Wednesday, May 31, 2017

nothing but high priced errand boys are lawyers

N.J. Town to Pay $3.25 Million to Settle Federal Lawsuits Over Mosque

Agreement clears the way for a Muslim group to open the first mosque in Bernards Township 

Mohammad Ali Chaudry, the former mayor of  Bernards Township, co-founded the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge.
Mohammad Ali Chaudry, the former mayor of Bernards Township, co-founded the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge. PHOTO: BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A New Jersey town will pay $3.25 million to settle two federal lawsuits that alleged discrimination against a local Islamic society, according to an agreement that paves the way for the Muslim group to open the town’s first mosque.
The settlement, the terms of which were made public Tuesday, resolves complaints lodged by the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge and the U.S. Department of Justice that accused the Bernards Township Planning Board of violating a federal law that prohibits religious discrimination in land-use decisions. Town officials denied anti-Islam bias and said they rejected the application because of parking concerns.
Last December, a federal judge ruled that planning board members showed “sufficient intent to discriminate on the basis of religion” in their consideration of the mosque proposal. The 11-member board held 39 public hearings on the proposed mosque before voting in December 2015 to deny the application.
The settlement, which will be paid by the town’s insurance carriers, includes $1.5 million in damages for the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge and $1.75 million in compensation for legal costs. It also requires officials “not impede in any way” the necessary local approvals for the mosque, which will be built on a 4-acre site owned by the Islamic Society, co-founded by former Bernards Township Mayor Mohammad Ali Chaudry.
New Jersey Acting U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick said Tuesday that towns must treat houses of worship proposals “like any other land use application.”
“Bernards Township made decisions that treated the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge differently than other houses of worship,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said in a written statement. “The settlement announced today corrects those decisions and ensures that members of this religious community have the same ability to practice their faith as all other religions.”
The case was one of nearly 20 disputes across the country that prompted lawsuits by the Justice Department under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, according to a December letter sent by the federal agency to local officials.
The federal government has opened nearly 100 formal investigations into alleged violations of the law, which prohibits local officials from using religious discrimination or substantially-burdensome land-use regulations in their consideration of proposed houses of worship. 
In 2014, the New Jersey township of Bridgewater settled a federal discrimination suit for $7.75 million and agreed to allow the Al Falah Center to open a mosque there. Last week, a Muslim group seeking to build a mosque in Bayonne, N.J. filed a federal lawsuit alleging religious discrimination by the city’s zoning officials. 
The mosque in Bernards Township will provide 50 paved parking spaces, the same number as initially proposed in the Islamic society’s 2012 application, as well as some overflow parking to accommodate a maximum 150 people.
Bernards Township is an affluent town of about 27,000 in Somerset County.
“We look forward to welcoming people of all faiths and backgrounds to our mosque,” Dr. Chaudry, who has a doctorate in economics, said in a written statement provided by his attorney on Tuesday. “Our doors will be open to anyone interested in building bridges to promote harmony in the community and peace in the world.”
Bernards Township officials said the settlement decision reflected a desire to avoid further costly litigation, according to a written statement issued by a spokesman hired by the town to handle public statements related to the mosque litigation.
“The township maintains that the denial of the planning board was based on accepted land use criteria only,” the statement said. “Indeed, Bernards Township is a diverse and inclusive community.”
The Islamic Society’s attorney, Adeel Mangi of the New York firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, said it would donate its share of the settlement to charity and “other worthy causes.”
“Municipalities around the country should pay close attention to what happened in Bernards Township,” Mr. Mangi said in a written statement. “The American Muslim community has the legal resources, the allies, and the determination to stand up for its constitutional rights in court and will do so.”
Legal exhibits filed by the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge included several examples of alleged bias by Bernards Township officials, including an email by a planning board member who wrote that “Islam owes its size and in[fl]uence to a tradition from Day One of forced conversion through violent means.” Another email sent by a township committee member said Mr. Chaudry should be prevented from participating in a town Sept. 11 memorial event and suggested instead finding “a real moderate Muslim.”
The Bernards Township spokesman declined to comment on the emails. Mr. Chaudry served as the Republican mayor of the town in 2004. 
The settlement agreement also mandates Bernards Township officials undergo diversity training, including on Islam, as well as instruction on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Person Act.
The town also must change or replace an ordinance passed in 2013 that required houses of worship only to be built on 6-acre plots. The Islamic Society claimed in its lawsuit that the zoning change was intended to prevent them from building their, an allegation town officials denied.
Appeared in the May 31, 2017, print edition as 'Mosque Settles For $3.25 Million.'

