The tensions point to the difficulty governors across the Northeast have had in persuading districts to reopen — decisions that often require school boards to buck powerful unions.
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Tag Archives: New Jersey
A Badly Timed Disruption for Wine Sales in the New York Area
A storm last week damaged a North Jersey warehouse, impeding deliveries to stores during a busy holiday season.
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Arthur Imperatore, Founder of a Critical Ferry Service, Dies at 95
He steered New York Waterway through financial straits. He also reveled in moments of glory, notably when his boats rode to the rescue on Sept. 11, 2001.
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Pot Legalization Hits an Unlikely Snag: ‘Magic’ Mushrooms
The addition of psilocybin mushrooms to a bill decriminalizing marijuana possession threw a monkey wrench into New Jersey’s legalization effort.
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Finally, New Jersey Might Be Cooler Than New York
If we’re judging by willingness to legalize recreational marijuana, that is.
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Coronavirus Surge in N.Y.: 5 Takeaways
New York and New Jersey have imposed new restrictions to curb a spike in coronavirus cases.
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19% Test Positive as Outbreak Accelerates in N.J.’s Largest City
After nearly one in five residents who were tested over three days last week were found to have the coronavirus, Newark announced a set of strict new rules.
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As Virus Rate Surges to 6%, N.J. Governor Warns of Crackdown
Like New York, the state had beaten back the virus in the early days of the pandemic. Now, it is bracing for another battle.
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Van Drew, Who Switched Parties and Backed Trump, Keeps N.J. House Seat
Jeff Van Drew, a Republican congressman who defected from the Democrats, beat back a challenge from a former schoolteacher who is married to a Kennedy nephew.
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Tears, Hugs and Fresh Clothes: New Jersey Prisoners Rejoice at Release
More than 2,000 inmates were freed to reduce the spread of Covid in the state’s prison system.
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Incumbent Democrats Win in N.J. House Races; Van Drew Narrowly Ahead
Voter turnout was on track to set records, complicating the counting process. Mail ballots may be counted for up to a week after the election.
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Oregon Decriminalizes Small Amounts of Heroin and Cocaine; Four States Legalize Marijuana
There were 38 statewide citizen initiatives being decided across the country on Tuesday, about half the level of the last presidential election.
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How Long Will the Counting Drag On in New York?
While the presidential race in the state was called on election night, more heavily contested races may take a while longer.
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2,258 N.J. Prisoners Will Be Released in a Single Day
By March, officials expect to have reduced the state’s prison population by about 35 percent since the start of the pandemic.
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Incumbent Democrats Prevail in New Jersey Congressional Races
Voter turnout was on track to set records, complicating the counting process. Mail ballots may be counted for up to a week after the election.
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Oregon Decriminalizes Small Amounts of Heroin and Cocaine, and New Jersey and Arizona Legalize Marijuana
There were 38 statewide citizen initiatives being decided across the country on Tuesday, about half the level of the last presidential election.
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Recreational Marijuana Legalized by New Jersey Voters
Voters approved a constitutional amendment to legalize cannabis in New Jersey, putting pressure on neighboring states like New York.
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‘Goodfellas,’ the Sequel? 4 Arrested in $6 Million Heist at J.F.K. Airport
The men used fake paperwork to steal more than 4,000 Prada, Gucci and Chanel items from a cargo area at the airport, prosecutors say.
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N.J’s Largest City Shuts Down Again as Virus Cases Surge
Newark required nonessential businesses to close indoor operations beginning at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. Salons may open by appointment only.
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Facebook steps into cloud gaming — and another feud with Apple
Facebook will soon be the latest tech giant to enter the world of cloud gaming. Their approach is different than what Microsoft or Google has built but Facebook highlights a shared central challenge: dealing with Apple.
Facebook is not building a console gaming competitor to compete with Stadia or xCloud, instead the focus is wholly on mobile games. Why cloud stream mobile games that your device is already capable of running locally? Facebook is aiming to get users into games more quickly and put less friction between a user seeing an advertisement for a game and actually playing it themselves. Users can quickly tap into the title without downloading anything and if they eventually opt to download the title from a mobile app store, they’ll be able to pick up where they left off.
