Berlin - A German court says a group of Islamic extremists who patrolled the streets of the city of Wuppertal in orange vests with the words “Sharia police” can be tried for violating laws against wearing uniforms with political messages. The Duesseldorf state court on Tuesday reversed a lower court’s dismissal of the case after prosecutors appealed. The group of nine men made headlines in 2014 when they attempted to establish “Sharia police” in Wuppertal to enforce a strict interpretation of Islam. They patrolled some parts of the city repeatedly asking people to stop drinking alcohol or visiting nightclubs. One, Sven Lau, was also indicted by federal prosecutors last month on suspicion of supporting a foreign terror group.
Donald Trump With Hannity Day Before Indiana Primary
Des Moines, IA - The Marine Corps says it has begun investigating whether it mistakenly identified one of the men shown raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima in one of the iconic images of World War II after two amateur history buffs began raising questions about the picture. The Marines announced its inquiry more than a year after Eric Krelle, of Omaha, Nebraska, and Stephen Foley, of Wexford, Ireland, began raising doubts about the identity of one man. In November 2014, the Omaha World-Herald published an extensive story about their claims and Saturday was the first to report the Marines were looking into the matter. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal shot the photo on Feb. 23, 1945, on Mount Suribachi, amid an intense battle with the Japanese. Rosenthal didn’t get...
New York - Amazon is clearly entering its Prime. Meaning, of course, its $100 annual membership program, now a decade old, which has accomplished the remarkable feat of convincing millions of people to pay an annual fee for the privilege of, well, shopping. Prime is now central to Amazon’s strategy of dominating the world of commerce. What started as a yearly fee for free two-day shipping now offers a sometimes bewildering array of perks, including household product subscriptions, one and two hour Prime Now delivery, streaming music and video, e-books, groceries (for an additional $200 a year), photo storage and more. “Prime has become an all-you-can-eat, physical-digital hybrid,” Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in his annual shareholder letter in Apri...
New York - Johnson & Johnson was ordered by a U.S. jury on Monday to pay $55 million to a woman who said that using the company’s talc-powder products for feminine hygiene caused her to develop ovarian cancer. The verdict is the second straight trial loss for the company, which is facing approximately 1,200 lawsuits accusing it of not adequately warning consumers about its talc-based products’ cancer risks. Following a three-week trial in Missouri state court, jurors deliberated for about a day before returning a verdict in favor of plaintiff Gloria Ristesund.
Debrecen, Hungary - Ofir Gross, H'yd, 40, who was found dead hours after having been declared missing in Hungary, had been beaten to death by bricks while sleeping according to Hungarian authorities, Channel 2 reported Tuesday. According to the report, two suspects arrested Sunday in connection to the murder came across Gross who was sleeping in an empty yard and stole his valuables including his cell phone and personal computer after killing him. They then allegedly dragged his body from the murder site and buried it under debris at a nearby abandoned building.  The suspects are male, aged 21 and 19. Gross had last contacted his family on Thursday. Israeli authorities delivered the announcement to his family, who traveled to Hungary to identify the body. Gross, a re...
Baghdad - Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Tuesday that an American serviceman has been killed near Irbil in Iraq. “It is a combat death,” Carter said at the outset of a news in Stuttgart, Germany where he has been consulting with European allies this week. The defense secretary provided no other details, other than to tell reporters that the serviceman lost his life “in the neighborhood of Irbil.” “A Coalition service member was killed in northern Iraq as a result of enemy fire,” the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement. “Further information will be released as appropriate.” The CENTCOM statement noted it is the policy of the military “to defer casualty identification procedures to the relevant national autho...
The five women crowded together around the kitchen table in New Jersey, their eyes fixed on a laptop screen. It was 7 a.m., and none of them had slept well the night before; they were too anxious and excited for this moment. Jess Katz logged into Skype as her mother and three sisters watched. A face flickered into view: their cousin, the son of a long-missing uncle, the family they thought they had lost forever in the Holocaust. On the other side of the screen, on the other side of the world, Evgeny Belzhitsky sat with his daughter, his granddaughter and a translator in his home on Sakhalin Island, Russia. The eight family members smiled at each other, speechless. Then, Katz recalls, they all started to cry. “What do you say to someone you’ve been searching for you...
Customs authorities, Shin Bet find four tons of chemical used in building rockets hidden in shipment of salt to Gaza. Authorities have announced that customs investigators, along with the Israel Security Authority (ISA, also known as the Shin Bet or Shabak), recently prevented an attempt to smuggle four tons of ammonium chloride into Gaza. The chemical, which is used in the production of weapons, was hidden in bags of salt. Four tons would have allowed Hamas or other terror groups to create hundreds of long-range rockets. About a week before Passover, a shipment labeled as 40 tons of salt reached the Nitzana crossing, which is used for transporting goods between Egypt and both Israel and Gaza. An extensive search of the containers revealed bags of ammonium chloride hidden among ...
Geneva - Saudi Arabia has warned the United States that a proposed U.S. law that could hold the kingdom responsible for any role in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks would erode global investor confidence in America, its foreign minister said on Monday. The minister, Adel al-Jubeir, speaking to reporters in Geneva after talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, which mainly focused on Syria, denied that Saudi Arabia had “threatened” to withdraw investment from its close ally. The New York Times reported last month that the Riyadh government had threatened to sell up to $750 billion worth of American assets should the U.S. Congress pass a bill that would take away immunity from foreign governments in cases arising from a “terrorist attack that kills an American o...
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...
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