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December 15, 2018 at 6:00 pm
5 Teves, was the yahrtzeit of my wife's grandfather, Rabbi Dr Israel Frankel, a"h. This week's shtikle, a most appropriate one, is dedicated le'iluy nishmaso, Yisroel Aryeh ben Asher Yeshayahu.
When Yaakov reaches Be'er Sheva on his way down to Mitzrayim (46:1), he bring sacrifices to "the God of his father, Yitzchak." Of course, This was the God of his grandfather, Avraham, as well. However, Avraham's name is not mentioned. Rashi writes that the reason is because one is obligated more so to respect his father than to respect his grandfather. The very simple and obvious inference to be made from this Rashi is that there is, in fact, some halachic obligation of respect owed to one's grandfather, albeit less so than for one's father. Rama in Yoreh De...
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December 14, 2018 at 3:17 pm
The White House will not hold its traditional holiday party for members of the press, it announced Thursday, with Fox News reporting that President Trump canceled the event.
“The White House Christmas press party was not put on the holiday schedule this year,” a White House official said in an emailed statement to The Hill.
The annual White House party for the media has been a tradition for decades as members of the press visited for the invitation-only event. The party’s cancellation marks the latest development in Trump’s ongoing feud with the media, calling negative reports “fake news” and the press the “enemy of the people.”
Read more at The Hill.
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December 14, 2018 at 3:13 pm
Ohio Gov. John Kasich says he’s seriously considering a presidential run against President Trump, but admitted Thursday that he probably could not win a Republican primary today.
“If you’re going to run as a Republican you have to have a sense that if you get into primaries you can win. Right now, probably couldn’t win,” he told the Associated Press in an exclusive interview. “But that’s today. It’s ever changing.”
He says he is still weighing his options for 2020 and is having his advisors monitor the headlines surrounding the White House, including Trump’s legal entanglements and talks of impeachment.
Read more at The Hill.
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December 14, 2018 at 3:08 pm
A Pulitzer-nominated New York Times photographer posted support for terrorism on his social media, i24NEWS has discovered.
Wissam Nassar posted pictures of the suspected terrorists behind the Barkan Industrial Estate and Ofra shooting attacks on Instagram, adding the text: “A sad morning that carries with it pride with the martyrs, and honor in resistance. ‘If you lost the way, follow the martyrs’.”
The Gaza-based photographer uploaded it as a “story”, meaning it was deleted after 24 hours.
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December 14, 2018 at 3:07 pm
Homeland Security says $5 billion will build 215 miles of wall — likely a bollard-style fence; William La Jeunesse reports from Los Angeles.
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December 14, 2018 at 3:07 pm
Of all the foreign countries targeted by President Donald Trump’s tweet-bashing, Mexico holds a special place. He has called it a “totally corrupt” country with “a massive crime problem” that has done “little, if not NOTHING,” to stop U.S.-bound migrants. The election of a combative leftist as Mexico’s new president seemed destined to drive the relationship to a new low.
And yet, five months after Andrés Manuel López Obrador won a resounding victory, he has defied expectations on both sides of the border. He and Trump publicly praise one another. Their administrations have worked fairly smoothly on such hot-button issues as illegal migration and the renegotiation of the North American trade deal. The U.S. government is even loo...
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December 14, 2018 at 2:56 pm
Los Angeles - Darlene Coker knew she was dying. She just wanted to know why.
She knew that her cancer, mesothelioma, arose in the delicate membrane surrounding her lungs and other organs. She knew it was as rare as it was deadly, a signature of exposure to asbestos. And she knew it afflicted mostly men who inhaled asbestos dust in mines and industries such as shipbuilding that used the carcinogen before its risks were understood.
Coker, 52 years old, had raised two daughters and was running a massage school in Lumberton, a small town in eastern Texas. How had she been exposed to asbestos? “She wanted answers,” her daughter Cady Evans said.
Fighting for every breath and in crippling pain, Coker hired Herschel Hobson, a personal-injury lawyer. He homed in on a suspect: the Joh...
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December 14, 2018 at 2:40 pm
New York - Facebook says a software bug may have exposed a broader set of photos to app developers than users had granted permission for.
