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July 18, 2019 at 10:19 am
BALTIMORE — The heat index values are forecast to be around 105 to 110 due to temperatures in the mid-90s, and dewpoints in the lower 70s this week.
Maryland health officials have reported four heat-related deaths so far this summer. The first heat-related death was reported July 3.
Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Letitia Dzirasa has issued a Code Red Extreme Heat alert for Tuesday to Sunday.
"Excessive heat is the leading weather-related killer in the United States. The effects of extreme heat are exacerbated in urban areas, especially when combined with high humidity and poor air quality," Dzirasa said in a statement. "Extreme heat is particularly dangerous to young children, older adults and those with chronic medical conditions. I encourage all residents to ta...
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July 18, 2019 at 10:18 am
The Democratic National Committee on Wednesday warned presidential campaigns against using the viral face-transforming app FaceApp, citing the software’s Russian developers. It urged campaign staff to “delete the app immediately.”
The app allows users to upload a photo of their face and have it automatically edited to look like their future self, replete with wrinkles and graying hair – a popular trick that filled the social media feeds of millions of users, including the celebrities such as Drake, LeBron James and the Jonas Brothers.
But concerns over how the photos could potentially be misused by the company, whose developers are headquartered in St. Petersburg, raised alarms among many users as well as DNC officials, who urged 2020 campaign staff and “peo...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:48 pm
West Palm Beach, FL - Officials in West Palm Beach are hoping a continuous loop of children’s songs played throughout the night will keep homeless people from sleeping in a city park.
West Palm Beach parks and recreation director Leah Rockwell tells the Palm Beach Post they’re trying to discourage people from camping out along the glass-walled Lake Pavilion. She says the pavilion rakes in some $240,000 annually from events.
The loop of “Baby Shark” and “Raining Tacos” is a temporary fix to keep homeless people off the patio. Rockwell says the city wants to formalize hours for the park, which should make trespassing laws easier to enforce.
Illaya Champion tells the Post “it’s wrong” to chase people away with music. He says he’ll...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:45 pm
Jerusalem - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday met with the leadership of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. The group included leaders from the US and Canada
They discussed the need to increase and expand initiatives focused on Jewish education and identity in the Diaspora. Netanyahu said that the Israeli government under his leadership has invested tens of millions of dollars in these programs, but he agreed this priority deserved more funding and more should be done.
The Israeli premier thanked the OU leaders for their support of Israel and for the advancing of relations between Israel and the US and declared it was now time for Israel to give back.
“It is time that instead of Israel receiving from ...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:42 pm
Washington - In a significant break with a longtime NATO ally, the Trump administration on Wednesday said Turkey can no longer be part of the American F-35 fighter jet program.
In a written statement, the White House said that Turkey’s decision to buy the Russian S-400 air defense system “renders its continued involvement with the F-35 impossible.”
The White House did not say explicitly that Turkey will be kicked out of the F-35 program, but the Pentagon was expected to do so.
Turkey makes numerous components for the stealth aircraft, which is sold internationally. If Turkey is removed from the program, as expected, the U.S. will have to find alternative suppliers.
“The F-35 cannot coexist with a Russian intelligence collection platform that will be used to lear...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:41 pm
Jerusalem - A project in downtown Jerusalem is using an ornate tower constructed of discarded windows from around the city to give people a view of its diverse cultural past and present and bring life to a neglected area.
“Window Stories” is made of 550 windows collected by the late Jerusalem artist Yoram Amir, who died earlier this year. Organizers say the eclectic collection reflects the ethnic and religious pluralism of the city and sends a powerful message.
There are “Muslim windows and Christian windows, and Jewish, and Armenian and they all come together as a beautiful piece, and it’s a statement for a better Jerusalem,” said the project’s manager, Kobi Frig.
The exhibit is part of an annual festival put on by Mekudeshet, a group that sponsors a...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:40 pm
New York - Judging by the social media metrics, it was a big week for the campaign of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Oh, wait.
