Cleveland - It was a brokered convention with three candidates and two factions. Republican Party leaders hoped for unity, but once the delegates began voting, consensus proved elusive.
Welcome to the presidential nominating convention of 1880. After round upon round of votes, the delegates finally nominated a dark horse from Ohio on the 36th ballot. The candidate nobody saw coming was James A. Garfield, a congressman and Civil War veteran. He went on to win the presidential election.
Garfield was shot by an assassin four months after taking office, and without a legacy, his story has faded. But history geeks and maybe even some of the Republicans heading to the convention in Cleveland this summer may find Garfield’s story — and the jockeying that led to his nominat...
New York, NY - A window washer has fallen to his death on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Police say the 57-year-old man fell at about 11:40 a.m. Monday while cleaning a third floor window on East 81st Street.
The unidentified man was pronounced dead at the scene.
It wasn’t clear what caused him to fall.
Washington - The Republican presidential nomination may be in his sights, yet Donald Trump has so far ignored vital preparations needed for a quick and effective transition to the general election.
The New York businessman has collected little information about tens of millions of voters he needs to turn out in the fall. He’s sent few people to battleground states compared with likely Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, accumulated little if any research on her, and taken no steps to build a network capable of raising the roughly $1 billion needed to run a modern-day general election campaign.
“He may be able to get by on bluster and personality during the primaries, but the general election is a whole different ballgame,” said Ryan Williams, a veteran of M...
Miami, FL - A man’s planned explosive attack on a South Florida Jewish center was thwarted by the FBI through an undercover operation involving a dummy bomb, authorities said Monday.
James Medina, 40, made his initial appearance in federal court Monday following his arrest last week in the alleged plot against the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center, which includes a synagogue, school and meeting halls. Medina is charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, which carries a potential life prison sentence.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Anton said the FBI learned in March that Medina — a Muslim convert who said in court he also goes by James Muhammad — planned to bomb the center by placing a device under a car or throwing it over a wall. An FBI undercov...
Jerusalem - An Israeli man was stabbed in the back on Monday night in an apparent terror attack near the Lions’ Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City. A knife was found at the scene, the police announced, but the assailant has fled.
“A man about 60-years-old was sitting near the the Lions’ Gate with a stab wound on the upper portion of his body,” said Israel Weingarten, a paramedic who arrived on the scene to treat the victim. “He was fully conscious and told us that he was stabbed in an alleyway and ran toward the Lions’ Gate to reach the security forces stationed there.”
The victim is “a Jewish man, approximately 60 years old,” according to a police spokesperson, who said that the man approached the police “and reported ...
Washington - Ted Cruz’s campaign says his choice for running mate, Carly Fiorina, is uninjured after falling on the campaign stage.
Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier says Fiorina missed a step Sunday but was uninjured and continues to campaign on behalf of the senator in Indiana.
Footage of the incident shows Fiorina dropping quickly, with Cruz apparently unaware as he enters and waves to the crowd. Fiorina re-appears a couple seconds later and is seen hugging Cruz’s wife Heidi.
The stumble comes as Cruz is trying to shake off the perception that his campaign is in trouble heading into the Indiana primary on Tuesday. Cruz has vowed to keep up his campaign as long as he has a viable route to winning the GOP nomination.
Jupiter, FL - Authorities say a separated tire likely caused a woman to lose control of her minivan, which crashed on a South Florida highway, killing four of her children and two other adults.
The Florida Highway Patrol says the driver and her 11-year-old daughter are in serious condition after the Saturday night crash.
Sgt. Mark Wysocky says in a news release that 33-year-old Heidi Solis-Perez’s 2001 Mercury Villager veered into a concrete barrier and then bounced into the path of an SUV.
Wysocky says investigators are trying to determine how many passengers were ejected. Three people died at the scene, and three died at hospitals.
The dead included Solis-Perez’s two sons and two of her daughters, ages 17, 14, 7 and 5. Her 31-year-old boyfriend and an 18-year-old m...