Facebook’s service will launch on the desktop web and Android, but not iOS due to what Facebook frames as usability restrictions outlined in Apple’s App Store terms and conditions.
With the new platform, users will be able to start playing mobile games directly from Facebook ads. Image via Facebook.
While Apple has suffered an onslaught of criticism in 2020 from developers of major apps like Spotify, Tinder and Fortnite for how much money they take as a cut from revenues of apps downloaded from the App Store, the plights of companies aiming to build cloud gaming platforms have been more nuanced and are tied to how those platforms are fundamentally allowed to operate on Apple devices.
Apple was initially slow to provide a path forward for cloud gaming apps from Google and Microsoft, which had previously been outlawed on the App Store. The iPhone maker recently updated its policies to allow these apps to exist, but in a more convoluted capacity than the platform makers had hoped, forcing them to first send users to the App Store before being able to cloud stream a gaming title on their platform.
For a user downloading a lengthy single-player console epic, the short pitstop is an inconvenience, but long-time Facebook gaming exec Jason Rubin says that the stipulations are a non-starter for what Facebook’s platform envisions, a way to start playing mobile games immediately without downloading anything.
“It’s a sequence of hurdles that altogether make a bad consumer experience,” Rubin tells TechCrunch.
Apple tells TechCrunch that they have continued to engage with Facebook on bringing its gaming efforts under its guidelines and that platforms can reach iOS by either submitting each individual game to the App Store for review or operating their service on Safari.
In terms of building the new platform onto the mobile web, Rubin says that without being able to point users of their iOS app to browser-based experiences, as current rules forbid, Facebook doesn’t see pushing its billions of users to accessing the service primarily from a browser as a reasonable alternative. In a Zoom call, Rubin demoes how this could operate on iOS, with users tapping an advertisement inside the app and being redirected to a game experience in mobile Safari.
“But if I click on that, I can’t go to the web. Apple says, ‘No, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that,’ Rubin tells us. “Apple may say that it’s a free and open web, but what you can actually build on that web is dictated by what they decide to put in their core functionality.”
Facebook VP of Play Jason Rubin. Image via Facebook.
Rubin, who co-founded the game development studio Naughty Dog in 1994 before it was acquired by Sony in 2001, has been at Facebook since he joined Oculus months after its 2014 acquisition was announced. Rubin had previously been tasked with managing the games ecosystem for its virtual reality headsets, this year he was put in charge of the company’s gaming initiatives across their core family of apps as the company’s VP of Play.
Rubin, well familiar with game developer/platform skirmishes, was quick to distinguish the bone Facebook had to pick with Apple and complaints from those like Epic Games which sued Apple this summer.
“I do want to put a pin in the fact that we’re giving Google 30% [on Android]. The Apple issue is not about money,” Rubin tells TechCrunch. “We can talk about whether or not it’s fair that Google takes that 30%. But we would be willing to give Apple the 30% right now, if they would just let consumers have the opportunity to do what we’re offering here.”
Facebook is notably also taking a 30% cut of transaction within these games, even as Facebook’s executive team has taken its own shots at Apple’s steep revenue fee in the past, most recently criticizing how Apple’s App Store model was hurting small businesses during the pandemic. This saga eventually led to Apple announcing that it would withhold its cut through the end of the year for ticket sales of small businesses hosting online events.
Apple’s reticence to allow major gaming platforms a path towards independently serving up games to consumers underscores the significant portion of App Store revenues that could be eliminated by a consumer shift towards these cloud platforms. Apple earned around $50 billion from the App Store last year, CNBC estimates, and gaming has long been their most profitable vertical.
Though Facebook is framing this as an uphill battle against a major platform for the good of the gamer, this is hardly a battle between two underdogs. Facebook pulled in nearly $70 billion in ad revenues last year and improving their offerings for mobile game studios could be a meaningful step towards increasing that number, something Apple’s App Store rules threaten.
