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March 21, 2018 at 10:04 pm
Hamas says it searching for suspect in last week’s bomb attack on PA cabinet leader Rami Hamdallah.
Hamas on Wednesday named a suspect in last week’s bomb attack on Palestinian Authority (PA) cabinet leader Rami Hamdallah, AFPreported.
Hamdallah was unhurt by the roadside blastthat struck his convoy on March 13 as he visited Hamas-run Gaza.
The interior ministry in Gaza on Wednesday said it was searching for Anas abu Koussa, born in 1993, describing him as the lead suspect in the attack.
It did not provide a possible motive for the attack on Hamdallah. A Hamas security source said investigators had arrested and were questioning three people, including two members of the PA-run intelligence services.
Another security source said he believed radical Salafist Muslim...
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March 21, 2018 at 10:02 pm
Senate expected to pass Taylor Force Act which would cut funding to the PA if it continues to pay terrorists.
The Senate is expected to pass the Taylor Force Act this week as part of the $1.3 trillion omnibus appropriations bill, The Jewish Insiderreported on Wednesday, citing Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who introduced the legislation last year.
The Taylor Force act would eliminate U.S. funding that directly benefits the Palestinian Authority (PA) as long it continues its policy of paying stipends to terrorists or their families.
The legislation, named for U.S. army veteran Taylor Force who was murdered in a stabbing attack in Jaffa in March of 2016, was approved by the House of Representatives in December but has yet to clear the Senate. The omnibus faces ...
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March 21, 2018 at 8:30 pm
ROUND ROCK, Texas (AP) — The Latest on the Austin bombings (all times local):
6:20 p.m.
Police have discovered a 25-minute recording on a cellphone found with bombing suspect Mark Conditt and Austin Police Chief Brian Manley says he considers it a "confession."
Manley says at a news conference that Conditt talks on the recording in great detail about the differences among the bombs he built.
He says that the tape is "the outcry of a very challenged young man."
Officials say the 23-year-old Conditt blew himself up in his vehicle overnight as authorities closed in on him.
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4:30 p.m.
An official with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says the agency is reasonably certain there are no other devices "out in the public," but he urges caution.
ATF Special A...
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March 21, 2018 at 8:30 pm
NEW YORK (AP) — A military analyst for Fox News said Tuesday that he was quitting the network because he believed it had turned into a propaganda machine for President Donald Trump's administration.
Ralph Peters, a retired U.S. Army officer, said he told Fox at the beginning of the month that he did not want his contributor contract renewed.
"Over my decade at Fox, I was long proud of the association," Peters wrote in an email that was distributed to colleagues at Fox News, and first reported by BuzzFeed News. "Now I am ashamed."
Fox said in a statement that the network did not want attributed to a specific spokesperson that Peters was entitled to his opinion, "despite the fact that he's choosing to use it as a weapon in order to get attention." Fox said it was proud of ...
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March 21, 2018 at 8:30 pm
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republican Rick Saccone conceded defeat to Democrat Conor Lamb on Wednesday night in a closely watched special election in Pennsylvania, more than a week after the end of a remarkable race that has shaken GOP confidence ahead of the November midterm elections.
Lamb, 33, claimed the seat by about 750 votes in a Republican-held district that President Donald Trump won by almost 20 percentage points just 16 months ago. Lamb, who struck a moderate tone during the race and was backed by the district's influential labor unions, beat Saccone, a state lawmaker who had compiled one of the most conservative voting records in the state Legislature.
Lamb also benefited from what Pittsburgh-area Democrats called the party's most energized electorate they had eve...
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March 21, 2018 at 8:30 pm
LONDON (AP) — Chris Wylie can't prove the work he did for Cambridge Analytica helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election, but he thinks he has pretty good evidence.
While working for the political consulting company from 2013 to 2015, Wylie's team spoke to Americans in focus groups to identify deep-seated concerns. Then they tested ways to tap into those fears through social media. The slogans they developed later became the catchphrases of the Trump campaign, he says.
"My ears perked up when I started hearing some of these things like 'drain the swamp' or 'build the wall' or 'the deep state' because these were all narratives that had come out from the research that we were doing," Wylie told an audience at London's Frontline...
