Join Citizens Committee for Children and the Family Homelessness Coalition Wednesday for an online panel discussion, moderated by City Limits, on policy-based solutions to New York’s housing crisis.

A family outside the city’s congregate shelter for immigrants at Floyd Bennett Field (now closed) at the end of November 2023. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

On Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as the city’s next mayor, ushering in a new era of leadership at City Hall, and at the agencies that carry out the work of city government.

The incoming administration faces familiar—but pressing—challenges. More than 100,000 people sleep in the city’s shelter system each month, the majority of whom are families and children. Many more face housing insecurity: nearly half of all renter households are rent burdened, and evictions are rising again to approach pre-pandemic levels.

On Wednesday, Citizens Committee for Children* and the Family Homelessness Coalition will host a webinar on these issues and how the city’s next leaders can solve them. The event, “Safeguarding Well-Being: Supports for Families Experiencing Housing Instability” will include a panel discussion moderated by City Limits’ Executive Editor Jeanmarie Evelly.

Speakers will include:

Alice Bufkin, associate executive director for data and policy, Citizens’ Committee for Children

Gina Cappuccitti, senior director of housing access and stability services for New Destiny Housing

Kadisha Davis, narrative change lead at the Family Homelessness Coalition’s Family Action Board

Vangie Gonzales, policy lead at the Family Homelessness Coalition’s Family Action Board

Maya Jasinska, director of policy and research for Win NYC

Jennifer Pringle, director of Project LIT at Advocates for Children

Joscelyn Truitt, vice president of empowerment with Riseboro

The program will kick off Wednesday at noon. You can register for free here.

*CCC is among City Limits’ funders.

The post TUNE IN 11/13: How The Next Administration Can Support Families Experiencing Housing Instability appeared first on City Limits.

GENEVA (AP) — A diamond brooch that French emperor Napoleon lost while fleeing from the Battle of Waterloo in the early 19th century sold for more than 3.5 million Swiss francs (about $4.4 million) at a Geneva auction on Wednesday, Sotheby’s said.

The brooch, which can also be worn as a pendant, features an oval diamond weighing over 13 carats surrounded by smaller cut diamonds. The sale price vastly outstripped the high end of the pre-sale estimate of 200,000 francs.

The hammer price was 2.85 million francs, excluding fees and other charges that were included in the final aggregate price.

The circular jewel was found in a stash of Napoleon’s personal belongings in carriages that got held up on muddy roads as he and his troops fled the Duke of Wellington’s British forces and the Prussian army under Field Marshal von Blücher, Sotheby’s said.

For more than two centuries, the jewels featured as part of heirlooms of the Prussian Royal House of Hohenzollern. Sotheby’s did not disclose the identity of the seller, and said that the buyer was a “private collector.”

Among dozens of lots on the block was a green beryl weighing over 132 carats, which Napoleon was said to have worn at his 1804 coronation. The jewel sold for a hammer price of 838,000 francs, or more than 17 times the high-end pre-sale estimate.

One diamond expert said the sale took on added allure in the wake of the much-ballyhooed robbery of Napoleonic jewels from the Louvre museum in Paris last month.

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“Given the recent Louvre heist and the provenance of arguably the most famous French figure in history, I’m not surprised the jewel achieved a majestic 3.5 million francs,” said Tobias Kormind, managing director of online jeweler 77 Diamonds. “The brooch arrives at a moment of renewed global fascination with Napoleonic jewels, and its story is irresistible.”

Later Wednesday, Sotheby’s was holding a “high jewelry” auction featuring a 10-carat pink diamond tentatively known as the “Glowing Rose,” which is expected to fetch about $20 million. The stone was unearthed in Angola’s Lulo mine.

By CHRISTINE FERNANDO, Associated Press

CHICAGO (AP) — The cyclists arrive at sunrise, rolling through Chicago’s Latino neighborhoods and stopping at tamale carts, elote stands and candy stalls. They buy out every last item — every tamale, every corn cob, every bundle of sweets. Then they load up the food and deliver it to shelters and families in need.

Since the start of a federal immigration crackdown that has led to more than 3,200 arrests in the Chicago metropolitan area, streets and storefronts in the city’s Latino neighborhoods have emptied out. Street vendors, fearing arrest, have been afraid to leave their homes to work. Local restaurants have struggled as customers stay home.

But as fear spread, so did something else — neighbors stepping up for one another and finding creative ways to show up for vendors and restaurant owners. This includes a grassroots effort to organize so-called “buy out” events meant to allow vendors who fear being detained by immigration agents to go home early. Some Chicagoans have pooled money in their neighborhoods or through local organizations while others have simply bought out taco stands while on their way to work or tamale vendors outside their local bars.

In Little Village, Rick Rosales, community organizer with Cycling x Solidarity, helps organize two of these “buy out” rides per week that typically support five street vendors each.

