Latest news with #Waldman
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Government drones used in ‘runaway spying operation' to peek into backyards in Sonoma County, lawsuit says
Three residents filed a lawsuit this week against Sonoma County seeking to block code enforcement from using drones to take aerial images of their homes in what the American Civil Liberties Union is calling a 'runaway spying operation.' The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU Wednesday on behalf of the three residents, alleges that the county began using drones with high-powered cameras and zoom lenses in 2019 to track illegal cannabis cultivation, but in the years since, officials have used the devices more than 700 times to find other code violations on private property without first seeking a warrant. 'For too long, Sonoma County code enforcement has used high-powered drones to warrantlessly sift through people's private affairs and initiate charges that upend lives and livelihoods. All the while, the county has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media,' Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a statement. A spokesperson for Sonoma County said the county is reviewing the complaint and takes 'the allegations very seriously.' The lawsuit comes amid a national debate over the use of drones by government agencies who have increasingly relied on the unmanned aircraft during disasters and for environmental monitoring and responding to emergency calls. More recently, some agencies in California and in other states have explored using drones to investigate code enforcement violations. In 2024, nearly half of Sonoma County's drone flights involved non-cannabis violations, including construction without a permit, junkyard conditions and zoning violations, according to data included in the complaint. 'The use of drones over someone's private space raises a question of what is considered private,' said Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor of law at UC Irvine. Waldman said if law enforcement on the ground wants to see on the other side of a tall fence or trees into someone's property they have to get the person's consent or they need probable cause for a warrant. 'Why shouldn't that apply above ground too?' he said. California doesn't have a law that regulates the use of drones by code enforcement agents. In 2015, lawmakers in the state Assembly approved a measure that would have restricted the use of drones over private property without the owner's permission. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the bill saying at the time that it could expose hobbyists or commercial users to 'burdensome litigation.' The ACLU argues that the county's use of drones as an investigative tool violates the California Constitution which provides people the right to privacy and against unreasonable searches and seizures. 'I think that our expectations of privacy are based on social norms and people don't normally expect that someone is going to have a super high powered, detailed ability to capture extraordinary detail with a camera that's just buzzing over their property,' Waldman said. 'We shouldn't have to walk around life expecting that just because this technology exists that we have no privacy from anything anymore, from any direction.' The lawsuit also alleges that the county's drone policy has loosened in the past several years. In 2019, the policy required inspectors to receive a complaint about a property before deploying a drone. Now, officials have no such requirement, allowing them instead to launch 'discretionary proactive investigations,' the complaint states. Residents named in the lawsuit say that the drones hovering above their homes have resulted in ongoing privacy concerns and a loss of enjoyment of their property. One plaintiff, Benjamin Verdusco, decided to sell his home after he learned that the county had been taking pictures of his backyard with a drone in 2021, according to the complaint. Another plaintiff, Nichola Schmitz, who is deaf, wasn't able to hear the buzz of the drone hovering above her property on Oct.10, 2023. When a worker on her property pointed it out she 'became confused and worried,' the complaint states. She rushed to her bedroom and closed the curtains, concerned about how long the drone had been there and whether it had seen her naked on her property earlier that day. She alleges the drone made two big loops around her property and, shortly after, a red tag appeared on her gate alleging two violations of the county code — one for illegal grading and another for having on her property an unpermitted dwelling, a small cabin that her father had built on the land in 1981. She spent $25,000 for a contractor to fix the alleged grading issue but still faces $10,000 in fines. ACLU attorneys allege the evidence obtained by the drone was done so unlawfully because officials did not have a search warrant. 'This horrible experience has shattered my sense of privacy and security,' Schmitz said in a statement. 'I'm afraid to open my blinds or go outside to use my hot tub because who knows when the county's drone could be spying on me.' A third plaintiff, Suzanne Brock, confronted county officials after she learned that they had taken detailed aerial photos of her outdoor bathtub and shower that she and her daughter used daily. She expressed concern to inspectors that they might have seen her naked in the bathtub. Code Enforcement Inspector Ryan Sharp told her that 'when we see something like that, we turn around,' according to the complaint. When Brock asked if county officials see people during the flights, Sharp told her yes, according to the complaint, but added that 'we don't put that in the camera footage.'
