The next time you’re stuck in a long security line, consider this: At most U.S. airports it’s possible to buy your way out of the wait. All major domestic airlines and some smaller carriers offer programs that allow people to skirt lines leading to the taxpayer-funded Transportation Security Administration checkpoints even if they don’t qualify for the government’s expedited security program. For a price. While that arrangement seems fine to people within the airline and travel industry — and is lauded by people who use it — critics say that it unfairly allows businesses to profit by taking advantage of a critical government function. “Buying your way to the front of the line — that has nothing to do with the level of security,” for...
Initial attempts to download information from the flight data and voice recorders of an EgyptAir plane that crashed into the Mediterranean last month have failed, and key parts of the recorders are being sent to France for repairs, according to Egyptian and U.S. officials. The “electronic boards” of the recorders are being flown next week to the offices of the French aviation accident investigation bureau near Paris, authorities said. After the boards are repaired and salt removed, they will be sent back to Cairo for data analysis, Egypt’s Investigation committee said in a statement late Thursday. The recorders, also known as black boxes, were extensively damaged when EgyptAir Flight 804 traveling from Paris to Cairo plunged into the sea on May 19, killing all 66 people...
Parshas Be’Ha’alos’cha / Baltimore Zmanim / Eruv is UP! Baltimore, MD – June 247, 2016    Parshas:  Be’Ha’alos’cha Today:    18 Sivan       Chatzos: 1:09 Hadlakas Nairos: 8:19 PM Shkiah:                   8:37:35 PM Tzais HaKochavim:  9:28 PM
The Bostoner Rebbe (right) from Beit Shemesh was Niftar moments ago at Jersey Shore Medical University Center.  The Rebbe Zatzal was in Lakewood for a granddaughter’s Chasunah, and on Shabbos suddenly suffered a heart attack and went into Cardiac Arrest. Hatzolah rushed to the Rebbe’s aid and managed to bring back a pulse. The Rebbe was transported to JSUMC, where he began recuperating. Several hours ago he suddenly took a turn for the worse and they were unfortunately unable to revive him. Pictured is the Rebbe just days ago visiting Lakewood BMG Rosh Yeshivah Reb Malkiel Kotler. Levaya details will be published when available. The Bostoner Rebbe from Beit Shemesh was Niftar moments ago at Jersey Shore Medical University Center, TLS is reporting. The Reb...
Prime Minister David Cameron is to step down by October after the UK voted to leave the European Union. Speaking outside 10 Downing Street, he said he would attempt to "steady the ship" over the coming weeks and months but that "fresh leadership" was needed. The PM had urged the country to vote Remain but was defeated by 52% to 48% despite London, Scotland and Northern Ireland backing staying in. UKIP leader Nigel Farage hailed it as the UK's "independence day". The pound fell to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985 as the markets reacted to the results. Flanked by wife Samantha, Mr Cameron said he had informed the Queen of his decision to remain in place for the short term and to then hand over to a new prime minister by the time of the Conservative conference ...
New York - CNN snapped up former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to work as a political commentator on Thursday, only three days after the political operative was fired. Lewandowski was to make his debut on Erin Burnett’s “Outfront” program on Thursday night, a spokeswoman said. The combative Lewandowski now joins a press corps that he was occasionally at odds with during the Trump campaign. That includes a CNN producer: Noah Gray tweeted last November that Lewandowski had threatened to pull his credentials when he tried to film a demonstration at a Trump rally. Lewandowski also was charged with misdemeanor battery last spring following an altercation with a female reporter from Breitbart News who had tried to ask Trump a question following a ra...
Jerusalem - A painful chapter in Israel’s history – the mysterious disappearance, or abduction, of hundreds of Yemenite children shortly after the country’s founding – has resurfaced to rattle the country during a special Knesset session on Tuesday. An emergency assembly of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee decided on Tuesday to demand release of all protocols and archived materials for several National Investigative Committees into the saga known as the “Yemenite Children Affair,” referring to the startling allegation that hundreds of newborn babies of recent immigrants, predominantly Yemenite, were kidnapped by authorities and handed over for adoption to Ashkenazi Israelis and Jews overseas between the years 1948 to...
