An investigation of public records shows the Law Department’s mandated reporting has not provided full transparency. When 20-year-old Ronald Herrera was killed in 2012 by a police cruiser driven by New York City police officer Sabrina Alicea, his family sued and settled in 2017. The public, however, never learned of the disposition despite extensive media coverage after a contradictory video surfaced disproving Alicea’s official statements. According to the Herrera family’s attorney Philip Newman, his clients were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The $750,000 settlement to Herreira’s family and $3.5 million payout to his friend, Leonel Cueves, who was maimed in the same incident, was never mentioned in the Law Department’s statutory reporting of litigation outcomes. A years-long investigation of public records obtained under Freedom of Information laws by City & State found that the lawsuit and 12,748 other cases filed against the New York Police Department that were settled or awarded monetary verdicts from January 2013 through December 2023 were never mentioned in litigation outcome summaries required bi-annually from the Law Department under legislation passed into law by the City Council. The same analysis found that settlements and awards that took more than five years, from filing to conclusion, were not reported. Nor have settlements been shared stemming from court actions filed prior to January 1, 2013. The Law Department also omitted cases that were closed within five years, but whose plaintiffs may still have had pending Surrogate's Court proceedings pegged to them. The department also left out cases settled under non-disclosure agreements.

It was a Tax Court of Canada case last year that went mostly under the radar by all except for the legal community who were taken aback by its implications for renters. A Montreal tenant was audited and ordered to pay the tax he had failed to withhold on the monthly rent to his non-resident landlord, as required by law. As a result, he was ordered to pay six years’ worth of tax as well as the compounded interest and penalties. The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) could not collect against his overseas landlord, so the Canadian tenant was on the hook. Last year, the tenant took the Minister of National Revenue to court, arguing that he did not know his landlord was a non-resident. The tenant, whose Italy-based landlord owned a single unit in a Montreal building, lost the Tax Court appeal on the grounds that they were a Canadian resident paying rent to a non-resident landlord, and were therefore required to withhold and remit 25 per cent of the rent to the CRA. The judge acknowledged “the harsh consequences,” in her decision, but still held the “resident payer,” or renter, liable.

A new congressional resolution aligns Republicans with the financial industry’s fight to preserve sky-high credit card late fees.

Rest of World spoke with 40 riders for Swiggy in India. Many described losing coverage when they needed help the most.

For months World Central Kitchen leadership censored material coming out of its Gaza operation and refused to honor staff concerns about our work there. They are finally taking a stand after personnel were killed, but it is much too late.

New federal rules require public systems to measure and mitigate certain harmful man-made chemicals. Maine is already learning how hard that can be. The Saunderses’ home, in Fairfield, Maine, is in a quiet, secluded spot, 50 minutes from the drama of the rocky coast and an hour and 15 minutes from the best skiing around. It’s also sitting atop a plume of poison. For decades, sewage sludge was spread on the corn fields surrounding their house, and on hundreds of other fields across the state. That sludge is suspected to have been tainted with PFAS, a group of man-made compounds that cause a litany of ailments, including kidney and prostate cancers, fertility loss, and developmental disorders. The Saunderses’ property is on one of the most contaminated roads in a state just waking up to the extent of an invisible crisis. Onur Apul, an environmental engineer at the University of Maine and the head of its initiative to study PFAS solutions, told me that in his opinion, the United States has seen “nothing as overwhelming, and nothing as universal” as the PFAS crisis. Even the DDT crisis of the 1960s doesn’t compare, he said: DDT was used only as an insecticide and could be banned by banning that single use. PFAS are used in hundreds of products across industries and consumer sectors. Their nearly 15,000 variations can help make pans nonstick, hiking clothes and plumber’s tape waterproof, and dental floss slippery. They’re in performance fabrics on couches, waterproof mascara, tennis rackets, ski wax.

During the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital, the Israeli army shot patients in their beds and doctors who refused to abandon the sick, separated people into groups with differently-colored bracelets, and executed hundreds of civil government employees.

The 67-year-old chairwoman of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country's 2022 GDP.

