Tag: new jersey

Red alert in New Jersey! China could be spying on your tolls through E-ZPass.

Did you think paying tolls in New Jersey was just a routine task? Think again! The New Jersey Turnpike Authority, in a move reeking of leftist negligence, just handed out an 11-year lawsuit contract for the E-ZPass system to a Singapore-based company with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Yes, you read that right: while you’re shelling out cash to cross a bridge, Beijing might be spying on your license plate. Thanks, incompetent progressives!

The company in question is ST Electronics, a subsidiary of the Singaporean giant ST Kinetics, and several conservative lawmakers have already sounded the alarm.

Why? Because behind this facade of modern technology lurks suspicious connections to the CCP, a dictatorship that not only oppresses its own people but has tentacles in every corner of the globe.

While the left embraces their fantasy of a borderless world, China is rubbing its hands with glee over our data.https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/1889661565512667263

Let’s be real: this isn’t some tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory from lunatics. Republican Senator Tom Cotton has already warned that Asian companies like this are often puppets of the Chinese regime, collecting data for its global surveillance machine.

And here in New Jersey, the Turnpike Authority handed them the keys to the highway—literally—without batting an eye. Where were the Democrats? Probably whining about climate change while ignoring this very real threat.

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New Jersey Governor Proposes Marijuana Tax Hike

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) wants to hike a special tax on cannabis from $2.50 to $15 an ounce to fund social service and violence intervention programs with tens of millions of dollars in new revenue.

“In just five years, cannabis has gone from destroying lives—in the form of excessive criminal sentences—to helping save lives,” Murphy said in his budget address Tuesday.

Murphy’s plan comes about two months after the state Cannabis Regulatory Commission hiked the tax from $1.24 to $2.50 an ounce in December.

The tax, known as the social equity excise fee, is paid by cannabis cultivators. The money goes to a dedicated fund for social equity programs and investing in communities hurt by marijuana prohibition, and another portion is allocated to programs to divert youth from cannabis.

As of August 2024, the tax has brought in more than $6 million, which is all sitting unspent, according to the cannabis agency. That money must be allocated by the Legislature and governor under the state’s cannabis legalization law.

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Dozens Of New Jersey Marijuana Businesses Push To Legalize Home Cultivation, Despite Resistance From Governor And Legislative Leaders

Dozens of New Jersey small marijuana businesses and advocacy groups are calling on the state legislature to allow adults to cultivate their own cannabis at home—seemingly contradicting repeated claims from the governor and legislative leaders that the reform could undermine the evolving legal marketplace.

And as Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is set to term out at the end of the year, activists are drawing attention where his potential successors stand on the issue as well.

The more than 50 businesses and advocates, which formed a collective known as the New Jersey Home Grow Coalition last year, signed an open letter to Senate President Nicholas Scutari (D), rejecting the idea that the market needs more time to mature before people can be permitted to grow their own plants for personal use.

Unlike most other states that have enacted cannabis legalization, New Jersey continues to prohibit home cultivation for adults or medical marijuana patients.

“Even with our growing industry there’s no hope of access to the clean, consistent, strain-specific medicine that I need for my epilepsy,” Andrea Raible, co-founder of the NJ Homegrow Coalition, said in a press release. “Politicians are concerned with adult use profits while we are concerned with life threatening health conditions and facing prison for plants.”

In the open letter to Scutari, who has broadly championed cannabis reform but has recently resisted calls for home cultivation, the members of the New Jersey marijuana community said “discussions on home cultivation in New Jersey have stalled, attributed to allowing the industry ‘time to mature.’”

“As licensed cannabis operators, stakeholders in the industry, and relevant organizations, we respectfully disagree with this statement. The legalization of medical home cultivation will not negatively impact the legal state cannabis industry,” they said. “We firmly support the immediate legalization of medical home cultivation for patients and caregivers. We also endorse additional legislation to be introduced that allows for the legalization of personal use home cultivation safely and equitably.”

