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June 22, 2019 at 9:58 pm
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra musicians met with management for the first time since their lockout Monday and chairs of the Players Committee described negotiations as "backwards progress," according to the Baltimore Sun.
Both management and musicians seeking a new working contract as musicians are not only losing their paychecks and medical insurance; they will also lose their long-term disability and life insurance on Sept. 1 if they do not reach an agreement.
"It wasn't just that there was no progress; there actually was backward progress. Losing our long-term disability coverage is egregious and unconscionable," Brian Prechtl, co-chair of the Players Committee, told the Sun.
BSO President and CEO Pete Kjome told the Sun that there was "no significant ...
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June 22, 2019 at 9:57 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Saturday delayed a nationwide immigration sweep to deport people living the United States illegally, including families, saying he would give lawmakers two weeks to work out solutions for the southern border.
The move came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trump on Friday asking him to call off the raids. But three administration officials said scrapping the operation was not just about politics. They said Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaders had expressed serious concerns that officers' safety would be in jeopardy because too many details about the raids had been made public.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to speak about private discussions.
"At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigr...
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June 21, 2019 at 4:07 pm
As Americans’ finances recovered from the Great Recession – spurred by the longest bull market, 50-year unemployment lows and an almost record-breaking expansion – they got dumber about money matters.
Just 34% could answer at least four out of five financial literacy questions correctly last year, down from 42% in 2009, according to the 2018 Financial Capability Study from FINRA Investor Education Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to financial education and empowerment. The figure was down from the 2012 and 2015 studies as well.
The money topics with the biggest drops in comprehension were inflation, risk and interest rates. Potential reasons for the declines may be that adults haven’t lived through enough cycles of higher and lower interest rates, or swings in in...
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June 21, 2019 at 3:02 pm
Miami will be one of the first cities where U.S. immigration authorities will target people for deportation as early as this Sunday, according to sources who were briefed on the enforcement action.
Immigration agents will target Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, and San Francisco by this weekend, congressional offices and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sources told the Miami Herald.
Earlier this week, a Trump administration official confirmed that ICE will specifically target for deportation as many as 1 million people “who have been issued final deportation orders by federal judges yet remain at large in the country.”
Among those to be targeted first, sources said: minors who came into the U.S. without th...
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June 21, 2019 at 2:59 pm
Yerushalayim city councilor Yochanan Weitzman of Agudas Yisroel warned that the city’s failure to stop selling tickets on Shabbos and Yom Tov at the Biblical Zoo is a blatant violation of coalition agreements reached with Mayor Moshe Leon.
Noting a Ramat Gan recreation center has been operating without chillul Shabbos since last year, he said, “With good will on all sides, it is possible to find common ground that preserves the honor of Shabbos.”
Yisroel Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman slammed Weitzman’s demand, saying, “This is a brutal and forceful chareidi attempt to turn Israel from a Jewish state to a halachic state.”
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June 21, 2019 at 1:41 pm
Iran refrained from blowing up an American plane with 35 people on board that was accompanying the unmanned drone the Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down, an Iranian commander said Friday.
“With the US drone in the region there was also an American P-8 plane with 35 people on board,” Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Guard’s Aerospace Force, was quoted as saying by the Tasnim news agency.
“This plane also entered our airspace and we could have shot it down, but we did not,” he said.
Read more at THE NY POST.
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June 21, 2019 at 1:40 pm
Thousands participated Wednesday evening in the emotional procession marking the return of the four sifrei Torah that were stolen last week from the Tiferes Shimon shul (Orchos Torah alumni) on Rechov Rabi Akiva in Bnei Brak.
The procession left from the house of the late Rosh Yeshivah, Hagaon Harav Aharon Leib Shteinman, zt”l, who was the Rosh Yeshivah of Yeshivas Orchos Torah.
Many Rabbanim and Roshei Yeshivah also participated in the hachnasas sifrei Torah.
Border Police located the four sifrei Torah in a PA town in the Shomron Sunday, and they were later identified as the ones stolen from the shul on Bnei Brak’s Rabi Akiva Street last Monday night. The sifrei Torah were in good condition and showed no signs of desecration.
After extensive searches, police found the si...
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June 21, 2019 at 11:48 am
US National Security Adviser John Bolton will travel to Israel on Sunday to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the White House said on Thursday.
Bolton will also meet with Israeli national security and atomic energy officials during the trip, National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis noted.
The trip precedes a US-led conference in Bahrain on Tuesday and Wednesday on proposals for the Palestinian economy as part of a coming peace plan.
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June 21, 2019 at 11:47 am
Thousands of demonstrators again blocked main city thoroughfares on Friday and, in a new show of displeasure, surrounded police headquarters, demanding that a deeply unpopular extradition bill be fully withdrawn by the city’s leader and police investigate cases of alleged abuse by officers.
For over a week protesters have taken to the streets of the semiautonomous territory calling for the scrapping of a bill that would allow for case-by-case extraditions to mainland China. The continued upheaval has placed Carrie Lam, the pro-Beijing chief executive, at the center of the most serious crisis of her political career.
Lam has suspended the bill, and offered up two public apologies, but has refused to withdraw the legislation completely. Her apologies have been dismissed as self-servi...
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June 21, 2019 at 11:02 am
Considering that a survey last year revealed that 31 percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and that 41 percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was, a large and impressive Holocaust exhibit would seem to merit only praise.And praise the “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away” exhibit currently at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan has garnered in abundance. It has received massive news coverage in both print and electronic media.First shown in Madrid, where it drew some 600,000 visitors, the exhibit will be in New York into January before moving on.
