Tag: freestory

Heat-related deaths in New Jersey appear to have shot up roughly five-fold over last summer following a holiday weekend with record-high temperatures, prompting advocates to urge the state to do more to protect vulnerable residents.

New Jersey reported 29 heat-related deaths between July 2 — when state data show temperatures in New Jersey peaked at 108 degrees — and July 6, according to state health officials, up from six such fatalities last summer.

Roughly a dozen of the deaths involved people who were unhoused or living in their cars, said Connie Mercer, CEO of the NJ Coalition to End Homelessness.

“Really we had a mass casualty event,” Mercer said.

Mercer and others want the state to expand its network of emergency cooling centers and take other steps to better protect those who are living or working outside from the impact of extreme temperatures.

State health officials did not provide specifics on the recent heat-related deaths, which must still be confirmed by autopsies, but they said most occurred in north and central New Jersey and involved people of all ages, not just elderly residents. Some were found in homes without air conditioning, while others died on the street or in parked cars, they said.

The heat also led emergency rooms to diagnose 132 people with heat-related illnesses on July 3, the highest single-day total in several years. Between July 2 and July 6, more than 350 people sought emergency care for heat issues, state data show.

“This is not a typical summer heat wave and it’s really important that we all take it seriously because it can become life-threatening very quickly,” state health commissioner Raynard Washington said at a July 4 press conference on storm damage and heat impacts.

New Jersey has reported heat-related fatalities in the single-digits for most years since 2000, when there were just two such deaths, according to health department data. Deaths peaked at 11 in 2002 and reached 10 in 2011 but fell to three in 2024.

The recent high death toll underscores the need to do more to protect those who work outdoors, according to state Sen. Joe Cryan (D., Union), who has championed a bill to create a state program to reduce occupational heat stress.

The bill, which has yet to get a hearing, calls for farms, amusement parks, and other outdoor job sites to provide water and shade breaks, and monitor workers for heat stress, among other things.

“Twenty-nine heat-related deaths is a staggering figure for one of the wealthiest states in the nation,” Cryan told the New Jersey Monitor, adding that he is renewing his push for worker protections and believes Gov. Mikie Sherrill “should be leading the charge for it.”

Sherrill’s office declined to comment but pointed to a broadcast interview the governor gave earlier this week about the impacts of the recent extreme weather, in which she said she was open to new ways to better serve the public during storms and heat waves. She said state agencies had sought to warn residents through social media and other channels and noted her office had worked closely with counties to establish cooling centers.

The governor also announced a new heat-health website during a July 4 press conference and urged residents to look out for each other during the extreme temperatures.

“Extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in America, and this is the hottest stretch we’ve seen in over 14 years. And the heat is hitting all of us — not just seniors, not just people with underlying conditions. People of all ages,” Sherrill said.

Advocates like Mercer said extreme temperature was only part of the problem. The recent deaths were preventable, she said, a result of systemic policy failure. New Jersey needs to do more to create affordable housing and support shelters, and to invest in emergency sites to keep people cool on dangerously hot days, she said.

“Quality shelter in a variety of forms would make sure that not too many people died horrible deaths out in the sun,” she told the New Jersey Monitor.

According to the most recent annual point-in-time count, more than 13,700 people in the state were considered homeless in 2025.

Heat-related illnesses occur when the body can’t properly cool itself, according to the health department, and the higher the temperature, the greater the risk. Infants, older adults, and people with chronic health conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular issues and respiratory diseases are most in danger, it notes.

Kelvin Boddy, director of healthy homes and communities with the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey, said the recent fatalities underscore the need for a statewide “code red” alert system for extreme heat, like the “code blue” warnings now in place for deep freezes.

As it is, Boddy said a handful of urban centers have instituted comprehensive responses to heat events, with designated cooling centers and clear strategies to communicate these options to residents. A pilot program adopted last year and backed by $2.5 million in state funds calls for similar programs in the five counties with the highest homeless rates: Essex, Burlington, Hudson, Union, and Mercer.

