Tag: new york

Migrants Protest for More Free Government Benefits in New York City

A group of several dozen migrants joined liberal Democrat politicians in New York City on Thursday to protest for even more government benefits for “newcomers.”

The New York Immigration Coalition joined a group of elected Democrat officials on the steps of City Hall to demand more money from the city budget to be dedicated to migrants, according to Caribbean Life.

The activists demanded an array of higher spending, including an additional $109 million for free legal services for immigrants, $5 million for language services, $25 million in support for two city programs for illegal aliens, and an end to policies that evict migrants from shelters after a prescribed time.

Council Member Alexa Avilés, for one, demanded that New York Mayor Eric Adams increase spending for migrants, and added, “Our priorities remain crystal clear: legal services, transfer schools, language justice and more.”

Council Member Shahana Hanif, who has advocated for permanent free housing for migrants, insisted that New York City should prioritize providing “quality education, good jobs, adequate healthcare, and dignified housing, reflect our unwavering commitment to building a city that uplifts all New Yorkers, regardless of their immigration status and no matter when they arrived.”

Hanif went on to claim that Biden’s tidal wave of illegal immigrants are “our new neighbors” who she claims face “roadblocks … when accessing housing, employment, and education.”

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Mayor defends NYPD response after officers seen punching pro-Palestinian protesters

New York City Mayor Eric Adams defended the police department’s response to a pro-Palestinian street demonstration in Brooklyn over the weekend, calling video of officers repeatedly punching men lying prone on the ground an “isolated incident.”

“Look at that entire incident,” Adams said on the “Mornings on 1” program on the local cable news channel NY1. He complained that protesters who marched through Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge section on Saturday had blocked traffic, spit at officers and, in once instance, climbed on top of a moving city bus. “I take my hat off to the Police Department, how they handled an unruly group of people.”

“People want to take that one isolated incident that we’re investigating. They need to look at the totality of what happened in that bedroom community,” Adams added.

Footage shot by bystanders and independent journalists shows police officers intercepting a march in the street, shoving participants toward the sidewalk, and then grabbing some people in the crowd and dragging them down to the asphalt. Officers can be seen repeatedly punching at least three protesters, in separate incidents, as they lay pinned on the ground.

A video shot by videographer Peter Hambrecht and posted on X shows an officer in a white shirt punching a protester while holding his throat. Hambrecht said the arrests took place after police told the crowd to disperse.

“They were aware they might get arrested, but many times people use that to justify the beating which is obviously ridiculous,” Hambrecht told The Associated Press in a text message.

Independent journalist Katie Smith separately recorded video of an officer unleashing a volley of punches on a man pinned to the ground, hitting him at least five times with a closed fist.

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Is This Suburban New York Charity a Terrorist Front Group?

At first glance, the Westchester Peace Action Committee Foundation (WESPAC) seems unremarkable: a sleepy community organization with just one part-time staffer, a modest office in White Plains, N.Y., and little by way of public events.

But the group raked in $2.4 million in 2022—more than three times as much as it raised in 2020, according to public tax filings. The charity in 2022 spent nearly $1.5 million on “office expenses,” a category the IRS says should only cover “supplies, telephone, postage.”

“This is all very strange, it seems like they’re trying to obfuscate what they’re really spending their money on,” said former IRS tax law specialist and nonprofit consultant Patrick Sternal. “This doesn’t look like a particularly transparent organization, this filing raises all sorts of questions.”

A new lawsuit could point to some answers.

In May, families of the victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel filed suit against National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, both of which, the plaintiffs allege, are “collaborators and propagandists for Hamas.” Buried in the suit is a brief reference to WESPAC, which the suit names as the “official ‘fiscal sponsor'” of National Students for Justice in Palestine.

“The financial interactions between WESPAC and its anti-Israel clientele is intentionally opaque to largely shield from public view the flow of funds between and among them,” the lawsuit reads.

Fiscal sponsorships are IRS-designated arrangements in which parent organizations accept donations on behalf of their subsidiaries. Legally speaking, there is no distinction between WESPAC and National Students for Justice in Palestine. If the latter is indeed proven to be a Hamas collaborator, the former would be as well.

The IRS created the “fiscal sponsorship” designation so that established charities could help incubate new initiatives that would spin off into their own independent organizations after a certain period of time. But in recent years, fiscal sponsorships have become a critical tool for left-wing activists and donors such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar to quickly mobilize “grassroots” campaigns on hot-button issues while hiding donors behind the causes.

For decades, WESPAC’s fiscal sponsorship has helped it to avoid scrutiny leveled at similar groups. According to its annual tax filings, WESPAC is just a small charity devoted to “current affairs education.” The group has even managed to remain under the radar as fiscal sponsorships connected to the left-wing Tides Foundation have been linked to a number of illegal protests.

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Public Art Portal Intended to Dismantle Argument For Borders Needs a Border to Protect It

The Portal, a public art installation intended to demonstrate how borders hinder human affinity and connectivity, now needs a border and 24/7 security to protect it from undesirables.

