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August 26, 2016 at 9:16 am
Chateaurenard, France - Burkinis must be banned throughout France, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy said at his first campaign rally for the 2017 presidential election.
Hundreds of supporters waving French flags chanted his name and applauded as Sarkozy, who led France from 2007-2012 before losing an election to Socialist Francois Hollande, promised to protect the French people.
“I will be the president that re-establishes the authority of the state,” Sarkozy told supporters packing a sports hall in Chateaurenard, a Provence town where Sarkozy’s Les Republicains just beat the far-right FN in regional elections last year.
Several French coastal towns, including on the Riviera, have banned the full-body swimwear worn by some Muslim women on the grounds that it brea...
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August 26, 2016 at 9:16 am
Singapore - The world’s first self-driving taxis began picking up passengers in Singapore starting Thursday.
Select members of the public can hail a free ride through their smartphones in taxis operated by nuTonomy, an autonomous vehicle software startup. While multiple companies, including Google and Volvo, have been testing self-driving cars on public roads for several years, nuTonomy says is the first to offer rides to the public.
Its launch in Singapore is beating ride-hailing service Uber, which plans to offer rides in autonomous cars in Pittsburgh, by a few weeks.
NuTonomy is starting small — six cars now, growing to a dozen by the end of the year. The ultimate goal, company executives say, is to have a fully self-driving taxi fleet in Singapore by 2018, to help...
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August 26, 2016 at 9:10 am
Washington - Donald Trump defeated 16 rivals in the Republican primaries by being the most anti-immigrant of them all, promising to build a giant wall on the border and deport millions. He labeled opponents like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as weak and amnesty-loving, and his extreme rhetoric pushed the entire debate over immigration to the right.
But suddenly, Trump is sounding like some of the people he defeated. In an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” show Wednesday, Trump talked about how tough it is to break up families for deportation, suggesting that maybe upstanding people who’ve been in this country for years should be allowed to stay if they pay back taxes and insisting, just as Bush and Rubio were repeatedly forced to do, that such actions...
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August 26, 2016 at 9:10 am
New York - For years following the events of September 11, 2001 in lower Manhattan, the disaster and its aftermath may have affected women and their babies who were not even conceived yet, according to a new study.
Researchers found that among women who were rescue or recovery workers responding to the events of 9/11, or women who resided below Canal Street in the World Trade Center’s neighborhood, those with the most intense exposures to the disaster had doubled rates of preterm delivery and low birthweight babies over the next few years.
“Associations between disaster exposure and adverse birth outcomes have been demonstrated repeatedly in the past,” said lead author Carey Maslow, deputy director of research for the World Trade Center Health Registry. ...
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August 26, 2016 at 9:09 am
Orlando, FL - Two Florida hospitals will not seek payment of medical bills from the dozens of people treated for injuries suffered in the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June, officials at the health facilities said.
The move leaves the hospitals with estimated unreimbursed costs topping $5.5 million, they said on Thursday.
Forty-nine people were killed and 53 were wounded by gunman Omar Mateen before police fatally shot him after a three-hour standoff inside the gay dance club on June 12.
U.S. authorities said Mateen was self-radicalized and acted alone, without assistance or orders from abroad, to commit the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“It was incredible to see how our community came together in the wake of the senseless Pulse shoo...
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August 26, 2016 at 9:07 am
Paris - A botched attempt to break into the iPhone of an Arab activist using hitherto unknown espionage software has trigged a global upgrade of Apple’s mobile operating system, researchers said Thursday.
The spyware took advantage of three previously undisclosed weaknesses in Apple’s iPhone to take complete control of the devices, according to reports published Thursday by the San Francisco-based Lookout smartphone security company and internet watchdog group Citizen Lab. Both reports fingered the NSO Group, an Israeli company with a reputation for flying under the radar, as the author of the spyware.
“The threat actor has never been caught before,” said Mike Murrary, a researcher with Lookout, describing the program as “the most sophisticated spyw...
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August 26, 2016 at 9:02 am
Brooklyn, NY - The ballot may come down to Donald versus Hillary, but a Youtube video released today by Assemblyman Dov Hikind suggests that the bigger question for many Americans may be “which is the lesser of two evils?”
