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May 15, 2019 at 12:29 pm
Baltimore, MD - May 15, 2019 - Bikur Cholim of Baltimore is proud to announce that we will once again be hosting our annual Gaining through Giving – The Laure Gutman Women’s Brunch, this Sunday, May 19, at the Pikesville DoubleTree Hilton Hotel, at 10:30 am. This event is a beautiful way for us to show our tremendous appreciation to all of our selfless volunteers. Women from all over the community attend the brunch to support the wonderful work that Bikur Cholim does. Following the inspirational morning, many are often motivated to sign up as a volunteer and join Bikur Cholim’s growing ranks.
This year, we are showing our tremendous Hakaras Hatov to our past Brunch Committee: Shira Miryam Bronfin, Leah Klein, Sarah Ottensoser, Ilana Portnoy, and Aliza Wein. These dedicat...
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May 15, 2019 at 11:12 am
Washington - If you want to save your brain, focus on keeping the rest of your body well with exercise and healthy habits rather than popping vitamin pills, new guidelines for preventing dementia advise.
About 50 million people currently have dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type. Each year brings 10 million new cases, says the report released Tuesday by the World Health Organization.
Although age is the top risk factor, “dementia is not a natural or inevitable consequence of aging,” it says.
Many health conditions and behaviors affect the odds of developing it, and research suggests that a third of cases are preventable, said Maria Carrillo, chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, which has published similar advice .
Since deme...
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May 15, 2019 at 11:09 am
Baghdad - Washington ordered the departure of non-emergency government employees from Iraq on Wednesday, after repeated U.S. expressions of concern about threats from Iranian-backed forces.
The U.S. State Department has ordered the pullout of the employees from both the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and its consulate in Erbil, the embassy said in a statement.
“Normal visa services at both posts will be temporarily suspended,” it said, recommending those affected depart as soon as possible. It was unclear how many staff would leave.
On Tuesday, the U.S. military reaffirmed concerns about possible imminent threats from Iran to its troops in Iraq, although a senior British commander cast doubt on that and Tehran has called it “psychological warfare.”
U.S. President Donal...
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May 15, 2019 at 11:05 am
Tel Aviv - Poland’s ambassador to Israel was spat at while sitting in his car in Tel Aviv, Israeli police said, and the Polish government condemned the incident, which coincided with rising tensions between the two countries.
“I am very worried to hear of a racist attack on @PLinIsrael ambassador @mmagierowski. Poland strongly condemns this xenophobic act of aggression. Violence against diplomats or any other citizens should never be tolerated,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote in a tweet on Wednesday.
An Israeli police spokesman said on Wednesday a 65-year-old Israeli man was arrested over Tuesday’s spitting incident. Israel’s Walla News site said the suspect was brought to court on Wednesday and released on bail. It quoted the judge as saying...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:55 am
Riyadh - The editor-in-chief of a Saudi newspaper is urging Palestinians to keep an open mind toward a Mideast plan being devised by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.
Faisal Abbas wrote in the Arab News on Wednesday that while the cards have been stacked against the Palestinians, Kushner’s plan just may reverse the situation and make peace more possible.
The column ran as Palestinians hold protests to mark the 71st anniversary of the “nakba,” or “catastrophe,” which commemorates their mass displacement during the war that led to Israel’s creation.
Abbas wrote there’s a “strong counter argument that it is time to think outside the box” and added: “The Palestinians should negotiate hard,...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:51 am
Oklahoma City - Two people, believed to be window washers, have been rescued from a scaffold near the top of an approximately 850-foot (259 meters) skyscraper in Oklahoma City.
The Oklahoma City Fire Department says on Twitter that the two were stranded shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday outside the 50-floor Devon Tower.
Firefighters managed to secure the scaffold that was dangling from the top of the building and pull the two to safety about 8:30 a.m. Video from the scene showed the scaffold banging against the building and breaking windows.
Fire officials did not immediately return phone calls for further comment. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was injured.
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May 15, 2019 at 10:46 am
Facebook will start restricting the use of its livestreaming feature for users who violate its content policies in a new shift that comes in response to the mosque attacks in New Zealand earlier this year that were livestreamed and quickly spread across social media.