“The vendors are often speechless,” Rosales said. “They’ll say, ‘I have a lot of tamales. You want all of them?’”

Once, after the group bought out a tamale vendor’s cart, that man found them days later to say immigration agents were spotted on his block just hours after. “You saved my life,” Rosales said the man told them.

“This is about food and joy and bike rides,” Rosales said. “But it’s also so incredibly high stakes because of the fear in our communities right now.”

Street vendors targeted in immigration crackdown

It’s hard to say how many street vendors have been targeted by federal immigration agents, said Maria Orozco, outreach organizer for the Street Vendors Association of Chicago, adding she knows of at least 10 who have been detained.

In September, a tamale vendor was detained while selling outside a Home Depot, according to local advocates. Soon after, federal agents arrested a flower seller in the southwest neighborhood of Archer Heights. Then they came for a cotton candy vendor in the predominantly Mexican American Little Village. Immigration agents descended on the Swap-O-Rama flea market in October and detained more than a dozen people. And last week, over 100 residents in the Brighton Park neighborhood rallied to demand the release of their local tamalero.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Orozco said losing these vendors is as much a cultural loss as an economic one, calling them part of the “fabric of our city.” She said they bring life, color and flavor to the city’s streets, preserving culinary traditions and building a sense of community — and they are beloved by neighbors.

Street vendors who are afraid to work or are seeing drops in sales can apply to get financial support through the Street Vendors Association of Chicago. The group launched a GoFundMe with the goal of raising $300,000 to support street vendors.

Orozco said local businesses have also hosted pop-up events where a certain percentage of proceeds go to street vendors. The organization has also helped connect vendors to people hoping to “buy them out,” Orozco said.

“It’s been emotional to see,” she said. “The vendors themselves didn’t realize how much Chicagoans love and support them. None of us expected this.”

Communities rally to support restaurants as customers dwindle

As Alonso Zaragoza, executive administrator of his neighborhood advocacy group, drove through his predominantly Latino community of Belmont Cragin, he noticed restaurants were mostly empty and dark. Restaurants in majority-Latino communities have reported significant drops in sales since federal agents descended on the city in September.

So Zaragoza began organizing restaurant crawls, drawing hundreds to struggling Latino-owned eateries. His previous event began at a taco and tamales restaurant and ended with a Mexican ice cream shop. Along the way, street cart vendors hawked elote, cotton candy and balloons as a local musical group played folk and bluegrass music.

“The financial support for our businesses is needed more than ever now,” Zaragoza said. “It goes such a long way.”

‘A day without fear’

Delilah Martinez, a community organizer and owner of the Vault Gallerie in Pilsen, couldn’t stand the silence on her street anymore. She was used to seeing familiar faces on 18th Street — a woman selling candy with her baby strapped to her back, a paletero who smiled at her each afternoon. Then one week, they were gone.

“It broke my heart,” Martinez said. “The streets felt empty. Our people were putting their freedom at risk just to work.”

She began raising money online and started “Operation Buyout,” approaching vendors one by one to purchase everything they had. The first woman was shocked when Martinez handed her $500.

“I just wanted her to have a day of rest, a day without fear,” Martinez said.

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Among those Martinez helped recently was a baker from Mexico City who arrived in Chicago 24 years ago.

Each night, he works late, hands dusted with flour, kneading dough until they’re sore and aching. For those few quiet hours, after his four children are asleep, the world feels simpler.

“There is a magic when I’m baking,” he said in Spanish. “I feel free. When I’m angry, I feel like the bread will absorb it. So I try to be happy and at peace, even when I know the reality is different.”

By 3 a.m., he’s up again for his grocery store shift, juggling work and school drop-offs. For years, he’s sold birthday cakes and pan dulce “by word of mouth” from his small kitchen, dreaming of one day opening his own shop.

But the baker has also heard the stories: street vendors arrested on residential streets and federal agents circling his historically Mexican American neighborhood of Pilsen. Two of his friends have been detained. When he hears sirens and helicopters, he feels “sick with fear.”

“I’m afraid for my youngest daughter,” he said. “It would be horrible to leave her. … I can’t see myself without my children.”

Martinez led the baker to a table and pulled off a black cloth. A silver, restaurant-grade mixer gleamed under the fluorescent light. Martinez also handed him an envelope with $1,500 gathered from neighbors hoping to help support him when he feels unsafe selling his baked goods on the street.

The man’s hand flew up to cover his mouth. He kicked his legs and began to cry.

“Thank you so much,” he said, clutching a mixer attachment to his chest. “It’s beautiful.”

By MICHAEL CASEY

BOSTON (AP) — When Jim Sanborn was commissioned to create a sculpture at CIA headquarters, he wanted to do something that spoke to its world of spies and secret codes.

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The result was a 10-foot-tall, S-shaped copper screen called “Kryptos” that resembles a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine. One side features a series of staggered alphabets that are key to decoding the four encrypted messages on the other side.