Work on the pilot is progressing slowly however, Boddy said, and the need for cooling services stretches statewide. “Clearly, as we saw with the recent statewide heatwave, this is needed outside the five counties,” he told the New Jersey Monitor.

Mercer said the code red program, while well intentioned, is not enough to address the need. “It’s a joke,” she said.

This story originally appeared on New Jersey Monitor.

New Jersey officials have given three public colleges $3.5 million in state funding to train aviation professionals, amid a national shortage of certified air traffic controllers that has led to mounting safety concerns and flight delays.

The state Office of the Secretary of Higher Education announced Tuesday that Kean University and Atlantic Cape Community College got $1.5 million each, and Warren County Community College received $500,000 under a grant program intended to grow New Jersey’s pipeline of aerospace professionals.

Those schools offer curricula aligned with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative, which gets graduates to on-the-job training faster by allowing them to bypass some standard FAA Academy requirements.

School administrators will use the money to expand aviation and aerospace programs.

Kean plans to create a new FAA-aligned bachelor of science degree in aviation management, expand its drone minor into a drone operations major, house a Center for the Study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, create a similar center focused on drones at its Skylands campus, and partner with K-12 schools to develop a pre-college aviation and drone pipeline program, according to the Office of the Secretary of Higher Education.

Atlantic Cape Community College plans to expand its FAA-aligned curriculum, add advanced simulation training, and expand teaching staff. Warren County Community College plans to develop an air traffic control certificate program and add an airport management and operations course.

“By supporting institutions to build programs and enhance training opportunities that feed into FAA certification pathways, we are developing routes into well-paying, stable careers for residents who will serve New Jersey and the nation over the decades to come,” Acting Secretary of Higher Education Margo Chaly said in a statement.

The funding came from former Gov. Phil Murphy’s final budget and was distributed last month.

The Trump administration announced a plan last year to “supercharge” hiring to reduce a shortage of 3,000 air traffic controllers nationally. The move came after a deadly air crash in Washington, D.C., and chaos from coast to coast, including at Newark Liberty International Airport.

The number of applicants spiked, but the shortage persists due to an increase in flights, high workforce attrition, difficult and lengthy training requirements, and the lingering impact of pandemic and government shutdowns, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in January.

This story originally appeared on New Jersey Monitor.

As police increasingly rely on a controversial investigative tool called facial recognition technology to identify crime suspects, New Jersey’s top court gave defense attorneys a win Wednesday, ordering prosecutors to more fully explain how they used the technology in a Jersey City murder case.

New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Douglas Fasciale, in a unanimous ruling, wrote that prosecutors were wrong to deny Tybear Miles’ discovery demand for details on which facial recognition software investigators relied on to arrest him in the June 2021 shooting death of Ahmad McPherson and how exactly they used it.

The technology is controversial because misidentifications have resulted in at least eight wrongful arrests nationally, with research showing it most often fails at identifying people of color, women, children, and elderly people. It also has gone largely unregulated both in New Jersey and nationally, alarming civil rights advocates.

Wednesday’s ruling builds upon a 2023 state appellate decision that required prosecutors to hand over 13 items related to the facial recognition software police used to charge Francisco Arteaga in a West New York armed robbery case.

Fasciale rejected any “mechanical application” of the Arteaga decision to other cases involving facial recognition technology, saying judges must decide such challenges based on case specifics.

Still, he said, fairness demands that defendants be able to scrutinize which tools police used to criminally charge them, both to challenge the tools’ reliability and to determine how police identified them as a suspect, examine whether the investigation was thorough, and demonstrate the possibility of another culprit.

“Although we reject a rigid checklist for [facial recognition technology] discovery, we note that such basic information will, in most cases, constitute the minimum necessary to safeguard a defendant’s right to a fair trial,” Fasciale wrote.

Attorney Dillon Reisman, who had argued before the court on behalf of the ACLU of New Jersey, called the decision “a really big win against the use of secret, opaque technology by law enforcement.”

“It’s a really positive sign that our court takes really seriously that new technologies are subject to constitutional safeguards,” Reisman said.

Tamar Lerer, deputy of the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender’s forensic science unit, had argued the case in court, too, and also applauded the ruling.

