A Long Island nonprofit hosted and promoted a fundraiser for a Democratic state lawmaker’s campaign in what appears to be a violation of federal rules governing tax-exempt organizations, according to findings reviewed by The Post.

Long Island Youth Development Inc., a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, held an Oct. 3 event for Assemblywoman Rebecca Kassay (D-Suffolk County). A social media post promoting the gathering urged followers to “do all we can to support her and care for our communities.”

“Join us as we hold a reception to celebrate the contributions Assemblywoman Rebecca Kassay has had to the Long Island Youth Development organization and the Asian community on Long Island,” the post stated.

The nonprofit is led by Dr. Yanping Yu, who published the post as Kassay secured a substantial state grant for the organization.

The accompanying flyer featured Kassay’s campaign logo and said that “donations [were] appreciated but not required.” Ticket prices ranged from $50 to $500, and the flyer included a link to Kassay’s campaign donation page along with a campaign email address.

“Thanks to New York State’s public financing program, in-district donations can be matched up to 12 times!” the flyer said.

Kassay is participating in the state’s campaign-matching program, under which donations of less than $250 can generate a matching contribution of up to $250 from state funds.

The flyer invited attendees to a reception featuring Yu and Suffolk County lawmaker Jonathan Kornreich.

Federal law strictly bars 501(c)(3) nonprofits from engaging in political activity, including soliciting contributions for or on behalf of a political candidate. Violations can lead to fines or the loss of an organization’s tax-exempt status under the Internal Revenue Code.

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“It’s clearly participating in a campaign, which is prohibited activity for a 501(c)(3),” Patrick Sternal, counsel at Holtzman-Vogel, told The Post.

Yu has donated $2,500 to Kassay since September 2025, while Kassay has appeared at several events for Yu’s nonprofit, according to posts on Yu’s social media accounts.

Kassay has also honored Yu with official proclamations and recognitions, including a “Women of Distinction” award and a designation as a “Women’s History Month honoree.” Social media posts show the pair together in Albany earlier this year.

Kassay’s office and the nonprofit did not respond to requests for comment.

The Instagram post was deleted Tuesday after The Post contacted Kassay’s office seeking comment.

Kassay is seeking a second two-year term representing the Assembly’s Third District in Suffolk County. She faces Republican Will Sussman in the Nov. 3 election.

Sussman said he welcomed a “full investigation” by the state attorney general, whose office oversees nonprofits.

“Even in Albany, most people know that you don’t give out taxpayer money in exchange for donations to your campaign,” Sussman said.

“Rebecca Kassay either doesn’t know the law, or she doesn’t think it applies to her,” Sussman said. “I look forward to a full investigation by the attorney general.”

State lawmakers earn $142,000 annually.

A newly released autopsy report has shed additional light on the killing of a new mother who was found fatally stabbed inside her home in an affluent New Jersey community, deepening the mystery surrounding the case.

Investigators say Brooke Hanlon, 35, was killed at her home on Pottersville Road in Chester, New Jersey. She is survived by her 1-year-old daughter. Her husband, Conor Hanlon, has publicly denied any role in her death.

Morris County Medical Examiner Dr. Di Wang performed the autopsy on June 7, one day after Hanlon was discovered dead. The examination identified “sharp force injuries” as the cause of death.

The report, which is heavily redacted, states that representatives of the Morris County Sheriff’s Office, the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office and the Chester Police Department were “present” during the examination.

The Morris County Prosecutor’s Office has not announced any arrests or identified a person of interest as the investigation continues.

Jennifer Payne, who met Hanlon in graduate school and once shared a home with her, previously told News Media, “Honestly, it’s been confusing, heartbreaking and incredibly frustrating,” as investigators have provided few updates.

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Payne also gave News Media exclusive photographs showing the two friends during their years in Boston and afterward.

According to a 911 call obtained by News Media, Hanlon’s husband was the first to find her unresponsive. During the distressed call, he told the operator there was “a laceration” on his wife’s body while being instructed to perform CPR.

Months after the killing, neighbors on Pottersville Road told News Media that Hanlon had been regularly returning to the Chester property and staying there overnight. He had previously been dividing his time between New Jersey and the Boston area, where his family lives.