West Bank - Israel’s military on Monday ordered a well-known Palestinian journalist to be held for four months without charges or trial, in so-called administrative detention.
The military said Omar Nazzal is being held on suspicion of “unlawful activity” for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small PLO faction that has been labeled a terrorist organization by Israel.
Nazzal’s lawyer, Mahmoud Hassan, said he believes his client, a leading member of the Palestinian journalists’ union, is being targeted because of his political activism. Hassan noted that under the system of administrative detention, the defense is not shown any alleged evidence against a detainee.
Nazzal, 53, has been in Israeli custody since he was seized at an I...
Jerusalem - Fifty holocaust survivors who were prevented from getting a traditional Jewish coming-of-age ceremony finally received it during an emotional event at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Monday.
The septuagenarians and octogenarians were given Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies, which are normally staged for male and female Jews at age 12 or 13, in an event held ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day.
The 13 men and 37 women had mostly missed their ceremonies due to the war and its after effects, so Israel’s government organised a joint one at Jerusalem’s Western Wall—Judaism’s holiest site for prayer.
The men and women filed into the two separate parts of the gender-divided site.
In the male area, the men read from the Torah while we...
Chicago - Playground concussions are on the rise, according to a new government study, and monkey bars and swings are most often involved.
Most injuries studied were mild, but all concussions are potentially serious and the researchers say the trend raises public health and safety concerns.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study examined national 2001-2013 data on playground injuries to kids aged 14 and younger who received emergency-room treatment. Of almost 215,000 kids on average treated yearly, almost 10 percent — about 21,000 annually — had traumatic brain injuries including concussions. Only nonfatal injuries were included.
Here are some key findings, published online Monday in Pediatrics:
CLIMBING RATE
In 2005, 23 out of 100,000 kids ha...
Istanbul - Pakistan angrily criticized Donald Trump, frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, for saying he would force the country to free a jailed Pakistani doctor believed to have helped the CIA hunt down al Qaada leader Osama bin Laden.
Trump, a 69-year-old billionaire real estate developer, told Fox News on Friday that, if elected, he would get Pakistan to free Shakil Afridi “in two minutes”, saying that Islamabad receives a lot of development aid from the United States.
“Contrary to Mr. Trump’s misconception, Pakistan is not a colony of the United States of America,” Pakistani Interior Minister Cheudhry Nisar said in a statement on Monday.
The statement said Afridi’s fate would be decided “by the Pakistani courts an...
Miami - On a recent Saturday morning in South Florida, 50-year-old Edgar Ospina stood in a long line of immigrants to take the first step to become an American.
Ospina has spent almost half his life in the U.S. after emigrating from his native Colombia, becoming eligible for citizenship in 1990. But with Donald Trump becoming a more likely presidential nominee by the day, Ospina decided to wait no more, rushing the paperwork required to become a citizen.
“Trump is dividing us as a country,” said Ospina, owner of a small flooring and kitchen remodeling company. “He’s so negative about immigrants. We’ve got to speak up.”
Nationwide, immigrants like Ospina are among tens of thousands applying for naturalization in a year when immigration h...
Rio De Janeiro -The popular WhatsApp messaging service is not working in Brazil, apparently as a result of an ongoing judicial battle.
Local news reports say a judge in the remote northeastern state of Sergipe ordered the service suspended nationwide for 72 hours, starting Monday afternoon.
The G1 internet portal of the Globo television network says the suspension by Judge Marcel Maia Montalvao is a new chapter in a tussle between Brazilian law enforcement and WhatsApp’s parent company, Facebook.
In March, Facebook’s most senior representative in Latin America was detained in Sao Paulo for repeatedly failing to cooperate with an investigation into drug trafficking and organized crime. Diego Dzodan was held for one night for failing to give law enforcement informatio...
Havana, Cuba - The first U.S. cruise ship in nearly 40 years crossed the Florida Straits from Miami and docked in Havana on Monday, restarting commercial travel on waters that served as a stage for a half-century of Cold War hostility.
