Caribbean-American United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams has announced his anticipated resignation ahead of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s assumption of Office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Williams, the son of a Jamaican-born immigrant physician who has served as the chief federal law enforcement officer in the district, said he intends to resign as a United States Attorney effective 11:59 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 13, 2024.

Williams said Edward Y. Kim, who currently serves as Deputy United States Attorney, will become the Acting United States Attorney on Williams’s departure.
Williams described his impending departure in a statement as “bittersweet,” saying it is “bitter in the sense that I am leaving my dream job, leading an institution I love that is filled with the finest public servants in the world.

“It is sweet in that I am confident I am leaving at a time when the Office is functioning at an incredibly high level – upholding and exceeding its already high standard of excellence, integrity, and independence,” he said. “That success is due to the career attorneys, staff members, and law enforcement agents of this Office.

“Working with them during my tenure has been a privilege of a lifetime,” Williams added. “They are worthy custodians of this Office’s tradition of doing the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons.  They are patriots. They are my family. And I will miss them dearly.”

Williams thanked President Joe Biden for nominating him in 2021 as United States Attorney and US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for leading the Department and supporting the Southern District of New York during his tenure.
“It has been an honor to serve the American people,” he said.

In addressing US Attorneys in the Southern District of New York last month, Garland said: “It feels a little bit full circle because my first visit was at Damian’s investiture. I got to talk to most of you then. So, now it seems like a good time to talk to you one more time.

“Mostly, what I just want to say is what Damian said, which is I am incredibly proud of you, and I am incredibly grateful for the terrific work that you’ve done,” he said.

“Over the past four years, this office has received public recognition, and rightfully so, for incredibly important cases — for disrupting the Sinaloa Cartel, for driving down violent crime, for successful prosecutions of the CEOs of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world, and for relentlessly pursuing public corruption without fear or favor,” the US Attorney General added.

“But this is just a sliver of the work you do, and I wish that the public could see all the rest of the work you do,” he continued. “The stuff that doesn’t make it to the headlines – the day in and day out work that you do; the time you take away from your families; the extraordinarily long days you spend and the risks that we all take. They would be extremely proud of you to see what true patriots all of you are.

“Now I want to say, while I care very much about the work that you do, I care even more about the way in which you do that work,” Garland said. “Yes, you are aggressive prosecutors, aggressive investigators, aggressive attorneys in service of the public. But in everything you do, you do it the right way. You follow the rule of law. You follow the Principles of Federal Prosecution in deciding who you should prosecute and who you shouldn’t prosecute.”

Garland said he may be coming to the end of his tenure at the US Justice Department but added: “I know that all of you will continue. You will continue in the Department’s mission, what has always been its mission: to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights.”

Trump has already announced that he will nominate Jay Clayton, a former corporate lawyer and the top Wall Street enforcer in the first Trump administration, as Williams’s successor.

Clayton has already reportedly pledged to pursue Trump’s quest in seeking revenge against those who prosecuted Trump in New York.
In an announcement on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump described Clayton as “a highly respected business leader, counsel and public servant.”

The US Senate must confirm Clayton as the next US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The Southern District of New York is regarded as one of the most illustrious federal prosecutor’s offices in the United States.

Go West, young Nets. Off to a dismal 4-13 start against Eastern Conference opponents, the youth-oriented, rebuilding Brooklyn Nets have made an early season habit of getting well when they venture toward that other coast. They’ll try to continue that mind-boggling trend when they visit the Memphis Grizzlies Friday night at FedExForum. Brooklyn (10-14) has […]

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“The Nutcracker” is a classic for a reason. The ballet is a holiday tradition at ballet companies around the world, and has served as inspiration for a great many ballerinas who saw it as children and realized they wanted to dance in it someday. 

It’s also quite old. The original “The Nutcracker” debuted in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1892, and is actually an adaptation of an 1819 by E.T.A. Hoffman. Perhaps the most famous version of the ballet, by George Balanchine, debuted at Lincoln Center in 1954, and has been performed there every year since. 

In Brooklyn, though, “The Nutcracker” is ever-evolving. Two different versions are opening Dec. 12: the Brooklyn Ballet’s “The Brooklyn Nutcracker” and the Mark Morris Dance Group’s “The Hard Nut.” 

A week before opening, Brooklyn Ballet’s founder and artistic director Lynn Parkerson watched closely as dancers practiced to Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s classic, lilting orchestrations. 

“The Brooklyn Nutcracker” retains many of the hallmarks of Balanchine’s ballet — the music, much of the dancing, the iconic snowy close to Act I. But it’s set in modern Brooklyn and is woven through with local culture and traditions. 

The show debuted in 2016, but started to come together in 2010, when Brooklyn Ballet choreographed the mechanical doll dance with a ballerina and a hip-hop dancer and performed it on the street. That dance is still part of the ballet today. 

Seeing Brooklyn at the ballet

“The community just went nuts for this kind of interaction between this community and the classical form,” Parkerson said. “We added more and more dances, more and more scenes, more costumes. It just kept growing and growing.”

At the Brooklyn Ballet, the story is centered not around the Nutcracker and Clara, but around Herr Drosselmeyer, who brings the Nutcracker to the Christmas party at the start of the ballet.

“It’s really about [Drosselmeyer] and his family and him being in the center of things,” Parkerson said. “It’s less about the brother breaking the nutcracker, and more about his dream, of old Brooklyn and then this new space that he’s wandering around in that is now.” 

Drosselmeyer isn’t a ballet dancer, but a pop-and-lock hip-hop dancer. In the classic battle scene, young dancers marching with prop rifles have been replaced by a fight between ballet and hip-hop dancers. 