responsible for your impending demise

have an auotimmune disease get bcg and see fsustmanlab.org
pubmed.org faustman  dl
pubmed.org ristori + bcg
uspto.gov inventor search faustman


These people kill like the pharmaceutical industry


Elisabeth Rosenthal, Editor-in-Chief, joined KHN in September 2016 after 22 years as a correspondent at The New York Times, where she covered a variety of beats from health care to environment to reporter in the Beijing bureau. While in China she covered SARS, bird flu and the emergence of HIV/AIDS in rural areas. Libby’s 2013-14 series “Paying Till it Hurts” won many prizes for both health reporting and its creative use of digital tools. Her book, “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business And How You Can Take it Back,” is being published by Penguin Random House in April 2017. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School and briefly practiced medicine in a New York City emergency room before converting to journalism.
erosenthal@kff.org | @rosenthalhealth
LaRonda Peterson, Managing Editor, previously worked nearly 6 years at Politico, where she was the deputy managing editor of Politico Pro. She helped launch the policy news service, built the Web team and was lead architect of Pro’s daily operations and digital strategy. She has worked at Newsday and the Orlando Sentinel and is a graduate of Duke University and the Georgetown University Law Center.
lpeterson@kff.org | @_ellepete
Julie Marquis, California Bureau Chief, has been a newspaper reporter and editor in California for 30 years, including two decades at the Los Angeles Times, where she most recently was the metro projects editor. Much of her work over the years has focused on health care. She was the primary editor on the Pulitzer Prize-winning series, “The Troubles at King/Drew.” Julie has a B.A. in history from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in communication from Stanford University. She attended the Harvard University School of Public Health in 1993-94 on an Alfred P. Sloan media fellowship.
jmarquis@kff.org | @juliedmarquis
Kathleen Hayden, Senior Digital Editor, is a 20-year online news veteran with a specialty in government, elections and policy coverage. Before joining KHN, she managed Bloomberg Government’s online, information graphics and multimedia teams and edited news and analysis on industries including health care. Prior to BGOV, Kathleen worked at AOL, CNN and TIME. She is a graduate of Haverford College and a proud New England native.
khayden@kff.org | @kathleenhayden
John HillkirkJohn Hillkirk, Senior Enterprise Project Editor, was a reporter or editor at USA Today for 33 years. Most recently, he led the newspaper’s Investigations team which won two IRE Silver Medals, a Gerald Loeb Award, a duPont-Columbia prize and was a Pulitzer finalist. Prior to that, John was editor-in-chief for three years and executive editor for five years. John also managed the Money section for a decade and covered technology and management as a business reporter. John has co-authored three books. “Xerox: American Samurai,” “Grit, Guts and Genius” and “A Better Idea: Redefining the Way Americans Work.” John graduated from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.
jhillkirk@kff.org | @johnhillkirk
John Fairhall, Senior Enterprise Editor, helped to launch KHN in 2009, coauthoring the first story and serving as editor-in-chief from 2011 to 2016. Under his leadership, KHN has become a bicoastal operation that provides multiplatform content to national, regional and local media outlets. Prior to joining KHN, John was an assistant managing editor supervising projects and health and science coverage at The Baltimore Sun, where he worked for 27 years. His investigative team was a Pulitzer finalist for its work on predatory practices in Baltimore’s ground-rent business. As city editor, John helped direct the paper’s coverage of the Washington-area sniper, which also was a Pulitzer finalist.
jfairhall@kff.org | @johnfairhall