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March 21, 2018 at 8:00 pm
Baltimore, MD - Mar. 21, 2018 - The Baltimore City Department of Public Works advises citizens that shortly before noon today, Wednesday, March 21, trash and recycling collection was cancelled for the remainder of the day due to worsening weather and road conditions. Make-up collections, service on Thursday, March 22, and additional updates will be announced as further assessment of the weather and routes are made. Please stay tuned to your local news, Twitter and Facebook for updates. Mechanical street sweeping was announced Tuesday evening as cancelled as drivers are reassigned to emergency snow operations.
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March 21, 2018 at 5:47 pm
The employee posted a photo of himself on Facebook wearing a t-shirt featuring the name of an SS Waffen division.
Austria's foreign ministry has recalled an employee of its embassy in Israel after an Austrian weekly said he posted a picture of himself on social media wearing a T-shirt bearing the name of a Nazi tank division.The Falter weekly published a screenshot of the attache's Facebook page which shows him in a green shirt with the words "stand your ground" and "Frundsberg." Frundsberg was a German Waffen SS armored division during World War Two.
The attache, Juergen-Michael Kleppich, is a member of the far-right Freedom Party, which is a junior partner in Austria's coalition government. He was sent to Tel Aviv in December to help out at the embassy for a few months, ...
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March 21, 2018 at 5:43 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign mined supporters' personal data from Facebook to benefit its voter turnout program. But former campaign officials said Wednesday they accessed and used the information in vastly different ways than Cambridge Analytica, the firm connected to President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign accused of improperly lifting data on 50 million Facebook users.
Former Obama advisers said they collected the data with their own app, complied with the social media platform's terms of service and received permission from supporters. An estimated 1 million Obama supporters gave the campaign access to their Facebook data.
In most cases, Obama supporters who signed on to the campaign's mailing list were asked to au...
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March 21, 2018 at 5:34 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve raised its key interest rate Wednesday in a vote of confidence in the U.S. economy's durability while signaling that it plans to continue a gradual approach to rate hikes for 2018 under its new chairman, Jerome Powell.
The Fed said it expects to raise rates twice more this year. And it increased its estimate for rate hikes in 2019 from two to three, reflecting more optimistic expectations for growth and low unemployment.
In a statement after its latest policy meeting, the Fed said it boosted its key short-term rate by a modest quarter-point to a still-low range of 1.5 percent to 1.75 percent. It also said it will keep shrinking its bond portfolio. The two moves mean that many consumers and businesses will face higher loan rates over time.
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March 21, 2018 at 5:28 pm
ROUND ROCK, Texas (AP) — The Latest on the Austin bombings (all times local):
4:15 p.m.
A friend of the suspected Austin bomber says he was an assertive person who would end up being "dominant and intimidating in conversation."
Jeremiah Jensen tells the Austin American-Statesman that he was close to Mark Anthony Conditt in 2012 and 2013. Jensen says they were both homeschooled in the same Pflugerville community and he would often go to the Conditt home for lunch after church on Sundays. He says they also attended Bible study and other activities together.
Jensen says, "I have no idea what caused him to make those bombs."
He says Conditt came from a good family, was athletic and a "deep thinker." He added that Conditt was "really rough around the edges" when they met.
Jensen say...
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March 21, 2018 at 5:16 pm
NEW YORK (AP) — Spring kicked off with a wallop of wintry weather along the East Coast as the fourth nor'easter in three weeks rolled in with the potential for a foot of snow Wednesday.
The first full day of the season included scenes of snow falling on blooming daffodils in suburban Philadelphia, New Yorkers twisting to fix blown-out umbrellas, tractor-trailers stuck on snowy highways and kids making their first snowman of spring.
"I want warm! I'm done with the cold," said Yana Damoiseau, a pedestrian in New York City.
Airlines canceled thousands of flights, an estimated 15,000 customers lost power from West Virginia northward, and school districts throughout the Northeast called off classes ahead of the storm. At least two traffic deaths were reported in New Jersey an...
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March 21, 2018 at 5:13 pm
BALTIMORE (AP) — A rare $1,000 bill from 1863 is expected to sell for about $1 million at an auction in Baltimore.
Stack's Bowers Galleries says the bill is one of only two of its kind available to collectors. The U.S. Treasury Department says thousand-dollar bills haven't been printed in the U.S. since 1945 . U.S. founding father Robert Morris of Pennsylvania is pictured on the bill.
