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August 24, 2016 at 12:43 pm
Paris - French schools will now hold three security drills a year — including one in which an alleged assailant enters their premises — as the French government ramps up security measures after a string of deadly extremist attacks.
Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced a series of measures Wednesday to improve how French schools and children handle terror threats.
Students will be taught how to hide or to escape, depending on the situation and where they are.
All students aged 13-14 and class representatives will also get a basic training on life-saving measures. Vallaud-Belkacem said, as of now, only 30 percent of students are trained.
In pre-school and kindergarten, for children aged 2 to 6, no mention of an at...
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August 24, 2016 at 11:53 am
GunKabul - Gunmen attacked the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul on Wednesday, with explosions and gunfire reported inside the campus, an Afghan interior ministry official and a student said.
“Several gunmen attacked the American University in Kabul and there are reports of gunfire and explosions,” the official said. “They are inside the compound and there are foreign professors along with hundreds of students.”
Ahmad Shaheer, a student at the university, told Reuters by telephone that he was trapped inside the university.
“We are stuck inside our classroom and there are bursts of gunfire,” he said.
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August 24, 2016 at 11:40 am
New York - A U.S. court on Wednesday rejected an appeal by victims of Hezbollah rocket attacks in Israel who sought to hold Lebanese Canadian Bank SAL liable for financing Hezbollah through its New York account with American Express Bank.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said it lacked jurisdiction over the Lebanese bank because customary international law immunized corporations from liability from claims brought under the federal Alien Tort Statute.
It said this was true even though the bank’s alleged conduct “touched and concerned” the United States, displacing the presumption against applying the Alien Tort Statute to foreign conduct.
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August 24, 2016 at 11:40 am
Brussels - Brussels Airlines has taken halva off the menu, after a passenger reportedly alerted its staff that the product was made in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. The disgruntled diner informed the airline staff that the Vanilla halva he had been served for dessert, came from an Israeli settlement on occupied Palestinian territory.
Belgian media cited the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign as saying that the airline “had not been aware of the nature of the product and the violent and illegal institutions behind it.”
The airline Tweeted Wednesday that the presence of the offending item in the in-flight meal was due to a mistake by the supplier. “We have stopped serving that product on our flights as it was not what we had ordered,” the airline Tweet...
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August 24, 2016 at 11:28 am
Baltimore County Schools will not close for Muslim holidays.
The county school board voted against the move by a six-to-five margin last night.
The board denied a similar request two years ago.
In the past year, Howard and Montgomery counties moved their professional development days for teachers to coincide with the Muslim holidays to make sure Muslim students were off without completely changing their calendars.
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August 24, 2016 at 11:15 am
Levayah of Rebetzin Esther Jungreis, a'h
Click here to watch
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August 24, 2016 at 10:47 am
Warsaw, Poland - A spokesman for explorers searching for a legendary Nazi “gold train” in Poland says there is “no train, no tunnel” at the site where they have dug extensively.
Last week explorers moved in with heavy equipment and dug deep at a site in the southwestern town of Walbrzych, following comments by residents and tests using earth-penetrating radar. Local legend says the Nazis hid a train with valuables in a secret tunnel there in 1945.
But the explorers’ spokesman, Andrzej Gaik, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that they found “no train, no tunnel” there. The machines are now covering over the pits that cost 140,000 zlotys ($37,000) to dig.
Gaik said “hope dies last” and a search using probes will resume at ...
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August 24, 2016 at 10:37 am
Washington - Hillary Clinton met or talked by phone with at least 154 people from private interests, such as corporations, during her time as secretary of the state. More than half those people had donated either personally or through companies or groups to the Clinton Foundation or pledged to donate to specific programs through the charity’s international arm.
Among them:
—Joseph Duffey, who once worked for Laureate Education, a for-profit education system based in Baltimore, was one of 20 people at a higher education policy dinner with Clinton in August 2009. Weeks earlier, Clinton emailed her staff looking for Duffey’s phone number. Duffey, whom Bill Clinton appointed as director of the U.S. Information Agency, gave between $10,000 and $25,000 to the founda...