I. Man Does Not Live on Quail Alone!  P’shat  “V’ruach nasa mai’ais Hashem va’ya’gaz sal’veem min ha’yam va’yeetosh al ha’machaneh k’derech yom koh u’k’derech yom koh – s’vee’vos ha’machaneh u’ch’amasayeem al p’nai ha’aretz  v A wind went forth the from Hashem and blew quail from the sea and spread them over the camp, a day’s journey this way and a day’s journey that way – all around the camp and two cubits above the face of the earth."  Numbers 11:31  The following dvar Torah is by R’ Shlomo Porter of the Etz Chaim Center for Jewish Studies, Baltimore, MD: Why is it that some of the most fabulously wealthy and suc...
JERUSALEM — Critics of Israel’s chief rabbinate have long complained that scores of American converts to Judaism have trouble getting approval to marry in Israel. Now, one such case with a celebrity connection could break open the rabbinate’s longstanding secrecy over which foreign rabbis are approved to conduct conversions. The case involves an American who, shortly after her Orthodox conversion in New York, became engaged to an Israeli, only to have the local rabbinical court in his hometown reject her status as a Jew when they tried to register for marriage. As it turns out, the rabbi who signed the woman's conversion certificate also converted Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and officiated at Ms. Trump’s 2009 wedding to Jared Kushner, th...
In what many believe is an unprecedented list, right-wing activists Meir Ettinger, who was released from ten-months of administration detention three weeks ago, is prohibited from having contact with no less than 92 right-wing activists by the Shin Bet. According to the Channel 10 News report, ironically, the others held in administrative detention during recent months do not appear on the list, pointing to the fact the allegations against them were baseless as they claimed. According to the report filed by correspondent Roi Sharon, among those appearing on the list are Rabbi Yosef Elitzur of Yitzhar and author of Toras HaMelech; those suspects arrested in the Dura arson case; Yakir Eshbol (the bridegroom from the so-called hate chasenah), and Amiram Ben-Uliel. Many on the list are minor...
Orlando, FL - About two dozen media organizations including The Associated Press, CNN and The New York Times filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking disclosure of city of Orlando phone recordings stemming from the Pulse nightclub shooting. The city, meanwhile, claimed in its own court filing that the recordings are exempt under Florida public records law and that the FBI insists releasing them may disrupt the ongoing investigation. The media lawsuit contends city officials are wrongly withholding recordings of dozens of 911 calls as well as communications between gunman Omar Mateen and the Orlando Police Department. Mateen was killed by police early June 12 after a lengthy standoff in a mass shooting that killed 49 people and wounded 53 others. A death certificate issued Thursday show...
Tokyo - Goro Hasegawa, the Japanese man credited with creating the Othello board game, has died. He was 83. Hasegawa died after a long illness Monday in his home in Kashiwa, a Tokyo suburb, Marie Kimura of the Japan Othello Association said Thursday. She declined to specify the illness. Hasegawa came up with the idea for the game as a child, and played it with milk-bottle caps when Japan was still poor and devastated by World War II. He proposed it to a manufacturer as an adult in 1972. His father, an English literature expert, was behind the name of the game, which was taken from Shakespeare’s play. Since 1973, 24.75 million Othello sets have been shipped in Japan, not counting online and overseas sales, according to Tokyo-based MegaHouse Corp., which makes the game. Hase...
This week’s Torah portion discusses one of the sources for the Mitzva of praying to Hashem when one is in need. The Torah writes, "When you go to wage war on the oppressor that oppresses you and you will cry out…and you will be remembered before Hashem your God and you will be saved from your enemies" (Bamidbar 10,9,) The following true story and moral dilemma explores the limits of this mitzva. Devorah was a 35 year-old wife and mother. She had ailing, elderly parents and had a very close relationship with them. Sadly, Devorah was diagnosed with an advanced stage cancer. Devorah knew that if her parents knew of her diagnosis it would cause them extreme anxiety and she felt it would harm their health. She asked her husband Arye to keep her cancer diagnosis a secret from...