Stack's Bowers Galleries will sell this bill and dozens of others from the same collection on Thursday at the Baltimore Convention Center. It expects to fetch a total of about $6.2 million from those sales.
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March 21, 2018 at 5:07 pm
Rebbetzin Tzipi Lau, Wife of Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Delivers Message of Strength and Encouragement to Women in Bat Melech’s Shelters
In an emotional visit to a shelter for battered women run by Bat Melech, Rebbetzin Tzipi Lau, wife of Israel’s Chief Rabbi David Lau, delivered a powerful and uplifting message of strength and encouragement in advance of the upcoming Pesach holiday. Bat Melech runs the only shelters in Israel for religious victims of domestic violence.
“On the eve of Pesach, women who have suffered from abuse identify with the Festival of Freedom in a powerful and symbolic way,” said Noach Korman, Bat Melech Founder and Director. “Each woman is going through a process of freedom from the enslavement of abuse and domestic violence. We are v...
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March 21, 2018 at 4:57 pm
A vandal attacks Chabad at Flamingo synagogue in Thornhill, Ont. on March 21, 2018 (Photo Credit: Rabbi Mendel Kaplan Facebook)
THORNHILL, Ont. – B'nai Brith Canada is appalled after learning Wednesday morning that a synagogue in Thornhill, Ont. has been targeted by antisemitic vandalism.
On Wednesday at about 9:40 a.m., a vandal smashed the glass doors of Chabad at Flamingo with a rock, according to Chabad Rabbi Mendel Kaplan.
York Regional Police have been contacted and are on the scene.
At 11 a.m., Rabbi Kaplan shared information about the incident to his Facebook page. “ANTISEMITIC ATTACK IN THORNHILL!!!” he wrote. “Our cameras show a man walking by our shul... stopping multiple times looking for rocks — and then running back TWICE ...
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March 21, 2018 at 4:47 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — The tempest over President Donald Trump's congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Putin quickly grew on Wednesday into an uproar over White House leaks, sparking an internal investigation and speculation over who might be the next person Trump forces out of the West Wing.
The White House, which has suffered frequent leaks — at times of notable severity — said in a statement it would be a "fireable offense and likely illegal" to leak Trump's briefing papers to the press, after word emerged that the president had been warned in briefing materials not to congratulate the Russian president on his re-election.
Trump did so anyway, and on Wednesday he defended the call, saying George W. Bush did not have the "smarts" to work with Putin, and that Bara...
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March 21, 2018 at 4:43 pm
ROUND ROCK, Texas (AP) — The Latest on the Austin bombings (all times local):
3:35 p.m.
The chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security committee says authorities seem to think the Austin bombing suspect had "above average intelligence."
Republican Congressman Michael McCaul told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the suspect matched the FBI's initial profile suspicion that the bomber was likely a white male. But he says a psychological profile probably won't be known until investigators go through Mark Conditt's writings and social media postings.
Authorities say Conditt blew himself up overnight in his vehicle in a hotel parking lot in another suburb as a SWAT team closed in on him.
McCaul says the suspect bought nails and other bomb-making equipment at a H...
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March 21, 2018 at 4:33 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — Housing Secretary Ben Carson, under fire after his office ordered a $31,000 dining set, told a House panel Tuesday that he left furniture purchasing decisions to his wife.
Carson said that he was unaware of the purchase, and canceled it as soon as he learned about it in news reports. But emails released by an accountability organization last week suggest that Carson and his wife, Candy Carson, both played a role in selecting the furniture.
On Wednesday, Carson told a House Appropriations subcommittee that he and his wife looked at furniture catalogues together. But "the prices were beyond what I wanted to pay," he said. Carson added, "I made it clear that didn't seem right to me."
Carson said he then put his wife in charge of furniture selection.
"I left it...
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March 21, 2018 at 4:28 pm
NEW YORK (AP) — Breaking more than four days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect user data in light of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm.
Zuckerberg said Wednesday that Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data and if it fails, "we don't deserve to serve you."
Zuckerberg and Facebook's No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, have been quiet since news broke Friday that Cambridge Analytica may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections.
Facebook has already taken the most important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again, Zuckerberg said. For example, in 2014, it reduced access outside apps had to user dat...