For a long time, “The Brooklyn Nutcracker” didn’t feature the ferocious Rat King, the main antagonist of the Balanchine ballet. Then, a few years ago, the company welcomed a dancer who seemed destined to bring the character to life.

“We got to know a certain kind of dancer, a street dancer with this krumping style, and he had done the Rat King in a past life or something,” Parkerson said. “I immediately thought, we have to add that.” 

Artist Avram Finkelstein, a Brooklyn native who used to create art for the AIDS activist group ACT UP, created the sets alongside the Brooklyn Ballet team, Parkerson said. His projections bring the show to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the subway, and provide magical backdrops to famous dance sequences like “The Waltz of the Flowers.” 

“He’s just a phenomenal artist, and he’s from Brooklyn, he grew up in Brooklyn, and he knows the landmarks,” Parkerson said. “He’s the art director and did all the projections … kind of enhancing each scene, so you sort of travel from space to space.” 

Crossing through cultures

One of the most significant changes to “The Brooklyn Nutcracker” comes in Act II, as the Sugar Plum Fairy introduces sweets from around the world. In other productions, the procession includes “Arabian Coffee” and “Chinese Tea,” often with racially and culturally insensitive costumes and imitative dances. In recent years, many companies have re-imagined the sequence. 

In “The Brooklyn Nutcracker,” that scene has always been different.

“We have Chinese dancers doing a classical Chinese dance, and we have a Middle Eastern belly dancer instead of a ballet dancer imitating the form,” Parkerson said. “The classical Chinese dance is so beautiful that it made complete sense to bring that to the production, particularly when you live in a community when you have all these dancers and all these folks from all over the world.” 

Each dance is accompanied, as of last year, by a live musician — a Palestinian violinist, a Chinese flute player, African drummers. Elsewhere in the show, a beat-boxer accompanies the hip-hop dancers, and an accordion plays alongside a traditional Ukrainian folk dance. 

“We’re crossing different time periods and through the cultures of different people,” Parkerson said. “Each of the [sequences] has a traditional instrument that’s connected to that dance.” 

Tristan Grannum, the Brooklyn Ballet’s director of community engagement, is also a rehearsal director and a dancer in “The Brooklyn Nutcracker,” where he performs one of the ballet’s most iconic sequences – the Snow Pas de Deux, a tender dance between the Snow King and Snow Queen.

It’s his favorite part of the show, as a dancer. The Snow Pas typically has the King and Queen dressed in big, elaborate, frosty costumes. In “The Brooklyn Nutcracker,” the King wears a button up and dress pants, Grannum said, and the Queen a long, flowing dress. Now in his third year in the role, Grannum said he’s gotten more comfortable with the dance and better at expressing the love between the two characters. 

“For me, it really, really shows this love story,” he said. “I think through the viewer, you can create multiple stories from this. I get emotional even dancing it.”

Diversity in the theater

Grannum grew up in Flatbush, and has performed in ballet companies around the country. He said “The Brooklyn Nutcracker” is “the most diverse, the most innovative Nutcracker I’ve ever been in.”

It’s an ode to Brooklyn, he said, something any longtime resident will recognize and appreciate, and the show has given a platform to street dancers not usually recognized on stage.

“Typically, you see them dancing in very underground work, or in the train station, outside, doing it more for fun,” he said. “But to see them in a professional setting … you’re seeing moreso the value of their dance style, it’s just as important as ballet.”

There’s also value in the different body types, aesthetics, and styles of the dancers at the Brooklyn Ballet, he said, and the fact that Brooklynites might spot their own neighbors among the company. 

Grunnam also loves introducing young Brooklynites to “The Nutcracker” and to the world of ballet, and his job there is twofold — he dances, of course, and organizes $10 community matinee performances of “The Brooklyn Nutcracker.”

Often, the students who attend those performances have never seen a professional ballet before, he said, and when they meet Grunnam and his colleagues at the Brooklyn Ballet, they realize for the first time that they could be dancers, too.

“Most of the time, people’s connection to ballet and to dance is through ‘Nutcracker,’” Grunnam said. “You hear across the board from ballet dancers, ‘I became a ballet dancer because I went to see ‘The Nutcracker,’ so to know we’re able to give four to 5,000 students access to see this performance, that’s 4-5,000 potential pathways to becoming a ballet dancer … which is then also going to be diversifying the entire art form.” 

While his time dancing at the Brooklyn Ballet is coming to an end relatively soon, Grunnam intends to stay around in his other roles. While other companies started to prioritize diversity and cultural inclusivity after the pandemic — especially after the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 — those values have always been central at the Brooklyn Ballet.

“I think more people need just need to understand that Brooklyn Ballet has been doing the work before everyone else,” he said. “Brooklyn Ballet was doing that … since its inception 23 years ago. I want people to understand that our message has been throughout our history.” 

“The Brooklyn Nutcracker” opens on Dec. 12, with performances through Dec. 15, at The Theater at City Tech, 275 Jay St. between Tillary Street and Tech Place. Tickets start at $35. 

Заявление президента Джо Байдена о помиловании почти 1500 человек, находящихся под домашним арестом, и помиловании 39 человек, осужденных за ненасильственные преступления Америка была построена на […]

ON THIS DAY IN 1892, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle said, “The address by Mr. Cleveland at the Reform club dinner on Saturday night was such as a Democratic President elect ought to have made. It was general, not minute; suggestive, not specific. Although it had these characteristics it was not evasive or double-tongued in any […]

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