“Facial recognition technology may be novel, but the ability of people accused of crimes to find out how and why they were investigated is not,” Lerer said.

In Miles’ case, none of the crime’s eyewitnesses identified him as the shooter or even placed him at the scene, according to the ruling.

Instead, police identified him as a suspect after showing a confidential informant footage from surveillance cameras of six Black men seen nearby. That informant, who was not at the scene and did not see the slaying, identified Miles on the footage by his nickname (“Fat Daddy”) and Instagram handle, according to the ruling. Miles’ sister and ex-girlfriend also identified him as one of the men caught on camera.

Police then ran two facial recognition technology searches using Miles’ Instagram profile picture, according to the ruling. One search returned 10 possible matches and listed Miles as the eighth-likeliest match, while another search also produced 10 possible matches, the first five of which pictured Miles, the decision says.

After defense attorneys demanded more details about the facial recognition technology investigators used, a trial judge ordered prosecutors to turn over the same 13 items the appellate panel in Arteaga’s case specified. Prosecutors appealed, a state appellate court denied their motion, and the Supreme Court agreed to consider the case.

Fasciale upheld most of the lower court’s rulings, ordering prosecutors to hand over “basic information,” including the name and manufacturer of the software police used to search for suspects and its performance metrics, including error rates. He also directed prosecutors to provide “straightforward items” related to how investigators used the technology, including the original photograph police used as the “probe photograph,” edited copies of that probe photograph, and the photographs the technology identified as matches.

He reversed one particular part of the lower court’s rulings, though, rejecting the defense’s request for proprietary information, including the software’s source code. Miles’ attorneys had not proved a need for that information, Fasciale said. But if they do as the case progresses, the court can reconsider that request then, he added.

Lerer cheered that part of the ruling, too, saying it recognizes that “commercial concerns must yield to constitutional rights.”

Reisman noted that New Jersey still has not regulated facial recognition technology more than four years since the attorney general’s office solicited public input as a first step toward shaping statewide policy on its use by law enforcement.

Former Attorney General Gurbir Grewal in 2020 barred agencies from using one specific facial recognition technology app, Clearview AI, but little is known about how many of the state’s 500-some law enforcement agencies use the technology and how.

Dan Prochilo, a spokesperson for Attorney General Jen Davenport, called facial recognition technology “a valuable tool for investigating and solving crimes.”

“We welcome today’s Supreme Court ruling, which thoughtfully accounts for constitutional rights while confirming that defendants are not automatically entitled to unnecessarily burdensome, proprietary information that would short-circuit vital, well-conducted investigations and prosecutions that make New Jerseyans safer every day,” Prochilo said.

In Miles’ case, officers used a facial recognition system that is part of a multiagency initiative to crack down on illegal drugs in New Jersey and New York. That effort, known as a high intensity drug trafficking area task force, involves officers from federal, state, county, and local agencies in New Jersey and New York.

Those multiple jurisdictions and diffused investigations have made it tough for people arrested through the task force’s efforts to understand how they became criminal defendants, Reisman said.

“We still don’t even really know what government agency is ultimately responsible for the facial recognition system,” he said. “We don’t know anything about it, and because of that, we can’t even hold it accountable.”

This story originally appeared on New Jersey Monitor.

A hunger and labor strike by detained immigrants at Newark migrant jail Delaney Hall that drew national attention and sparked weeks of violent protests outside the detention center has effectively ended, immigration advocates said Monday.

The detainees ended their strike because of the actions taken by the jail’s guards, and not because conditions behind bars have improved, the advocates said.

“Because of the intimidation tactics, the disciplinary consequences for folks to be placed in segregation, [detainees] have now resorted to going back to job assignments and eating,” said Sally Pillay, an advocate with Eyes on ICE who has spent months outside of the migrant jail aiding families of detainees.

A request for comment from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was not immediately returned. Federal officials have said for weeks that detainees never engaged in a hunger or labor strike.

More than 300 detainees inside the immigration detention center said they launched the strike May 22 to call attention to what they called inhumane conditions, including inedible food and poor treatment by guards. Delaney Hall soon became a national flashpoint, attracting members of Congress, state officials, and sustained crowds of protesters to Doremus Avenue in Newark on a near-daily basis.

Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said the tactics used to break the strike are nothing new. Some detainees were transferred out of the facility as a “means of punishing them for being part of that dissent,” she said.

Torres said among those transferred was a 20-year-old man who crossed the border at 18. He was transferred in the last two days and his location remains unknown as of Monday, she said.

“There are hundreds more that have disappeared,” Torres said. “There’s no way to account for where they are. Are they OK? What’s going on with them? It’s pure heartbreak.”

Pillay said activist groups have tracked detainees to facilities in Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, and Colorado.

“These transfers have had devastating consequences,” she said. “We know that these facilities are in remote locations where people do not have access to their lawyers, to their families, and their support networks.”

She noted that detainees in the units most active in the strike were deliberately broken up, with people dispersed throughout the facility. Detainees have also raised new concerns inside the jail, like discolored drinking water and weeks without access to hot water, Pillay said.

Family visitation, which was briefly suspended during the strike, was reinstated with sharp restrictions. Pillay said visitations have been cut to 30 minutes, are only offered twice a week in some units, and are limited to immediate family members on an approved list. She said Geo Group — the private company that runs the detention center — has not posted information about the new visitation schedule online, so families show up expecting the old schedule and are turned away.

Detainees have also been blocked from speaking with members of Congress conducting oversight visits. Detainees must now sign a privacy waiver, provided only in English, before a member of Congress can speak with them, and forms must be submitted in advance of the visit, a process Pillay said is “to probably intimidate and use retaliatory tactics against the individuals who speak out.”

On Father’s Day, Pillay said of the 80 family members who arrived to visit loved ones, more than 30 were turned away.

“We saw heightened emotions, distraught families, and loved ones outside,” she said.

Dozens showed up for a protest Sunday. Some tied neckties to the fence outside the jail in honor of the fathers who remain detained and some held up signs that read, “Free the dads.”

One protester holding an upside-down American flag near the driveway of the prison was hit by a car entering the jail parking lot, video shows. Newark Public Safety Director Emanuel Miranda said the incident is under investigation.

“Federal agents are brutal, abusive, and reckless with the public,” Torres said. “We can only imagine what they’re doing to people in detention behind closed doors.”

This story originally appeared on New Jersey Monitor.

RINGOES — The first time Ozgur Tunceli planted hazelnut saplings on her Hunterdon County farm, deer came through and ate them to the ground.

The next time, her goats did the same.

“Imagine me sitting there and crying and regretting everything that I did,” she said. “I said, ‘I should sell this farm and just go back to my suburban life.’”

Instead, she got an electric fence. Now, four years after she set out to become a hazelnut farmer, Tunceli has close to 1,000 trees planted on her hilly, sprawling property in Ringoes. She’s part of a small but widening group of pioneers who are working to make hazelnuts as much of a signature New Jersey crop as tomatoes, blueberries, corn, and cranberries.

“We are really trying to build an entire industry here,” Tunceli said.

The state wants to help, said Ed Wengryn, the state’s agriculture secretary.

Officials are eyeing incentives to offset high startup costs and entice more farmers into growing the trees, Wengryn said.

And Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex), whose district office is just up the road from a hazelnut farm in Hillsborough, is seeking $6.5 million in state funding to help growers buy equipment to sort, shell, and package nuts for sale and secure a processing site. He envisions hazelnuts at every Garden State farm stand and a New Jersey version of Nutella on supermarket shelves someday.

“The potential for New Jersey to become a major player in hazelnut production is enormous,” Zwicker said. “I don’t think New Jersey peaches, blueberries, and tomatoes are going away, but I think if we get this right, we will be known worldwide as a hazelnut producer.”

Some hazelnut history

Turkey produces about 70% of the world’s hazelnuts, and until recently, Oregon’s Willamette Valley was the only place in the U.S. to grow the nutrient-rich, round nuts also known as filberts.

The seeds for New Jersey’s fledgling filbert industry were first planted, literally, by Rutgers University.

