Tag: new york

New York Passes Online Age Verification Digital ID Law

Lawmakers in New York have passed the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act and the Child Data Protection Act.

Assembly Bill A8148A and Senate Bill S7694A (that became the SAFE Act) were introduced as aiming to prevent social platforms from showing minors “addictive” (i.e., algorithmically manipulated) feeds, among a host of other provisions.

Parental consent is now required for children to have access to the latter versions of the feeds – which in turn means that the controversial age verification for adults must be introduced into the mix.

The new rules will not prohibit children from searching for particular keywords but social platforms will not be able to send notifications to their phones “regarding addictive feeds” from midnight to 6 am – again, this will be possible, but only with parental consent.

Could this be the true impetus behind the two bills – to usher in age verification and digital ID, some skeptics might wonder.

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Judge Alerts Trump, Manhattan DA of Possible Jury Confidentiality Breach

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan on June 7 alerted counsel for former President Donald Trump and the Manhattan District Attorney of a potential juror confidentiality breach.

“Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System’s public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention,” Justice Merchan wrote in a letter.

“In the comment, the user, ‘Michael Anderson,’ states: ‘My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted  Thank you folks for all your hard work!!!!’”

The post was made on May 29, the day the jury began deliberations, one day before the guilty verdict on May 30.

The comment had been made on a post unrelated to Justice Merchan’s courtroom, for the appellate division in the New York Supreme Court.

The comment, and others made by the user on the New York Courts Facebook page, have since been deleted. They came from an account describing itself as a “professional [expletive] poster,” raising questions about the validity of the comment.

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NY Dem Suggests Trump Supporters Need ‘Re-education Camps’ Following ‘MAGA Nightmare’

A Democrat running for Congress in New York suggested that supporters of Donald Trump might need to be subjected to “re-education camps.”

Paula Collins argued during a heated Zoom Townhall meeting that these camps would “put it all together again” after enduring what she described as a “MAGA nightmare.”

Her remarks came while discussing the aftermath of the 2024 election.

“Even if we were to have a resounding blue wave come through, as many of us would like, putting it all back together again after we’ve gone through this MAGA nightmare and re-educating basically, which, that sounds like a rather, a re-education camp,” Collins said.

“I don’t think we really want to call it that,” she added. “I’m sure we can find another way to phrase it.”

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New York’s “SAFE” Digital ID Act For Kids Threatens Online Free Speech and Privacy

Legislators in the state of New York are pushing two new bills to regulate the internet, specifically as it pertains to the way minors use social media – Assembly Bill A8148A and Senate Bill S7694A.

If it succeeds, the law would be the first of its kind in the US, and likely represent a blueprint for other states.

But both acts, dubbed Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids, have drawn criticism for bringing up constitutional issues tied to First Amendment rights.

Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers are said to be close on agreeing on the text of the bills, which are presented as designed to prohibit tech platforms from providing addictive feeds to minors (replacing them with content shown in chronological order), and monetizing their data, among other things.

But how would these platforms ascertain if somebody’s a minor? By requiring that their parents go through the digital ID age verification before they can provide consent on behalf of their children to use a particular social network in a particular way.

And this is where the legislative intent goes against the First Amendment, critics say, as having all online activity tied to a government-issued ID chills free speech and opens data privacy issues.

Somewhat ironically, given their open disregard of the First Amendment in other scenarios, those critics include some of the biggest tech companies.

Constitution and freedom of expression aside – their bottom lines would suffer if the bills pass, and so they find themselves as (no doubt, for both parties) uneasy bedfellows with those who consistently campaign against age verification, manipulated feeds, and data harvesting.

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Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect studied ‘Mindhunter’ book like ‘homework’, typed planning notes on Microsoft Word, and murdered woman as far back as 1993: Docs

Prosecutors in the Suffolk County, New York, confirmed Thursday that the suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer has been formally accused of two more murders, but the bail application to make extra certain that Rex Heuermann remains behind bars also provided details that are chilling in their implications.

Heuermann, now 60, was infamously arrested last summer on the strength of discarded pizza crust and DNA evidence that allegedly linked him to male hairs found on the victims, of whom there are now six.

The Manhattan architect, already accused of murdering Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, Amber Costello, 27, and Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, in the late 2000s and 2010 on Long Island, has since been indicted in the 2003 slaying of Jessica Taylor, 20, and the 1993 murder of Sandra Costilla, 28.

Simply put, the link between Heuermann and a murder from the early 1990s, when he would have been around 30 years old, raises the distinct possibility that, if he really is who prosecutors say he is, there’s no telling how far back the serial killings largely targeting sex workers may go or how many victims there might be.

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New York Spends $225 Million on Its Own “Cop City” — to Make the Whole City Run on Cops

NEW YORK CITY Mayor Eric Adams announced last Friday that the city would spend at least $225 million on a new police training facility in the borough of Queens. The mayor’s decision to pour further public funding into policing comes as he slashed services to the city’s most vulnerable, including cutting library budgets by $58.3 million.

The priorities could not be clearer. Like many politicians across the country, the mayor wants to disinvest from public services and privatize them, while instead increasing mass policing and carceral enforcement as a response to social problems.