Authorities have not said whether investigators found or recovered a weapon at the home.

Hanlon’s family previously told News Media, “We have full and unwavering confidence in the investigative efforts of law enforcement.”

Government portals, hospital websites and school services went offline around the world on Wednesday as operators rushed to defend their systems against two critical software vulnerabilities.

The disruption was linked to flaws in PHP, a programming language used to run as many as 70 percent of websites worldwide.

Services in several countries, including the Netherlands, Finland, France and Denmark, were temporarily taken offline as organizations sought to prevent a potential cyberattack.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI urged organizations running PHP to take vulnerable systems offline if they could not install the available security updates immediately.

The technology is used by major US websites and services such as Etsy, Wikipedia and NASA.gov, highlighting PHP’s role across online retail, information platforms and government operations.

Cybersecurity agencies in Europe, Australia, Japan and Britain issued similar warnings, telling PHP users to apply the patches without delay or take affected sites offline until they could be secured.

The vulnerabilities could enable hackers to seize control of affected servers without a password or user account. Attackers could then steal data stored on the server or hijack a trusted website to launch attacks against visitors.

Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and security provider, reported evidence of attacks as website operators worked to deploy the emergency fixes.

Cybersecurity firm Huntress wrote in a blog post: ‘PHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, ​Drupal, Joomla and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful lot of software that doesn’t even advertise that it runs PHP under ⁠the hood.’

Both flaws relate to the way PHP manages server memory. One can cause the software to mishandle data during memory errors, while the other enables it to reuse information after that memory has already been released.

The full scale of the attacks is not yet known, although cybersecurity platform Patchstack said it had received ‘reports of active exploitation.’

The security team responsible for maintaining PHP reportedly issued patches at 10am ET to address the vulnerabilities.

Operators are now racing to install the updates before hackers use AI to analyze the patches and develop methods for attacking systems that remain exposed.

Thai Duong, chief executive of Calif, the security company that discovered the flaws, told The Wall Street Journal: ‘Some dude on Twitter could take the patches and run AI against it and post some exploit script.’

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He added: ‘All hell will break loose.’

CERT-EU, the European Union’s technical cybersecurity advisory body, said: ‘Organizations should consider isolating internet-facing applications from public networks until a fix is available.’

In the Netherlands, several organizations followed the example of the National Cyber Security Center and took public-facing websites offline.

Those included the Port of Rotterdam, government portal Overheid.nl, the national soccer association KNVB, the websites of the country’s five largest political parties and several hospital websites.

Danish municipal IT company Kombit said it shut down several ⁠services, including ​the national school communication platform, a spokesperson told Reuters.

Disruption was even more widespread in Finland, where state IT services provider ​Valtori said government public network services had been taken offline ‘as a precautionary measure.’ 

France’s Interior Ministry said it had temporarily taken local government administrative websites offline while awaiting a security fix.

AI-assisted hacking campaigns, which have proliferated in recent weeks, could magnify the threat, said Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London.

‘The scale is huge,’ Olejnik said. ‘And with AI, exploitation may happen instantly, on a large scale.’ 

PHP is a programming language used to run websites. When a visitor loads a page, a server running PHP assembles the content and sends it to the browser. 

Rather than target victims individually, attackers could scan ⁠the internet for systems running vulnerable versions of PHP.

New York state court officers endorsed Republican Bruce Blakeman for governor Wednesday, marking the first time in at least two decades that the unions have supported a candidate for the state’s highest office.

The Supreme Court Officers and Court Officers associations said they were backing the Nassau County executive because “he has made public safety a central part of his public service.” The unions also accused Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York’s Democratic leaders of allowing their ranks to shrink and leaving officers vulnerable on the job.

“This election is about more than politics, it’s about public safety, respect for the rule of law,” Patrick Cullen, president of the New York State Supreme Court Officers Association, said at a news conference outside Manhattan Criminal Court.

“Bruce Blakeman has made public safety a central part of his public service,” Cullen said. “His record as Nassau County executive and his emphasis on supporting law enforcement reflects the priorities that court officers want to see taken seriously at the state level.”

Sgt. Thomas Hickey, who leads the state Court Officers Association, said the union had reviewed endorsements from “20-something years” ago but could not recall publicly supporting a gubernatorial candidate.

