Credit: (Screengrab from YouTube)
May 24, 2021: Gov. Phil Murphy announces details of how the state’s mask mandate will be lifted.
On Friday, New Jerseyans can abandon their face masks even when inside dine at regularly spaced restaurant tables, belly up to a bar for nothing more than a beverage and even take to the dance floor.
Gov. Phil Murphy announced Monday that many of the state’s remaining COVID-19 restrictions would end in four days, just in time for the Memorial Day weekend, and the current gathering limits would be eliminated the following Friday. The declining impact of COVID-19 makes this possible, he said, but also noted that he predicted in December that things would likely return to more normalcy by this holiday.
Fighting tax pirates from New York State: A Q&A with Sen. Steve Oroho
Updated May 12, 2021;
About 400,000 New Jerseyans typically commute to New York, but an estimated 90 percent of them worked from home after the pandemic slammed the door on interstate travel last year. New York taxed them anyway, because their employers are in New York.
Our truculent neighbor applies a “convenience of the employer” rule to tax all non-residents who work for a New York company unless “necessity, as distinguished from convenience, obligate the employee to out-of-state duties.” You’d think a once-in-a-century pandemic would make working at home a necessity, but New York asserts that those should be considered days worked in New York, and they believe the convenience rule provides the necessary cover.
Credit: (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
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To keep unemployment benefits flowing while it faced a historic demand for help, New Jersey has relied on an interest-free loan of more than $1 billion from the federal government.
But the zero-interest part is due to change later this year, unless action is taken in Washington, D.C., providing some urgency to come up with a plan to pay down the unemployment debt before the interest charges come due.
Now some lawmakers and business-lobbying groups are making the case for using a portion of the more than $6 billion that New Jersey is waiting to receive from the federal government’s recently enacted American Rescue Plan Act.
Credit: (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
File Photo: Newark Police
New Jersey is in the midst of providing two days of training for all police as part of a comprehensive approach that has two main goals: restore public trust in law enforcement and prevent the use of excessive force that has killed people and sparked protests across the country, the state’s attorney general told lawmakers Thursday.
“There is a crisis of confidence in policing,” Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said. “We recognize the need to bridge that divide and rebuild that trust with the public. We need that trust for public safety.”