To see just how much Adams has become the paragon of governance through policing, one need only look at the intended purposes of the police training facility. The site will be used to train law enforcement officers for all the city’s agencies — including the departments of Sanitation, Homeless Services, the Administration for Children’s Services, and the Taxi and Limousine Commission — under one roof, alongside New York Police Department officers.

In response to the mayor’s announcement, a number of commentators on social media decried the plan as a “Cop City” for New York — the term used to describe a vast police training facility under construction in Atlanta, which will swallow up crucial forest land in that city.

Despite the fact that the Atlanta facility will be a compound of over 85 acres, the cost is estimated to be a ballooning $109 million — less than half the amount New York City is dedicating to its new training building.

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New York and New Jersey Want To Let Felons Serve on Juries. Here’s Why.

The vast majority of states—44, to be exact—suspend people from serving on juries when they are convicted of a felony, and in many states the suspension is permanent. That means millions of people—especially groups of people convicted at relatively high rates, such as black and Hispanic men—are disqualified from jury service, quietly resulting in what some have called the “whitewashing” of American juries.

At least two states, New York and New Jersey, would like to change that.

The New York proposal, which is currently under review by the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee, would repeal the clause in the state’s judiciary law that blocks individuals convicted of felonies from serving on juries. New Jersey’s bill, which was introduced in January and endorsed by Gov. Phil Murphy on May 1, would amend the equivalent clause in its code to permit most felons to serve on juries, barring only people convicted of murder and aggravated sexual assault.

“Jury exclusion laws bar more than 20 million people nationwide from serving,” said Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative. “With this bill, New Jersey has the chance to reverse one of the harshest jury exclusion laws in the country, and to set an example that other states can follow to make their criminal legal systems fairer and more effective.”

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NYC Hotel Room Prices Skyrocket as 20% of Hotels Converted to Migrant Shelters

Average hotel room prices in New York City have exploded now that 20% of hotels have been converted into shelters for illegal aliens.

The average hotel room rate in the city reached a record high of $301 a night since 1 out of every 5 hotels have turned into migrant shelters since 2022, the New York Times reported last week.

“About 135 of the city’s roughly 680 hotels entered the shelter program, with many congregated in Midtown Manhattan, Long Island City in Queens and near Kennedy International Airport — all traditional magnets for tourists,” The Times reported.

“Participating hotels are paid up to $185 a night per room, according to the city. Not a single one has converted back into a traditional hotel.“

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‘The New McCarthyism’: NY Hospital Fires Nurse for Empathizing With Gaza Mothers

A nurse was fired earlier this month from a New York City hospital for a speech lamenting the anguish felt by Palestinian mothers whose children were killed during the Gaza genocide – remarks that came as she was being honored for providing extraordinary care to mothers who’ve lost babies.

NYU Langone Health labor and delivery nurse Hesen Jabr, who is Palestinian American, was terminated over her May 7 speech accepting the award, in which she said that “it pains me to see the women from my country going through unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza.”

“Even though I can’t hold their hands and comfort them as they grieve their unborn children and the children they have lost during this genocide, I hope to keep making them proud as I represent them here at NYU,” she added.

In a May 27 Instagram post, Jabr recounted what she says happened to her when she went back to work for the first time after her speech:

As soon as I walked onto the unit, I was dragged into an impromptu meeting with the president and vice president of nursing at NYU Langone to discuss how I “put others at risk” and “ruined the ceremony” and “offended people” because a small part of my speech was a tribute towards the grieving mothers in my country. I was sent back to work my shift while the hospital spent the day “figuring out” what to do with me. After working almost the entire shift, I was dragged once again to an office where I was read my termination letter by the director of human resources, Austin Bender, and escorted off the premises by a plain clothes police officer.

NYU Langone spokesperson Steve Ritea told The New York Times that Jabr was terminated over the speech and “a previous incident” related to Gaza, over which she was warned “not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace.”

“She instead chose not to heed that at a recent employee recognition event that was widely attended by her colleagues, some of whom were upset after her comments,” Ritea added. “As a result, Jabr is no longer an NYU Langone employee.”

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Video Of NYC Cops’ Marijuana Raid Raises Questions About Mayor’s Enforcement Offensive

As a new mayoral task force conducts sweeps of hundreds of shops suspected of selling illegal weed, a video of a raid on a Staten Island store obtained by THE CITY captures how enlisting police to conduct regulatory inspections can lead to criminal charges, igniting concerns about potential due process violations.

The 90-second clip taken from a store surveillance camera on May 18 shows seven uniformed law enforcement officers, most of them in NYPD gear, cursing, jumping over the store counter and charging at a shopkeeper after he asked them for a court order before opening the door to the back of the store.

Instead, the man was cuffed—before any unlicensed cannabis products were found—and taken to a local precinct where he was charged with obstruction of justice, records show.

“When a cop tells you to do something, you fucking do it,” one officer told the shopkeeper.

The surveillance video was shared with THE CITY on the condition that the identity of the shopkeeper be protected. The arrest and criminal charge was confirmed by police records.

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