The company announced in a blog post on Tuesday that users who break rules involving terrorism, hate speech and violence will not be allowed to use Facebook Live for a certain amount of time.
“For instance, someone who shares a link to a statement from a terrorist group with no context will now be immediately blocked from using Live for a set period of time,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, wrote in the post. “We plan on extending these restrictions to other areas over the...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:43 am
There have been 11 homicides in Baltimore since the start of May, pushing the number of homicides in 2019 past 100.
The hardscrabble, postindustrial city of 611,000 people reached this grim milestone at almost the same time as New York City, which is home to more than eight million people.
Baltimore has been mired in a murder crisis since 2015. But several brazen shootings this spring have heightened the sense of urgency and outrage. At the end of April, seemingly indiscriminate fire interrupted a Sunday afternoon cookout, killing one person and wounding eight others. In early May, two toddlers were shot.
Michael Harrison, the city’s new police commissioner, assured that he had strategically deployed his officers to stop the violence. Officers were in the “right places,&...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:37 am
Billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he has not ruled out a third-party presidential run, arguing that no current Democratic candidate is capable of defeating President Trump.
“We’ll see what happens. It would take the perfect storm for me to do it,” Cuban told CNBC’s “Halftime Report.” “There’s some things that could open the door, but I’m not projecting or predicting it right now.”
Cuban, who has flirted with a White House bid in the past, argued there could be an opening for a centrist with charisma but without a history in politics, adding “the reality is people don’t trust politicians.”
He added that “nobody right now” in the crowded Democrati...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:35 am
America’s baby bust isn’t over. The nation’s birth rates last year reached record lows for women in their teens and 20s, a government report shows, leading to the fewest babies in 32 years.
The provisional report, released Wednesday and based on more than 99% of U.S. birth records, found 3.788 million births last year. It was the fourth year the number of births has fallen, the lowest since 1986 and a surprise to some experts given the improving economy.
The fertility rate of 1.7 births per U.S. woman also fell 2%, meaning the current generation isn’t making enough babies to replace itself. The fertility rate is a hypothetical estimate based on lifetime projections of age-specific birth rates.
Whether more U.S. women are postponing motherhood or forgoing it entir...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:28 am
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Tuesday sent a letter to leaders of Yahadut HaTorah following their request to prevent chillul Shabbos during the Eurovision Song Contest this coming weekend to reassure them that the contest is not government run and the government does not sanction chillul Shabbos.
“I would like to make it clear that the Eurovision Song Contest is a singular international event set in advance by international standards that are not under government control and are managed exclusively by the public broadcasting corporation and not by the government,” Netanyahu wrote.
The Prime Minister added, however, that “the Israeli government is not interested in desecrating Shabbos, and that most of the participants in the event are from abr...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:27 am
Germany on Saturday said it was deeply troubled by anti-Israel bias at the United Nations and vowed to oppose “any unfair treatment” of the Jewish state in international fora.
The statement, issued on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s accession to the UN, was welcomed by Jerusalem’s envoy to Germany, Jeremy Issacharoff, who said he hoped it signals a change in Berlin’s voting pattern vis-a-vis the Middle East. Germany’s voting record on Middle East issues has been criticized by Israel and its supporters, as the country often joins other European nations in voting against Israel’s interest at the UN.
“Seventy years ago today — 24 years before the Federal Republic of Germany’s admission to the United Nations —...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:27 am
The Aish World Center, opposite the Kosel, hosted Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon and a delegation of 30 of his peers during their visit to Yerusalayim earlier this month, following their historic visit to Poland for the annual March of the Living.
Danon has brought more than 100 U.N. ambassadors to the Aish World Center in the past year. Aish welcomes hundreds of dignitaries annually to teach the importance and relevance of Jewish wisdom and values.
“It is so important to start our tour at the Aish World Center. If you look out the window, you’ll see Jewish worshippers going to pray at the Western Wall on Shabbat; above them, Muslims praying for Ramadan; and a few hundred feet away, you will see Christians, all in one square kilometer,” explained D...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:26 am
In March 2007, agents from Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, broke into the Vienna suite of the director of Syria’s atomic energy agency and secretly downloaded the contents of his computer. They discovered that Syria was building a nuclear reactor with the assistance of the North Korean regime, in a region known as Deir al-Zour near the Euphrates River. Additional intelligence showed that the reactor was just months away from being activated, posing an urgent, existential threat to Israel – one found not in a more remote country like Iran or Iraq, but in Israel’s backyard, just over the border with Syria.
