Gina Harkins joins National as a Deputy America Editor
We are happy to announce that Gina Harkins, a versatile editor and deft manager who successfully helped lead the General Assignment team, has permanently joined National as a deputy America editor.
Gina is working with correspondents in Washington and around the country to drive coverage of major breaking news events and shepherd deeply reported enterprise work that illuminates America during a period of profound change.
Gina joined The Post as Morning Mix editor in 2021, guiding a team of journalists writing off-the-news features in the overnight hours on everything from the Surfside condo collapse, the war in Ukraine and Mikhail Gorbachev's death. She demonstrated strong leadership and editing skills, as well as an eye for finding compelling and sometimes quirky stories that draw the interest of readers. Included in the aptly named mix: Pieces on a daughter who was worried about her 80-year-old mom when she didn't text her Wordle score, only to find she was being held hostage in her home; a woman who'd arranged for a flash mob to crash her own funeral (to the tune of "Another One Bites the Dust"); and a reformed criminal who wanted "one last score" arranging a heist to steal Dorothy's famous ruby red slippers.
Last year, Gina co-led the merger between Morning Mix and its dayside counterpart General Assignment team, helping to manage the newly unified 20-member department and develop its revised mission. She has worked closely with the America team throughout her time with Mix and GA and has been exceptionally generous in allowing us to dispatch reporters to cover campus protests, mass shootings, natural disasters and other major events.
Since August, Gina has been working with National Politics, helping to lift the huge load there by editing coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign, the Trump transition and other stories, along with the Early Brief and 5-Minute Fix newsletters.
In all of her roles, she has also shepherded reporters' longer-term enterprise reporting on national and international topics and worked closely with visual and design teams on interactive stories.
Before joining The Post, Gina covered the military for more than a decade for the independent Military Times and Military.com, including stories about sailors on the second submarine to integrate women creating a 'rape list,' female Marines being singled out for having children, and two injured recruits getting trapped at boot camp for 500 days. She was also a regular contributor to USA Today magazines, where she covered everything from NASA missions to mass shooting victims' heroic actions.
Gina has a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School and a bachelor's in political science from Northeastern Illinois University.
Please join us in formally welcoming Gina to National. She began her new assignment last week.
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Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
New Orleans pushes to legalize police use of ‘facial surveillance'
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In an emailed statement, a police spokesperson said the department 'does not surveil the public,' and that surveillance is 'not the goal of this ordinance revision.' But the word 'surveillance' appears in the proposed ordinance dozens of times, including explicitly giving police authority to use 'facial surveillance.' Advertisement Many police departments use AI to help them identify suspects from still images taken at or near the scene of a crime, but New Orleans police have already taken the technology a step further. Over the past two years, the department relied on a privately owned network of cameras equipped with facial recognition software to constantly monitor the streets for wanted people and automatically ping an app on officers' mobile phones to convey the names and locations of possible matches, The Post reported last month. Advertisement In April, after The Post requested public records about this system, New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick paused the automated alerts and ordered a review into how officers used the technology and whether the practice violated local restrictions on facial recognition. David Barnes, a New Orleans police sergeant overseeing legal research and planning, who wrote the proposed ordinance, said he hopes to complete the review and share his findings before the City Council vote. The facial recognition alerts are still paused, he said Wednesday. There are no federal regulations around the use of AI by local law enforcement. New Orleans was one of many cities to ban the technology during the policing overhauls passed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, with the City Council saying it had 'significant concerns about the role of facial recognition technologies and surveillance databases in exacerbating racial and other bias.' Federal studies have shown the technology to be less reliable when scanning people of color, women, and older people. New Orleans partly rolled back the restrictions in 2022, letting police use facial recognition for searches of specific suspects of violent crimes, but not for general tracking of people in public places. Each time police want to scan a face, they must send a still image to trained examiners at a state facility and later provide details about these scans to the city council — guardrails meant to protect the public's privacy and prevent software errors from leading to wrongful arrests. Advertisement Now, city leaders want to give police broad access to the technology with fewer limitations, arguing that automated surveillance tools are necessary for fighting crime. Violent crime rates in New Orleans, like much of the country, are at historic lows, according to Jeff Asher, a consultant who tracks crime statistics in the region. But facial recognition-equipped cameras have proven useful in a few recent high-profile incidents, including the May 16 escape of 10 inmates from a local jail and the New Year's Day attack on Bourbon Street that left 14 dead. 