TGIF

Good morning!

It’s Friday and there are just 18 days until Election Day. Let’s get right to it. 👇

Schools: Teachers union officials were in Trenton Thursday to lobby for a bill that would revamp the state-run health benefits plan for school workers, which is in distress after school districts have fled it seeking cheaper plans on the private market, leaving behind a sicker pool of workers that has driven costs up further. Critics of the bill say it’s well-intentioned but will not bring costs down. “You can put a new name on the box. You can give it a gold-plated guarantee, but you don’t fix what’s inside the box, you’ve just made a prettier box. The bill as proposed right now is a prettier box,” said Patrick Duncan, legislative co-chair for New Jersey Statewide Recruitment of Visionary Educators.

Prisons: Also in Trenton, corrections officers and prisoner advocates clashed over a bill that would allow prisons to expand isolated confinement, a push the officers said is needed to combat rising assaults on them by inmates. “We now encounter inmates who deliberately assault officers because they believe doing so will get them removed from the general population,” said William Sullivan, head of the New Jersey Policemen’s Benevolent Association Local 105, which represents nearly 4,500 correctional and parole officers.

Critics like Sean Washington, who spent 25 years behind bars before being exonerated in 2020, countered that isolated confinement amounts to torture. “Go look at them cells. That’s not good for human beings,” Washington said. “If they had animals in there, PETA would be protesting and filing lawsuits against New Jersey for the way those cells look.”

Courts: Saint Peter’s Healthcare and RWJBarnabas Health are in a legal fight over claims that Barnabas colluded with a doctor to lure her patients from Saint Peter’s to Barnabas’ Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. Saint Peter’s alleges in a new lawsuit that Barnabas knew from confidential information it obtained when the two systems planned on merging that the doctor in question was responsible for millions in revenue at Saint Peter’s. Barnabas denies the claims.

Crime: A New Jersey deputy attorney general is accused of using AI to create child sex abuse material, via Alec Sturm at NJ Advance Media. Brian Richard Fitzgerald faces multiple felony counts after investigators say they searched his home and found prompts and scripts with an AI program to create this material.

Trump: The Trump administration sought a federal court order Thursday to force California to purge 20,000 people from its voter rolls over claims they are not U.S. citizens, a major development less than three weeks before the midterm elections.

More: Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev at the New York Times say Alina Habba, our former chief federal prosecutor and staunch Trump ally, is now feuding with another Trump buddy, Richard Grenell, over claims Grenell misallocated millions Habba’s new hubby donated to the Kennedy Center. Also in this story: Habba’s husband may be just 25. 👀