JoNel Aleccia, Senior Correspondent on the KHN enterprise team, focuses on aging and end-of-life issues. Before joining KHN in November 2016, she was a health reporter for more than a decade, covering regional and national news at outlets including The Seattle Times, NBCNews.com, TODAY.com and MSNBC.com. Before that, she was a reporter, editor and columnist at newspapers in the Northwest. JoNel was a member of reporting teams that won National Press Club Awards for digital journalism focused on the Great Recession and on amputees in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon.
jaleccia@kff.org | @JoNel_Aleccia
Paula Andalo, Ethnic Media Editor, is focused on expanding KHN’s partnerships with Spanish-language media. She has more than 20 years of experience as a health care writer and editor. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she began her career at Clarín newspaper, where she created an award-winning health section. She served as editor of El Tiempo Latino, the Hispanic newspaper that belongs to The Washington Post, and she was Spanish editor of the Pan American Health Organization. She was a Knight Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a Kaiser Media Fellow.
pandalo@kff.org@paula_andalo
Julie Appleby, Senior Correspondent, reports on the health law’s implementation, health care treatments and costs, trends in health insurance, and policy affecting hospitals and other medical providers. Her stories have appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, MSNBC and other media. Before joining KHN, Julie spent 10 years covering the health industry and policy at USA Today. She also worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, The Financial Times in London and the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, California. She serves on the board of the Association of Health Care Journalists and has a Master of Public Health degree.
jappleby@kff.org | @julie_appleby
Melissa BaileyMelissa Bailey is a Boston-based correspondent on the KHN enterprise team, focusing on aging and dying. Her stories have appeared in The Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, PBS, the Chicago Tribune and other publications. She was a 2015 Nieman Journalism Fellow and holds a math degree from Yale. She joined KHN from Stat, where she was the national health care reporter.
mbailey@kff.org@mmbaily
Pauline BartolonePauline Bartolone, Sacramento Correspondent for California Healthline, has been a radio and print journalist for 15 years, contributing frequently to NPR. Most recently, she covered the rollout of the Affordable Care Act for NPR’s Sacramento affiliate and delved into the complex world of pharmaceutical prices for CALmatters. She has won multiple regional Edward R. Murrow awards, national recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists and a first-place prize from the Association of Health Care Journalists. She freelanced throughout Latin America before and during her studies at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Journalism, from which she earned a master’s degree in new media.
pbartolone@kff.org | @pbartolone
Emily Bazar, Senior Correspondent for California Healthline, writes the “Ask Emily” column, which addresses readers’ concerns about the Affordable Care Act and other health care topics. The column has appeared in more than 25 newspapers and NPR affiliate websites across California and generated more than 2,500 direct questions and comments. Emily regularly appears on KPCC, KQED, Capital Public Radio and other California radio stations. She also covers stories about Medi-Cal, Covered California, and health care affordability and access. Emily previously worked at the CHCF Center for Health Reporting, USA Today and the Sacramento Bee. She graduated from Stanford University.
ebazar@kff.org | @emilybazar
Rachel BluthRachel Bluth, Peggy Girshman Web Reporting Fellow, recently earned her master’s from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. At Merrill, she reported on health disparities in Baltimore, and her work was published on NPR.org and PBS.org. She was previously the lead political correspondent for the Annapolis Bureau of Capital News Service, where she covered the Maryland General Assembly and Gov. Larry Hogan. She has also written for the Maryland Reporter and the Prince George’s Sentinel.
rbluth@kff.org | @rachelhbluth
Terry ByrneTerry Byrne, Copy Editor, is a veteran of newspapers and magazines — and their digital platforms — including USA Today, The Detroit News, The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot, The (Newport News) Daily Press and USA Weekend Magazine. There she served as copy desk chief and was on the founding team behind its Make A Difference Day volunteerism franchise. She is a former Dow Jones Newspaper Fund scholarship recipient and a graduate of Michigan State University Honors College.
tbyrne@kff.org | @terryism
Mary Agnes Carey, Partnerships Editor and Senior Correspondent, oversees placement of KHN content in publications nationwide and covers health reform and federal health policy. Before joining KHN, Mary Agnes was associate editor of CQ HealthBeat, Capitol Hill Bureau Chief for Congressional Quarterly and a reporter with Dow Jones Newswires. A frequent radio and television commentator, she has appeared on CNN, C-SPAN, the PBS NewsHour and on NPR affiliates nationwide. Her stories have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, TheAtlantic.com, Time.com, Money.com, and The Daily Beast, among other publications. She worked for newspapers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
macarey@kff.org | @maryagnescarey
Doug Carroll joined KHN as an editor in August 2015. Before that, he was a reporter and editor for USA Today’s Money section for nearly 30 years. He joined USA Today as a business reporter in 1985, three years after the national newspaper’s creation. Earlier, he was employed by The Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y., where he’s a native.
dcarroll@kff.org
Heidi de Marco, Multimedia Reporter and Producer for California Healthline, was previously a freelance video journalist and photographer specializing in work abroad, including a series of short-form videos about artisans in Guatemala supported by Novica and National Geographic. She was a managing editor for El Pueblo in Los Angeles prior to moving to India for a post-graduate program at the International Center for Journalists. Heidi also studied Spanish-language broadcast journalism at UCLA.
hdemarco@kff.org | @heidi_demarco
Barbara Feder Ostrov, Senior Editor for California Healthline, has reported on medicine and health policy for more than 15 years. She covered the medical beat for the San Jose Mercury News for eight years and edited the website of the Center for Health Journalism at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. She previously worked at The Palm Beach Post and the Miami Herald. Her work also has been published in The Boston Globe, Ms. Magazine, Atlantic.com, PBS NewsHour, NPR, CNN.com and EverydayHealth.com. She has won awards from the Society for Women’s Health Research, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the Florida Press Club. She is based in San Jose, California.
barbarao@kff.org | @barbfederostrov
Phil Galewitz, Senior Correspondent, covers Medicaid, Medicare, long-term care, hospitals and various state health issues. He has covered the health beat for more than two decades. He is a former board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists. In 2004/05, he was a Kaiser Media Fellow and wrote about community solutions to the uninsured. Before coming to KHN, he was at The Palm Beach Post and was a national health industry writer for the Associated Press and The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. He has a BA in health planning and administration and a master’s in public administration with an emphasis in health policy from Penn State University.
pgalewitz@kff.org | @philgalewitz
Jenny Gold, Senior Correspondent, covers the health care industry, the ACA and health care disparities for radio and print. Her stories have aired on NPR and been published by USA Today, The Washington Post and many other news organizations. She was previously a Kroc Fellow at NPR, where she covered health and business, and a broadcast associate at the CBS Evening News. She is a graduate of Brown University.
jgold@kff.org @jennyagold
Anna Gorman, Senior Correspondent, is based in Los Angeles. She joined the team from the Los Angeles Times, where she worked for nearly 15 years covering health care, immigration and the Mexican border. She was a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and taught journalism at Harvard University and at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Anna earned her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and her master’s from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. While at the L.A. Times, she was part of a team that won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

