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April 21, 2017 at 12:37 pm
Jason Greenblatt holds video conference with private sector leaders from Israel and the PA on ways to improve Arab economy.
As part of the Trump Administration’s broader efforts to advance a genuine and lasting peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, senior administration officials held a video-conference on April 20 with Israeli and Palestinian Authority private sector leaders, as well as representatives from the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, to discuss measures to develop the Palestinian Authority's economy in Judea and Samaria.
The United States government participants were led by Jason Greenblatt, President Donald J. Trump’s Special Representative for International Negotiations, and included representatives of the National Security Counci...
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April 21, 2017 at 12:35 pm
JTA - The Texas House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill banning state entities from dealing with businesses that boycott Israel or Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
The bill approved Thursday follows the state Senate’s approval of a similar bill in March by overwhelming numbers. Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign a reconciled version of both bills next month.
In statements, pro-Israel groups that lobbied for the bills praised its passage.
“The relationship between the Jewish state and the Lone Star State is built upon shared values, including a rock-solid commitment to standing up for liberty – especially when it is threatened by radical Islamic extremism,” Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United For Israel, said in a statement.
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April 21, 2017 at 12:33 pm
Baltimore, MD – Apr. 16, 2017 - It is with deep sorrow that BaltimoreJewishLife.com informs the community of the petirah of Beryl Epstein, Z’L, brother of Yocheved Schechter of Baltimore, Mordechai Epstein of Pittsburgh, PA., Eron Epstein of Chattanooga, TN, and Rachel Epstein of Santa Rosa Beach, FL
Yocheved will be sitting shiva at her home, 3200 Nerak Road, after Yom Tov, beginning Wednesday, April 19, until Sunday evening, April 23.
Visiting times are:
Wednesday and Thursday 10 AM until 6 PM.
Friday 10 AM until 4 PM.
Sunday 10 AM until 6 PM.
Bila HaMaves LaNetzach...
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April 21, 2017 at 12:30 pm
Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) blasted Zionist Union MK Erel Margalit over his meeting Thursday night with a senior Fatah official in Ramallah and expressions of support for Fatah leader Jibril Rajoub.
“Margalit met with someone aiding efforts to boycott us, and together with him he [Margalit] attacks the Prime Minister and myself, and supports terrorists who murdered hundreds of Israelis,” Erdan wrote on Twitter Friday.
Erdan argued that Margalit’s decision to meet with PLO faction leader Jibril Rajoub was motivated in large part by his campaign for the upcoming Labor Party primaries.
“Everything is acceptable [in the Labor Party], even to identify with murderous terrorists against the Israeli government.”
Fellow Druze Likud mini...
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April 21, 2017 at 12:30 pm
Deadly terror attack in Paris the result of weak, indecisive government, says prominent Jewish backer of Marine Le Pen.
JTA - A prominent Jewish supporter of the National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in France blamed the current government for the death of a police officer in a suspected terrorist attack in Paris.
Michel Thooris, a police officer from southern France, was referencing the slaying Thursday evening of a policeman who was shot dead with a semi-automatic assault rifle at the Champs-Elysees shopping street.
Police killed one man whom it said was armed shortly after the shooting, in which two other people were severely wounded. On social media accounts affiliated with the Islamic State terrorist group, the alleged shooter was identified as Abu Sayif al-Baljik...
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April 21, 2017 at 12:21 pm
Anti-Zionist rabbi tells parents that their sons' deaths would be preferable to their enlisting in the Israeli army.
A rabbi affiliated with the Yerushalmi Faction declared Thursday night that it was preferable for one’s child to die rather than to see them enlist in the IDF.
Rabbi Tzvi Friedman, a member of the anti-Zionist Yerushalmi Faction, spoke at a gathering of supporters in a makeshift yeshiva outside of Army Prison 6, near Atlit on the northern coast.
The Yerushalmi Faction eschews not only haredi service in the IDF, but encourages its followers not to seek deferments from service as yeshiva students, breaking with the mainstream haredi approach to the draft.
Since the establishment of the state in 1948, full-time yeshiva students have been given deferments from...