Tom Molnar was a Rutgers student about 30 years ago hunting for a Ph.D. topic when he decided to focus on hazelnuts, which are native to New Jersey but had been decimated by disease decades ago. Molnar’s mentor was the late C. Reed Funk, Rutgers’ famed turfgrass breeder whose work made the school millions in royalties and a global powerhouse in grass development. Funk saw better breeding as key to growing nuts in the Northeast, Molnar said.

“We had land, we had funding, and he knew how to run a breeding program,” said Molnar, who’s now a professor of plant biology at Rutgers.

Molnar rejected nut trees like walnut, pistachio, and pecan, not wanting to compete with big U.S. producers like California and Georgia. He picked hazelnuts because, besides being native to New Jersey, they need less water, are more compact, and produce faster than other nut trees, he said.

He started by collecting hazelnut seeds from around the world and eventually planted tens of thousands of trees at Rutgers’ research farm in East Brunswick, observing and experimenting to create disease-resistant, higher-yield trees.

By 2020, his research had progressed enough that he wanted to see how his trees would do around the Garden State. He partnered with several farmers to plant Rutgers-bred varieties whose names honor their Jersey roots: Raritan, Somerset, Monmouth, and Hunterdon. Those farms still serve as living laboratories, with new growers adding to their ranks since Rutgers licensed a Columbus nursery to sell their cultivars.

“This has been a dream to grow hazelnuts in the eastern U.S. for 200 years,” Molnar said.

Ed Clerico was one of the “early adopters,” as Molnar puts it.

Clerico is a third-generation farmer whose family ran a dairy farm in Hillsborough (the one near Zwicker’s office), but who pivoted in retirement to perennial crops that don’t require annual tillage and planting.

He also had a career in water resource management, an experience that has deepened his dedication to filbert farming.

His 38-acre farm sits along Royce Brook, which feeds the Millstone and Raritan rivers, two waterways that flow through nearby Manville and Bound Brook and that sometimes catastrophically flood. He regards hazelnut trees, as well as thirstier breeds like the persimmons and pawpaws he’s planting in a floodplain beside the brook, as pulling double duty.

“There’s just a lot of benefits to agroforestry. Growing trees sequester a lot of carbon, so there’s greenhouse gas benefits. And they help with water quality and flood mitigation,” Clerico said. “This could be one of the best stormwater management and water quality advancements. When you hear about stormwater management, people are very oriented towards man-made infrastructure, but we could be using the environment as infrastructure too.”

Wengryn already is a convert, for the trees’ ecological benefits alone.

“They create a shade canopy, reducing ambient air temperatures in and around the orchard area. When we get these intense storms that drop a quarter to a half inch of rain in 15 minutes, the leaf canopy breaks that up, so it actually falls more gently to the soil and we get less soil erosion from this kind of agriculture,” Wengryn said.

Molnar ticks off a long list of other perks he hopes will persuade more farmers to plant Rutgers’ hazelnuts. They don’t require as many fungicides or insecticides, or as much pruning, as the peach, apple, and other fruit trees more commonly grown in New Jersey. They’re harvested by machine so don’t need as much labor as hand-picked crops. The trees are more climate-resistant and can live for over 50 years, making them both less susceptible to weather extremes that can destroy less-hardy crops and a good long-term investment. And hazelnuts aren’t as perishable as other crops; harvested unshelled nuts can be stored and stay fresh for over a year.

“That means you could sell them throughout the winter into the spring,” Molnar said.

But several hurdles have kept the industry small so far.

The high land costs that can make farming a pricey profession in New Jersey have hindered hazelnut expansion, farmers agreed.

The costs and logistics of processing are another barrier, Molnar added.

With most filbert farming occurring on other continents, U.S. growers must look to Europe and beyond for the machinery to harvest, sort, and get the nuts to market. Tunceli, Clerico, and two other farmers formed an agroforestry cooperative to process, promote, and sell their nuts. The co-op recently bought some equipment, funded by a federal grant, that they’ll house at Tunceli’s 89-acre farm until they find funding to open a separate processing facility.

