|
January 17, 2019 at 12:30 pm
(Thursday, 17 January 2019) – The inaugural ‘Global Impact Awards’ were presented at a gala event in Tel Aviv, in the presence of the President Reuven Rivlin, to humanitarians who have excelled in making a positive impact in the developing world.
Among the winners are six Israeli ventures, non-profits, and individuals and two non-Israeli citizens who have contributed meaningfully towards global volunteering, international development, and humanitarian aid while forging partnerships between Israel and global Jewry.
The Global Impact Awards winners with President Reuven Rivlin (Photo Credit: Benny Lapid)
The unprecedented awards are a joint initiative of the Society for International Development (SID) Israel, Walla! News and OLAM, an organization designed ...
|
January 17, 2019 at 12:15 pm
A refusal to vaccinate ranks alongside air pollution and climate change as a top global threat.
THE WORLD HEALTH Organization is calling out the anti-vaccine movement as one of the top global health threats this year.
WHO named vaccine hesitancy, the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite available vaccines, among its recently released list of 10 global health threats for 2019. It joins air pollution and climate change, the worldwide influenza pandemic, weak primary health care and HIV in the listing, among others. WHO pledged to make them priorities for the organization and its partners throughout the year.
Vaccine hesitancy "threatens to reverse progress made in tackling vaccine-preventable diseases," WHO said.
The organization added that vaccination is "one...
|
January 17, 2019 at 12:14 pm
IT company Hewlett-Packard (HP) says it won’t allow users of its 3-D printers to produce guns unless those users are firearms manufacturers and the weapons that are created can be detected by airport security.
“HP is against ‘ghost guns’ being produced on our 3-D printers,” HP chief executive Dion Weisler wrote in the November letter, obtained by the Oregonian/OregonLive.
HP did not say how it would stop people from using its products to make ghost guns — weapons that are untraceable and unregulated — and it was unclear how the policy would limit their production.
Read more at NY POST.
|
January 17, 2019 at 11:07 am
London - Facebook said Thursday it removed hundreds of Russia-linked pages, groups and accounts that it says were part of two big disinformation operations, in its latest effort to fight fake news.
The social media company said it took action after finding two networks “that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in a blog post that one network operated in countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Central Asia and the Caucasus. The other focused on Ukraine.
The people running the accounts represented themselves as independent news sources and posted on topics like anti-NATO sentiment and protest movements.
“We didn’t find any links b...
|
January 17, 2019 at 11:02 am
Connecticut smokers are coughing up $2,854,614 on their cigarette habits over their lifetimes, according to WalletHub’s “The Real Cost of Smoking by State Report” released on Wednesday.
New York, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts and Rhode Island round out the top five most expensive states to light up in, with annual costs topping $50,000, and lifetime costs of more than $2 million. Plus, the estimated 37.8 million Americans who smoke are also costing the US more than $300 billion a year in medical care and lost productivity, according to the CDC.
WalletHub’s report calculated these potential losses by factoring in the annual cost of a cigarette pack per day in each state, as well as the health care expenditures, income losses from lowered productivity and ...
|
January 17, 2019 at 10:55 am
Gary Cohn, President Donald Trump’s former top economic adviser, said in an interview published Thursday that the partial government shutdown is “completely wrong” and that he is confused by the White House’s strategy in the standoff with Congress.
“I don’t understand what the outcome is here, and I don’t understand where we’re going with it,” Cohn was quoted as saying in a Boston Globe story about his appointment as a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. “I’m confused as to what the White House’s strategy is on this a little bit.”
In the interview, Cohn criticized the shutdown as “completely wrong” and said the furloughing of thousands of federal workers “makes absolute...
|
January 17, 2019 at 10:54 am
New York - Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, said on Thursday he paid a firm to manipulate online polling data “at the direction of and for the sole benefit of” Trump.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen had paid the data firm RedFinch Solutions to manipulate two public opinion polls in favor of Trump before the 2016 presidential campaign.
“As for the @WSJ article on poll rigging,” Cohen wrote on Twitter on Thursday, “what I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of @realDonaldTrump @POTUS. I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it.”
The attempts to influence the polls ultimately proved largely unsuccessful but shed a light on the tactics of the Trump campaign a...
|
January 17, 2019 at 10:28 am
This past Tuesday New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo released his executive budget for the 2019-2020 fiscal year which contains a number of positives for the yeshiva and nonpublic school community.
The budget increases mandated services reimbursement to over $115 million, an increase of 3.6% over last year, and allocates over $77 million for the Comprehensive Attendance Policy (CAP) which includes a large payment on a longstanding debt for these services. The Mandated Services and CAP reimbursements were originally conceived by Agudath Israel and its coalition partners under the leadership of its late president Rabbi Moshe Sherer ob”m, and the Agudah continues to aggressively advocate annually for this funding.
As we all know anti-Semitic incidents have unfortunately been on t...
|
January 17, 2019 at 9:30 am
President Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin and his wife Nechama today, Thursday 17 January / 11 Shevat, invited David (Dugo) Leitner to for a falafel. Dugo, along with 60,000 Jews, was on the death march from Auschwitz at the age of 14. Exhausted and starving, he marched for miles dreaming of the ‘bilkelach’ rolls he would eat in Israel. When he arrived and first visited Machane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, he saw falafel for the first time and they reminded him of the rolls that he had dreamed of when times were hard.
