Kevin Tampone

3 days ago | syracuse.com | Kevin Tampone

The administration of President Donald Trump is considering stripping the name of a famed abolitionist with Central New York ties from a U.S. Navy ship that had previously been named in her honor. The USNS Harriet Tubman is among the ships named for prominent Black Americans, abolitionists, labor leaders and others that the Defense Department might rename, according to CBS News. Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and eventually settled in Auburn, west of Syracuse.

3 days ago | syracuse.com | Kevin Tampone

Syracuse, N.Y. — Superintendent Anthony Davis was the highest-paid employee in the Syracuse City School District during the 2023-2024 school year, according to state and district records. Davis’ salary for the year was $255,000. That’s the amount in the contract he signed when he took over as permanent superintendent in December 2022. Before that, he had been serving as interim superintendent in the district and earning a rate of $895 per day.

4 days ago | syracuse.com | Kevin Tampone

New federal hiring guidelines from the White House include a series of essay questions that amount to a presidential loyalty test, critics said. The new guidelines are aimed at candidates for civil service jobs. The positions are not political appointments. Hiring for those positions is supposed to be based on merit, not ideology, and the jobs themselves are meant to be insulated from politics. The positions include everything from janitors and nurses to lawyers and economists, according to Axios.

4 days ago | syracuse.com | Kevin Tampone

Syracuse, N.Y. — The population increased in nearly every town in Onondaga County between 2023 and 2024, according to new data from the Census Bureau. The population was up in every town in the county, except for two. The population in Fabius declined 0.05% to 1,974 last year and the population in DeWitt was down 0.27% to 25,345. The town of Lysander had the biggest population increase in the county in 2024 at more than 0.59%.

5 days ago | syracuse.com | Kevin Tampone

President Donald Trump reposted a bizarre conspiracy theory about former President Joe Biden on Truth Social on Saturday night. Trump shared a post from another user stating Biden was killed in 2020 and suggesting he was replaced with “clones, doubles” and “robotic engineered soulless mindless entities,” according to NBC News. That’s false. The user who originally made the post is anonymous and often spreads outlandish claims, NBC said.