'Violent crime is at an all-time low but mass murders and shootings are at an all-time high,' Oliver Thomas, one of two council members sponsoring the ordinance, said in an interview this week. 'This is a tool to deal with some of this mass violence and mass murders and attacks.' After The Post informed Thomas there were 310 fatal and nonfatal shootings in New Orleans last year — by far the lowest number in the 14 years the city council has published these statistics on its online crime data dashboard — he acknowledged that shootings are down and partly attributed the decline to his work with young people and ex-offenders. Nora Ahmed, the legal director for the ACLU of Louisiana, said council members are using public concern over recent news to justify the widespread adoption of facial recognition technology, or FRT — a powerful technology with the potential to strip people of their rights. 'In the name of making FRT available for a once-in-a-decade jail break, this bill opens up FRT to being used by federal and state entities, and enterprising local police departments,' Ahmed said in a text message. 'This type of surveillance should not exist in the United States period.' Advertisement The new ordinance would give police the ability to use 'facial surveillance' and 'characteristic tracking' systems to actively monitor the streets looking for people with warrants or people under investigation. It would require them to continue sharing data about facial searches to the City Council and begin reporting details about the software they use and its accuracy. While the ordinance says police cannot use facial surveillance tools to target abortion seekers or undocumented immigrants, Ahmed says those protections are 'paper thin' and worries officers would find ways around them. It's not clear whether New Orleans plans to keep working with Project NOLA, a privately funded nonprofit group that has provided automated facial recognition alerts to officers despite having no contract with the city. Barnes, the police sergeant, said Project NOLA would need to come into a formal data-sharing agreement with the city if it wanted to continue sending automated alerts to officers who have logged into a Project NOLA system to receive them. Under the new ordinance, Project NOLA could also be required to publish information about all of its searches to the city council. Such data reporting could be complicated with a live facial recognition system, in which cameras are constantly scanning every face in their vicinity. With hundreds of cameras potentially scanning thousands of faces a day, Project NOLA, or the city, could theoretically need to report information about millions of facial recognition scans in each of its quarterly data reports the department is required to provide to the City Council. Bryan Lagarde, Project NOLA's founder, declined to comment this week, saying he was on vacation. Advertisement New Orleans's embrace of the term 'surveillance' — which appears 40 times in the text of the proposed ordinance — appears at odds with statements made by Kirkpatrick, the city's top police official. In an interview last month, Kirkpatrick said she believes governments should be prevented from surveilling their citizens, especially when they are in public exercising their constitutional rights. 'I do not believe in surveilling the citizenry and residents of our country,' Kirkpatrick said at the time. 'Surveilling is an invasion of our privacy.'
New York Post
2 hours ago
- New York Post
Alleged LA riot leader's father slams him for handing out supplies to anti-ICE protesters
The dad of a young union worker and socialist activist arrested by the FBI for handing out face shields to dozens of LA rioters said his son isn't a criminal — but slammed him for supplying the anti-ICE riots, and leading the feds to bust down the door of their family home. Francisco Orellana's reaction to seeing his son Alejandro 'Alex' Orellana driving a truck loaded with supplies for protesters was: 'What the f–k are you doing?' The elder Orellana, a US citizen who moved to the US in the 1970s, told The Post the feds handcuffed the whole family in pursuit of his son on Thursday morning, smashing in the front door of their Los Angeles house and breaking a window on his truck. 10 Alejandro 'Alex' Orellana was arrested after passing out face shields to LA rioters. USAttyEssayli/X 10 The FBI raided Orellana's LA house where he lives with his parents and sibling. Courtesy of Francisco Orellana The younger Orellana was busted on charges of conspiracy to commit civil disorders, US Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli said. Images taken at the riot show dozens of protesters running up to a truck Alex was allegedly driving to grab 'Bionic Shield' transparent masks, which are normally used at jobsites to protect workers' faces from flying debris or chemical splashes. Francisco Orellana, a construction technician, told The Post he didn't know how his son got involved in the protests, and said he may have been in the truck because someone asked him for a favor. 'My son is a good boy … he's not a criminal. He doesn't have a bad record, he's clear,' he said. 'I saw the picture [of Alejandro in the truck], which my sister-in-law sent to my wife. I said, 'what the f–k are you doing? Why are you doing that?'' 10 Boxes of face shields being passed out the back of a truck in LA. FOX11 10 Orellana's father Francisco told The Post his son is a 'good boy' and doesn't have a criminal record — but still questioned why he would allegedly help rioters. FOX11 He said his son told him, 'Papa, I don't think this is illegal,' but the concerned dad had his doubts. 'I said, 'it ends up being a big problem when you're giving stuff to people [who do violence]. They burned police cars, they broke windows, this is not right.' I said, 'It's illegal to [help] people fighting with the police, people fighting with immigration.' Alex Orellana, a US Marine veteran, is a UPS worker and a shop steward for the Teamster's union who has been active for years with fighting for social justice causes — including with Centro CSO, which famously trained Cesar Chavez, according to social media posts. One video shows him giving a May Day speech last year in black combat boots and camouflage pants. 