Cuomo says behavior may have been seen as ‘unwanted flirtation’
ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Andrew Cuomo acknowledged for the first time Sunday that some of his behavior with women had been “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation,” and said he would cooperate with a sexual harassment investigation led by the state’s attorney general.
In a statement released amid mounting criticism from within his own party, Cuomo, a Democrat, maintained he had never inappropriately touched or propositioned anyone. But he said he had teased people and made jokes about their personal lives in an attempt to be “playful.”
“I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended. I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” he said.
He made the comments after the state’s attorney general demanded Cuomo grant her the authority to investigate claims he sexually harassed at least two women who worked for him.
Cuomo’s legal counsel said the governor would back a plan to appoint an outside lawyer as a special independent deputy attorney general.
Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who has been, at times, allied with Cuomo but is independently elected, appeared to emerge as a consensus choice to lead a probe.
New York’s two U.S. senators,
Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, said an independent investigation was essential.
Charlotte Bennett, a low-level aide in the governor’s administration until November, told The New York Times that Cuomo asked her inappropriate questions about her sex life.
Her accusation came days after another former aide, Lindsey Boylan, a former deputy secretary for economic development and special adviser to the governor, elaborated on harassment allegations she first made in December. Boylan said Cuomo subjected her to an unwanted kiss and inappropriate comments.
Cuomo said Saturday that he had intended to be a mentor for Bennett. He has denied Boylan’s allegations.
Migrant deaths: At least 15 Africans drowned when their boat capsized Sunday off Libya, a U.N. spokeswoman said, the second shipwreck involving migrants headed to Europe in just over a week.
Safa Msehli, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said the dead were on a rubber boat carrying at least 110 migrants, who embarked Friday from the Libyan coastal town of Zawiya.
The boat started to sink early Sunday and the Libyan coast guard managed to rescue at least 95 migrants, including six women and two children, she said. Msehli said many of the survivors suffered from burns from engine fuel, and hypothermia, with some taken to hospital.
Sunday’s shipwreck was the latest along the Central Mediterranean
migration route. At least 41 migrants were reported dead last week, part of a group of some 120 migrants on a dinghy that left the North African country Feb. 18.
The Israeli government approved a measure Sunday to vaccinate tens of thousands of Palestinian laborers, after facing fierce criticism over the small number of inoculations it had provided to Palestinians living under its military occupation.
Israeli teams will soon begin vaccinating Palestinians with permits to work in Israel or in settlements in the occupied West Bank, according to a statement by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Defense Ministry unit responsible for liaising with the Palestinians.
There are about 80,000 Palestinians who have permits to work in Israel and about 30,000 who have permits for work in the settlements. The tens of thousands of Palestinians who work in Israel without official documents would not be eligible for inoculations.
A heated debate has raged for weeks over whether Israel bears responsibility for the health of Palestinian in the occupied West Bank and the blockaded Gaza Strip.
Human rights groups have argued that international law requires Israel to provide Palestinians with the same access to vaccines as its own citizens receive. But supporters of Israel’s policies have contended that the Palestinians assumed responsibility for health services when they signed the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
Palestinians to get shots:
Hong Kong police charged dozens of opposition activists including Joshua Wong with violating the city’s national security law, taking formal action against them less than a week before China’s highest-profile annual political meeting.
Of the 55 opposition figures initially arrested in January, 47 were charged Sunday with conspiracy to commit subversion. They had previously been facing allegations of subversion. It is the largest mass charge under the new law since it went into effect last year.
The former lawmakers and activists were being detained pending a court appearance Monday, the police said in a statement.
They were arrested in January on suspicion of subversion for their roles in helping organize a democratic primary contest over the summer that drew more than
Hong Kong charges:
600,000 voters.
Wong, who testified before the U.S. Congress last year, was already behind bars. He is serving a sentence of over a year handed down in December for a separate charge related to a protest in 2019; this is the first time he’s been charged under the national security law.
Others charged Sunday include veteran activist Leung Kwok Hung, former lawmaker Alvin Yeung, and the ex-convener of Civil Human Rights Front, Jimmy Sham, according to their respective Facebook pages.
A science professor at a university in central Michigan who claimed sinister forces were targeting him and breaking into his home has been fired months after using racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs on Twitter.
Thomas Brennan announced
Michigan professor fired:
in a Twitter posting Saturday he’d been fired, and Ferris State University later confirmed he was dismissed last week, The Detroit News reported.
The university, which put Brennan on administrative leave in November, declined further comment.
The Torch, the university’s student-run newspaper, first reported about the tweets in November.
According to the newspaper’s screenshots, one tweet said: “Covid19 is another jewish revolution.”
In a statement linked to his Saturday posting, Brennan expressed remorse for the tweets. But he said they were a consequence of self-destructive behavior and migraines that stemmed from a “secret program” in which electromagnetic fields and nanotechnology were deployed against him
It is not unusual for people who change employers to lose track of their retirement accounts. If they fail to transfer the account properly, and the account becomes dormant, after two years the funds in the account are turned over to the state as unclaimed property. State laws vary a great deal on what happens next.
Anita Mukherjee and Corina Mommaerts, faculty members at the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have found that many of these accounts — which can run into the tens of thousands — remain unclaimed because most states are not allowed to link them to a Social Security number, and the states make no attempt to contact the account holders.
The accounts are listed as unclaimed property in the state in which they were established. And unless account owners do a state search of unclaimed property, their accounts will remain dormant for many years, perhaps forever.
Mukherjee and Mommaerts also point out that the state of Wisconsin is an exception. The state links accounts to a Social Security number, and does contact people whose accounts have become dormant.
Most employees with retirement accounts know that when they leave their jobs, it is their responsibility to take the proper steps and transfer their retirement accounts.
Unfortunately, some fail to take that action, or they may not even know they have a retirement account. Some companies automatically sign their employees to a retirement account without their knowledge. In other cases, individuals are simply too careless because the size of the account is small.
State databases are free to access. There is no reason for you not to search the unclaimed property database in your state to see whether there is any asset in your name. Generally, all you have to do is search by personal name or business name to determine if there are any assets under your name. Go to missingmoney.com, a free site managed by the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, for a free search by state.
You may find that it is not difficult to have the funds transferred to you if you are the rightful owner of the asset. Several years ago, I used the site to recover thousands of dollars from a CD I was not aware of, left to me and my children by a deceased aunt.
According to Sarah Brenner of Ed Slott & Co., if you recover funds from the state from a retirement account, you are allowed to roll over these funds into a retirement account with a procedure known as self-certification. (See her article, “IRS Adds New Reason for Self-Certification of Late Rollovers,” at www.irahelp.com.)
Revenue procedure 2020-47 covers this situation and provides a sample letter for you to send to a trustee to allow the rollover. If you don’t do a rollover, you may be subject to income taxes and possibly an early withdrawal penalty if you are younger than 59 ½.
If you do leave your job and have a retirement account, make sure you take the proper steps to transfer the account to another financial institution. If you allow the account to become dormant, you will lose the ability to have the account increase in value. Once the account becomes dormant, you no longer earn income on the account. You also lose any potential capital gain, and you may be subject to tax penalties.