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April 21, 2017 at 12:18 pm
The Champs-Elysees gunman who shot and killed a police officer just days before France’s presidential election was detained in February for threatening police but then freed, two officials told The Associated Press on Friday. He was also convicted in 2003 of attempted homicide in the shootings of two police officers.
The French government pulled out all the stops to protect Sunday’s vote as the attack deepened France’s political divide.
“Nothing must hamper this democratic moment, essential for our country,” Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after a high-level meeting Friday that reviewed the government’s already heightened security plans for the two-round vote that begins Sunday.
“Barbarity and cowardice struck Paris last night,” the ...
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April 21, 2017 at 12:15 pm
The investigation into the death of a 14-year veteran firefighter of the FDNY, in Queens, will center on a ladder and the immediate moments before he fell.
Firefighter William Tolley, 42, of Bethpage, was killed when he fell to the ground while battling a fire at an apartment building in Queens Thursday afternoon.
Investigators are reviewing video that shows the ladder on the Ladder 135 truck swaying as Tolley fell, which matches similar witness accounts. The firefighter may have been moving between the roof and the bucket at the top of the ladder when he fell.
Tolley was going to the roof to help ventilate the building, a routine maneuver. He was not fighting the fire, which officials said “was not under control, but was mainly extinguished” at the time.
Tolley is survived...
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April 21, 2017 at 12:11 pm
Annapolis, MD -- Lawrence Hogan Sr., a former Maryland congressman and father of Gov. Larry Hogan, died on Thursday at age 88, the governor's spokesman said.
Hogan suffered a major stroke Saturday and his condition later took a turn for the worse, Doug Mayer, a spokesman for the governor, said Thursday as the younger Hogan cancelled his appointments to be with his father.
"He had an amazing life that spanned 88 years. He leaves behind a loving family, countless friends and admirers, and a lasting legacy that won't be forgotten," governor Hogan said in a statement posted on Facebook.
The elder Hogan served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1969 to 1975. He represented Maryland's 5th congressional district, which included Prince George's and Charles...
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April 21, 2017 at 11:45 am
Israel President Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin and wife Nechama hosted on Wednesday the ‘Danielle Prize - Healing with a Heart’ Awards Ceremony of 2017. The Prize, presented this year for the second consecutive year to 12 male and female doctors and nurses employed in hospital oncology units in Israel, acknowledges the efforts of hospital medical personnel who distinguish themselves in the compassion and care that they bestow upon their patients. The Prize is awarded in loving memory of Danielle Sonnenfeld, a volunteer in the Oncology Unit at Schneider Children Hospital who perished two years ago in a tragic car accident.
During the course of the evening, a special prize was likewise awarded to Dr. Patch Adams, an American physician who pioneered the concept of hospital clowns to...
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April 21, 2017 at 11:32 am
It isn’t the super-sized Jewish experience of New York City or some of its suburbs. But for an observant Jew living in New York State’s Mid-Hudson Valley, the area still has plenty to offer. You could try out “chair yoga,” play more than your fill of Bingo, attend a weekly Torah class, immerse in a beautifully maintained mikvah or even attend a Jewish War Veterans meeting.
Yet in the rich, nearly 130-year history of the organized Jewish community in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., pushing a stroller or carrying any possession in public areas on Shabbat—without violating the laws of the day of rest—was out of the question.
After a six-year effort by a dedicated force of nature named Harold Warren, that has changed. Warren, a retired court stenographer and the secon...
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April 21, 2017 at 11:13 am
The giant tent with its 1,700 seats stands erect as preparations for Lag B’Omer continue at the tziyun of the Rashbi ZY”A in Meron.
The tent was erected this week and when preparations are complete, it will be air conditioned. An estimated 350,000 meals will be distributed in the tent as hundreds of thousands of mispallalim will be visiting the area on Lag B’Omer along with the days before and after.
This year, many will decide to spend Shabbos in Meron and other northern cities including Tzfat and Tiveria as Lag B’Omer begins on motzei Shabbos.
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April 21, 2017 at 11:05 am
The nation’s super-secret intelligence court denied just nine of the more than 1,700 requests it received last year for government surveillance warrants in terrorism and espionage cases, according to a report released Thursday that offers a rare glimpse into its work.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court received 1,752 applications for wiretaps and other surveillance in 2016. It granted 1,378 of those requests; 26 others were partially denied, and 339 were modified, according to the report, the first year-long accounting of the court’s work.