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August 24, 2016 at 10:35 am
Traveling as an observant Jew is no easy task.
Kashrut is one thing, but think about all the smaller issues.
Eruvs, sliding doors, and automatic faucets are a few more points of concern. What about being in a hotel with a key card opener? How do you get in if there is no physical key alternative? Leave a towel in the door? Get a shabbos goy and hint that you can’t get in your room?
David Woolf posted the following video to YouTube showing a very creative way to make sure you can open your door from the outside without breaking shabbos. Make sure to take notes!
Watch below:
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August 24, 2016 at 10:34 am
Weehawken, NJ - A new ferry soon will be carrying commuters between New Jersey and New York City.
New York Waterway’s 400-passenger Betsy Ross is open for inspection Wednesday at the Port Imperial Ferry Terminal in Weehawken. The Betsy Ross will go into service next week.
The 109-foot vessel has climate-controlled cabins and heated handrails. A marble bar serves coffee in the morning and cocktails in the afternoon.
The ferry’s sister ship, Molly Pitcher, began service last year carrying commuters from Middletown to Paulus Hook in Jersey City, the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan and West 39th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
The Betsey Ross and Molly Pitcher were built by Yank Marine in Cape May County.
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August 24, 2016 at 9:51 am
Pyongyang - North Korea fired a submarine-launched missile on Wednesday that flew about 500 km (311 miles) toward Japan, a show of improving technological capability for the isolated country that has conducted a series of launches in defiance of UN sanctions.
The missile was fired at around 5:30 a.m. (4:30 p.m. ET) from near the coastal city of Sinpo, where satellite imagery shows a submarine base is located, officials at South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defence Ministry told Reuters.
The projectile reached Japan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ), an area of control designated by countries to help maintain air security, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported.
The distance of the flight indicated the North’s push to develop a submarin...
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August 24, 2016 at 9:42 am
Washington - A Palestinian not seen publicly since his capture by the CIA in 2002 appeared Tuesday at a U.S. government hearing called to determine whether he should remain in detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Abu Zubaydah, who sat expressionless during the brief hearing, was the first high-profile al-Qaida terror suspect captured after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the first to vanish into the CIA’s secret “black site” prison network.
The review panel issued no immediate ruling on his status. He has been held at Guantanamo Bay since September 2006.
The U.S. believed that Zubaydah, 45, was one of the most senior figures in al-Qaida when he was captured in Pakistan. It has since dropped that claim. Zubaydah’s lawyers deny ...
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August 24, 2016 at 9:40 am
Jerusalem - Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reportedly told journalists from the Jewish ultra-Orthodox sector on Tuesday that they would have to compromise on many social issues, such as the status of non-Orthodox Jewish streams in Israel and prayer rights at the Western Wall.
Netanyahu has been conducting personal off-the-record briefings with representatives of Israel’s major news outlets at his office over the past week. Several ultra-Orthodox-affiliated publications, such as Kikar Hashabbat, met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Tuesday evening. The meeting lasted over four hours, two hours longer than Netanyahu’s meeting with representatives of Channel Two News.
Netanyahu discussed his policy off-the-record with the journalists and according to reports this morni...
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August 24, 2016 at 9:27 am
Donald J. Trump, after weeks of self-inflicted damage, has seen support for his candidacy in national polls dip into the 30s — Barry Goldwater and Walter F. Mondale territory — while Hillary Clinton has extended her lead to double digits in several crucial swing states.
Time to declare a landslide, right? Not so fast.
The vote may be more favorable to Mr. Trump than the worst-case-scenario prognosticators suggest for a very simple reason: Landslides do not really happen in presidential elections anymore.
It has been 32 years since a president won the popular vote by a double-digit percentage. That was when Mr. Mondale suffered an 18-point defeat to Ronald Reagan in 1984. It was also the last time there was a landslide among states, with Mr. Mondale winning only Min...