Among many writers who experienced the exhibit and wrote movingly about its power was reporter and au...
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June 21, 2019 at 11:00 am
President Trump reportedly appeared to threaten a Time magazine reporter with prison time after a photographer tried to take a picture of a letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Time reports.
During an interview with the publication in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump asked the reporters to go off the record while he showed them the letter he received from Kim.
According to the interview transcript, the photographer appeared to try and snap a photo of the document, but White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it wasn’t allowed.
Later on in the interview, the publication asked Trump about former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who testified that the president, “under threat of prison time,” tol...
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June 21, 2019 at 10:45 am
A former top aide to President Donald Trump told House investigators that officials on the 2016 campaign felt “relief” when WikiLeaks released hacked information damaging to rival Hillary Clinton, reaffirming Robert Mueller’s conclusion that Trump associates welcomed Russia’s interference in the election.
During a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Hope Hicks defended the Trump campaign’s use of private Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails that were hacked by Russia, then were released by WikiLeaks. Hicks, a close confidante of the president who was mentioned more than 180 times in the Mueller report, argued that the emails were “publicly available information.”
“I think that ‘h...
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June 21, 2019 at 10:30 am
The Senate is expected to approve tough new sanctions against North Korea with bipartisan legislation that would cut off from the U.S. banking system any person or entity doing business with the hermit kingdom, according to the measure’s authors.
The sanctions, advanced by Sens. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., as an amendment to the Senate’s annual defense bill, have the backing of Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the two lawmakers said Thursday. Such an endorsement all but guarantees the full Senate will approve the measure, which is designed to isolate North Korea from its financial allies and force leader Kim Jong Un to abandon his nuclear weapons program.
A spokeswoman for Inhofe did not respond to a request for comment.
T...
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June 21, 2019 at 10:05 am
Baltimore, MD - June 21, 2019 - The following email was sent out this morning by Kehilas Bnei Torah.
Subject: Public Safety Announcement - Speed
A member of our community was approached this morning by one of the city/county sanitational engineering department. The person complained that carpools in the area drive at hazardous speeds.
The person further stated that they are afraid to pick up the garbage in the area due to the cars traveling at unsafe speeds.
I would therefore ask people to please slow down and drive safely. Stop signs and speed limits are present for a reason. Unsafe driving creates life-threatening situations for everyone.
Is it worth the two extra minutes, when your actions not only cause an extreme danger, but an enormous Chillul Hashem.
Please pass this on-...
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June 21, 2019 at 9:55 am
1) Menorah is “Pesach Divarecha Ya’ir”
We start off with talking about the menorah which is what the Torah begins the parsha about, and there’s a very famous and enigmatic medrash that the Gra sheds beautiful light on, and no pun intended because that is really what the medrash is about. There’s a medrash that says, “El mool pnei hamenorah”, opposite the menorah, that’s what the pasuk says, “pesach divarecha ya’ir”. There’s a pasuk in Tehillim, kapitel 119, the longest one in Tehillim. It’s actually pasuk 130. So, it says, “pesach divarecha ya’ir.” The opening of your words, G-d, it’s referring to “yair” will shine forth brightly. “Mi&...
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June 21, 2019 at 9:50 am
Washington - President Donald Trump says the U.S. was “cocked and loaded” to retaliate against Iran for downing an American drone, but canceled the strikes 10 minutes before they were to be carried out after being told some 150 people could die.
Trump tweeted Friday that the U.S. was ready to “retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die.” He said a general told him 150 people, and he canceled the strikes as “not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”
Trump tweeted that the U.S. will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But he says he’s in no hurry to respond to the downing of the U.S. surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz.
He says U.S. sanctions are crippling the Iranian economy and that mo...
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June 21, 2019 at 9:35 am
President Trump confirmed early Friday that he called off a retaliatory attack on Iran in response to the downing of a U.S. drone “10 minutes before the strike,” saying the number of expected casualties was not "proportionate" to what Tehran did.
In a stunning tweet thread, the president said the U.S. was "cocked & loaded to retaliate" against three sites, but he reversed course after asking military leaders about how many would be killed.
"... I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not ... proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world," Trump said. "Sanctions are biting & ...
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June 21, 2019 at 9:28 am
Albany, NY - Lawmakers in New York state have voted to eliminate criminal penalties for public possession and use of marijuana after efforts to legalize pot stalled.
The measure would reduce low-level criminal charges for unlawful possession of marijuana to a violation, which comes with a fine similar to a parking ticket. The penalty would be $50 for possessing less than one ounce of pot or $200 for one to two ounces.
In an effort to address decades of racial disparities in drug arrests, the bill would also allow for the expungement of past convictions for possession of small amounts of marijuana.
The state Senate passed the bill Thursday evening a few hours before the chamber adjourned for the year. Passage followed Friday morning in the state Assembly before it too adjourned.
Sen. Ja...
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June 21, 2019 at 9:24 am
Washington - The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday issued an emergency order prohibiting U.S. operators from flying in an overwater area of Tehran-controlled airspace over the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman due to heightened tensions.
The order came hours after United Airlines suspended flights between New Jersey’s Newark airport and the Indian financial capital of Mumbai, which fly through Iranian airspace, following a safety review after Iran shot down a high-altitude U.S. surveillance drone.
The downing of the unarmed Global Hawk aircraft, which can fly at up to 60,000 ft (18,300 m), was the latest of a series of incidents in the Gulf region, a critical artery for global oil supplies, that included explosive strikes on six oil tankers.
FAA said according to fl...