Oh, the irony.

The continuous live video feed, which allows Dubliners and New Yorkers to see each other and interact, has been beset with a deluge of anti-social behavior, including people flashing their private parts and engaging in other lewd, drunken and offensive behavior.

That wasn’t the intention of the artist behind the project, with Lithuanian Benediktas Gylys asserting that, “Portals are an invitation to meet people above borders and differences and to experience our world as it really is – united and one.”

“The livestream provides a window between distant locations, allowing people to meet outside of their social circles and cultures, transcend geographical boundaries, and embrace the beauty of global interconnectedness,” he added.

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He Was Sentenced to a Decade in Prison for Having Unlicensed Weapons

A New York City man on Monday was sentenced to a decade in prison after a jury convicted him of a slew of violent felonies. Most intriguing, though, is that there were no victims because there was no violence.

Dexter Taylor, 53, was arrested in 2022 after police raided his home and found several firearms without the state-required licenses. Taylor, who works as a software engineer, had taken an interest in weapons science and started building “ghost guns”—essentially firearms made by nontraditional manufacturers. Despite Taylor’s hobby being victimless, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez brought a 37-count indictment against him.

“By assembling guns from kits, unfinished parts, or 3D printed components, those who possess ghost guns evade critically important background checks and registration requirements, and because they have no serial number they are untraceable,” he said in a press release at the time. “The surge in ghost guns in our neighborhoods is a major contributor to the violence plaguing our communities and my Office is working tirelessly to stop their proliferation in Brooklyn.”

It’s difficult to know whether or not the latter claim—that ghost guns are at the root of Brooklyn’s gun violence—is true. Beyond dispute, however, is that Taylor did not contribute to those statistics because he didn’t harm anyone. Nevertheless, a jury convicted him of two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon; five counts of criminal possession of a firearm; unlawful possession of pistol ammunition; and violating the prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers. Many of those charges are violent felonies under New York law, even though they’re essentially paperwork violations.

Especially ironic is that Gonzalez promised to lead “the most progressive D.A.’s office in the country.” Ensuring that a man serves substantial prison time for crimes that hurt no one does not strike me as particularly progressive. The decadelong sentence should “send a message to anyone who, like this defendant, would try to evade critically important background checks and registration requirements to manufacture and stockpile these dangerous weapons,” said Gonzalez on Monday. 

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Investigation Finds NYPD Disciplinary Records Often Go Missing

In the summer of 2021, New York Police Department officer Willie Thompson had sex at least twice with a witness to a Harlem carjacking that he was investigating. When a prosecutor questioned Thompson about his relationship with the witness, Thompson first lied, denying the relationship, before recanting and confessing the next day, according to an internal discipline report. About a week later, the woman, sounding upset, called the prosecutor and said Thompson had cornered her at a bodega, blaming her for getting him in trouble and threatening that officers from the precinct would be coming to her home, the document shows.

Thompson, who declined to comment, was found guilty by the NYPD on two misconduct charges and was placed on probation.

But if you looked up his disciplinary history on the department’s public database of uniformed officers, you would be unlikely to learn that.

ProPublica has found the NYPD site for allowing the public to track officers’ misconduct is shockingly unreliable. Cases against officers frequently vanish from the site for days — sometimes weeks — at a time. The issue affects nearly all of the officers in the database, with discipline disappearing from the profiles of patrol officers all the way up to its most senior uniformed officer.

ProPublica examined more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database’s contents and found that, since the fall of 2022, the number of discipline cases that appear in the database has fluctuated often and wildly. Try to pull up the record for a disciplined officer and the site sometimes spits back, “This officer does not have any applicable entries.”

Since May 2021, at least 88% of the disciplinary cases that once appeared in the data have gone missing at some point, though some were later restored. As of this week, 54% of cases that had at one point been in the system were missing.

“It is really disconcerting to see that there are records that are there one day that are not the next,” said Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project.

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New York governor regrets saying Black kids in the Bronx don’t know what a computer is

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says she regrets making an offhand remark that suggested Black children in the Bronx do not know what the word ”computer” means.

Hochul, a Democrat, made the extemporaneous comment Monday while being interviewed at a large business conference in California to discuss expanding economic opportunities in artificial intelligence for low-income communities.

”Right now, we have young Black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word computer is. They don’t know, they don’t know these things,” Hochul said while on stage at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

The remark was not addressed during the interview and the governor went on to explain that her goal is to provide avenues for communities of color to access emerging artificial intelligence technologies as a means to address social inequality.

Still, the gaff drew immediate criticism from some political leaders in New York, including state Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo, a Bronx Democrat, who said the remark was ”harmful, deeply misinformed, and genuinely appalling.”

In a statement later Monday, Hochul said ”I misspoke and I regret it.”