The 2015 report only represents the last six months of that year, but notes the court denied five applications. In both years, the denied applications were mostly for electronic surveillance, such as email, phone and data intercept...
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April 21, 2017 at 10:58 am
Russian Bear bombers and spy planes buzzed Alaskan airspace the past two nights in a repeat of incidents earlier this week, two U.S. officials told Fox News on Friday.
Wednesday night a pair of Russian spy planes Ilyushin IL-38s flew near the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea staying in the U.S. Air Defense Zone for a few hours before departing.
Thursday night, a pair of long-range nuclear-capable Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bombers flew near Alaska and Canada staying in each country’s air defense zone for hours.
In both incidents, the U.S. Air Force did not scramble any fighter jets or airborne warning planes (AWACS). The Russian jets in both incidents remained in international airspace. It was not immediately clear how close they came to mainland Alaska.
Russia now has flown bombers or...
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April 21, 2017 at 10:53 am
White House budget director Mick Mulvaney says that Democratic negotiators on a massive spending bill need to agree to fund top priorities of President Donald Trump such as a down payment on a border wall and hiring of additional immigration agents.
Mulvaney told The Associated Press in an interview that “elections have consequences” and that “we want wall funding” as part of the catchall spending bill, which lawmakers hope to unveil next week.
The former GOP congressman from South Carolina also said that the administration is open, though undecided, about a key Democratic demand that the measure pay for cost-sharing payments to insurance companies that help low-income people afford health policies under the Affordable Care Act.
The $1 trillion-plus legislation i...
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April 21, 2017 at 10:43 am
Iranian state TV said Thursday that the body charged with vetting candidates has disqualified former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from running in next month’s presidential election.
It carried an Interior Ministry statement saying that President Hassan Rouhani has been approved to run for re-election, along with hard-line cleric Ebrahim Raisi, who is considered close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Ahmadinejad, who remains a deeply polarizing figure even among Iranian hard-liners, had shocked the country by registering last week. Khamenei had previously urged him not to run.
Ahmadinejad was president from 2005 to 2013, and was best known abroad for his incendiary rhetoric toward Israel, his questioning of the scale of the Holocaust and his efforts to ramp up I...
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April 21, 2017 at 10:40 am
A navi I’m not, but, still, it was good timing. Several weeks back, at the height of the fears fomented by bomb threats against U.S. Jewish institutions, I wrote an article for an Israeli newspaper gingerly pointing out that, of the nearly 150 threats and building evacuations and searches, not a single bomb had been found.
All that is needed, I noted, to make an effective anonymous crank call, is an unlocked cellphone and a prepaid SIM card — and “using the internet to make an untraceable call is even easier.”
I pictured a shlub without much of a life making such calls, to wield “power” or get attention. “Maybe he is even capable of true violence,” I wrote, “but then again, maybe not.”
It turned out, of course, that man...
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April 21, 2017 at 10:39 am
An Egyptian American charity worker who was imprisoned in Cairo for three years and became the global face of Egypt’s brutal crackdown on civil society returned home to the United States late Thursday after the Trump administration quietly negotiated her release.
President Trump and his aides worked for several weeks with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to secure the freedom of Aya Hijazi, 30, a U.S. citizen, as well as her husband, Mohamed Hassanein, who is Egyptian, and four other humanitarian workers. Trump dispatched a U.S. government aircraft to Cairo to bring Hijazi and her family to Washington.
Hijazi, who grew up in Falls Church, Va., and graduated from George Mason University, was working in Cairo with the Belady Foundation, which she and her husband esta...
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April 21, 2017 at 10:38 am
A 37-year-old eastern Jerusalem resident was apprehended red-handed as he was trying to break into vehicles on Museum Blvd. in Jerusalem. A routine police patrol saw the man moving from parked vehicle to vehicle, prompting them to call him over to ask for some identification.
An eyewitness told police he saw the man throw something as they approached. A search revealed he threw a key which he was using as he tried various car doors. They also found he was carrying a device that together with the key, would open a vehicle door.
The man was then placed under arrest and during questioning admitted he was trying to steal a car.
