Eric Adams’ case indefinitely adjourned by judge following DOJ request

(LAS VEGAS) — To Cherie DeVille, one of the adult entertainment industry’s most popular stars, pornography — and its easy accessibility online — is a fundamental freedom protected by the First Amendment.

“This isn’t a whim or something that I’m going to do for a week. I love this job,” said the former physical therapist turned sex worker who has millions of followers on social media. “It’s very good business for me.”

To parents with young children, like Dawn Hawkins of Virginia, America’s multibillion-dollar porn juggernaut is a social poison infiltrating families via the internet.

“How are we going to teach our children healthy intimacy and boundaries and consent when what they’re viewing across multiple platforms is sharing really the opposite message,” said Hawkins, who wants stricter controls for sexually-explicit content.

The age-old debate over the widespread availability of pornography in America will enter a new phase this spring as the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether states can legally require websites hosting adult content to perform electronic age verification of all users.

A green light for online age checks could dramatically alter how millions of U.S. adults access sexually explicit content on their phones, tablets, and computers and potentially build a more stringent safety barrier for children than what currently exists.

The decision will come at a time when hardcore porn is booming business and easier to obtain than ever before, with the rapid proliferation of adult film studios, live camera websites, social media platforms, and online networks of amateur creators. Many sites have no paywall or age verification gateways.

“It’s not a matter of if my kids are going to be exposed to pornography. It’s a matter of when. It’s definitely going to happen,” said Hawkins, a mother of 5 who also heads the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which has led an effort to crack down on the porn industry.

Hawkins and many national parent organizations have voiced growing concern in recent years that software filters and parental controls on personal electronics – installed by manufacturers and long considered the primary line of defense for families – have not been effective at keeping explicit content from kids.

More than 70% of men and 40% of women say they’ve consumed sexually explicit content in the past year, according to a recent study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. American teens have reported similar levels of exposure in studies reviewed by ABC News.

Public health experts say young people who view sexually explicit content are more likely to start having sex earlier, engage in unsafe sex, and have multiple partners.

“As long as we’re prioritizing adults’ access to this content and not also prioritizing children’s safety, we are going to destroy the next generation,” said Hawkins. “We are just asking that the pornography companies put a fence around it and make sure that those accessing this content are of age.”

Nineteen states have recently passed laws mandating that sites containing sexually-explicit material harmful to children require all users to upload a copy of their digital or government ID, or perform a biometric scan, in order to verify that they are over 18. Legislators say the measures are common sense steps similar to age checks at brick-and-mortar stores.

“It’s possible to prove your age entirely on your own cell phone. So, no personal data need ever leave the palm of your hand,” said Iain Corby, executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association, an industry trade group that sells technology to adult websites.

Third-party apps — used widely by porn sites across Europe — can make the verification process fast, free, and secure for consumers, Corby said.

“The simple case might be using a driver’s license. So you would be redirected to an agency’s website, and then once you’ve done a photo of your I.D., you do a selfie. And then we check that the two match,” Corby said. “We just tell that website that you’re over 18 – not your name, not your face, and not even your actual date of birth. Just that you were over 18.

“Another option works in a very similar way to facial estimation, but in fact, it’s based on how you move your hands,” added Corby, demonstrating the biometric scan technology for ABC News.

The porn industry, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, says online age-verification requirements are unconstitutional, infringing on adult rights by putting privacy at risk and impeding access to legal content.

Decades of Supreme Court precedent have upheld the constitutionality of pornographic material and adults’ right to access it. In two separate cases, the court previously ruled that the government can’t mandate age verification of users online before allowing them to see explicit material.

“Whenever the government is passing a law in the name of protecting kids, I think there are serious questions to be asked about whether what it’s really doing is saying this speech is bad for everyone,” said Vera Eidelman, an ACLU attorney. “And that’s exactly what the First Amendment exists to protect against.”

Industry advocates say the onus should remain on parents and technology companies, which they claim have the capacity to install smarter content filters and other safety monitoring controls on devices used by kids.

“Kids are going to do what they’re going to do. You know, you don’t ban alcohol because kids can get a fake ID or because they can drink from their parents’ liquor cabinet,” said Ken Fields, an adult film actor who opposes electronic age verification laws. “You do the best you can to try to keep that from happening within reason without infringing on the legal rights of legal adults and citizens.”

