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The installation of Deborah David’s new kitchen faucet was a $180 job. But it lies at the heart of an expanding $400 billion commercial war.

Some of the biggest names in e-commerce, along with a growing pool of start-ups, are vying for a chunk of the fragmented, quotidian, heretofore entirely local market of electricians, plumbers, dog walkers and other manual labor, known broadly as home services.

The work may be mundane but the money and stakes are huge. Angie’s List, the 20-year-old subscription service that offers reviews of local service providers to members, estimates the home services industry is $400 billion. Others put it at more than $800 billion. Read more →

The study

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The number of black immigrants in the United States has more than quadrupled since 1980, a new study has found, and that group is expected to make up an increasing share of the nation’s black population in the decades ahead.

The study, released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, found that 3.8 million black immigrants lived in the United States in 2013, and their share of the black population in the country “is projected to rise from 9 percent today to 16 percent by 2060,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of Hispanic research at Pew and an author of the study along with Monica Anderson.

That differs from the Hispanic population, Mr. Lopez said, because the share of Hispanics in America who are immigrants is declining. Read more →

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At the heart of the Giuliani-led critique of the president’s patriotism is the suggestion that Barack Obama has never expressed love for the United States.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, has even challenged the media to find examples of Mr. Obama expressing such affection.

Has the president done so?

Yes, he has.

A review of his public remarks provides multiple examples.

In 2008, when he was still a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama uttered the magic words in Berlin, during a speech to thousands.

“I also know how much I love America,” he said at the time.

He did it again that same year during his speech at the Democratic National Convention, observing that “I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.”

Mr. Obama used a similar construction, as president, in 2011, during a town hall meeting in Illinois, when he recalled “why I love this country so much.” Read more →

The U.S. census

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Immigration from Africa has exploded all over the country. The U.S. census reports that 1.6 million African immigrants live in the U.S.—or 4 percent of the country’s foreign born population–and the influx has exceeded 300 years of the slave trade. In New York City, the African-born population increased about 39 percent, to 128,200, over the past decade, according to the Department of Planning. African groups do not make the city’s top-20 list of the foreign-born, but represent a growing presence among recent entrants to the city, notes the planning agency.

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BankMobile says it is the first full-service mobile-only bank.

Taking a trip to your local bank may no longer be necessary.

BankMobile, a division of Customers Bank, launched Wednesday, claiming to be the first bank to allow customers to open checking and savings accounts and even get a credit line solely through a mobile app.

BankMobile hopes to cater to wired millennials, who are expected to make up 50% of the workforce by 2020.

Of course an app still can’t dispense cash, the most analog of financial instruments. To solve that problem, BankMobile will offer customers access to 55,000 ATMs nationwide, and reimburse them the cost of ATM surcharges. The ATMs, however, must be part of the STAR network. There are about 5,800 STAR network ATMs in the tristate area, according to the state Department of Labor. Prominent retail banks Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, though, are not part of the STAR network. Read more →

Queens Library

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The applicants clustered on Kissena Boulevard, clutching documents from around the world, trading familiar stories with strangers in a driving rain outside the Queens Library in Flushing. There were the police encounters, the school visits, the fraught hospital trips — all negotiated without the bureaucratic lubricant of local identification.

“We feel naked,” said Mauricio Peña, 34, who is originally from Honduras. “We feel like we don’t exist.”

At his side, a peer, who immigrated from Malaysia 17 years ago, nodded beneath his umbrella.

Such was the scene at enrollment sites across New York City on Monday, with crowds gathering by the hundreds as the de Blasio administration introduced the country’s largest municipal identification program. Read more →

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For generations, the label has been at once exclusive and widely misapplied, available to millions in earnest, but vulnerable to line-blurring by suburban peers who claimed New York City residency without an address to match.

Could a New Yorker be identified by a harried gait? A brash retort? The knowledge that L trains are to be avoided on weekends?

Perhaps. But beginning this week, the evidence will, for the first time, be wallet-size.

here are the link to make an appointment for an IDNYC

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/idnyc/card/make-an-appointment.page

https://idnyc.appointment-plus.com/