10 Orellana's Marine uniform seen on a pile of clothes after the FBI raided his house. Courtesy of Francisco Orellana 10 A damaged door frame in the house after the FBI raid. Courtesy of Francisco Orellana On June 6, he wrote gleefully for the socialist news site Fight Back! about protesters chasing down federal agents in Los Angeles and forcing them to leave the neighborhood of Boyle Heights. The elder Orellana said he disagrees with the protesters' tactics, even though some cheered his son's alleged actions in helping them. 'Some people are thinking, 'he's helping people. He's doing a good job.' I don't think that. I tell a lot of people, 'don't go to the protests,'' he said. 10 FBI agents took the entire family's electronic devices in the raid, Francisco Orellana told The Post. Courtesy of Francisco Orellana 10 Damage inside Orellana's house seen after the raid. Courtesy of Francisco Orellana He detailed the federal agents' raid on the family home, where Francisco lives with his wife and two adult sons, including Alex. 'They broke down my door, broke the window of my truck, they broke my wall. … I woke up, and I heared boom boom boom on the door. I said, 'wait, wait, wait! Let me put on my clothes, let me put on my shoes …The FBI, they arrested me, they arrested my wife, my other son,' he said. 'They go through my house. Who's going to pay for my house? Who's going to fix these things?' Francisco said the FBI took the phones and laptops for everyone in the home and held them in custody for an hour. 10 A protester waving a Mexican-US flag in front of police officers in downtown LA on June 9, 2025. Photo by RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP via Getty Images 10 Police officers in riot gear blocking an on ramp to the 101 freeway in LA on June 11, 2025. Photo byAs for his take on immigration, Francisco said law-abiding people coming into the country to work is a good thing, but condemned the many he sees as taking advantage of the system. 'It's too many people not working. Who's paying for them? You and me, and everybody working. We're paying to keep those people here,' he said, sharing a story about one of his neighbors. 'She has seven kids. They said the government pays rent, gives them money for food, everything. I told her one day, 'I am the government. They're taking that money from my check. You eat because we're working. We don't work, you don't eat,' he said. He also spared no praise for the lefty policies of Golden State politicians, whom he blames for the current state of affairs. 'California is no good. Democratic people left the state really, really bad.'
New York Post
2 hours ago
- New York Post
NUMC CEO canned in hospital shocker in first action after NYS' controversial ‘takeover'
Nassau University Medical Center's CEO was abruptly booted in the first board meeting since New York state effectively took control of the hospital through Gov. Kathy Hochul's budget deal. CEO Meg Ryan planned to stay on until July 20 to help with the transition, but was removed on the spot and placed on administrative leave Tuesday night by the hospital's new state-appointed board of directors. 'This evening's actions reflect our commitment to restoring stability and building a successful future for this essential public hospital,' Stuart Rabinowitz, the hospital's newly appointed board chair said in a statement. Advertisement 3 Nassau University Medical Center's CEO, Meg Ryan, was fired and replaced with a new long-term CEO, yet to be announced, Richard Becker has been named interim CEO of NUMC. Stefano Giovannini The board replaced Ryan with Northwell Health executive Richard Becker for the interim, and also agreed to bring in three outside firms to help steer the hospital through the transition. Manatt, Phelps & Phillips was hired as legal counsel, Deloitte brought on to handle the finances and operations, and Korn Ferry to find a new permanent CEO. Advertisement Ryan declined comment to The Post. Ten hospital execs including Ryan announced over the last two weeks that they'd resign in July. Nassau Executive Bruce Blakeman announced he and the GOP majority in the county legislature would not be making their designated picks to the newly-formatted board out of protest — and instead would be naming Hochul in the lawsuit to overturn the 'illegal takeover.' '[New York State] has made it very clear that they do not want me to be in the CEO role,' Ryan told The Post after she made the decision to step down. Advertisement 3 Ryan was placed on administrative leave Tuesday night, though she planned to stay with NUMC for the next month to ease the transition. Stefano Giovannini Two weeks ago, she and other executives predicted that the power balance will completely shift, pointing out that seven out of the 11 board members are being hand-picked by the state. The five-member Nassau County Interim Finance Authority, which monitors and oversees the county's finances, unanimously voted last week to impose a 'control period' of overseeing NUMC spending. That means that every major contract the hospital enters now needs the fiscal watchdog's sign-off. Advertisement 3 Nassau Executive Bruce Blakeman said the GOP majority in the county will not name who they want to take over in the full-time role as a protest against Gov. Hochul's 'illegal takeover' of the hospital. Heather Khalifa for the NY Post 'This is a mandatory requirement,' NIFA chair Richard Kessel explained ahead of the June 2 vote. 'It's not something that's optional. The numbers that have been presented here tonight automatically trigger the imposition of a control period.' He explained that under the new state budget, NIFA is now required to intervene if the hospital runs an operating deficit above 1%. NUMC posted an 11% shortfall in 2023 — roughly $77 million — which ballooned to $83 million last year, which he said has no sign of slowing down. However, Ryan and other NUMC leaders have said they've turned around the fiscal disaster since new leadership under Blakeman took the reins and is now on track to profit $11 million this year without cutting any jobs or departments — despite being in the hole hundreds of millions of dollars just a few years ago.