The Texas law at issue before the Supreme Court applies to websites with more than one-third of sexually-explicit content harmful to children. It does not apply to search engines or social media sites. Critics say it could also limit teenagers’ access to public health and sexual health resources unrelated to porn.

“I think their heart is in the right place. The execution is not there,” said Nick from Colorado, an attendee at the AVN Expo in Las Vegas last month, the nation’s annual adult entertainment convention. “There’s a way to do it, it’s just not the way it’s being done.”

Several participants, who all declined to share their last names, told ABC News they worried about a loss of anonymity when surfing to adult websites. “If you do absolutely upload your driver’s license, who gets it? So where does that information go?” said Meredith from Tennessee.

“There’s a lot of ways you can get shamed, whether it’s at work or other places,” said Brett from Florida. “It’s more of a privacy concern than anything else.”

During Supreme Court oral arguments last month in a major test case from Texas, a majority of justices appeared sympathetic to the states’ efforts to limit kids’ exposure to sexually explicit material, despite long standing precedent opposing overly burdensome requirements on adults, including electronic age checks.

A decision is expected by the end of June.

“It’s going to be a massive amount of monetary loss, and I think you’re going to see an explosion of illegal, unethical porn because they don’t care and they won’t comply,” said DeVille. “I do not care what you think about porn. This should terrify you because this is a massive government overstep in one of our most cherished things in the United States.”

To Hawkins, a favorable decision would be a sigh of relief.

“The burden can’t only be on parents,” she said of the need to keep children away from pornography. “Something like demanding age verification on these nefarious websites is such a simple, commonsense measure that that would drastically help protect kids from exposure.”

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(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge temporarily paused the Trump administration’s “illegal” reductions in force and reinstated approximately 20,000 probationary government employees across 18 agencies who had been terminated.

U.S. District Judge James Bredar — an Obama appointee — concluded that the Trump administration failed to provide the legally required advanced notice before it tried to conduct “massive layoffs.” The judge also prohibited the Trump administration from conducting future mass firings without giving notice.

“When the federal government terminates large numbers of its employees, including those still on probation because they were recently hired or promoted, it must follow certain rules,” Bredar wrote.

The ruling applies to 18 of the federal agencies named as defendants in the case except for the Defense Department, the National Archives and the Office of Personnel Management.

The decision came in a case brought by 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued last week to block the firings and is separate from a California judge’s decision also dealing with probationary employees that was issued earlier Thursday.

Similar to the reasoning of the judge in the California case, Bredar wrote that he believes the government lied when it listed “performance” or other individualized reasons as justification for the layoffs.

“On the record before the Court, this isn’t true. There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively,” he wrote. “It is simply not conceivable that the Government could have conducted individualized assessments of the relevant employees in the relevant timeframe.”

Bredar concluded that the states that sued are suffering irreparable harm by having to assist thousands of unemployed workers who were fired illegally.

“Lacking the notice to which they were entitled, the States weren’t ready for the impact of so many unemployed people,” he wrote. “They are still scrambling to catch up,” he wrote.

Bredar’s order will remain in place for two weeks, and he scheduled a hearing for March 26 to consider issuing a preliminary injunction, which is a longer-term measure.

Like the California case, Bredar did not rule that the Trump administration is not able to conduct mass firings; rather, the administration just needs to provide advanced notice when it conducts a reduction in force. While the order provides a reprieve for more than 20,000 government workers, the lifeline is temporary, even if the order is extended later this month.

The judge’s order came after a hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

The Democratic attorneys general argued that the Trump administration violated federal law with the firings by failing to give a required 60-day notice for a reduction in force, opting to pursue the terminations “suddenly and without any advance notice.”

Lawyers with the Department of Justice have argued that the states lack standing because they “cannot interject themselves into the employment relationship between the United States and government workers,” and that to grant the temporary restraining order would “circumvent” the administrative process for challenging the firings.

In separate earlier lawsuits, two other federal judges had declined to immediately block firings of federal employees or to reinstate them to their positions.