The company said Friday that the bug affected 6.8 million people who used Facebook to log in to other services and granted permission for third-party apps to access the photos for 12 days in September. The bug has been fixed.
Generally when people give apps access to their photos, this only means photos posted on their Facebook page.
Facebook says the bug potentially gave developers access to other photos, such as those shared on Marketplace or on Facebook Stories. The bug also affected photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post or could not post for technical reasons.
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December 14, 2018 at 2:40 pm
Warsaw - The Warsaw Ghetto Museum should be an ambitious state-of-the art facility —“the major Holocaust museum in Poland” — when it opens in 2023, its newly appointed chief historian said Friday.
The Polish government announced plans in March to create a museum dedicated to the Jews who were imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto and then tortured and murdered by German forces during their World War II-era occupation of Poland.
But Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described a mission for the museum that is much broader and more ambitious.
“What I would like to achieve is a wide perspective of Jewish life and death during the Nazi occupation through the perspective of the history of the Warsaw ghetto,” Blatma...
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December 14, 2018 at 2:24 pm
CUCUTA, Venezuela/Colombia border – As Venezuela continues to crumble under the socialist dictatorship of President Nicolas Maduro, some are expressing words of warning – and resentment – against a six-year-old gun control bill that stripped citizens of their weapons.
“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”
Under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan Natio...
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December 14, 2018 at 2:12 pm
Parshas Vayigash/Baltimore Zmanim / Eruv is UP!
Baltimore, MD – Dec. 14, 2018
Parshas: Vayigash
Today: 6 Teves
Chatzos: 12:01 PM
Hadlakas Nairos: 4:26 PM
Shkiah: 4:44:03 PM
Tzais HaKochavim: 5:35 PM
Asara B’Teves, Tuesday, Dec. 18 Taanis Begins – 5:55 Taanis Ends – 5:31
Kiddush Levanah: Monday, Dec. 10, 3:08 PM – Shabbos, Dec. 22, 9:30 AM
Kiddush Levanah may only be said at night
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December 14, 2018 at 2:10 pm
After revealing his true identity, Yoseph and his brothers, once getting over the initial shock, are able to share a brief reunion. Yoseph reassures them that his sale was brought about by Hashem in order that Yoseph would be in Mitzrayim ahead of time to prepare for the famine. (Vayigash 45:7) Yoseph is quite preoccupied with bringing his father Yaakov down to Mitzrayim to join them and immediately begins gathering wagons and provisions for the journey back to Be’er Sheva. (45:21) Surprisingly, Yoseph while providing changes of clothing for all the brothers, gives Binyamin five changes of clothing and three hundred pieces of silver. Wasn’t this precisely the type of favoritism which brought forth the brothers jealously in the first place? After enduring...
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December 14, 2018 at 2:10 pm
When Yosef finally revealed his true identity to his brothers, they were utterly speechless. Regarding their silence, the Midrash comments "woe to us on the day of judgment; woe to us on the day of rebuke. If the brothers could not reply to Yosef's rebuke, how will we possibly answer Hashem's rebuke on our personal day of judgment"? (Bereishis Rabbah 93:10)
What is the Midrash talking about; what rebuke did Yosef give? All he did was reveal his identity to his brothers. Additionally, what relevance could Yosef's rebuke possibly have to the rebuke that we will each receive in Heaven?
The Bais HaLevi answers that Yosef was pointing out to his brothers the glaring inconsistencies in their behavior. He was asking them "how could the very same people who sold their father...
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December 14, 2018 at 2:04 pm
Yosef HaTzaddik had a difficult childhood, to put it mildly. His own brothers plotted to kill him, and then decided to sell him into captivity instead. He then sat in prison in Egypt for twelve years, falsely accused of a crime that he didn't commit. Most people would have a tremendous amount of resentment and contempt towards the perpetrators of such suffering. How did Yosef overcome this? How was he able to begin a fresh relationship with the very brothers who had perpetrated such atrocities towards him? Rav Yeruchem Levovitz explains that If I get angry at someone for hurting me, it's like getting angry at a rock that was thrown at me. Every life situation is Divinely ordained. Hashem, in His Infinite Wisdom, arranges the situations and characters within our...