dear emily saul,

have you filed requests with them pursuant yo ny pub off law sec 84 etc?

Queens casino keeps getting fined for fire code violations


The Resorts World Casino at Aqueduct keeps making the same bet — and losing.
The Queens casino has been fined three times in as many years for flouting fire codes, and each time the multi-billion dollar establishment rolls the dice on a costly appeal instead of just shelling out a few thousand dollars to settle the low-level violations.
The casino has been cited for various minor civil infractions like not posting signs for crowd capacity, failing to prevent a baseless fire alarm and not keeping the alarm system up to date.
In total, the three fines have amounted to a mere $3,975.
Yet, upon receiving the summons, casino lawyers offered the same losing argument: that it is part of the state and therefore not subject to FDNY regulations.
Each case has made it’s way to the city’s Office of Administrative Trials & Hearings–where it the panel determined the casino’s arguments were a dud.
Neither the FDNY nor a spokeswoman for the casino responded to requests for comment.
Resorts World, run by the Genting Group, is one of the most profitable casinos in the US. In April, it posted profits of $62.6 million, according to filings with the state.

Monday, May 29, 2017

the profits of.....the

restsurant at the carle place branch of nassau otb are ours......

joseph mondello could not see that sn italian restsurant was maintained in operation at the carle place branch of nassau otb




