Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.

Judge Rules Against NYC in COVID Vaccine Case After Mandate Lifted

New York Post reported:

The city’s bid to toss an NYPD sergeant’s vaccine mandate lawsuit was shot down by a Manhattan judge — in what could be the first such ruling since Mayor Eric Adams lifted the COVID-era rule requiring Big Apple workers to get the jab.

Attorney James Mermigis — dubbed the “Anti-shutdown” lawyer for his pandemic-related litigation — told The Post that the city has sought to get roughly 50 of his cases tossed out as moot since the mandate was lifted on Feb. 9.

On Tuesday, in what could be a first-of-its-kind ruling, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Erika Edwards rejected the city’s argument in one such lawsuit — filed by NYPD Sgt. Patrick Agugliaro after his request for a COVID-19 vaccine exemption on religious grounds was denied.

Mermigis, who represents roughly 100 city workers in such lawsuits — the majority of which are NYPD cops, but also include firefighters and teachers — noted that when Adams announced the mandate lift, he left the door open to reinstating it again in the future.

N.Y. Court System Nixes COVID Vaccine Mandate for Employees

Reuters reported:

The New York state court system has withdrawn a requirement that judges and employees receive COVID-19 vaccines, according to a filing made on Thursday in a judge’s lawsuit claiming he should have been granted a religious exemption.

Lawyers for Frank Mora, a city court judge in Poughkeepsie, New York, said in the filing that the state Unified Court System issued a memo to employees on Wednesday announcing that the mandate adopted last year would be discontinued.

As a result, Mora’s request for a preliminary injunction seeking to have his full job duties restored is moot, but the underlying lawsuit should proceed, his lawyers wrote.

The court system last April fired 103 employees who did not comply with the vaccine requirement and required Mora and three other judges to work remotely.

U.S. Navy Will No Longer Require COVID Vaccines for Deployment

The Hill reported:

The U.S. Navy is rolling back requirements for COVID-19 vaccines, axing the consideration of vaccination status when making decisions about the deployment of sailors.

The decision by the Navy reverses a policy that was in place for more than a year, mandating that vaccination status be considered when determining deployment.

Congress nixed the military’s vaccination requirements as part of the annual National Defense Authorization Act at the end of 2022.

The new guidelines did not offer directives on how to handle personnel that were separated from the Navy because of their vaccination status when the mandate was still in place.

If AT&T Can Silence Newsmax, Who Is Next?

Newsweek reported:

AT&T’s recent de-platforming of Newsmax, one of America’s most influential cable news channels, should alarm everyone, including liberals. We are all at risk when censorship occurs — when one is silenced based on his or her point of view.

The facts strongly suggest that partisan and ideological motives played a sizable role in AT&T and DirecTV’s decision to remove Newsmax on January 24, when some 13 million homes were deprived of the channel — including my own. After the recent State of the Union address, I turned to Newsmax for its coverage but was surprised to find it suddenly missing from my channel guide.

Newsmax has been quite familiar to me: For several years, I have been a legal analyst for the network. While the channel is center-right in its political orientation, my liberal positions are welcomed without any hesitation. In my book The Case Against the New Censorship, I studied the growing movement to silence dissenting views, of which Newsmax now appears to be a victim.

After Elon Musk‘s release of the “Twitter Files,” we know the FBI worked to censor private parties — a serious potential breach of constitutionally protected free speech rights. Did something similar happen when AT&T shut off OANN and Newsmax?

U.S. Launches Artificial Intelligence Military Use Initiative

Associated Press reported:

The United States launched an initiative Thursday promoting international cooperation on the responsible use of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons by militaries, seeking to impose order on an emerging technology that has the potential to change the way war is waged.

Bonnie Jenkins, the State Department’s undersecretary for arms control and international security, said the U.S. political declaration, which contains non-legally binding guidelines outlining best practices for the responsible military use of AI, “can be a focal point for international cooperation.”

Jenkins launched the declaration at the end of a two-day conference in The Hague that took on additional urgency as advances in drone technology amid Russia’s war in Ukraine have accelerated a trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield.

The U.S. declaration has 12 points, including that military uses of AI are consistent with international law, and that states “maintain human control and involvement for all actions critical to informing and executing sovereign decisions concerning nuclear weapons employment.”

OpenAI Cofounder Elon Musk Said the Non-Profit He Helped Create Is Now Focused on ‘Maximum Profit,’ Which Is ‘Not What I Intended at All’

Insider reported:

OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk took to Twitter to defend his early involvement in the company that created ChatCPT, saying it has become a “maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” which was not what he “intended at all.”

The billionaire was responding to a tweet questioning why he co-founded OpenAI when he considers artificial intelligence “one of the biggest risks” to civilization and needs further regulation.

Musk wrote in response: “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, the maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.”

It was initially a non-profit dedicated to developing digital intelligence “in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” it wrote on its website in 2015, Insider’s Grace Kay recently reported. But it shed its non-profit status in 2019 and became a “capped-profit” company to “raise investment capital and attract employees,” the company announced in a blog post.

The company announced a partnership with Microsoft the same year and welcomed a $1 billion investment from the tech giant.

TikTok, Twitter, Facebook Set to Face EU Crackdown on Toxic Content

Politico reported:

TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have now confirmed they will face the strictest rules under the EU’s content-moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Online platforms have until Friday at midnight to reveal how many Europeans use their services under the DSA. Platforms and search engines with over 45 million EU users will have to adhere to sweeping requirements starting in the summer of 2023 including swiftly taking down illegal content, limiting disinformation and better protecting kids and teenagers under the supervision of the European Commission.

The European Commission could slap fines of up to 6% of companies’ annual global revenue if their investigations find such very large online platforms (VLOPs) at fault. Large companies will also be audited by external companies to check they are doing enough to ensure their algorithms and platforms don’t pose major risks to society, and researchers will have access to some crucial internal data.

Several big social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have been under scrutiny for spreading disinformation and pushing users down rabbit holes of increasingly extreme content. Instagram has also faced widespread criticism for reportedly harming teenage girls’ mental health.

EU Countries Agree to Scrap COVID Tests for Travelers From China

Politico reported:

EU countries have agreed to phase out two of the recommended travel-related measures agreed upon in the wake of China’s scrapping of its zero-COVID policy, the Swedish Presidency said in a statement on Thursday.

Countries agreed to lift the requirement for a negative pre-departure COVID-19 test for people traveling to the EU from China by the end of February and put an end to randomly testing travelers arriving from China by mid-March.

Already, Sweden’s Public Health Agency has announced the country will be lifting all entry requirements for travelers from China starting February 19.

Fears that China’s lifting of its zero-COVID policy could result in fresh coronavirus variants have not yet materialized.