Hikind said that he has been bombarded with questions about who to vote for from those who find neither candidate to be a palatable choice.
“Literally everywhere I go people are asking me,” Hikind told VIN News. “The average person is conflicted and more and more people who would have voted Republican are saying that they will vote for a third party candidate. The reality is we have to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump because voting for a different candidate is a wasted vote.”
Hikind, a Democrat, stated uneq...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:57 am
Washington - The Marine Corps has acknowledged it misidentified two of the servicemen who helped raise the first U.S. flag at Iwo Jima during World War II, an event that was overshadowed by the raising of a larger flag that became an iconic image of the war.
In a statement Wednesday, the Marines said two men long thought to have participated in the first flag-raising on Feb. 23, 1945, were nearby but didn’t actually help raise the flag. The accomplishment gave hope to troops engaged in the long, bloody battle on the island.
The acknowledgement came two months after the Marines announced the misidentification of one of the men who raised the second, larger flag at Iwo Jima. That flag-raising was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, whose image was displa...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:55 am
Seattle - A federal jury convicted the son of a Russian lawmaker Thursday of hacking into U.S. businesses to steal credit card information and orchestrating an international online theft scheme that netted him millions of dollars.
Jurors deliberated over two days before finding Roman Seleznev guilty of 38 charges, including nine counts of hacking and 10 counts of wire fraud. He could face up to 40 years in prison when he’s sentenced Dec. 2, and he still faces similar charges in federal courts in Nevada and Georgia, his attorney said.
Seleznev hacked into businesses, mostly pizza restaurants in Washington state, and stole millions of credit card numbers that he sold on underground internet forums, authorities said. The thefts led to almost $170 million in credit card losse...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:54 am
United Nations - The Israeli government on Thursday rejected a U.N. request for diplomatic immunity for a Palestinian engineer who worked for the U.N. in the Gaza Strip but is now in prison after being accused of assisting the territory’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers.
Israel arrested 38-year-old Waheed Borsh, who worked for the U.N. development agency known as UNDP for 13 years, on July 16 on suspicion of aiding Hamas. The government announced on Aug. 9 that he had been indicted on charges of assisting the militant group.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nachshon said “Israel rejects the claim that a person assisting a terror organization recognized by the international community such as Hamas could enjoy immunity.”
Israel’s Shin Bet i...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:52 am
North Berwick, Maine - Republican Gov. Paul LePage is being accused again of making racially insensitive comments, this time by saying photos he’s collected in a binder of drug dealers arrested in the state show more than 90 percent of them are black or Hispanic.
The governor made the remark at a town hall in North Berwick on Wednesday, a day he also said the father of a dead Muslim U.S. Army captain is a “con artist” for criticizing GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
LePage’s comment about the drug dealers came after a businessman asked how he could bring a company to Maine “given the rhetoric you put out there about people of color,” the Portland Press Herald reported.
LePage, who’s white, said he keeps a three-ring binder of photo...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:49 am
New York - Amazon is starting a site offering research, reviews and other information on new and used cars.
The latest venture by the e-commerce powerhouse will compete with established players in the field including CarSoup.com, Edmunds.com, truecar.com and cars.com.
Amazon Vehicles won’t sell cars. But in addition to car specifications, images, videos and customer reviews, the new site will let customers ask each other questions about cars.
Amazon.com Inc. already sells car parts and accessories in its Amazon Automotive store.
From its roots as an online bookseller, the Seattle company has expanded into a myriad of arenas. Most recently it launched a site for handmade goods, introduced a voice-recognition speaker and has begun creating original movies and TV shows.
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August 26, 2016 at 8:48 am
Manchester, NH - Hillary Clinton said Thursday that Donald Trump has unleashed the “radical fringe” within the Republican Party, including anti-Semites and white supremacists, dubbing the billionaire businessman’s campaign as one that will “make America hate again.”
Trump rejected Clinton’s allegations, defending his hard-line approach to immigration while trying to make the case to minority voters that Democrats have abandoned them.