She’s not running for president. But the Democratic representative from Queens dwarfed the Democrats who are actually seeking President Donald Trump’s job in a measurement of social media interactions with news articles by the tracking firm NewsWhip. The statistics were first reported by Axios.
For the week that ended on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez, who is known as AOC, had attracted 4.8 million such interactions, NewsWhip said. By comparison, all of the Democrats running for president reached a combined 6.5 million. California Sen. Kamala Harris had 1.2 million to lead the way, with Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizab...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:37 pm
New York - The heat wave that has been roasting much of the U.S. in recent days is just getting warmed up, with temperatures expected to soar to dangerous levels through the weekend.
Communities are preparing by offering buildings as cooling centers and asking residents to check in on family members and neighbors. Officials are also concerned about smog, which is exacerbated by the heat and makes it harder for certain people to breathe, including the very young, the elderly and people with asthma or lung diseases.
More than 100 local heat records are expected to fall on Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. Most won’t be record-daily highs but record-high nighttime lows, and that lack of cooling can be dangerous, meteorologists say. Temperatures in parts of the East ...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:34 pm
Portugal has approved about a third of approximately 33,000 applications for citizenship under its 2015 law for descendants of Sephardic Jews, according to official data.
Applications based on the 2015 law, primarily from Israel, Turkey, Brazil and Venezuela, are behind a 10-percent increase in applications in 2018, which saw 41,324 such requests in 2018, the Publico magazine in Portugal reported last month. It was the highest tally in at least five years.
The Foreigners and Borders Service told Publico the increase owed primarily to the law about descendants of Sephardi Jews passed in 2015. The law, which offers citizenship to descendants of Jews forced to flee Potrugal, was created to atone for the Church-led persecution of Jews in the 15th and 16th centuries, known as the Inquisition....
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July 17, 2019 at 7:32 pm
Egypt is preventing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh from setting out on a fundraising trip to several countries, chief among them Iran, Gaza media reported Tuesday.
Hamas’s official mouthpiece in the Gaza Strip, Al-Risala, claimed that Egypt and Israel are joining forces to undermine Hamas’s ties with the Iranian regime.
Haniyeh has been trying for some time now to leave the Gaza Strip via Egypt, with the aim of raising funds for his organization, which is in dire economic straits.
The London-based pan-Arab media outlet Al-Araby Al-Jadeed quoted Egyptian sources as saying Cairo has informed Haniyeh he will not be allowed to leave the coastal enclave through Egypt, due to his plans to visit Iran, Turkey and Qatar. Egypt, like Israel, fears Iranian support for the Al-Qassam Brigad...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:30 pm
The House on Wednesday voted 332-95 to kill the first articles of impeachment brought forward under the new Democratic majority, showing off a deep divide among Democrats on whether to go forward with an effort to unseat President Trump.
A majority of Democrats, along with the chamber’s Republicans, voted to table the measure sponsored by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), while 95 Democrats voted in favor of it.
It’s the first time the Democratic House has been confronted with a vote on impeachment, and comes a week before former special counsel Robert Mueller is set to testify before two committees on Capitol Hill.
Read more at The Hill.
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July 17, 2019 at 7:13 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Democratic-controlled House voted Wednesday to hold two top Trump administration officials in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with subpoenas related to a decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
The House voted, 230-198, to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt. The vote, a political blow to the Trump administration, is largely symbolic because the Justice Department is unlikely to prosecute the two men.
The action marks an escalation of Democratic efforts to use their House majority to aggressively investigate the inner workings of the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump abandoned the citizenship question last week after the Supreme Court said the administration’...
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July 17, 2019 at 7:07 pm
1) “Vayeilchu ziknei Moav v’ziknei Midyan u’kesamim b’yadam”
We are looking at the Vilna Gaon’s comments and he has a couple of very interesting ones, especially because understanding the whole story of Bilam, Balak and what they were trying to do against the Jews is a little bit unclear, and some of his words will shed a lot of light on this topic.
