The Senate’s pardon warning, a telehealth data suit, New York’s gun-sale gambit, and the subway’s worst knots

The Senate put itself on record against clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell, agreeing without a single objection that the convicted associate of Jeffrey Epstein should never receive a presidential pardon.[1] The measure is a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution, and it passed by unanimous consent on July 29, meaning no senator of either party asked to be heard against it.[3] Its sponsor cast the vote as a direct message to the White House, at a moment when the president has not foreclosed the possibility of acting on Maxwell’s behalf.[1]

01 A vote with nothing behind it but its message

Senator Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat, brought Senate Resolution 608 to the floor and asked that it be agreed to; the presiding officer heard no objection, and the measure carried.[1] Unanimous consent is the chamber’s tool for clearing business without a roll call, and it works only if every senator present declines to object, so the outcome recorded Republicans and Democrats alike declining to speak for a pardon.[3] The resolution states the sense of the Senate that Maxwell should not be granted a pardon or any form of clemency for her crimes involving the sexual exploitation and trafficking of minors.[2] It changes no law and binds no one; its weight lies entirely in the going on record.[2] “There should be absolutely no pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell,” Rosen said on the floor. “Not now, not ever.”[1]

02 Why the question turned live this summer

Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 of federal sex-trafficking and conspiracy charges for helping Epstein recruit and abuse teenage girls, and she is serving a 20-year sentence.[2] The pardon question moved from hypothetical to pressing after the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, met with her, and she was then moved from a low-security prison to a minimum-security camp in Texas.[5] Rosen and other Democrats read that sequence as a possible prelude to leniency and acted to box it in before the president could.[3] The timing was pointed: the vote landed as the Senate weighed the same official’s nomination to become attorney general.[1]

03 What a nonbinding vote can and cannot do

The resolution cannot stop a pardon. The Constitution places the clemency power over federal offenses with the president and gives Congress no veto over how it is used.[2] What a unanimous vote does is raise the political price of acting, by making every senator take a side in advance and denying the White House any claim that the chamber’s silence meant consent.[1] Reporting on the vote noted that the president has not ruled out a pardon, which is why the opponents reached for a floor statement rather than a court.[3]

Whether the message holds is now a test of whether a public, on-the-record consensus can constrain a power the courts will not.[3]

Federal and state regulators sued one of the country’s largest telehealth companies over how it handled patients’ most sensitive information. The complaint says Hims & Hers fed medical details to Meta, Snap and roughly a dozen other advertising platforms, and locked customers into subscriptions that were hard to leave.[2] The Federal Trade Commission, joined by California and Utah, filed the case on July 29 in federal court in San Francisco.[1] It pairs a privacy theory with a billing theory, reaching back to conduct the government dates to 2019.[2]

01 The privacy theory

The government’s core claim is that Hims & Hers promised to keep health information private and then did the opposite, embedding third-party tracking code on its site and uploading customer lists so that outside advertising platforms could target the same people.[2] The recipients named in the complaint include Meta, Snap, Google, TikTok, Pinterest and Reddit, among others.[2] A tracking pixel is a small piece of code that reports a visitor’s actions back to an advertiser, so that a search for a treatment can quietly become a data point an ad network holds.[2] “Consumers unknowingly locked into recurring subscriptions, and the disclosure to third parties of consumers’ most private health information without their consent,” the head of the FTC’s consumer-protection arm said of the case.[1]

02 The billing theory

The second half of the complaint is about money and the difficulty of stopping it.[2] Customers were charged almost immediately after submitting an intake form, the government alleges, sometimes before the promised consultation with a provider had happened; refills were billed about ten days earlier than buyers expected; and cancellation windows closed roughly two days before a charge would process, so a subscriber who tried to quit could still be billed.[2] Individual disputed charges cited in the filing ranged from about 147 dollars to 897 dollars.[2] Those counts are brought under the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, a 2010 law that requires clear disclosure, informed consent and a simple way to cancel before a company can bill on a recurring basis.[2]

03 What the suit seeks, and what the company says

The commission voted 2 to 0 to bring the case.[1] It was joined by the Utah Division of Consumer Protection and by California acting through Los Angeles County.[3] The plaintiffs ask for a permanent injunction against the practices, monetary relief for affected customers, and civil penalties that under California law can reach 2,500 dollars per violation.[2] Hims & Hers called the allegations “baseless,” saying its customers have the information they need to make informed decisions about their care.[4] Beyond one company, the case tests what a health platform’s privacy promise legally means, and whether an advertising pixel can count as a disclosure the law will punish.[2]

