BOSTON (AP) – The Dunkin’ coffee chain says customers will have to do without a “double cup” for their iced drinks. A new campaign focused in Massachusetts and Rhode Island tells customers they can no longer nest their iced drinks in a second, foam cup for extra insulation as the company moves to eliminate its polystyrene cups. The brand says the double-cup habit was started in New England and is most common there. But by Dec. 1, all the region’s stores will swap foam cups for paper ones that the company says are more environmentally friendly. New ads tell customers that the “double cup is breaking up” because the chain’s relationship with foam isn’t sustainable. Cold drinks are being marketed as “iced, delicious and single.&rd...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is ramping up its push to get a bill through Congress that curbs prescription drug costs, feeling a new urgency as the impeachment investigation advances amid the 2020 election campaign. The effort has progressed beyond anything seen in years, says President Donald Trump’s top domestic policy adviser. “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to confront these issues in a nonideological fashion,” adviser Joe Grogan said in a recent session with reporters. “Unfortunately,” Grogan explained, “there are some current complications.” After months of dialogue, the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have parted ways on Medicare price negotiations that Pelosi advocates and Trump — unlike most Repub...
VENICE, Italy (AP) — Venetians are bracing for the prospect of another exceptional tide in a season that is setting records. Officials are forecasting a 1.6 meter (5 feet, 2 inch) surge of water Sunday through the lagoon city. That comes after Tuesday’s 1.87-meter flood, the worst in 53 years, followed by high tide of 1.54 meters on Friday. Those two events mark the first time since records began in 1872 that two floods topped 1.5 meters in the same year — much less the same week. The city’s mayor says the flooding damages are in “the hundreds of millions” and Italian officials have declared a state of emergency for the area. Tourists with suitcases were rushing to grab the last water taxis to get to the mainland Sunday before service is interrupted i...
Everything seemed ready to go: President Donald Trump’s ban on most e-cigarette flavors had been cleared by federal regulators. Officials were poised to announce that they would order candy, fruit and mint flavors off the market within 30 days – a step the president had promised almost two months earlier to quell a youth vaping epidemic that had ensnared 5 million teenagers. One last thing was needed: Trump’s sign-off. But on Nov. 4, the night before a planned morning news conference, the president balked. Briefed on a flight to a Lexington, Kentucky, campaign rally, he refused to sign the one-page “decision memo,” saying he didn’t want to move forward with a ban he had once backed, primarily at his wife’s and daughter’s urging, because he f...
Dramatic and far-reaching agreements have been made between MK Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party and the larger Blue and White party chaired by MK Benny Gantz. The parties’ negotiating teams agreed, among other things, to pass legislation allowing municipal rabbis to open batei dinim for geirus, which will not be supervised by the government conversion system. They also agreed to fully implement the Kosel Plan, allow civil marriage, and pass the Draft Law in its original version. In addition, the agreement states that the Supermarkets Law will be canceled, and there will be regular public transportation on Shabbat (the Sabbath) in any municipalities interested in it. The agreement has not yet been signed. Read more at Arutz Sheva.
Microsoft has hired former US Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether the use of facial recognition technology developed by an Israeli startup it funded complies with its ethics principles, the company said on Friday. AnyVision, based outside Tel Aviv, has come under scrutiny following reports by Haaretz‘s The Marker business newspaper and NBC News that its technology is used to surveil Palestinians who live in the occupied West Bank. AnyVision, which denied to NBC such use of its services, did not respond to a request for comment. The probe reflects growing unease about facial recognition surveillance in the United States and elsewhere that civil liberties groups say could lead to unfair arrests and limit freedom of expression. Microsoft announced facial recognition ...
Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes, a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, joins Chris Wallace on ‘Fox News Sunday.’
TEL AVIV(VINnews)— An eagle-eyed plane spotter noticed that the name of one of the new Dreamliner planes ordered by Ethiopian Airlines is “Tel Aviv,” in honor of the Israeli city. The plane’s name was revealed as it left the Boeing plant in Charleston, South Carolina.According to the Ynet news site, the name was supposed to be a surprise and was to be revealed at a ceremony at Ben Gurion airport. The Ethiopian state airline operates two daily flights between Tel Aviv and Addis Ababa and the new airline will most likely feature on those flights. Naming planes for cities is a common practice with airline companies and El Al also has a number of planes named for cities, among them a plane named for Tel Aviv.