For the time being, Facebook is keeping this launch pretty conservative. There are just 5-10 titles that are going to be available at launch, Rubin says. Facebook is rolling out access to the new service, which is free, this week across a handful of states in America, including California, Texas, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia and West Virginia. The hodge-podge nature of the geographic rollout is owed to the technical limitations of cloud-gaming– people have to be close to data centers where the service has rolled out in order to have a usable experience. Facebook is aiming to scale to the rest of the U.S. in the coming months, they say.
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Two Children Killed in Trenton, Where Violence Is Surging
Killings in New Jersey’s capital city have more than doubled since last year, officials said.
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No, New York Isn’t Putting New Jersey on the Quarantine List
The governor said he would not restrict travelers from New Jersey, Connecticut or Pennsylvania, despite virus spikes in those states.
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Line Holders Are Paid to Wait All Night Outside Motor Vehicle Offices
A huge backlog at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission has spawned a new gig worker.
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Virus Cases Spike in New Jersey, Threatening ‘Lurch Backward’
Gov. Philip D. Murphy said that residents should refrain from all but necessary out-of-state travel.
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Football’s Boo Birds Are All Cooped Up
N.F.L. fans in the Northeast, lusty booers in normal times, have had to watch their teams’ dim performances from afar, without recourse. “I have no way to release my venom,” one Jets fan said.
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Mail-In Ballots in N.J.: ‘It’s Like They Can’t Wait to Vote’
Democrats in New Jersey are voting at higher rates than Republicans in conservative strongholds with three weeks to go before Election Day.
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5 Professors Sue Rutgers, Saying It Shortchanges Women on Pay
The five women say they are paid tens of thousands of dollars less than men with similar qualifications. The university says it is “committed to pay equity.”
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Twentyeight Health is a telemedicine company expanding access to women’s health and reproductive care
New York’s Twentyeight Health is taking the wildly telemedicine services for women’s health popularized by companies like Nurx and bringing them to a patient population that previously hadn’t had access.
The mission to provide women who are Medicaid or underinsured should not be deprived of the same kinds of care that patients who have more income security or better healthcare coverage enjoy, according to the company’s founder, Amy Fan.
The mission, and the company’s technology, have managed to convince a slew of investors who have poured $5.1 million in seed funding into the new startup. Third Prime led the round, which included investments from Town Hall Ventures, SteelSky Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, GingerBread Capital, Rucker Park Capital, Predictive VC, and angel investors like Stu Libby, Zoe Barry, and Wan Li Zhu.
“Women who are on Medicaid, who are underinsured or without health insurance often struggle to find access to reproductive health services, and these struggles have only increased with COVID-19 pandemic limiting access to in-person appointments,” said Amy Fan, co-founder of Twentyeight Health, in a statement. “We are fighting for healthcare equity, ensuring that all women, particularly BIPOC women and women from low-income backgrounds, can access high quality, dignified and convenient care.”
To ensure that its catering to underserved communities, the company works with Bottomless Closet, a workforce entry program for women, and the 8 colleges in the City University of New York ecosystem including LaGuardia College, which has 45,000 students with 70% coming from families making less than $30,000 in annual income.
The company’s services are currently available across Florida, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and it’s the only telemedicine company focused on contraception services to accept Medicaid.
In another example of how awesome this company is, it’s also working to provide free birth control for women who aren’t able to pay out of pocket and are uninsured through a partnership with Bedsider’s Contraceptive Access Fund. The company also donates 2% of its revenue to Bedsider and the National Institute for Reproductive Health. (Y’all, this company is amaze.)
To sign up for the service, new customers fill out a medical questionnaire online. Once the questionnaire is reviewed by a US board-certified doctor within 24 hours customers can access over 100 FDA-approved brands of birth control pills, patches, rings, shots, and emergency contraception and receive a shipment within three days.
Twentyeight Health provides ongoing care through online audio consultations and doctor follow up messages to discuss issues around updating prescriptions or addressing side effects, the company said.
“Today, low-income women are three times more likely to have an unintended pregnancy than the average woman in the U.S., and nearly one-third of physicians nationwide aren’t accepting new Medicaid patients,” said Bruno Van Tuykom, co-founder of Twentyeight Health, in a statement. “This underscores why offering high-quality reproductive care that is inclusive of people across race, income bracket, or health insurance status is more important than ever.”