BBC News
23-03-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Covid fifth anniversary: Grandson remains 'scarred' by her final hours
The grandson of a care home resident who died of Covid has said his family remains "scarred" by the memories of her final Shelia Lamb, from Liverpool, moved to a care home in March 2020, the 94-year-old thought it was only for a trial period to see if she liked it she contracted coronavirus and became one of approximately 46,000 care home residents to ultimately die from the Lamb's grandson Amos Waldman, from Stockport in Greater Manchester, said: "If you go through what we did, what so many other families did, you can't just move on and say it is time to move on." 'You're supposed to get closure' Mr Waldman is part of the Liverpool-based Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice campaign group which fought for a public inquiry into how the authorities prepared for and responded to the his grandmother, he told the BBC he "will never forget" her final moments or the heavy restrictions that were placed upon funerals at the time."Those moments you have at the end of someone's life... A funeral by Zoom?" he asked, rhetorically. "You're supposed to get closure - it is supposed to be a solemn experience. We didn't have that."Mr Waldman told the BBC that when Mrs Lamb first fell ill, the family were told she had a water infection. Later they were told it was a chest said: "She was screaming out in pain."The last phone call I had with her about two days before she died was really harrowing."I won't forget it because she was delusional." Just under 227,000 people died in the UK from Covid between March 2020 and May 2023, when the World Health Organization said the "global health emergency" was ongoing public inquiry was launched by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in June 2022, more than a year after he promised that the government's actions would be put "under the microscope".The inquiry's first report, published in July 2024, said flawed pandemic preparations had led to more deaths and greater economic damage than should have been the Waldman said: "Given the death tolls here were so much higher than other countries, unfortunately people who were supposed to be leading us through that didn't do it as well as they should have done."We just want to do everything we possibly can to make sure we are better prepared next time."The government said it welcomed the inquiry's findings so far and accepted that lessons should always be learned from past events. Listen to the best of BBC Radio Merseyside on Sounds and follow BBC Merseyside on Facebook, X, and Instagram and watch BBC North West Tonight on BBC iPlayer.
Fox News
01-03-2025
- Health
- Fox News
Mother launches milk with 'secret' veggie flavors, says MAHA movement's timing is 'serendipitous'
Ashley Waldman is the founder of Jubilee, a children's milk newly launched from Austin, Texas. Like many other parents across the country, Waldman said she's felt increasingly concerned about her children's daily sugar consumption, especially from everyday products that are not often suspected to contain added sugars. As she navigated serving milk to her oldest daughter, who was diagnosed with autism, Waldman struggled to interest her child in a glass without Hershey's chocolate syrup, as her sensitivity to food texture and flavor created obstacles. "I felt comforted because I was like, 'Well, at least she's getting milk,'" Waldman told Fox News Digital. "Of course, I did not feel great about the sugar." So Waldman, a former product manager at YouTube, enlisted her father, a veteran of the beverage industry, for regular dad-daughter question-and-answer sessions. She also began researching parental perspectives on the milk industry in order to best position her no-added-sugar milk, flavored with "secret" vegetables, in the market. The consensus showed low-sugar milk products and plant-based milk alternatives were considered "gross." Kids did not like them – and these products ended up at the bottom of the trash bin, according to Waldman. "It's just a waste of money," Waldman said. Waldman brought her idea of a low-sugar, amazing-tasting milk to a beverage formulation company. Without contention, Waldman said, the product needed to have a strong functional benefit. "My product solves all of my problems," she said. The Chocolate Chip Cookie and Strawberry Shortcake varieties each contain eight grams of protein, 100% vitamins and zero added sugar. They are among the flavors Jubilee's introduced to consumers in late February. "I handed an 11-year-old boy the Chocolate Chip Cookie, and he was like, 'Mom, this is so good, we have to get some,'" Waldman said. Her product launch is "serendipitous," as it coincides with the MAHA movement. She then shocked the child by revealing carrot as the ingredient flavoring the milk, Waldman said. "It's been so exciting to see that reaction from people because it's like the surprise, the doubt, the kid tries it — and then they're leaning in and wanting to buy it," she added. Waldman said the timing of her product launch is "serendipitous" as it coincides with the Make America Healthy Again movement. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, is leading the charge on this front as he serves in President Donald Trump's second administration. "I'm just so appreciative that there is now a broad platform that I have felt very passionate about for a long time," Waldman told Fox News Digital. "How are we normalizing giving our kids 22 grams of sugar per an 8-ounce drink every single day, multiple times a day?" "I'm just glad that there's more conversation about it," Waldman also said. "How could anybody be upset about it?"
