Tag Archives: New York

Brooklyn terrorist attack suspect taken into custody

Important Takeaways:

  • Brooklyn shooting suspect Frank James taken into police custody
  • The madman who allegedly opened fire on a Brooklyn subway car, shooting 10 and leaving another 19 injured, has been taken into custody, law enforcement sources told The Post on Wednesday.
  • Frank James, 62, is the prime suspect in Tuesday’s attack and had been on the lam for more than 24 hours after he allegedly disguised himself as a construction worker and fired 33 rounds onboard a Manhattan-bound N train in Sunset Park during the early-morning rush.
  • Cops are still working to determine how James escaped after the attack, but they initially believed he blended in with a wave of commuters who transferred to the R train immediately following the incident.

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Ukraine-Russia Crisis: Cyberattacks Could Affect U.S.

Important Takeaways:

  • If Russia mounts cyberattacks against the United States, the targets could include banks, power plants, water treatment facilities, and communications. Cyber experts say Russia has the capability to disable or destroy U.S. satellites. Those attacks could also impact GPS for navigation, farming, automation, and oil exploration.
  • “Our food supply, things that have to do with our power supply, utilities,” cybersecurity expert Ian Marlow said. “Utilities have been brought down and then you don’t have service.”

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Powerful nor’easter expected from Philly to Boston

Luke 21:25,26 “There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth dismay among nations, in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Important Takeaways:

  • Winter Storm Watches issued for Boston, New York, Philadelphia ahead of powerful weekend nor’easter
  • A powerful nor’easter will develop into a “bomb cyclone” off the East Coast
  • Expected to intensify into a bomb cyclone, a term used to describe a low-pressure system that undergoes “bombogenesis” – defined as a rapid pressure drop of at least 24 millibars in 24 hours or less – indicative of a very intense storm.
  • Heavy snow, high winds and coastal flooding are expected
  • You’re advised to avoid all unnecessary travel across this region.
  • A large portion of the Northeast coast could face a significant threat of coastal flooding, high surf and beach erosion. Astronomical tides will already be running high this weekend as we approach a new moon, which will only make these threats worse.

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Major cities see spike in crime

Mark 13:12 “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Carjackings soar by up to 510% in major US cities: Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans are all experiencing ‘disturbing’ spikes in crime
  • Critics are blaming a rise in violent car takeovers on lax punishment for offenders, and Covid-era changes in driving habits
  • Last November, Chicago’s top cop revealed that an 11-year-old boy is believed to have committed several of the vehicular hijackings
  • In Chicago, 1,849 carjackings were reported last year – a 510 per cent increase from the 303 vehicular hijackings in 2014, according to city data.
  • Meantime, New York City has seen carjacking rising by more than 350 per cent in the past three years, to 510 in 2021.
  • Philadelphia, which reported 750 carjackings last year, a 34 per cent year-over-year increase
  • The numbers are also moving in the wrong direction in New Orleans, which saw its most marked jump when cases hit 278 in 2020, a 104 per cent increase from 2019, NOLA.com reported.

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‘End Times Beast’ Described in The Bible Removed from UN

Revelation 13:2. “And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Sculpture Which Some Likened to ‘End Times Beast’ Described in The Bible Removed from UN
  • The artwork known as the “guardian for international peace and security”
  • Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the Secretary-General, told CBN News the sculpture was not permanent and its removal was planned.
  • Daniel Chapter 7: 2 – 4 describes the beast with the body of a lion and wings of an eagle:
  • “Daniel spake and said, “I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea. And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another.

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Incoming New York mayor to appoint first woman to lead city’s police department

(Reuters) – New York Mayor-elect Eric Adams will appoint a woman to serve as commissioner of the city’s police department for the first time in its 176-year history, local media reported on Tuesday.

Adams, himself a former New York City police captain, will introduce Keechant Sewell at a news conference in Queens on Wednesday, New York’s Daily News reported.

“Keechant Sewell is a proven crime fighter with the experience and emotional intelligence to deliver both the safety New Yorkers need and the justice they deserve,” Adams said in a statement published by the newspaper.

The New York Times reported that Sewell is a 23-year veteran of the police department in Nassau County, New York, where she is chief of detectives. She would be New York City’s third Black police commissioner.

The current commissioner, Dermot Shea, was appointed in 2019 by Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“We welcome Chief Sewell to the second-toughest policing job in America,” Patrick Lynch, president of the city’s major police union, said in a written statement. “The toughest, of course, is being an NYPD cop on the street.”