The ping-pong accusations come as the two candidates vie for minorities and any undecided voters with less than three months until Election Day. Weeks before the first early voting, Trump faces the urgent task of revamping his image to win over those skeptical of his candidacy.
In a tweet shortly after Clinton wr...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:48 am
Washington - Eating a handful of nuts five times per week may reduce inflammation, a condition that contributes to heart disease, diabetes and many other chronic illnesses, say the authors of a recent U.S. study.
This inflammation-dampening effect might be the secret to the health benefits of nuts, the study team writes in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Past research has linked eating nuts to lower rates of heart disease and diabetes, but the exact reason was unknown, senior study author Dr. Ying Bao, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, told Reuters Health.
“We hypothesized that nuts may exert these health benefits by reducing inflammation,” Bao said by email.
Nuts may lower inflammation because they contain fiber, magnes...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:48 am
New York - The regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac unveiled on Thursday a program aimed at homeowners who are paying their mortgages on time but whose loan-to-value (LTV) ratios are too high to qualify for traditional refinance programs.
To be eligible for this program, which Fannie and Freddie will implement, borrowers must have not missed any mortgage payments in the prior six months; must not have skipped more than one payment in the previous 12 months; must have a source of income and must receive a benefit from the refinance such as a reduction in their monthly loan payment, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said.
“This new offering will give borrowers the opportunity to refinance when rates are low, making their mortgages more affordable and thus reducing credi...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:46 am
Washington - Cars that wirelessly talk to each other are finally ready for the road, creating the potential to dramatically reduce traffic deaths, improve the safety of self-driving cars and someday maybe even help solve traffic jams, automakers and government officials say.
But there’s a big catch. The cable television and high-tech industries want to take away a large share of the radio airwaves the government dedicated for transportation in 1999, and use it instead for superfast Wi-Fi service. Auto industry officials are fighting to hang on to as much of the spectrum as they can, saying they expect they will ultimately need all of it for the new vehicle-to-vehicle communications, or V2V.
The government and the auto industry have spent more than a decade and more than ...
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August 26, 2016 at 8:37 am
Amatrice, Italy - Strong aftershocks rattled central Italy and shut down a key route into the hard-hit town of Amatrice on Friday as hopes dimmed that firefighters would find any more survivors from the earthquake that killed at least 267 people.
The Italian government declared Saturday a day of national mourning and scheduled a state funeral to be attended by President Sergio Mattarella.
Some crumbled buildings in Amatrice cracked even further after the biggest aftershock of the morning struck at 6:28 a.m. The U.S. Geological Service said it had a magnitude of 4.7, while the Italian geophysics institute measured it at 4.8.
The shaking ground also damaged a key access bridge to Amatrice, forcing emergency crews to close it and making an already challenging traffic flow into th...
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August 25, 2016 at 11:20 pm
New York - In light of recent tragic suicides committed as a direct result of child sexual abuse, as well as other physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences suffered by innocents in Jewish Orthodox communities and beyond, a proclamation signed by a large and diverse group of rabbis from the United States, Canada and Israel has taken a firm stand against abuse in children, acknowledging that the Jewish community has been slow to recognize incidents of molestation in the past and calls upon schools and synagogues to institute policies that will prevent sexual abuse.
The statement, signed by close to 300 Orthodox Jewish rabbis, admits that rabbis and community leaders have not always dealt effectively or appropriately with victims of child sexual abuse or their ...
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August 25, 2016 at 10:53 pm
In this week's parshah, the Torah warns us not to forget Hashem in our pursuit of wealth, nor when we achieve it. After describing a future where the Jewish people enjoy great prosperity, the Torah foretells and warns "...you will then say in your heart: my strength and the might of my own hand made this wealth for me".
The Saba of Kelm observes that the Torah does not write, "maybe you will say" that your ingenuity and hard work brought you your success. Rather, the Torah attests that you will certainly say this and think that you earned your wealth through your own hard work and good ideas. Apparently, the Torah is attesting that this is human nature. The Torah, therefore, proceeds to instruct us to take to heart that it is really Hashem who gives us our talents for making wealth (...