At the same time, it takes five years for young hazelnut trees to produce their first nuts and seven to eight years for them to come into significant production, Molnar said. That means farmers see little to no return on their investment for years.

“Younger farmers don’t really have that much money to invest, while older farmers don’t have that much time,” Tunceli said.

Tunceli, who’s 56 and has kept her job in the healthcare insurance industry, hopes her orchards will thrive enough for her to live wholly off her land, but she expects that could take another five years.

Because hazelnuts have not been a U.S. crop outside of Oregon, some local farmers also see challenges in who to sell them to, fretting that a market might not exist here.

Tuncheli is not one whit worried about that.

She grew up in Turkey and immigrated here for college about 30 years ago. In Turkey, every bit of hazelnut trees gets used, she said. The kernels become nut butters, oils, flour, milk, candies, desserts, and other foods; the trees’ leaves can make herbal teas; their limbs can be used to weave baskets; and nutshells can be used for exfoliating scrubs, cosmetics, and even clean-burning fuels.

“That part is really easy,” she grinned.

Wengryn doesn’t see that as a problem either, noting a “global craze” for treats like Italian company Ferrero’s Nutella and Ferrero Rocher chocolate-hazelnut bonbons.

“People love this product,” he said of hazelnuts. “There’s very little domestic production of it, and this is an opportunity to enter that market.”

The future of filberts

Zwicker has submitted two budget resolutions that, if approved, would provide $298,200 in state funding to the agroforestry cooperative to support hazelnut automation, cold storage, food safety compliance, and commercial-scale infrastructure and nearly $6.3 million for the cooperative to build a processing facility and establish grower incentives.

Wengryn said he aims to work with the state Economic Development Authority to tailor more “business builder” funding to sustainable agriculture like hazelnut farming. He also thinks New Jersey could designate money collected under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate effort to reduce the power sector’s emissions that worsen climate change, for agroforestry.

“This type of agriculture really complements that carbon sequestration and really does improve our air quality and our water quality,” he said.

Whether or not New Jersey becomes a hub for hazelnuts, Rutgers’ cultivars now grow beyond the Garden State. Their trees are planted on about 300 acres across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, Molnar said.

His work has made him somewhat of a celebrity in agriculture, at least elsewhere, in places where hazelnuts are a major, prized crop.

“In New Jersey, I’m an anonymous nobody, and like, nobody cares what I do,” he said with a laugh. “I guess agriculture isn’t really cool.”

But Clerico expects Molnar’s research, like the trees on his own Hillsborough farm, will outlive them both.

“Rutgers’ work isn’t just leading-edge in terms of New Jersey. What they’ve done in their breeding programs to produce trees that have multiple gene resistance to diseases could benefit everywhere in the world,” Clerico said.

Some state legislators clearly agree and aren’t waiting on the industry to scale up to brag about New Jersey’s role in the hazelnut tree’s return to the region’s soils.

They want hazelnuts to be the official state nut.

The Assembly passed the proposal Thursday, despite opposition from most of the chamber’s Republicans that drove some to voice their objections for the record.

Assemblywoman Aura Dunn (R-Morris) said anointing hazelnuts the state nut was a few decades premature, Assemblyman Gregory Myhre (R-Ocean) said the American chestnut should get the honor, and Brian Bergen (R-Morris) blasted the the bill as a “moronic, awful, stupid, crazy, nutty piece of legislation.”

“Why on earth do we need a state nut?” Bergen said, before imploring Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin: “I just really wish that, Mr. Speaker, you would do a better job selecting the bills that come to the floor, because this is useless.”

Bill sponsor Assemblyman Sterley Stanley (D-Middlesex), whose district includes Rutgers’ research farm, remained undeterred.

In a sweeping statement on the Assembly floor with Molnar standing at his side, Stanley hailed hazelnuts as “the most promising engine for economic development offered to rural communities in decades.”

“These trees represent a monumental achievement for our state, a true breakthrough in science that reinforces why we are known as the Garden State,” he said. “These hazelnuts are testament to the balanced spirit of innovation and resilience that lies at the heart of what it means to be a New Jerseyan.”

This story originally appeared on New Jersey Monitor.