“At the time, codes and encoding was an esoteric subject,” Sanborn said. “I wanted it to be less so, and I wanted it to be fun. … Any artist’s goal when they make an artwork is to have the viewer’s attention for as long as possible.”

Sanborn figured the first three messages on the sculpture, dedicated in 1990 and known as K1, K2 and K3, would be cracked relatively quickly, and they were.

But 35 years later, the fourth, K4, remains a mystery and a source of obsessive fascination among thousands of “Kryptos” fans. One person has contacted Sanborn every week for the past 20 years, trying to solve K4, and the artist received so many inquiries that he began charging $50 per submission to make it more manageable.

Now, Sanborn, who at age 79 has had a series of health scares in recent years, is auctioning off the solution to K4, anointing a new “Kryptos” keeper whom he hopes will keep its secrets and continue interacting with followers.

Finding the next keeper

Boston-based RR Auction launched the auction last month. It runs through Nov. 20, with the top bid currently at $201,841 for the “Kryptos” archive.

This undated photo provided by RR Auction Monday, Nov. 10, 2025, shows some of artist Jim Sanborn’s archive materials that are up for auction related to the 1990 Kryptos encrypted sculpture that was installed on the grounds CIA headquarters. (RR Auction via AP)

“Since its installation in 1990, ‘Kryptos’ has become a worldwide phenomenon,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction. “K4 has stumped professional cryptologists and code breakers as well as amateurs who have tried to solve it and read the message. The winner of this archive is now going to possess the secrets of ‘Kryptos.’”

The archive includes everything needed to solve K4, along with an alternate paragraph that the artist is calling K5. The original coding charts for K1, K2 and K3 will also be up for bid, along with the original scrambled texts, which Sanborn said he showed to the CIA’s Department of Historical Intelligence to ensure the agency understood there was nothing “untoward” on the sculpture.

Sanborn has created about 50 public sculptures, including a memorial for a 2019 mass shooting in Odessa, Texas, but he is best known for “Kryptos.” Over the years, snippets from the cryptic sculpture appeared on the dust jacket of the Dan Brown bestseller “The Da Vinci Code” and were mentioned in a chapter of Brown’s book “The Lost Symbol.”

Auction almost derailed

In September, Sanborn got a phone call from two “Kryptos” sleuths. Tipped off by the auction listing, writer and researcher Jarett Kobek asked playwright and journalist Richard Byrne to take photos of Sanborn’s papers at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Among the papers were Sanborn’s original scrambled texts.

Kobek said he had hoped to discover “a document that had some vague hint of about how K4 was encoded,” but was astonished to realize they had stumbled upon the text itself instead.

This photo provided by Jae Ko shows sculptor Jim Sanborn in Magdalena, N.M., 1995. (Jae Ko via AP)

Sanborn was initially “shocked” by the call, and he and his wife, Jae Ko, “just sort of put our heads in our hands.” He was mostly upset at himself for putting the texts into the archive — he has since sealed his papers so they can’t be accessed for the next 50 years. RR Auction also deleted any mention of the Smithsonian in connection with the auction.

“It was miserable, and it’s still miserable,” Sanborn said. “It’s very difficult. There’s a lot of regret and anguish.”

Sanborn initially figured that the discovery meant the auction could not proceed. But he decided to proceed anyway, while changing it from just offering the secrets to K4 to offering the entire archive. RR Auction also acknowledged the pair’s discovery on the auction description, though Kobek said that came weeks afterward.

“The important distinction is that they discovered it. They did not decipher it,” Sanborn said. “They do not have the key. They don’t have the method with which it’s deciphered. To the entire cryptographic community, that method is the real deal, and nobody has the method but me.”

Keeping K4 a secret

Elonka Dunin, co-moderator of the largest group of “Kryptos” enthusiasts, said most people she has talked with want K4 kept secret. “There is a very strong desire that we would like to know whether K4 is even solvable,” she said.

Sanborn came up with the texts, and a retired CIA cryptographer showed him several systems for encoding them. The paragraphs, he said, were “designed to unravel like a ball of string” or “nesting Russian dolls” and get increasingly difficult.

Still, Sanborn and RR Auction aren’t taking any chances. Sanborn unsuccessfully asked Kobek and Byrne to sign a nondisclosure agreement that included giving them a portion of the auction proceeds. RR Auction also sent the pair scores of emails threatening legal action for everything from trade secret violations to defamation.

Kobek, a self-described fan of “Kryptos” and the artist, has no plans to release the text publicly, though he read it over the phone to a New York Times journalist who was the first to report their discovery. Still, he wants the auction house and others to respect their discovery, noting that allies during World War II used weather reports to help solve encrypted messages.

“I’m the first person to say that it was not a mathematically cryptographic solve. One hundred percent. There’s no way that it was,” Kobek said. “But to pretend that this has no connection to the history of cryptography is little more than advertising for an auction.”