Carnival Cruise Line’s Adonia became the first U.S. cruise ship in Havana since President Jimmy Carter eliminated virtually all restrictions of U.S. travel to Cuba in the late 1970s.
Travel limits were restored after Carter left office and U.S. cruises to Cuba only become possible again after Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro declared detente on Dec. 17, 2014.
Hundreds of workers and passersby gathered to watch, some cheering, as the gleaming white 704-passenger ship operated by Carnival’s Fathom subsidiary pulled into the doc...
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May 2, 2016 at 12:14 pm
Chicago - A federal lawsuit claims Starbucks regularly overfills its cold drinks with ice instead of using the advertised amount of coffee or other liquid in its plastic cups.
The lawsuit was filed last week in Chicago on behalf of Stacy Pincus, a local woman who accuses Starbucks of misleading consumers. The lawsuit alleges that an iced beverage advertised at 24 ounces contains about 14 ounces of fluid, and that ice isn’t a fluid or beverage.
“A Starbucks customer who orders and pays for a cold drink receives much less than advertised — often nearly half as many fluid ounces,” the lawsuit states, adding that the practice is “by design and corporate practice and procedure.”
Starbucks said the lawsuit is without merit.
“Our customers und...
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May 2, 2016 at 12:12 pm
Osceola, IN - Ted Cruz is calling the Indiana primary “neck and neck” and says he’ll stay in the Republican presidential race for as long as he has a “viable path to victory.”
He spoke to reporters after greeting hundreds of people in northern Indiana at a popular breakfast stop a day before the state’s crucial primary.
Cruz is framing a potential fall election match-up between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the choice between two “big government, New York liberals.”
And he has been trying to rally the politically diverse, working-class swath of voters in northern Indiana, where the industrial economy remains viable but union jobs have declined in recent decades.
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May 2, 2016 at 11:32 am
Nine months after the deaths of two toddlers prompted Ikea to launch a safety awareness campaign about unstable dressers, a third fatality has the company and federal regulators reviewing whether that effort went far enough - and negotiating potential next steps for Ikea.
A company spokeswoman on Wednesday acknowledged its ongoing discussions with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission about "additional actions" that the retailing giant might take.
She wouldn't elaborate on the negotiations, nor would a representative from the safety agency.
But calls for a full-blown recall of Malm dressers - a popular, low-cost line involved in all three deaths - mounted last week. Safety advocates said they were baffled, and increasingly concerned, that the commission has let Ike...
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May 2, 2016 at 11:08 am
Jerusalem - Israeli police say security guards and not officers fired the shots that killed two Palestinian siblings at a West Bank checkpoint last week.
A police statement on Monday says officers at the scene acted “according to regulations,” including firing warning shots in the air during the incident, and that security guards shot the brother and sister.
Israeli media reported the guards were civilian contractors. At the time of the incident, police said officers had also opened fire at the pair.
Police say the pair ignored calls to stop and that a woman threw a knife at officers. The siblings’ family and Palestinian witnesses have disputed the account, saying the siblings were some 20 meters (yards) away from security forces and could have been stopped w...
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May 2, 2016 at 10:55 am
Here you will see the FDNY responding to and battling a major 4 alarm fire at the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava on West 25th street in the Nomad area of Manhattan in New York City. G-d bless the men and women of the FDNY for all that they do for us all year round! They are truly new york's bravest.
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May 2, 2016 at 10:24 am
In the wake of an event that could have torn a community apart, Jewish and African-Americans living in northwest Baltimore turned to art to promote unity.
April 14, at the Weinberg Park Heights JCC, representatives of northwest Baltimore unveiled their art project titled, Look. Again. Understand the Other. to a crowd of over 50 people. The mural itself is 10 large-scale panels that explode with bold color, energy and a folk art interpretation of racial unity. Pieces of the powerful community mural, conceptualized and painted by Jewish, African-American and Latino middle school boys are now on display at the JCC as well as Cross Country and Fallstaff Elementary/Middle schools.
The Boy’s Mural Project, which initially engaged 24 middle schoolers, grew out of a need to address racial ...