“And one of us, no matter how far we went back, can remember endorsing a Republican,” he said.

Union leaders said the number of court officers has declined under Hochul and the state’s Democratic leadership. They also pointed to aging courthouse security equipment and what they described as more violent offenders moving through courthouses because of lax bail reform laws that have created a revolving door in the justice system.

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“They see that the people coming in don’t have any regard for law and order inside the courthouse,” Hickey said. “They realize there is no consequences for being disruptive so they come back and commit crimes again and again inside the courthouse.”

Hickey said metal detectors at courthouse entrances are outdated and can be bypassed too easily.

“These people are bringing in 4D weapons that are not picked up by magnetometers,” he said. “So, what you have is a situation where there’s less court officers because we’re short staffed, and there are guys coming in with a knife that they can’t detect.”

Blakeman, who trails Hochul in the polls with the election just two weeks away, has made public safety a central theme of his campaign. He has repeatedly criticized Democrats in Albany and New York City, accusing them of underfunding police departments, allowing violent offenders to remain free under lax bail laws and failing to support law enforcement.

“Kathy Hochul, her priority is are all upside down,” Blakeman told reporters. “After this year we will have spent $10 billion on illegal migrants who just claim asylum. They get free food, free housing, free transportation, free cell phone and free health care.”

“That’s money that I would be spending on law enforcement, on our court system, on infrastructure, on our schools, are on our hospitals,” he said. “Cutting taxes and cutting utility bills.”

The two unions represent about 4,000 active and retired members combined. Their officers patrol courthouses and maintain order in courtrooms across New York state.

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A Massachusetts woman has been accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of orchestrating sham marriages designed to help clients obtain green cards and, ultimately, U.S. citizenship.

Jennifer Gonzalez, a U.S. citizen, allegedly charged as much as $40,000 for each marriage and arranged up to 20 such unions annually over the past decade, according to Leah Foley, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

Authorities said Gonzalez’s female employees, who also face charges, married men seeking legal immigration status in the United States.

“This conspiracy netted her $6 million during the course of the alleged scam,” Foley said Wednesday at a news conference at the Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston. She added that Gonzalez boasted about investing the proceeds in businesses and property in the Dominican Republic, which she repeatedly called “my country.”

According to prosecutors, Gonzalez revealed details of the alleged operation to a witness cooperating with federal investigators. Foley said Gonzalez believed the person was an undocumented immigrant.

Gonzalez, 43, allegedly told the witness—who was recording the conversation—that Massachusetts was “so special” because it is a sanctuary state where “illegal aliens get a lot of help as an immigrant.”

She also allegedly said she wanted to give each of her children land in the Dominican Republic that they could own in the future.

“Miss Gonzalez got rich off selling the American dream, all the while investing her money in another country,” Foley said.

Foley said Gonzalez told the witness she stopped arranging fraudulent marriages at the end of 2024 because President Donald Trump was returning to office. She allegedly ended the operation altogether in 2025, saying immigration enforcement had become “a little harsh.”

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Prosecutors identified Gonzalez as the alleged “ringleader” of the operation, which involved several other alleged co-conspirators.

Amara Pugh, Gonzalez’s 31-year-old secretary, as well as Jessica Tavares, 31; Erica Daniels, 29; and Jaylin Hill, 26, allegedly received payment to marry Gonzalez’s clients. Prosecutors also accused Gonzalez of entering into a sham marriage with an undocumented immigrant herself.

Court records released by the Justice Department included photographs from at least two of the alleged marriage ceremonies.

Officials said the women generally remained married to the men for years before divorcing them. Some then married other undocumented immigrants as soon as one month after their divorces.

Foley also said Gonzalez allegedly defrauded the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by applying for and receiving benefits from 2019 through 2026. Prosecutors say she collected more than $124,000 from the program during that period.

“She did not list her income from her sham marriage business and did not list anyone else in her household, not the illegal alien she married and not the father of her children, who she referred to as her husband,” Foley said.

The Justice Department said Gonzalez, Pugh, Tavares and two other alleged conspirators were arrested Wednesday morning. Hill was already serving a state prison sentence for a gun offense.