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Peter Cooney)

U.S. Supreme Court rejects religious challenge to New York vaccine mandate

By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected challenges brought by a group of Christian doctors and nurses and an organization that promotes vaccine skepticism to New York’s refusal to allow religious exemptions to the state’s mandate that healthcare workers be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Acting in two cases, the justices denied emergency requests for an injunction requiring the state to permit religious exemptions while litigation over the mandate’s legality continues in lower courts. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted the injunction.

The Supreme Court previously rejected other challenges to vaccine mandates including one focusing upon Maine’s lack of a religious exemption for healthcare workers.

The New York challengers said the mandate violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on religious discrimination by the government, or a federal civil rights law requiring employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious beliefs. A lower court rejected their bid for an injunction.

New York’s Department of Health on Aug. 26 ordered healthcare professionals who come in contact with patients or other employees to be vaccinated by Sept. 27. That deadline was delayed to Nov. 22.

The state has said that under the policy employers can consider religious accommodation requests and employees can be reassigned to jobs such as remote work.

The state said it allows a narrow medical exemption for the small number of people with a serious allergic reaction to the COVID-19 vaccines. It said longstanding healthcare worker vaccine mandates for measles and rubella also have no religious exemptions.

One lawsuit was brought by a group of 17 doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers, most of whom are Catholic, who sued under pseudonyms, denouncing “medical dictatorship.” Sixteen said they were fired or suspended under the policy, while one nurse agreed to be vaccinated to keep her job.

In a dissent in that case, Gorsuch said the mandate seemed based “on nothing more than fear and anger at those who harbor unpopular religious beliefs.” Joined by Alito, Gorsuch chastised the court for not protecting the challengers, saying that it “is always the failure to defend the Constitution’s promises that leads to this court’s greatest regrets.”

The other case involved a challenge by three Christian nurses, who are members of We the Patriots USA, a Connecticut-based group that is also a plaintiff. The group opposes vaccine mandates and advocates for various causes including what it called “medical freedom.”

In a video on the group’s website, co-founder Brian Festa said, “We were fighting against vaccine mandates. We were fighting to reveal the truth about what’s in these shots, long before COVID was even a thing.”

These plaintiffs are represented by Norman Pattis, a lawyer known for defending conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, founder of the right-wing website Infowars, against defamation lawsuits after he falsely called a 2012 Connecticut school mass shooting a “hoax.”

According to government data, about 84% of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 72% are fully vaccinated. A minority of Americans has declined to get the shots.

In legal filings, the New York challengers said that they believe abortion is “evil” and object to any COVID-19 vaccine whose development relied on cell lines from aborted fetuses.

The three COVID-19 vaccines authorized for U.S. use do not contain aborted fetal cells. Laboratory-grown cells that descended from the cells of an aborted fetus obtained decades ago were employed in testing during the vaccine development process. Drug efficacy and safety testing using such cell lines is routine.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)

New York governor orders masks indoors for businesses without COVID-19 vaccine requirement

(Reuters) -New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on Friday that starting next week, face coverings must be worn inside all businesses and venues unless they have implemented a vaccine requirement, as cases of COVID-19 rise in the state.

The measure will be in effect from Dec. 13 to Jan. 15 in order to curb the spread of the virus during the holidays when more time is spent indoors shopping and gathering, she said in a statement.

“We shouldn’t have reached the point where we are confronted with a winter surge, especially with the vaccine at our disposal, and I share many New Yorkers’ frustration that we are not past this pandemic yet,” Hochul said.

While 80% of New Yorkers are fully vaccinated, the state has seen a recent surge in the spread of the virus, which has killed more than 46,000 residents.

Since Thanksgiving, the statewide seven-day average case rate has jumped by 43% and hospitalizations have increased by 29%, state data showed.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Berkrot)

U.S. EPA allocates billions in water funding from infrastructure law to states

By Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday released over $7 billion to state governments and tribes to upgrade drinking and waste water systems, the first allotment of clean water funds that was approved in the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law last month.

The installment is part of $44 billion in clean water funds that will be dispersed over five years through a federal-state partnership program. The Biden administration has touted the benefits for states that will flow from the $1 trillion infrastructure law, which President Joe Biden signed on Nov. 15 after months of congressional negotiations.

The $1 trillion in infrastructure spending features what the EPA describes as the “single-largest investment in U.S. water infrastructure ever.”

Over half of the $7.4 billion in state revolving funds (SRFs) that the agency will allocate to states for 2022 will be available as grants or principal forgiveness loans that are meant to make it easier for underserved urban and rural communities to access.

“Billions of dollars are about to start flowing to states and it is critical that EPA partners with states, Tribes, and territories to ensure the benefits of these investments are delivered in the most equitable way,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan.

He urged that the money be used to “correct longstanding environmental and economic injustices across America.”