Photo
CreditTim Peacock 
When President Trump took office, his lawyers said they had an easy way to solve the legal questions posed by his ownership of a Washington hotel. Since the Constitution’s emoluments clause bans government officials from accepting payments from foreign governments, Sheri Dillon of Morgan Lewis, standing with Mr. Trump next to a mound of files at a made-for-television news conference, said her client would “voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments made to his hotel to the United States Treasury.”
You didn’t believe that, did you?
Early on, anyone who asked the hotel for proof that it was earmarking foreign government profits for taxpayers was told to wait until the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Trump International Hotel continued accepting foreign payments in Washington, where every diplomatically recognized nation has an embassy and where foreigners account for 27 percent of visitor spending, according to the local tourism authorities. Since Mr. Trump won the election, the hotel has been booked for parties thrown by the governments of Azerbaijan, Bahrain and Kuwait, which moved their events from other hotels to Mr. Trump’s.
Last month, Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings, respectively, the chairman and the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, requested documents detailing exactly how the Trump Organization and Morgan Lewis would identify, track, pay and claim tax deductions for the foreign profits Mr. Trump had promised to give to taxpayers.
The response? A slick eight-page brochure titled “TRUMP: Donation of Profits from Foreign Government Patronage,” illustrated with stock photographs of a chandeliered hotel lobby, a champagne bucket and a golf course water feature. On the bottom of Page 4, near a photo of a businessman gazing at the sunset, is the bottom line. “Putting forth a policy that requires all guests to identify themselves would impede upon personal privacy and diminish the guest experience of our brand,” the paragraph reads. “It is not the intention nor design of this policy for our properties to attempt to identify individual travelers who have not specifically identified themselves as being a representative of a foreign government entity on foreign government business.”
In other words: We don’t ask if they don’t tell.
Ethics experts say it would be easy to encourage foreign government patrons to identify themselves. If online reservation forms let guests request a hotel room away from the elevators, they could also include a box to check if you’re a foreign government emissary. Even better: Why can’t Mr. Trump, who is fond of issuing executive orders, sign one banning members of his administration from dining or attending events at his hotel? No foreign government would bother throwing an expensive party in the Trump hotel if nobody from the White House were allowed to show up.
It should have been clear from the start that Mr. Trump’s hotel scheme was as bogus as most of his pledges to give money away. Even as she laid out the vague plan during that January dog-and-pony show, Ms. Dillon offered her own custom interpretation of the emoluments clause: “Some people want to define emoluments to cover routine business transactions like paying for hotel rooms,” she said. “These people are wrong.” (“These people” include a watchdog group, a restaurant organization and an events booker harmed by the hotel, whose suit against Mr. Trump maintains that he is violating the emoluments clause.)
In the same news conference, Mr. Trump repeatedly affirmed his true intention. “I could actually run my business and run government at the same time,” he said. “I don’t like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that if I wanted to.” Now it’s clear that is exactly what Mr. Trump is doing, and we don’t like the way it looks, either.


Sunday, May 28, 2017

update needed michael goodwin

start with suffolk county legislator and teamsters local 707  president kevin mccaffrey


When pension funds go empty, all bets are off


Some 407,000 Teamsters are learning a painful lesson: Their private-sector pensions aren’t as safe as they once thought.
Pay attention, government workers — and taxpayers — in New York and New Jersey.
Last week, letters informed these Teamsters they’re facing cuts in benefits of up to 60 percent. Why? Because their pension fund is going broke.
The Central States Pension Fund covers workers from more than 1,500 trucking, construction and other companies in 37 states. Thanks to trucking deregulation, declining union rolls, aging workers and weak stock-market returns, the fund is now paying out $3.46 in benefits for every $1 it takes in. That’s $2 billion a year in red ink.
At that rate, doom arrives in 2026, sinking Central States and maybe even the federal fund that’s supposed to insure such private-sector pensions. Retirees would get even lower benefits — or maybe nothing at all.
Which is why Congress and President Obama last year gave “multi-employer” funds like Central States the green light to restructure if necessary — and slice benefits.
At least a few big pension systems are sure to follow Central States.
And so the retirement security countless workers have long counted on went poof.
Government pensions aren’t immune. Yes, many state constitutions bar pension cuts — and if the funds sink, politicians would find it easier to hit up taxpayers in a crunch than anger unions and their members by trimming benefits.
Easier at first, anyway. But when the well runs dry, what’ll happen?
That’s the nut New Jersey governments have been grappling with in recent years. New York’s situation is better — but it, too, faces a reckoning.
That’s even though Jersey’s funds need a whopping $200 billion to make good on their pension promises, while Empire State funds need $308 billion. Driving the shortfalls: Too many retirees for each current worker, as with Central States; overly generous pension promises pols made to please unions — and governments’ habit of not paying what they should into the funds.
Trouble is, New York and New Jersey taxpayers already bear a heavier load than in any other state and have been fleeing the area for years. Squeeze them too hard to plug pension gaps, and you start losing taxpayers in a downward spiral.
That’s part of what drove Detroit to bankruptcy — and when the Motor City went belly-up in 2013, a judge OK’d cuts in public-worker pensions — never mind what it said in Michigan’s constitution.
Local public-sector unions and their members would do well to rethink their stubborn resistance to reforms and their endless fight for ever-costlier benefits.
“What we’re asking is to let us tap the brakes a little now, and let us avoid insolvency,” says Central States Executive Director Thomas Nyhan. “The longer we wait to act, the larger the benefit reductions.”
That math is the same everywhere.