Launched in 2018, Twentyeight Health said it would use the new cash to continue to expand its services across the U.S.
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Domenic Parisi Dies at 76; He Sheared Nixon’s Locks
Born in Sicily, he trained as a farrier but became a barber in New Jersey, where his most famous client was the former president. He died of the coronavirus.
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White House Is Not Contact Tracing ‘Super-Spreader’ Trump Rose Garden Event
Since President Trump’s Covid diagnosis, numerous associates have tested positive, but the White House has not aggressively investigated the outbreak.
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Should N.J. Legalize Marijuana? The Voters Will Decide
A question on November’s ballot asks residents if they support changing the state Constitution to allow recreational use of the drug.
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New Jersey Gas Tax Spikes Because of Coronavirus Impact
Taxes on gasoline and diesel increased by 9.3 cents a gallon on Thursday in a state once known for bargain fuel. The increase came a month after tolls on major roadways also went up.
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False G.O.P. Ad Prompts QAnon Death Threats Against a Democratic Congressman
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These Restaurants Reopened. That Doesn’t Mean They’ll Survive.
As New York City restaurants prepare to reopen for indoor dining, New Jersey owners say indoor capacity limits of 25 percent are hurting their odds of survival.
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Even Paper Bags Will Be Banned From N.J. Supermarkets
The bill, which would make the state the first to ban single-use paper bags at supermarkets, would also ban single-use plastic bags in stores and restaurants.
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N.J. Will Borrow $4.5 Billion as Pandemic Pain Hits States
It is one of the first states to take on debt to plug a budget hole created by the impact of the coronavirus.
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Deal Reached in N.J. for ‘Millionaires Tax’ to Address Fiscal Crisis
Gov. Philip Murphy said the tax would help make up shortfalls caused by the pandemic, but Republicans warned it would lead to an exodus of wealthy residents.
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2 Killed, 6 Injured in Shooting Near Rutgers University
The authorities said that the shooting on Sunday morning had “no affiliation” with the college or its students.
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Small Earthquake Rattles New Jersey Coast
The 3.1-magnitude earthquake shook an area about a mile south of East Freehold in Monmouth County. There were no reports of damage or injuries.
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Give Money to Babies
New Jersey’s “baby bonds” plan is a potentially transformative effort in the fight against inequality.
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New Apartments in the Suburbs Attract New Yorkers
City residents head to new developments in walkable suburban communities where they can get apartments with more indoor and outdoor space.
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A Pit Stop and a Pause to Reflect on a Summer That Wasn’t
After a summer marked by hot spots, lockdowns and travel restrictions, Labor Day was a last chance to get back on the open road.
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My Immigrant Mother’s Vote Is More Than Just a Ballot
My mother moved to America in 1989. This summer, amid a pandemic and an uprising, she voted for the first time.
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A Quick Virus Test? Sure, If You Can Afford It
Standard tests in New York City can take days or weeks. Wealthier people are turning to concierge services and small laboratories to get results in as little as 24 hours.
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14 Injured in Bus Accident Near Port Authority
One person was critically hurt after a New Jersey Transit bus struck a barrier on a ramp at 39th Street and Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, the authorities said.
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Why New Jersey’s Plan for In-Person Schooling Is Falling Apart
Growing numbers of districts are going online only, citing teacher shortages, ventilation issues and delayed guidance from the state on the virus.
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$1,000 ‘Baby Bond’ Proposed in N.J. in Bid to Narrow the Wealth Gap
A plan would set aside money at birth for children in most families, giving them a financial lift when they reach 18 and enter adulthood.
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The Dreaded Lanternbug, Scourge of Agriculture, Spreads in New Jersey
The insect poses a serious threat to American crops, particularly vineyards, and inspires creative backyard methods of eliminating them.
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Homes for Sale in New Jersey and Long Island
This week’s properties include a four-bedroom in Stockton, N.J., and a five-bedroom in Nesconset, N.Y.
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The Jersey Shore Vacation of my Imagination
Where the Bruce is loud, and the Rolling Rocks are cold.
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