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New Columbia Wrinkle: Police Takedown Facilitated By Faculty Member Who Serves On NYPD Anti-Terror Squad…Conspiracists Cry Foul

The recent ousting of students and professional agitators from a Columbia University building was led in part by a Columbia adjunct professor who is also the civilian Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism for the NYPD.

The story is from The Grayzone, a media project headed by Max Blumenthal, Jewish blogger and former Clinton aide. That said, the article is written with a decidedly pro-Palestine bent. Author Wyatt Reed describes the Columbia uprising as a “protest model [that] has since spread to over 100 other universities in the US, and even been taken up abroad, with similar actions occurring at Leeds University in the UK and the Sorbonne in Paris”, as if it were organic, and not, in fact, funded by groups such as the Soros-backed U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).

Still, Reed injects some salient points into the Columbia conversation. He correctly notes that, “During the NYPD’s triumphant May 1 post-raid press conference, Weiner blamed ‘outside agitators’ for triggering the military-style police crackdown at Columbia. However, she refused to name the outsiders supposedly on the scene.”

Next, Reed asserts that Weiner falsely used the terroristic past of an elderly Columbia encampment visitor–Nahla al-Arian, 63, as preface for police intevention:

“…a brief visit to Columbia by Nahla Al-Arian, who Weiner incorrectly described as ‘the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism.’

‘That’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia,’ Weiner commented.

Nahla’s husband, Palestinian academic Sami Al-Arian, had been indicted on flimsy terrorism charges in 2003, but a jury refused to convict him. Nevertheless, her brief stop at the Columbia encampment — where she says she did not even interact with any demonstrators — was cited by Adams during three separate media engagements to justify the police repression.”

–Ibid., editorial emphasis.

Further, Reed points out, somewhat ominously, that Weiner is the granddaughter of one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb:

“Weiner is the granddaughter of Stanislaw Ulam, the Polish Jewish mathematician who helped conceive the hydrogen bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. “I’m very proud of that legacy,” Weiner said of her grandfather’s work upon being appointed as NYPD intelligence chief.“

–Ibid.

Reed stops short of calling Weiner a Mossad asset, but he sets the table elaborately, stopping just short of lighting the dinner candles:

“The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau currently maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it coordinates with Israel’s security apparatus and maintains a department liaison. Weiner appears to serve as a bridge between the Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York.

A 2011 AP investigation revealed that a so-called ‘Demographics Unit’ operated secretly within the NYPD’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. This shadowy outfit spied on Muslims around the New York City area, and even on students at campuses outside the state who were involved in Palestine solidarity activism. The unit was developed in tandem with the CIA, which has refused to name the former Middle East station chief it posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. 

The ‘Demographics Unit’ appears to have been inspired by Israeli intelligence as well. As a former police official told the AP, the unit attempted to ‘map the city’s human terrain’ through a program ‘modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.‘”

–Ibid., editorial emphasis.

To sum up: Rebecca Weiner is, plainly, a liaison between the NYPD and Columbia University. The police division she works for was formed as a response to 9/11, and was done so with Israeli intelligence guidance, as would seem a natural fit for a country that has dealt with Middle East terrorism for decades.

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NYPD union sues over officers’ rights to use steroids

Lawyers from the Police Benevolent Association have filed a lawsuit against NYPD Police Commissioner Edward Caban and Mayor Adams over recent policy changes relating to the use of performance enhancing drugs such as steroids by active duty officers. From NY Daily News:

The 2011 contract prohibited officers from ingesting or possessing any anabolic steroid or other forms of human growth hormones without a medical prescription. However, the old standard didn’t require officers to run any such prescription by their NYPD district surgeon before starting to use it.

The new protocol — which was enacted on Dec. 26, 2023, and described in an internal memo reviewed by The News as a “zero tolerance drug policy” — beefs up the old rule by affirming that officers must “immediately notify their district surgeon” of any steroid prescription they receive and provide “all supporting medical documentation” to the surgeon backing up the need for the drug.

If officers are caught violating the new rule by, for example, deviating from a prescribed dosage, they can face firing, the memo says.

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Turbo cancer in New York

Executive summary

Cancer cases are up by 2.5X in New York state Medicaid vs. a 2017-2019 baseline.

Is this normal? Absolutely not! This is a very serious problem.

Isn’t it awesome that they keep these numbers confidential? And that nobody in the mainstream press will look into this?

The data

You can examine the data: NY Medicaid ICD-10 Cxx codes data (2019-2023) (the link downloads the xlsx spreadsheet).

Cancers with the highest increase

The ratio column is the ratio vs. counts in the 2019 baseline.

Overall, there was a 2.5X increase over baseline.

Some cancers got better vs. baseline, others got worse. The odds that a given cancer code got worse were 25:1.

Note that the rates of increase strongly depends on the type of cancer. This means that they can’t use the excuse that this is all because people didn’t get treated for their cancers during the Covid lockdowns. It that were the case, the increases would be the roughly the same for all cancer types, not dramatically different.

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