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December 14, 2018 at 12:48 pm
Washington - A rush of Democrats will likely announce U.S. presidential bids in January in an unusually early start to the 2020 election cycle, lining up for what is poised to be a crowded race to take on President Donald Trump.
Democrats are riding a wave of enthusiasm after taking control of the House of Representatives in last month’s congressional elections, which were viewed as a referendum on Trump. But the party has no clear presidential front-runner for the first time since the 2004 campaign.
Party insiders expect between six and 10 candidates to launch exploratory or formal White House bids next month, with the eventual field of Democratic contenders swelling to as many as 20, according to interviews with nearly a dozen senior Democratic strategists.
During the 2016 presi...
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December 14, 2018 at 12:48 pm
New York - Record cash streamed out of U.S.-based stock funds and billions more fled bonds in a week of apparently escalated caution, Lipper data showed on Thursday.
More than $46 billion thundered out of U.S. stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the most ever, while a near-record $13 billion poured from bonds, according to the research service. Relatively low-risk money market funds pulled in $81 billion, also the most recorded, the research service’s data showed.
The withdrawals appeared to show investor confidence cracking in the waning days of a wild year of up-and-down trading that has left many people with losses across both stock and bond funds, a rare occurrence.
The end-of-year numbers could also reflect changes related to capital gains distributions and a...
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December 14, 2018 at 11:56 am
Phoenix - Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio alleges in a defamation lawsuit that CNN made no effort to correct anchor Chris Cuomo’s erroneous statement that the lawman was a convicted felon.
But CNN says in a statement Thursday that Cuomo corrected his error within minutes of making it on Jan. 10.
Arpaio says the correction has no bearing on the case.
CNN says an online companion story about Arpaio didn’t contain Cuomo’s correction, though it has been updated to include the on-air correction and a written preface that points out Cuomo rectified the error during the same show.
CNN says if it had known of the oversight in the digital posting it would have corrected it immediately.
Arpaio filed the lawsuit Monday against CNN and two other news organizations.
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December 14, 2018 at 11:51 am
Mechanicsburg, PA - A Pennsylvania man who has been praised for giving up his first-class seat for a mother with an 11-month-old sick baby said he doesn’t think it was that big of a deal.
Jason Kunselman said he first saw Kelsey Zwick and her daughter Lucy getting ready to board an airplane from Orlando to Philadelphia on Dec. 6. It’s common to see ill children at the Orlando airport because of trips granted through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Mechanicsburg-area man said.
Zwick was bringing her daughter to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for treatment of chronic lung disease.
The York Daily Record reported Kunselman saw Zwick was carrying her baby’s oxygen machine and gave up his seat after learning the two were sitting in the back of the plane.
&ldq...
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December 14, 2018 at 11:50 am
Mojave, CA - Virgin Galactic’s tourism spaceship climbed more than 50 miles high above California’s Mojave Desert on Thursday, reaching for the first time what the company considers the boundary of space.
The rocket ship hit an altitude of 51 miles (82 kilometers) before beginning its gliding descent, said mission official Enrico Palermo. It landed on a runway minutes later.
“We made it to space!” Palermo said.
Thursday’s supersonic flight takes Virgin Galactic closer to turning the long-delayed dream of commercial space tourism into reality. The company aims to take paying customers on the six-passenger rocket, which is about the size of an executive jet. Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson has said he wants to be one of the first on board.
Branson gr...
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December 14, 2018 at 11:47 am
West Bank - Israeli forces arrested dozens of Hamas activists in the West Bank overnight as the army intensified a crackdown in response to a pair of deadly shootings believed to have been carried out by Hamas militants, officials said Friday.
Some 70 Hamas members, including lawmakers, were arrested this week, including about 40 overnight, said a Hamas official in the West Bank. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing arrest by Israel. The Israeli military confirmed the overnight arrests.
The arrests came as Israel’s military accelerated its search for the Palestinian gunman who opened fire the day before on a West Bank bus stop, killing two soldiers. The shooting occurred just a short distance from the scene of another drive-by shooting earlier this week that wounde...