The advocates and stakeholders are voicing support for an amendment to expand a pair of bills seeking to provide for medical cannabis home cultivation, making it so the plant limit would be replaced with an allowance to “allow up to 100 square feet of mature cannabis plant grow canopy area.”

“This would allow patients and caretakers to have the ability to properly pheno-hunt and cultivate an amount that meets individual needs,” they said. “Additionally, this change would mitigate the potential for exploiting the law through the cultivation of massive cannabis plants.”

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Some drones over US bases may have been conducting surveillance: NORTHCOM general

A senior U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) official told members of the Senate that some of the 350 drones that flew over military installations and sensitive areas last year may have been conducting surveillance.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, who is commander of NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), was questioned about the drones during a Senate Armed Services Committee Budget hearing on Thursday.

Drones were spotted flying all over the country last year, though most notably in New Jersey. They were also flying over military installations, including Joint Base Langley, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., asked Guillot about the threat the unmanned aircraft pose to military operations, facilities and personnel.

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New Jersey Climate Lawsuit Dismissed with Prejudice: Court Rejects Baseless Claims Against Oil Giants Causing Climate Change

A New Jersey lawsuit accusing major oil companies of contributing to climate change has been dismissed.

The lawsuit, spearheaded by New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin in 2022, targeted industry behemoths like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute.

It alleged that their operations exacerbated climate-related damages across the state.

According to the lawsuit:

Plaintiffs assert that Defendants have engaged in a decades-long campaign to discredit the science of global warming, conceal the dangers posed by their fossil fuel products, and misrepresent their efforts to combat climate change.

They claim that despite knowing about the adverse climate impacts of their products since the 1950s, Defendants failed to adequately warn consumers, the public, and decision-makers about these risks.

Defendants are alleged to have engaged in deceptive marketing practices, including promoting fossil fuel products as environmentally friendly or “clean,” while downplaying their role in contributing to climate change.

Plaintiffs contend that these deceptive campaigns have led to an increase in greenhouse gas pollution, resulting in sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and other climate change impacts that have affected New Jersey residents.

The decision, delivered on Wednesday by Superior Court Judge Douglas Hurd, concluded that these legally operating companies could not be held accountable for global emissions.

The dismissal, rendered with prejudice, firmly shuts the door on any possibility of reopening the case.

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White House reveals Trump explanation for NJ drones — and raises even more questions

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the drones that spooked New Jersey residents last month were “not the enemy,” reading aloud President Trump’s assessment that many were doing “research” — an assertion that generated new questions.

“After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons,” Leavitt said, reading Trump’s dictation at her first briefing.

“Many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones. In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy.”

The explanation did not clarify what research was being performed — in many cases near military bases — or detail what “other reasons” were at play.

Some leading politicians have been skeptical of the official explanation that the drones were innocent.

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White House Clarifies ‘Dronegate’: New Jersey UAPs Authorized By FAA For “Research Purposes”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt provided much-needed transparency regarding the “dronegate” incident that sparked nationwide concerns over potential threats from China and Russia.

In a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Leavitt said the drones spotted over New Jersey and New York in December had been authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration for “research purposes.” 

“An update on the New Jersey drones. After research and study, the drones flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons. Many of these drones are hobbyist and recreational drones that enjoy flying drones,” Leavitt said during her press conference. 

She concluded on the drone subject: “This was not the enemy.” 

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New Jersey Teachers No Longer Required to Pass Basic Literacy Test

Aspiring teachers in New Jersey are no longer required to pass a basic skills in order to be certified.

New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy passed Act 1669 as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June to address a teacher shortage, Read Lion reports. The law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass the Praxis Core Test, a basic skills test for reading, writing, and math that is administered by the state’s Commissioner of Education.

“We need more teachers,” Democratic Sen. Jim Beach, who sponsored the bill, said in May 2024 when the chamber cleared the bill in a 34-2 vote. “This is the best way to get them.”