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Douglas Dunn's Dance Idyll, With Undertows of Darkness
'L' Embarquement pour Cythère,' a 1717 painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau, depicts lovers having a party on an island. They are paired off near a statue of Venus, with encouraging Cupids flying about. Douglas Dunn's new dance shares a title with the painting, along with some of its pastoral charm and idealization of the past. But this idyll — the work of a choreographer now in his 80s, known for his wit and whimsy — is troubled by a darker present. The dance, which Douglas Dunn + Dancers debuted on Wednesday in the second half of a two-week season at Judson Memorial Church, is presented in the round. Jerome Begin's score, played live by the violin duo String Noise with Begin on electronics, evokes at first an underwater realm, like Neptune's Garden. Dancers skitter on, grouping themselves not in the painting's couples but in two same-gender trios. Their movements are courtly, ceremonial, but then, periodically, bestial or bullish. Both modes gesture at antiquity. Sections of dance like this alternate with sections in which the poet Anne Waldman is wheeled around in a chariot by Dunn and his longtime partner, Grazia Della-Terza, both attired (by Mimi Gross) in Renaissance garb. Between Waldman's fluttery conjurer's recitation, her unclear diction and the church's echoey acoustics, it can be difficult to decipher much of what she's saying. That's a pity, because her words (supplied to me after the show) are cascadingly associative, allusive poems about the painting and the dance, about enemies of beauty and whether art is antidote or merely a brief escape. The second section of dancing, featuring a different set of six dancers, seems to be set more in the Renaissance. At least that's my association with the lutelike pizzicato of the violins. The choreography is circular in design, often inscribed with smaller circles in the compositional shape of a canon or round. It's still idyllic, but partway through, Begin introduces buzzing electronic bass notes, like a serpent in Eden or death in Arcadia. Waldman's text, even if comprehended only in fragments, suggests what the danger could be: a dark age, end time, something dissolving, tyrants, despots (who talk of living on Mars). Against this, Dunn offers more of what he always has: intelligent form and whimsy. All 12 dancers circle now, stopping to strike well-balanced, three-person fountain poses, but also overlapping and interchanging intricately. While Begin's score gathers momentum, the choreography mainly resists, remaining stately or still. Then, without altering tone or manner, the dance bursts into multiplicity, with each dancer doing his or her own thing, hopping around or slowly balancing while Waldman recites in their midst. Complex but not chaotic, this has the look of what Merce Cunningham, in whose company Dunn danced long ago, described as the art of nature, a composition with lots of things in it, all different, yet each affecting the others. A word that Waldman repeats with a positive spin applies well to the vision: 'entanglement.' Such multiplicity is the chief choreographic strength of the piece featured in the first week of Dunn's season, the 2023 experimental opera 'Body/Shadow.' This sui generis work features the odd performer ratio of 17 dancers and one singer — the composer, Paul J. Botelho. He wanders among the dancers dressed like an amateur naturalist or an eccentric explorer, a gentle and curious fellow festooned with cameras, carrying a sack filled with equipment and knickknacks that he offers to audience members. He sings wordlessly in a countertenor, employing extended vocal techniques to chirp, weep, trill and speak sibilantly in something like the snake language of Harry Potter movies. As Botelho does this for an hour, the dancers stay in nearly ceaseless motion, only one or two of them leaving the stage and then only for moment, perhaps to don a Zebra head. Occasionally, they extend sheets as screens for projections and shadow play. But mostly they gracefully execute a series of short phrases, in a saltimbanque, or traveling player, style similar to that of 'L'Embarquement,' that add up to an overabundance. Watched with soft-focus attention, it's a planetary wonder. In 'L'Embarquement,' that vision extends too long, across a false ending as the lights fade and the violins sound as though they're sliding off the edge of the earth. But even the overextension, the refusal to stop pumping out steps and patterns, is affecting. Colored by Waldman's words, the harmonious multiplicity might be seen as pluralism, a beneficent entanglement currently under threat. Certainly, 'L'Embarquement' is a pledge of allegiance to the imagination and once-again embattled art.
