Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about new data on organ donations in New York State. We’ll also get details on charges against an official of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in connection with a failed assassination plot in Brooklyn.
For the first time, the share of eligible New Yorkers who have signed up to be organ donors has passed 50 percent.
New figures being released today show that 7.9 million people in New York State have given permission for their organs to be used for transplants or research. That works out to 50.3 percent of those eligible, up from 48 percent at the end of last year.
Aisha Tator, the executive director of Donate Life New York State, a nonprofit that works to increase organ, eye and tissue donation, said the figure was a significant milestone, even if it was well below the national average of 64 percent. New York has long trailed other states in sign-ups, and Dr. James McDonald, the state health commissioner, said that New York was “still not anywhere close to leading the nation on this.”
Tator said that the number of people registered as donors had doubled in the last 10 years, as her group worked with state agencies to put sign-up messages in more places than on the forms drivers see when they renew their licenses.
While more than 90 percent of donor registrations come through the Department of Motor Vehicles, New York is now the only state where someone can simultaneously register to vote and to be an organ donor.
Tator said that her group had also worked to make it possible to sign up through the state’s health insurance marketplace, created under the Affordable Care Act. Someone can also register to be an organ donor when applying for a hunting and fishing license, and the state’s student financial aid agency is working to incorporate a registration question in electronic applications.
“Our strategy has been an ‘if you build it, they will come’ kind of thing,” Tator said. “Just keep presenting the opportunity.”
At the same time, McDonald said, “we just don’t have enough organ donations.”
New York has the third-highest number of patients on the national transplant waiting list: around 8,000, down 20 percent from a decade ago, Tator said. Roughly 400 New Yorkers die every year waiting for a transplant — more than one a day. Their deaths are troubling because they are preventable.
Tator said that a majority of those on the list need a kidney transplant. The average waiting time for a suitable kidney in New York is more than five years. Some would-be patients wait far longer: Assemblywoman Yudelka Tapia, a Democrat from the Bronx, has talked about how her son was on the waiting list for 16 years, starting when he was 13, until the call came in 2021 that a match had been found.
She said that she was now looking for a match for her youngest son, who is 26, also has kidney disease and is on dialysis.
She said that the donor registry gave families like hers hope. “Being a donor is knowing that you’re going to save a life,” she said, “but sometimes you save a family.”
Tator said there is an upstate-downstate divide in donor registrations. North of Westchester County, more than 50 percent of the eligible population has signed up for the donor registry, she said. In one county, Jefferson, in the state’s Northern Tier, the figure is 79.1 percent.
But downstate, in New York City and the surrounding suburban counties, the picture is “not so good,” Tator said. In the Bronx, she said, only 30.6 percent of the population had registered. Queens is not much higher at 30.8 percent. The figure for Brooklyn is 37.1 percent; for Staten Island, 34.6 percent.
Manhattan stands out, at 60.4 percent.
Obviously, the city — which accounts for nearly half of the state’s population — has a higher proportion of residents who do not have driver’s licenses. But Mark Schroeder, the commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles, said he wanted to increase the numbers in the five boroughs. “When I learned there are 8,000 New Yorkers on a waiting list,” he said, “I was upset about that.”
Schroeder said that registry sign-ups had done especially well at the License Express on West 30th Street in Manhattan, an office that concentrates on license renewals and vehicle registrations. Roughly one-third of those who went to the License Express location last year registered to be donors, he said.
But Tator said that the decision by the Department of Motor Vehicles to extend the time that drivers’ licenses are valid to eight years, from four years, created a hiccup for Donate Life New York State. Drivers saw the registry sign-up pitch only half as often as before.
Tator’s staff now explains the sign-up process to new D.M.V. employees. “I call them ambassadors, the Donate Life ambassadors,” Schroeder said. “They’re recipients or family members. When they tell their story, people listen. Or when an 8-year-old girl who’s had two heart transplants shows up and does a little dance, it blows everyone away.”
Weather
Expect sunshine with temperatures in the mid-70s. Tonight, mostly clear skies with temperatures in the high 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect today; suspended tomorrow (for Shemini Atzeret).
The latest New York news
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A new mayoral challenger: Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist from Queens, is joining the list of candidates hoping to replace Mayor Eric Adams.
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U.S. charges an Iranian Revolutionary Guards official in an assassination plot
A failed plot to kill Masih Alinejad, a human-rights activist who had criticized Iran’s repression of women, has already led to murder-for-hire charges against members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran.
Now federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged a senior official in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and three other men connected to the Iranian government with participating in the plot to assassinate Alinejad in Brooklyn in 2022.
The plot was disrupted by the U.S. government.
The new charges are the first to directly accuse an official in the Revolutionary Guards: Ruhollah Bazghandi, who was described in an indictment made public on Tuesday as a brigadier general. The indictment said the U.S. Treasury Department called him a counterintelligence official who had been involved in assassination plots against journalists, Israeli citizens and others whom Iran considered enemies.
“It is very significant that now we have proof that I.R.G.C. members, the senior members of the Revolutionary Guards, were sitting in Iran and ordering a guy in New York to kill a U.S. citizen,” Alinejad told The New York Times on Tuesday. She added that she was now “more determined to give voice to Iranian people, especially women, who actually face the same killers within their country.”
The charges were announced on the same day that Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel amid the conflict that has enveloped the region over the past year. His visit coincided with a missile attack by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, on an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv, and with a strike by Israel near the largest public health facility in Lebanon.
METROPOLITAN diary
A Piano in Bryant Park
Dear Diary:
Elegant ebony grand in afternoon sun, awkwardly balanced on cobblestone, amid benches, fountains, a great square of lawn.
Passers-by circle it cautiously, as they would a fallen meteor. Its shiny keys synthetic, out of place among the earthy greens and browns of the park.
Now a pianist, hair cinched back in a bun, regal bearing, lowers her hands, begins. A soprano, in white silk, sings
the still fresh words of Walt Whitman, launches them into summer air, where they mix with the honks and sirens of 42nd Street.
A duet of city and song, urban harmony that ruffles senses as it soothes souls. The sky darkens — storm clouds from the west
move in, veil the park in shadow. Now the pianist squints at her score, and the wind is a brutal page turner.
— Jimmy Roberts
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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