Just a few months prior, Murphy also signed a similar bill into law that established an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement. According to Read Lion, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), a teachers union, was a driving force behind the bill and called the testing requirement “an unnecessary barrier to entering the profession.” NJEA is associated with the National Education Association (NEA).

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Drones ‘the size of buses’ are still invading New Jersey… as experts reveal why crisis has gone silent

While official reports of eerie drone-like UFOs dropped over the holidays, New Jersey residents are still coming forward with bizarre encounters.

Two witnesses in Manalapan Township, for example, videotaped a bus-sized, 25- to 50-foot-long black triangle UFO that they saw ‘pull off a high g [force] maneuver over a residential area’ just days before Christmas.

The sighting, which lasted at least one minute, ended with the object zooming ‘in the general direction of McGuire [Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst]’ — matching a persistent pattern of ‘drone’ UFO incursions over US bases in recent years.

Another New Jersey skywatcher recorded what they described as a classic ‘flying saucer’ with an ‘aura or haze around object’ just three miles off the coast of Atlantic City.

And still more Garden State witnesses now say they saw as many as 20 to 30 drones just this Wednesday night, which ‘kind of hovered and all looked like miniature aircraft,’ in an account posted to Facebook. ‘Very disconcerting for sure,’ one witness said.

Some experts attribute the drop in official reports to law enforcement to expanded drone flight bans by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) across the tristate area.

But others, including former chief of the FBI‘s counter-drone unit Rob D’Amico, believe most of the sightings were errors and ‘hysteria’ to begin with, suggesting that the decline might be nothing more than a case of the ‘mystery drone’ fever breaking. 

‘I truly think that 90 percent of these sightings are manned aircraft,’ D’Amico said. ‘People have never looked up in the sky before to notice how crowded it is.’

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Drones Run Amok

Drones, drones, everywhere drones. For a few weeks, clusters of drones of unknown provenance were recently seen flying in the skies above New Jersey. Local, state, and federal authorities claimed that they did not know whose drones they were. The expression “baseless conspiracy theory” saw an uptick in usage once again as some in the media scoffed at the proliferating hypotheses about what was going on. Incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump, opined that the machines should be shot down, but the Joe Biden administration did not agree, lending significant support to the simplest hypothesis of them all: that the drones have been used by the government itself for whatever its purposes may be. Having once recognized this very real possibility, Trump cryptically intoned, “Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don’t want to tell the people.”

State officials, spurred by their constituents, got to work attempting to find ways to halt the drones overhead, suggesting that, if the executive branch would not itself prevent certain unnameable rogue government departments from violating the Posse Comitatus Act, then at least by asserting the sub-federal authority enjoyed by states, it would be possible to stop whoever was behind whatever the operation may have been. New Jersey is not Nordstream, which U.S. citizens were quite willing to forget about and pretend never happened, despite in all likelihood having paid for the terrorist act of sabotage.

On December 19, 2024, the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) issued a one-month ban on the flying of UAVs over swaths of New Jersey, declaring the areas to be “national defense airspace,” and oddly claiming that “deadly force” could be deployed in response to violations of the ban. It is unclear what the use of “deadly force” against inanimate machines might mean, but it ominously suggests that the persons behind the drones might be subject to summary execution. Or perhaps the reference to “deadly force” was just part of a cover story composed in order to dispel the most plausible available hypothesis, undoubtedly made even more popular by Trump’s pronouncement that, “The government knows what is happening.” Having himself been the object of attempted assassinations by figures with rather bizarre back stories and curious connections, Trump understandably canceled a planned trip to New Jersey. The terrifying truth is that, with the advent of clusters of weaponized drones the size of insects, there really is nowhere and no way to hide from a determined killer with access to the latest and greatest lethal technologies developed by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—fully funded by U.S. taxpayers).

Regardless of who may have launched the mysterious drones, the implication for U.S. citizens is that at long last they have been subjected to the specter of insecurity and danger posed by the hovering overhead of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which may or may not bear lethal payloads, and which may or may not be monitoring the movements of specific targets, whose names may or may not be found on government “kill don’t capture” lists.

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