New York is trying to wall off its own gun laws from a federal rollback. As Washington prepares to let firearms be sold online without a face-to-face meeting, Governor Kathy Hochul said the state will move the other way and require every sale to happen in person.[1] The federal firearms bureau is moving to rescind more than thirty of its rules, among them the barrier to non-face-to-face sales nationwide.[1] Hochul’s response mixes a bill she cannot pass until the Legislature returns in January with steps her agencies can take now.[2]

01 The federal change that set it off

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is moving to strike more than thirty of its regulations, a package one account put at thirty-four rules in all.[1][3] The change that drew New York’s attention would permit firearms to be sold without the buyer and seller meeting in person, a practice the federal government has long restricted.[3] Because a licensed dealer must still run a background check, the practical worry is not the paperwork but the loss of the in-person step, where an identity is confirmed and a nervous or prohibited buyer can be seen.[2]

02 What Albany proposes to do about it

When the Legislature reconvenes in January, Hochul says she will introduce a bill requiring that all firearm sales in New York be conducted in person, aligning guns with the state’s existing rule for ammunition.[1] A second piece would tighten the background-check standard so that a dealer must receive an affirmative approval before completing a sale, rather than proceeding when no answer comes back within the federal review window.[2] That default-proceed gap is how some sales close before a check is finished, and closing it is the mechanical heart of the proposal.[2] None of it takes effect unless the Legislature agrees, and the bill will not be taken up until the new session.[2]

03 The parts that do not wait for a vote

Alongside the legislation, Hochul directed the State Police to prioritize on-site inspections of dealers whose guns have turned up at crime scenes, and to work with the attorney general on enforcement.[1] The state also plans to expand its Interstate Task Force on Illegal Guns, a coalition of New York and nine other states created in 2022 to trace weapons that cross state lines, and to remind licensed dealers by mail that New York’s own laws still bind them whatever Washington rescinds.[1] “New York State is taking action to blunt their efforts by bolstering our nation-leading gun laws,” Hochul said.[1] New York cannot restore the federal rule it dislikes, but it can raise its own floor, and it is testing how high that floor can go.[2]

The subway loses much of its time not on long stretches of track but at a handful of pinch points, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has now written them down.[1] Its first systemwide bottleneck study identifies more than seventy congested locations and singles out twenty-five as the best candidates to fix, with two Brooklyn junctions at the top.[2] The plan trades the language of grand expansion for something more surgical: find the switches and merges where trains wait on one another, and redesign them.[3]

01 Where the minutes go

A bottleneck on the subway is usually a place where two lines share track, or where trains must cross one another’s paths through a set of switches, so that one train’s move forces another to hold.[3] The study, titled “Eliminating Bottlenecks: Speeding Up Your Ride,” is the authority’s first to look at these choke points across the whole system rather than line by line.[2] It counts more than seventy of them, with individual sites slowing between roughly 85,000 and 825,000 trips on a peak day, against a network that carries about 4.5 million riders daily.[1] Of the seventy, twenty-five are named as the most promising to unclog.[1]

02 Two Brooklyn junctions lead the list

The worst offender is Nostrand Junction, east of Franklin Avenue, where the 2, 3, 4 and 5 trains sort themselves out and about 1.2 million daily trips pass through.[1] The proposed fix redesigns the track switches so that trains swap routes cleanly instead of merging into one another’s way, a change the authority estimates would save each affected rider 45 to 60 seconds.[1] A few seconds sounds small until it is multiplied by more than a million trips and repeated every weekday.[2] The second is the DeKalb interlocking near the Manhattan Bridge, where more than 1,600 trains a day thread eighteen switches; that project is further along, in procurement, with a construction award planned by year’s end.[1]

03 Cheap seconds, patient money

The tools range from operational tweaks to heavy capital work, including modern signaling known as communications-based train control, which tracks trains continuously and lets them run closer together, along with switch reconfiguration, terminal redesign and smoother track geometry.[1] The catch is time and money: many of the fixes would be paid for through the authority’s next five-year capital program, which begins in 2030, and the wider list feeds a twenty-year needs assessment due in October 2028.[1] “We need to figure out how to unsnarl it, and that’s what we’re doing across the system to help move people faster,” the authority’s construction chief said of the network.[2] If the capital holds, a catalog of small, physical fixes may buy more speed per dollar than any single grand line.[3]