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(WASHINGTON) — The website of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency provided its third weekly update of federal government cost-cutting Sunday night, claiming total government savings of $105 billion, up from the $65 billion it claimed in last week’s update — but the figure remains unverifiable as the site still says it’s posted only a fraction of the receipts supporting this total.

In its latest update to its “Savings” page, DOGE continued to update — and in some cases delete — contracts that it had previously listed as having saved up to billions of dollars in federal funds, after media outlets, experts and others publicly questioned details of the contracts.

In all, DOGE listed a total of 2,334 canceled contracts on its latest “Wall of Receipts,” with the savings from those contracts amounting to $8.8 billion.

The amount is actually lower than the $9.6 billion in claimed savings from 2,299 contracts posted on its “Wall of Receipts” last week, reflecting the difficulty in pinpointing exactly what DOGE is cutting and by how much.

Similar to last week, DOGE claims in this week’s update that the $105 billion figure is based on a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

The site, however, only provides receipts for a fraction of that number. In addition to the $8.8 billion alleged savings in canceled contracts, the new data on the site lists $660 million worth of real estate leases under the GSA that were canceled, and, for the first time, it lists federal government grants that have been terminated, totaling $10.3 billion.

Among the contracts that have been deleted from DOGE’s latest “Wall of Receipts” is the biggest contract it had listed as having canceled last week: a seven-year blanket purchase agreement from the IRS with $1.9 billion cap for “IT strategy and modernization.”

The website removed this contract from its “Wall of Receipts” after the vendor, financial management and IT company Centennial Technologies, told the New York Times last month that the contract was actually canceled last fall, under the Biden administration.

The previous week, DOGE had to revise down its largest claimed savings contract from $8 billion to $8 million after the contract’s vendor explained that the $8 billion listed on it procurement record was likely a clerical error.

Another contract that was removed from DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” in the latest updated was a five-year $150 million USAID contract under the Asia Futures Activity initiative, aimed at serving the USAID’s Asia Bureau to solve “interconnected challenges of economic growth, democratic governance, and resilience in the face of increasing health, climate, and food security threats.”

Representatives for the Cadmus Group, which had received that contract, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

DOGE also deleted from its latest “Wall of Receipts” what appeared to be a $149 million National Institute of Health contract awarded to software company Advanced Automation Technologies.

Last week, the DOGE website listing that contract linked to a different NIH contract for leasing and maintaining refrigerated gas tanks. An NIH contract with Advanced Automation Technologies that shares the same contract ID is capped at just $1.4 million — not the $149 million figure that had been listed by DOGE.

Other terminated contracts listed in this week’s data include a USAID contract for the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative with a $256 million ceiling, from which DOGE claims to have saved $170 million that has yet to be obligated to the contractor.

Another newly listed canceled contract is the USAID’s Global Health Training, Advisory, and Support Contract program, a multi-year program that started in 2021 and was capped at $682 million through 2029. DOGE claims to have saved $284 million by terminating this program.

The single biggest contract listed this week is a seven-year IT services contract from the USAID to the vendor Salient CRGT Inc., with a $597 million ceiling.

Similar to last week’s data, DOGE now lists more than 940 contracts where contract obligations have already been fully delivered — meaning that 40% of the contracts they claim to have terminated will not actually result in saving any money.

Asked about contracts that list $0 in savings last week, a White House official told ABC News that they’re using a conservative methodology of calculating savings because they subtract the contracts’ obligated dollars from the ceiling amounts. However, for many contracts the ceiling dollars are much higher than what is actually expected to be spent.

For the $10.3 billion in federal grants the sites says it’s terminated, DOGE lists each of the 3,389 grants with the name of the awarding agency and the amount of each grant, but does not lists the grant’s name or purpose.

So far, much of the claimed savings from these grants have come from the USAID — totaling $8.7 billion — followed by $1.1 billion from the State Department, $472 million from the Education Department and $61 million from the EPA.

DOGE has also updated its list of real estate leases that have been terminated, totaling $660 million. But much of the data is now missing information regarding which agency the leases were under, whereas the site previously listed leases from across more than 40 agencies.

The current data shows $143 million worth of real estate leases under the GSA that were terminated, and the rest of the terminated leases– totaling $516 million — do not list their agencies.

DOGE said last week that it would begin updating its website twice a week, but the current update, like the first two, came after a week.

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