What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good? The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements. Last week, Janko Roettgers, a technology and entertainment reporter, uncovered a dystopian patent filed last August by Roku, the television- and streaming-device manufacturer whose platform is used by tens of millions of people worldwide. The filing details plans for an “HDMI customized ad insertion,” which would allow TVs made by Roku to monitor video signals through the HDMI port—where users might connect a game console, a Blu-ray player, a cable box, or even another streaming device—and then inject targeted advertisements when content is paused. This would be a drastic extension of Roku’s surveillance potential: The company currently has no ability to see what users might be doing when they switch away from its proprietary streaming platform. This is apparently a problem, in that Roku is missing monetization opportunities! Although the patent may never come to fruition (a spokesperson for Roku told me that the company had no plans to put HDMI ad insertion into any products at this time), it speaks to a dispiriting recent trend in consumer hardware. Internet-connected products can transform after the point of purchase in ways that can feel intrusive or even hostile to users. Another example from Roku: Just last month, the company presented users with an update to its terms of service, asking them to enter a pre-arbitration process that would make it harder to sue the company. On one hand, this isn’t so unusual—apps frequently force users to accept terms-of-service updates before proceeding. But on the other, it feels galling to be locked out of using your television altogether over a legal agreement: “Until I press ‘Agree’ my tv is essentially being held hostage and rendered useless,” one Roku customer posted on Reddit. “I can’t even change the HDMI input.” A Roku spokesperson confirmed that a user does have to agree to the latest terms in order to use the company’s services but said that customers have the option to opt out, by sending a letter, in the actual mail, to the company’s general counsel (though the window to do so closed on March 21).

When a new owner took control of a mobile home park in Mercer County, West Virginia, its residents noticed immediate changes.Rents went up, and it seemed like the new owner was doing less to take care of problems like broken windows, or even a sewage leak. So one resident started looking into exactly who this new owner was.

The new report debunks widespread misinformation that the mRNA shots were connected to sudden cardiac death in young athletes.

The enormous Hawaiian-born wrestler helped raise the international profile of Japanese sumo in the 1990s.

For $699 and $24 a month, this wearable computer promises to free you from your smartphone. There’s only one problem: it just doesn’t work.

Woodford Reserve Distillery and parent Brown-Forman have been ordered to recognize and bargain with a Teamsters affiliate after a judge found that the distillery unfairly influenced a 2022 unionization vote by handing out bottles of premium bourbon and pay bumps. The National Labor Relations Board judge found that Louisville-based Brown-Forman “committed serious violations” of labor law.

O.J. Simpson -- one of the most infamous high-profile Americans of all time -- is dead after a cancer battle.

There’s a lot we don’t know about these early mammals. For example, the first mammals evolved out of the reptilian order Therapsida. These early creatures also laid eggs, much like today’s monotremes (platypuses and echidnas), however the process with which they shed their reptilian features and began to evolve into attributes we know about mammals today remains a mystery.

Danielle Johnson was worried about the eclipse. The astrology influencer and “divine healer,” who went by the name Danielle Ayoka online, called the upcoming astronomical event “the epitome of spiritual warfare” and told people they needed to “pick a side,” in posts Thursday on X. Less than three days later, in the early morning before the partial solar eclipse, Johnson left a trail of tragedy in her wake: her partner stabbed to death in the kitchen of the family apartment in Woodland Hills, her 8-month-old baby dead after being pushed from Johnson’s moving Porsche Cayenne on the 405, and Johnson herself dead after crashing her car on Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach.

Kids recognize that the world is going to shit, experts respond with “maybe more school psychologists and less social media”.

Dr Hilary Cass’s review into trans children’s healthcare says it aims to “ensure children and young people who are questioning their gender identity” receive “care that meets their needs”. It ensures the opposite. The Cass Review on gender identity services for children, published on Wednesday, boosts Tories, bigots and transphobes and will make life harder for trans+ people. Dr Cass paints a picture of medics stampeding to hand out puberty blockers to children. One look at the waiting lists for trans healthcare shows a very different picture. Some 26,234 adults were waiting for a first appointment with an adult gender clinic as of August 2022—and 23,561 had been waiting for over 18 weeks.

A scammer's dream and a disaster waiting to happen.