“Vayeilchu ziknei Moav v’ziknei Midyan u’kesamim b’yadam.” (Bamidbar 22:7) Vilna Gaon asks: How do you read this pasuk? The ziknei Moav and Midyan came, and they were holding kesamim. We know that kesamim is referring to magical spells or magical powers that they were trying to tap into which we’ll talk about in a moment. Obviously, Hashem gives pe...
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July 17, 2019 at 6:59 pm
The Siyum App: Statement from Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, Executive Vice President of Agudath Israel of America
This is the text of the above statement:
Leaders of Agudath Israel of America were recently contacted by a number of Roshei Yeshiva, Mechanchim and Rabbanim from across America who expressed concerns about the “Siyum App” introduced by the Agudah in conjunction with the upcoming 13th Global Siyum HaShas of Daf Yomi.
The original intent behind the Siyum App was להגדיל תורה ולהאדירה: to encourage and facilitate Torah learning among the broad hamon am by making Daf Yomi shiurim and other forms of limud haTorah easily accessible to the masses. The Siyum App was never intended to encourage those who do not have “smartphones” to...
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July 17, 2019 at 5:44 pm
President Donald Trump’s close relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has now been memorialized in the White House, where a photo of the two leaders now hangs in the West Wing.
Trump and Kim have met three times during Trump’s presidency. They gathered for a nuclear summit in Singapore in June 2018, a second summit in Hanoi, Vietnam this past February, and met at the de-militarized zone (or the DMZ) last month.
The photo in the White House, posted to Twitter by Bloomberg White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs, shows the two leaders at the DMZ, which Trump visited after the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan.
Read more at Insider.
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July 17, 2019 at 5:41 pm
Lawyers acting for the family of a French Jewish widow murdered in her own home during a frenzied antisemitic assault have vowed to appeal the ruling of a Paris court that will potentially allow her accused killer to be released without trial.
Last Friday, the judges in charge of the preliminary investigation into the murder of Sarah Halimi — a 65-year-old former teacher who was severely beaten and then tossed from a third-floor window on April 4, 2017, by 27-year-old Kobili Traore, her neighbor in a Paris public housing project — ruled that Traore could not be held criminally responsible for his actions because he had been smoking marijuana heavily in the hours before the killing.
In addition, according to a source close to the case who was quoted by the leading news outlet ...
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July 17, 2019 at 5:40 pm
A United Arab Emirates oil tanker traveling through the Strait of Hormuz stopped in Iranian waters and switched off its transponder more than two days ago, according to shipping tracking data, amid heightened tensions over a spate of incidents involving commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf.
The Panama-flagged Riah stopped transmitting its position late Saturday and was last shown off the coast of Iran’s Qeshm island in the Strait of Hormuz. It was unclear Tuesday what happened to the tanker, which was on its way to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates before diverting sharply toward Iranian waters and slowing to a halt, tracking data showed.
A UAE government spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Since May, at least six vessels have been attacked near the strait, the...
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July 17, 2019 at 5:40 pm
A federal judge who has warned Roger Stone to stop criticizing the criminal case against him on social media finally banned him from the platforms outright.
Prosecutors have complained to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson that the longtime Republican party operative and former adviser to President Donald Trump has been using social media to assail the government’s case, in violation of her February ruling. Jackson read her ruling from the bench, following a 45-minute recess from a two-hour-long hearing.
“I’ve twice given you the benefit of the doubt,” she told Stone, saying he had forced his lawyers into contortions to contend he was in compliance with her directives.
Reprising a theme she raised in the case of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, J...
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July 17, 2019 at 5:37 pm
President Trump is considering firing Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, according to a report on Monday.
Trump is fed up with Ross over the lack of progress in trade negotiations and the defeat in the administration’s fight to get a citizenship question added to the 2020 Census, White House aides and allies of the president told NBC News, adding that the president has discussed finding a replacement for Ross .
Ross, one of the few original cabinet officials remaining in the Trump administration, could be pushed out as soon as this summer, the report said.
Read more at THE NY POST.