This week's Parsha teaches us the protocol which governed the traveling itinerary of our people’s 40 year trek through the desert before entering the Land of Israel. The governing principle was “by the Word of HaShem they traveled and by the Word of HaShem they encamped… by the Word of HaShem they encamped and by the Word of HaShem they traveled.” The redundancy seems out of place. Once it says they traveled by HaShem's Word and they encamped by HaShem's Word, what is added by reversing it?   Let us analyze the nature of their encampments as follows. Was the period of encampment a default state or was it a conscious deliberate state? Was there purpose in our encampment and when we finished the job we traveled to the next location but there was n...
Jerusalem - Israel has granted refugee status to a Sudanese asylum seeker from Darfur for the first time. Ministry of Interior spokeswoman Sabine Haddad says Darfur-born Mutasim Ali is the first national of Sudan — an enemy state of Israel — to gain temporary residency according to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. Ali says regime forces burned down his family’s village in Darfur. He fled Sudan after he was arrested and tortured for activism, and crossed Egypt before slipping across the Israeli border in 2009. Ali applied for refugee status in 2012 and endured 14 months in a desert detention facility in Israel before winning release in the Supreme Court. About 40,000 Sudanese and Eritreans migrants are in Israel, Haddad said on Thursday. She says the...
Over the course of their 40 years traveling through the desert, the Jewish nation complained to Moshe Rabbeinu on multiple occasions. Moshe seemed to be able to tolerate and deal with every single complaint, with only one exception. In this week’s parsha, when the Jews complained about the Mun (Manna), Moshe was crushed. For the first and only time in his long career as our leader, he told Hashem to kill him and grieved in a way that he had never done before. Now, I can understand that complaining about the Mun was a great sin, but how could it be worse than sins like the Golden Calf and worse than their many other complaints, in which we don’t find Moshe making such grave comments??? We can answer this by addressing another question: The Vilna Gaon writes that the purpose of...
New York - With Amazon and other e-commerce sites continuing to take market share from malls and other physical retailers, U.S. mutual fund managers are upping their bets on an overlooked part of the online shopping boom: warehouses. Real estate investment trusts that own the distribution centers required to fill all those Amazon Prime boxes are a growing favorite on Wall Street after two years of underperformance compared with the broad real estate market. In large part, the move comes about because of changes in the supply chains of online retail giants like Amazon.com Inc over the last few years as they focus on fast, two-day shipping. Whereas a traditional retailer might send a pallet full of merchandise to a store, online shippers send out individual packages. That require...
Orlando, FL - The gunman who went on a rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people, has been buried in South Florida. A death certificate issued Thursday shows that the body of 29-year-old Omar Mateen was buried at the Muslim Cemetery of South Florida in Hialeah Gardens near Miami. The certificate doesn’t say when Mateen was buried. It indicates that Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, provided the Orange County Bureau of Vital Statistics with information to complete the death certificate. No one answered the phone Thursday at the Muslim Cemetery of South Florida. The FBI says Mateen opened fire in the crowded Pulse nightclub on June 12. In a 911 call from the club, he pledged solidarity with the Islamic State group. He was killed by police after a three-...
[Ed. Note] Out of the respect and recognition of the impact made by longtime BJL friend and contributor, Reb Shaya Gross, z’l, we will maintain a living memoriam to Shaya through the sweet words and thoughtful insights of  his Divrei Torah. BJL readers will remember his weekly column on the Parsha and on various Torah ideas and concepts. These meaningful words will help us remember this special young man who will be sorely missed and for those who did not merit to know him, this will be the most appropriate way for them to become familiar with who he was. In this week’s Parsha we have the story of the nation beginning to complain a lot in the Midbar. Hashem responds by giving Moshe the Seventy Elders to help lead Klal Yisroel. Why were they complaining? And what is the me...
Houston, TX- A Houston-area woman’s accent sounds completely different since she underwent jaw surgery in December, and doctors say she might have a neurological condition called foreign accent syndrome. In a KTRK-TV (http://abc13.co/28Q4OkZ ) video posted online, Lisa Alamia’s (al-uh-MEE’-uh) accent swings between various British accents and a faint Australian twang. Foreign accent syndrome is a rare medical condition that can result from trauma or an injury to the area of the brain that controls speech. The cause is often unknown, but it has been linked to strokes, head injuries and psychiatric conditions. Speech therapy can help patients restore their usual accents. Dr. Toby Yaltho says he believes she has the rare condition. Alamia says she knows some peop...
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