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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration is under fire for signing off on a building plan that allows a new luxury high-rise on Manhattan's western edge to have a separate entrance for low-income residents.

About 20 percent of the units in the 33-story tower will be reserved for low- and middle-income residents. But all the affordable units will be grouped in one area, and those tenants will have to enter through a separate door.

"This developer must go back, seal the one door and make it so all residents go through the same door," City Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal said. "It's a disgrace."

U.S.

Lack Of Affordable Housing Puts The Squeeze On Poor Families

New Jersey used to be known as "the nation's medicine chest," but over the last two decades, many of the state's pharmaceutical industry jobs have dried up or moved elsewhere and left millions of square feet of office space, warehouses and laboratories sitting empty.

One of those sites is the 116-acre corporate campus of the Swiss drug maker Roche in Nutley, N.J. There are dozens of buildings on this campus, 10 miles west of midtown Manhattan. In fact, there are enough bio and chem labs, offices and auditoriums to fill up the entire Empire State Building. But since December, all of that space — 2 million square feet of it — has been vacant, the laboratories dark and the sidewalks deserted.

"When this was a thriving site, this sidewalk would have been busy with folks walking up and down," says Darien Wilson, one of just 38 Roche employees still working at the site as the company tries to sell the property. "We had great amenities for people, like on-site childcare, you had dinners to-go where you could order food by lunch and take it home with you if you were working late. We had dry cleaning," he says.

Five years ago, Roche acquired Genentech, moved its management to San Francisco and started to slowly withdraw from New Jersey. That's a pretty typical story for what's been happening in the state. In the last 20 years, New Jersey went from having more than 20 percent of U.S. pharma manufacturing jobs to less than 10 percent.

"Essentially, every time there's a merger or one company acquires another company, there's a reduction in force, and there's been furious mergers and acquisitions in the pharma industry, particularly over the past 10 years," says James Hughes, dean of the school of public policy at Rutgers.

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Israel broadened its assault on Gaza on Tuesday, wrecking the region's only power plant and killing dozens of Palestinians.

Barrages "destroyed Hamas's media offices, the home of a top leader and what Palestinians said was a devastating hit on the only electricity plant," The New York Times reports.

The bombings came on a day when hope briefly arose about a new cease-fire. Both Israeli and Palestinian officials in the West Bank discussed the possibility.

But Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, rejected the idea.

"We don't accept any condition of ceasefire," Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif said on Hamas broadcast outlets. "There is no ceasefire without the stop of the aggression and the end of the siege."

With Tuesday's bombings, which the Guardian described as "the most relentless and widespread" of the three-week-old conflict, the Palestinian death toll has exceeded 1,200.

The shelling of the power plant, which Palestinian officials described as taking a devastating hit, will bring additional hardship. The lack of electricity will make existing problems with water and sewage far worse.

"We need at least one year to repair the power plant, the turbines, the fuel tanks and the control room," Fathi Sheik Khalil of the Gaza energy authority told the Guardian. "Everything was burned."

On All Things Considered, NPR's Emily Harris described how one family in Gaza spent the Muslim holiday of Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan.

Some family members have been killed, others injured and nearly all displaced. "There are 53 people staying in this three-bedroom apartment," Harris reported, "including, the mothers say, at least eight infants."

On the diplomatic front, there was disagreement between the U.S. and Israel about what had been said in private conversations between top officials.

The White House dismissed as "totally false" a report on Israel's Channel 1 that President Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a telephone call Sunday that Israel must immediately end its military offensive in Gaza and was not in a position to choose which countries could mediate a cease-fire.

"We have seen reports of an alleged POTUS-Netanyahu transcript; neither reports nor alleged transcript bear any resemblance to reality," tweeted the National Security Council's press account.

For their part, Netanyahu's aids denied Secretary of State John Kerry's characterization of one of his many conversations with the Israeli prime minister. Kerry suggested Tuesday that Netanyahu had asked him to "try to get a humanitarian cease-fire," but the prime minister's staff said that the cease-fire idea was actually Kerry's.

Small fatty fish like mackerel, herring, sardines and anchovies are high in omega-3s, vitamin D and low on the food chain.

Those shining attributes have earned them plenty of nods from doctors and environmentalists alike, as we've reported. They're not among the most popular seafoods in the U.S., though, partly because of their fishy taste.

But if you knew that eating these fish would mean shrinking your carbon footprint a wee bit, would that convince you to buy them over say, that bag of frozen shrimp you just mindlessly threw into your grocery cart?

Robert Parker is betting that if you care about eating greener, you'll want to know about how much fuel it takes to catch your favorite fish. He's a Ph.D. candidate from Nova Scotia, studying the fishing industry at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

Parker and Peter Tyedmers, who directs the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, recently published an analysis of a fishing industry fuel use database Tyedmers developed. Their analysis finds that fisheries producing the small fish – sardines, mackerel, and anchovies — are "among the most energy and carbon-efficient forms of protein production." The paper appeared in the journal Fish and Fisheries on July 4.

They also found that fishing for shrimp and lobster are almost as fuel-intensive as raising livestock. As we've reported, raising livestock has more of an impact on the environment than any other food we eat.

For example, Parker says, to catch a metric ton (about 2,200 pounds) of sardines or anchovies, it takes about 5 gallons of fuel.

In contrast, to get the same amount of lobster or shrimp, you'd burn an average of 2,100 to 2,600 gallons of fuel.

Now, U.S. and Canadian lobster outfits "are a bit more efficient because of the higher lobster biomass in the ocean," he says. But they are still burning close to 264 gallons of fuel to catch those 2,200 pounds of crustacean.

So why is all this fuel getting burned? As the fishing industry has evolved in the last century from throwing out a few lines over the local dock to industrialized operations, we've been able to fish in more parts of the ocean and freeze our catch right on the boats.

But "a consequence of many of these advancements has been the increased reliance of fisheries on larger vessels, the motorization of fishing fleets with more powerful engines and the increased demand by fisheries for fossil fuels to power everything from propulsion and gear operation to on-board processing, refrigeration and ancillary services such as navigational aids," the paper says.