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August 24, 2016 at 9:21 am
Sydney - A British woman was stabbed to death on Wednesday at a backpackers’ hostel in Australia and two people were injured, one seriously, in what police say may have been an “extremist” attack.
A spokesman for Queensland state police said the suspected attacker, in Australia on a tourist visa, was a 29-year-old French national who had yelled “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) when arrested.
A 21-year-old British woman died at the scene of the attack, south of Townsville in the state’s far north, police said. A 30-year-old British man was in critical condition in hospital.
“Initial inquiries indicate that comments which may be construed of being of an extremist nature were made by the alleged offender,” Queensland Police Service De...
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August 24, 2016 at 9:20 am
Boston - Cities are increasingly changing bike lanes to make them safer in light of fatal crashes involving cyclists and cars.
From Boston to San Francisco and New York to Tokyo, traditional bike lanes running alongside vehicle traffic are being replaced in favor of “protected” lanes or “cycletracks,” where physical barriers like concrete curbs, planters or fences separate cyclists from vehicle traffic.
“For 50 years, we’ve just been putting down a stripe of white paint, and that was how you accommodated bikes on busy streets,” says Martha Roskowski, director of People for Bikes, a Boulder, Colorado-based advocacy group that’s calling for better designed bike lanes. “What we’ve learned is that simply doesn’t work f...
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August 24, 2016 at 9:18 am
Amatrice, Italy - A strong earthquake in central Italy reduced three towns to rubble as people slept early Wednesday, with reports that as many as 50 people were killed and hundreds injured as rescue crews raced to dig out survivors.
The toll was likely to rise as crews reached homes in more remote hamlets where the scenes were apocalyptic “like Dante’s Inferno,” according to one witness.
“The town isn’t here anymore,” said Sergio Pirozzi, the mayor of Amatrice. “I believe the toll will rise.”
The magnitude 6 quake struck at 3:36 a.m. (0136 GMT) and was felt across a broad swath of central Italy, including Rome, where residents felt a long swaying followed by aftershocks. The temblor shook the Lazio region and Umbria and Le Marche ...
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August 24, 2016 at 9:15 am
Doha - Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund has made an iconic purchase in America — a stake in the company that owns New York’s Empire State Building.
The $622-million purchase by the Qatar Investment Authority comes as the Doha fund increases its investments in the U.S. as the small country on the Arabian Peninsula tries to cope with low global oil and gas prices.
The Empire State Realty Trust Inc., which manages the 102-story, 1,454-foot (443-meter) -tall building, announced the Qatari purchase late Tuesday, saying the fund would gain a 9.9-percent stake in the company. The trust owns a total of 14 office properties and six retail properties around the New York area.
The Qatar Investment Authority did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The poin...
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August 24, 2016 at 9:06 am
New York - An ambitious effort to replace obsolete New York City pay phones with Wi-Fi kiosks that offer free web surfing and phone calls has been a hit with panhandlers and the homeless, the least wired people in the city.
The city doesn’t track who is using the kiosks, but anecdotal evidence suggests many users of the new LinkNYC terminals are living on the streets. On several recent weekdays, people wearing plastic garbage bags or hauling dented shopping carts were hunkered down at terminals in Manhattan.
“It’s free. That’s the best part about it,” said a tall man drinking a beer out of a paper bag as he watched an R. Kelly video at a terminal on Eight Avenue in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.
The man, who would give only his street name...
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August 24, 2016 at 8:56 am
Pittsburgh, PA - Young adults with jobs that involve heavy lifting and forceful movements might be at higher risk for back pain later in life, a study from Finland suggests.
“When you’re young, you do things your own way, you muscle your way through it, but sooner or later, that behavior can cause problems,” said Michael Timko, a physical therapist and instructor at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved with the study.
“If we’re going to put a dent on the back pain issue, we should consider training younger people about basic body mechanics like how to lift and load and how to sit properly,” he told Reuters Health by phone.
To examine whether heavy physical work in young adulthood increases the risk of low back pain in midlife, Tea...