EPA Assistant Administrator Radhika Fox will soon issue national program guidance from the EPA’s Office of Water to help agencies best use the billions that will become available.

SRFs, which provide low-cost federal financing, have been used for decades by states to invest in their water infrastructure but many vulnerable and poor communities facing water challenges have not historically accessed their fair share of funds. Regan said he wants the new flow of money from the infrastructure bill will correct the disparities.

California, Texas and New York – the biggest states – will receive the largest share of SRF funds.

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

In U.S. Supreme Court case, the past could be the future on abortion

By Lawrence Hurley

OXFORD, Miss. (Reuters) – Just months before she was set to start law school in the summer of 1973, Barbara Phillips was shocked to learn she was pregnant.

Then 24, she wanted an abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court had legalized abortion nationwide months earlier with its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling recognizing a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But abortions were not legally available at the time in Mississippi, where she lived in the small town of Port Gibson.

Phillips, a Black woman enmeshed in the civil rights movement, could feel her dream of becoming a lawyer slipping away.

“It was devastating. I was desperate,” Phillips said, sitting on the patio of her cozy one-story house in Oxford, a college town about 160 miles (260 km) north of Jackson, Mississippi’s capital.

At the time of the Roe ruling, 46 of the 50 U.S. states had some sort of criminal prohibitions on abortion. Access often was limited to wealthy and well-connected women, who tended to be white.

With a feminist group’s help, Phillips located a doctor in New York willing to provide an abortion. New York before Roe was the only state that let out-of-state women obtain abortions. She flew there for the procedure.

Now 72, Phillips does not regret her abortion. She went on to attend Northwestern law school in Chicago and realize her goal of becoming a civil rights lawyer, with a long career. Years later, she had a son when she felt the time was right.

“I was determined to decide for myself what I wanted to do with my life and my body,” Phillips said.

U.S. abortion rights are under attack unlike any time since the Roe ruling, with Republican-backed restrictions being passed in numerous states. The Supreme Court on Dec. 1 is set to hear arguments in a case in which Mississippi is seeking to revive its law, blocked by lower courts, banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Mississippi has raised the stakes by explicitly asking the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Such a ruling could turn back the clock in Mississippi, which currently has just one abortion clinic, and other states to the kind of environment on abortion access that Phillips experienced nearly a half century ago.

Large swathes of America could return to an era in which women who want to end a pregnancy face the choice of undergoing a potentially dangerous illegal abortion, traveling long distances to a state where the procedure remains legal and available or buying abortion pills online.

Mississippi’s abortion law is not the only one being tested at the Supreme Court. The justices on Nov. 1 heard arguments in challenges to a Texas law banning abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy, but have not yet ruled.

TRIGGER LAWS

Mississippi is one of a dozen states with so-called trigger laws that would immediately ban abortion in all or most cases if Roe is overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Many are in the South, so a Mississippi woman would be unable to obtain an abortion in neighboring Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee or Alabama. The nearest states where abortion would remain legal, at least in the short term, would be Illinois and Florida.

The average distance a Mississippi woman would need to drive to reach a clinic would increase from 78 miles to 380 miles (125 to 610 km) each way, according to Guttmacher.

While some abortion rights advocates fear a return to grisly illegal back-alley abortions, there has been an important development since the pre-Roe era: abortion pills. Mississippi is among 19 states imposing restrictions on medication-induced abortions.

Mississippi officials are cagey on what a post-Roe world might look like. Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who asked the court to overturn Roe, declined an interview request, as did Republican Governor Tate Reeves.

Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce Andy Gipson, who as a Republican state legislator helped shepherd the 2018 passage of the 15-week ban, called Roe v. Wade “antiquated, old law based on antiquated and old science.”

Gipson in an interview declined to answer questions about what Mississippi – or the southeastern United States – would be like without abortion rights, focusing on the specifics of the 15-week ban.

“It’s a false narrative to paint this as a picture of an outright ban throughout the southeast,” Gipson said, noting that the Supreme Court does not have to formally overturn Roe to uphold Mississippi’s law.

In court papers, Fitch said scientific advances, including contested claims that a fetus can detect pain early in a pregnancy, emphasize how Roe and a subsequent 1992 decision that reaffirmed abortion rights are “decades out of date.”

Abortion rights advocates have said any ruling upholding Mississippi’s law would effectively gut Roe, giving states unfettered power to limit or ban the procedure.

Phillips worries about a revival of dangerous, unregulated abortions that imperil women’s lives.

“I’m afraid that many more women and girls will be in back alleys,” Phillips said. “I’m worried we are going to find them in country roads, dead.”

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)