Then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert shared the intelligence with President George W. Bush, hoping to persuade Bush that the U.S. military should launch a...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:26 am
San Francisco on Tuesday became the first city in the U.S. to ban the use of facial-recognition software by city agencies and the police, dealing a swift symbolic blow to a key technology rapidly being deployed by law enforcement nationwide.
The 8-to-1 vote by the city’s Board of Supervisors will forbid public agencies from using the artificial-intelligence software to find the identity of someone based on a video clip or photograph. Privacy and civil-rights advocates have worried that the capability could be misused for mass surveillance and possibly lead to more false arrests.
The law will not regulate local businesses, and the technology is still largely unregulated across the U.S. But San Francisco’s ban will resonate because of the city’s identity as a friendly bac...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:26 am
President Donald Trump escalated his long-running attacks on the FBI Tuesday, calling recent remarks by Director Christopher Wray “ridiculous,” as officials said a senior prosecutor would examine the roles of the bureau and the CIA in the early stages of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with members of the Trump campaign.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Trump said Wray gave a “ridiculous answer” during congressional testimony last week when he declined to characterize an FBI investigation of Trump campaign advisers in 2016 as “spying.”
The president’s public criticism of Wray – the man he picked to run the FBI after firing James Comey two years ago – showed how tensions between ...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:25 am
Commissioners in a Tennessee county voted unanimously on Monday evening in favor of censuring a judge for posting on his Facebook page a link to an article that states that Jews should “get ((expletive deleted) over the Holocaust,” in addition to posting anti-immigration content.
The Shelby County Commissioners voted 12-0 in favor of a resolution calling on the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct to censure Jim Lammey of the Shelby County Criminal Court, as the commission itself cannot censure the judge.
Numerous organizations, including Jewish ones such as the Anti-Defamation League, and the Memphis Jewish Federation and Jewish Foundation of Nashville & Middle Tennessee, have called for Lammey to be reprimanded.
A spokesperson for the state’s Board of Judici...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:24 am
On Wednesday morning, May 1, a couple of hours after returning home from a glorious Passover in Israel, my wife and I called The New York Times and explained to a very respectful representative why we wanted to end 60 years of on-and-off home delivery of the paper. We told him that the cartoon that was published in The New York Times International Edition on Thursday, April 25 — depicting a guide dog with Benjamin Netanyahu’s face leading a blind, fat Donald Trump wearing dark glasses and a black kippa — crossed every boundary that separates us from virulent antisemitism, bigotry, and obscenity. It exposed, in our eyes, something rotten in what used to be known as “the paper of record” and brought the Times to a level which m...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:24 am
Flatbush — Brooklynites elected Farah Louis today to replace former city councilman, current Public Advocate, Jumaane Williams.
Patch.com reports that Louis defeated Williams’ endorsed candidate, Monique Chandler-Waterman, and six other candidates in the District 45 special election to represent Flatbush, Midwood and Canarsie with 42 percent of the vote, according to the New York City Board of Elections.
Louis claimed 3718 of the 8775 votes counted and beat Chandler-Waterman by more than 1000 votes. Louis, who spent six years in Williams’ City Council office, will serve in the City Council seat through the end of 2019, completing Williams’ last term, but her race is not over: she will face a June 25 primary and a general election in November.
The seat Louis ...
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May 15, 2019 at 10:23 am
(Wednesday, May 15, 2019) – New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Bret Stephens spoke about the history and politics of nations whose interests are guided by their values as opposed to nations whose values are guided by their interests, in a wide-ranging presentation he gave at the annual American Friends of Migdal Ohr (AFMO) Gala last night.
“The West is in crisis because it is following policies that are not in keeping with its values and deep traditions, especially with the rise of antisemitism which is usually the harbinger of national decline,” Stephens said. “It is happening in Europe with the rise of fascist parties and it is happening in the U.S., when a member of Congress can explain the hold Israel has on the American imagination, as ‘a...