Since then, every January 18th, Dugo celebrates the fact that he is alive by eating falafel. The Testimony House at Nir Galim works with him on this project.
Dugo told the president and Nechama, “I was walking with my eyes shut. I couldn’t open them because...
|
January 17, 2019 at 9:30 am
Former FBI director James Comey and his team, including Andrew McCabe, attempted to rig 2016 presidential election against Donald Trump.
|
January 17, 2019 at 9:29 am
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani says he's "never said there was no collusion" between Russia and members of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Giuliani's comments Wednesday night on CNN directly contradict the position of his own client, who's repeatedly insisted there was no collusion during his successful White House run. Giuliani himself has described the idea of Russian collusion as "total fake news."
Giuliani says even if some on the campaign did something wrong, there's "not a single bit of evidence" tying Trump to a Russian hack of Democratic emails.
The comments on collusion came after Giuliani was asked about the revelation in court papers that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had shared campaign p...
|
January 17, 2019 at 9:29 am
Trump’s 2020 campaign senior adviser Lara Trump weighs in on the ongoing partial government shutdown and the fight over border wall funding. #Hannity #FoxNews
|
January 17, 2019 at 9:12 am
Dr. Mikhail Varshavski on the partial government shutdown’s potential impact on food safety and concerns over Americans use of vitamins and supplements.
|
January 17, 2019 at 9:12 am
Raw wastewater and sewage from Gaza is being pumped into southern Israeli streams, and garbage is being amassed along the Israeli border fence, causing an ecological nightmare and the suffering of residents near the border, according to a report in Ynet.
The report stated that polluted sewage is being pumped from the Gaza cities of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia into Nahal Hanun, which travels through Israel before emptying out into the Mediterranean Sea.
In the process, Israeli groundwater is being polluted, and causing an invasion of mosquitoes and flies in the moshavim and kibbutzim adjacent to Gaza.
Due to the difficult conditions, Israel’s Water Authority has established a pumping station near the Erez border crossing and begun to purify the water.
Gaza’s government is res...
|
January 17, 2019 at 8:58 am
New York - The partial government shutdown is a double-whammy for Cara and Philip Mangone, a married couple from Philadelphia. Both are agents with the Transportation Safety Administration, both working full time at the Philadelphia airport. Neither knows when they might again start drawing their paychecks.
Part-time jobs are out of the question — they work opposite shifts timed to make sure one of them is always home with their kids, ages 2 and 5. So donations of food and diapers have been a real help as savings are being stretched thin.
“Every penny that we don’t have to spend is helpful,” Cara Mangone said Wednesday as she picked up donated goods being distributed at the airport by fellow members of the American Federation of Government Employees.
The shutdo...
|
January 17, 2019 at 8:56 am
The National Council of Young Israel (NCYI) today called on Newsweek to fire Nina Burleigh, its national political correspondent, after she tweeted anti-Semitic tropes.
Burleigh’s tweet came in response to a series of tweets by writer Sarah Kendzior, in which she questioned why the media fails to follow up on stories relating to certain Jewish organizations and entities relating to Israel. Kendzior referenced the Chabad movement, which works to promote Judaism worldwide, and noted “how Chabad is used as a cover for criminal activity by international mafias.” Kendzior stated that “the press seems particularly reluctant to pursue these [stories],” and that it “is not surprising since those who do write about them are threatened.”
Replying to Kendzi...
|
January 17, 2019 at 8:55 am
Canberra, Australia - Australian police were looking Thursday for at least one attacker who killed an Israeli woman as she was walking on a city street speaking to her sister by phone.
Aiia Maasarwe, a 21-year-old student who had been studying at La Trobe University in the city of Melbourne, was slain at 12:10 a.m. on Wednesday shortly after she got off a tram in the suburb of Bundoora, Detective Inspector Andrew Stamper said.
Maasarwe was having a conversation with her sister when she was attacked on her way home from a comedy club, Stamper said. The sister “heard the sound of the phone falling to the ground, she heard some voices and that was it,” he said.
The family alerted police around the same time that Maasarwe’s body was found at 7 a.m. Wednesday near the tram ...
|
January 17, 2019 at 8:55 am
Beijing - A senior North Korean official arrived in Beijing on Thursday, reportedly en route to the United States for talks ahead of a possible second summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Kim Yong Chol, a former spy chief, arrived at Beijing’s airport and was booked to leave on a flight for Washington with two other North Korean officials later in the day, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said.
A motorcade that included the North Korean ambassador’s car and a Chinese car with a sign reading “state guest” could be seen departing from a VIP area at the airport.
Neither the U.S. nor North Korea has announced any meetings.
Kim Yong Chol has been holding talks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on North Korea’s ...
|
January 17, 2019 at 8:55 am
SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — When Sen. Elizabeth Warren took the stage earlier this month at this city’s ornate Orpheum Theatre, Tricia Currans-Sheehan posed a pointed question to the expected presidential contender.
“Why did you undergo the DNA testing and give Donald Trump more fodder to be a bully?” the Iowa college professor asked, referring to a genetic analysis the Massachusetts Democrat released last fall to rebut President Donald Trump’s repeated jabs about her Native American ancestry.
Warren had a simple response: “I can’t stop Donald Trump from doing what he’s going to do.” After another woman in the crowd retorted, “Yes, you can,” Warren gently reiterated that “I can’t stop him from hurling racial insult...
