online for news podcasts or culture podcasts,” said Preiss.
At the very least, the NYT Audio app felt like a smoother experience than Apple’s much-deridedpodcast app. It felt, too, like a huge investment incongruous with the state of the audio industry—one perhaps only the Times is in the position to make right now.