JERUSALEM (VINnews) —When Beatie Deutsch sets her mind to something, she does it. This has been empirically proven over her meteoric career as a marathon runner. Just four years ago she had never even run as a hobby, let alone essayed to complete marathons. Yet she has not just regularly completed marathons since then, she has actually won them in style, making her one of the top three marathon runners in Israel at present. This would be a remarkable statistic in any circumstance, but Deutsch is even more unique because she is a mother of five (even running a marathon while she was pregnant with her fifth child!) and because as a Chareidi woman she runs in a knee-length skirt, leggings, a shirt with sleeves past her elbows and her hair covered. In Michael and Beatie Deutsch’s ...
A few years ago, it would have been unimaginable: the Democratic Party, the party supported by the overwhelming majority of American Jews and with a long record of pro-Israel figures — Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, Frank Church, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and so on — is now fielding presidential candidates calling for cutting aid to Israel. Those include Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–MA) and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. All three have called for making US annual military aid to Israel conditional on Israel embracing the so-called “two-state solution” — that is to say, establishing an unreconstructed, unreformed Palestinian Arab terror state on Israel’s do...
New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute has denied a pro-Israel student’s request to host a Zionist speaker in response to an event it hosted last month with anti-Israel Palestinian-American lawyer Noura Erakat, according to emails obtained by JNS. Citing NYU’s policy regarding speakers, which includes “the free exchange of ideas and open inquiry are the bedrock principles at NYU,” Ben Newhouse, a junior, emailed on Oct. 15 to request that the department of social and cultural analysis (SCA) host one of the following speakers in response to the Oct. 23 event with Erakat as part of her tour promoting her book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine: former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren; Alan Dershowitz,...
Four people were killed and six others wounded in a shooting Sunday night in California. Fresno Police Lieutenant Bill Dooley said a suspect or suspects sneaked into a football viewing party in a backyard and opened fire, according to CBS Fresno affiliate KGPE-TV. There were about 35 people at the party, he said. Fresno Police Deputy Chief Michael Reid told the station 10 people were hit, three died on the spot and another at the hospital where the rest of the victims were taken. The other six were said to have suffered non-life-threatening wounds. "Thank God that no kids were hurt," Reid said.  Police said the victims were Asian males between the ages 25 and 35.
JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Will a secular Israeli government be established? The 28-day limit for the establishment of  a government led by Benny Gantz will expire Wednesday evening and it is unclear whether he will form a narrow secular government. Yet even the fact that such a government, devoid of religious parties and supported by members of the anti-Zionist Joint Arab List, is even being considered at all is a source of worry and concern for religious Jews in Israel. The likelihood of such a government is very slim. It is hard to see Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman sitting in a government with rabid left-wingers like Ofer Kasif, who deemed the targeted elimination of Islamic Jihad terrorist leader Baha Abu El-Ata “murder”, and it is even harder to see him si...
A new poll released on Sunday shows that just under half of Israeli-Arabs would support a minority government led by Blue & White alliance leader Benny Gantz backed by Joint List lawmakers. The survey, commissioned by Army Radio, showed 49% of Israeli-Arab citizens supporting the Joint List, made up of four separate Arab parties, backing Gantz from outside a coalition government even if it includes secular right-wing politician Avigdor Liberman, head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. Those who would oppose such an arrangement were surveyed at 33%, with the rest either declaring they did not know or refused to answer the question. Read more at i24NEWS.
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump summoned Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to the White House on Monday to discuss the economy and interest rates — issues on which Trump has repeatedly attacked the Fed. The Fed said in a statement that Powell’s message Monday to Trump was similar to his congressional testimony last week, when he suggested that the economy is in good shape and that the Fed would pause its rate cuts. Trump has assailed Powell’s leadership of the Fed, an independent agency, for not cutting rates as aggressively as Trump has insisted. The president has called Fed officials “boneheads” and has asserted that the economy and stock market would be performing better if rates were lower or even negative. Trump tweeted Monday that ...
New York (AP) – What’s eating yogurt? Despite shelves full of new varieties — from Icelandic to Australian to coconut-based — U.S. yogurt sales are in a multiyear slump. Yogurt companies are confident that more new products can boost sales. But some analysts are skeptical, saying larger trends — like growing sales of protein bars — will be hard to turn around. “Consumers are just not eating as much yogurt as they once did,” said Caleb Bryant, associate director of food and drink reports for Mintel, a market research company. U.S. sales of yogurt and yogurt drinks peaked at nearly $9 billion in 2015. In 2019, they’re expected to hit $8.2 billion, down 3.6% from 2018, Mintel says. They’re expected to fall another 10% to $7.4 bill...
CZECHOSLOVAKIA (Czech News Agency) – Prague will remove the sett pavement cobblestones from several streets in the city’s center made from old Jewish gravestones during the communist era and return them to the Jewish community, the City Hall and the Technical Road Administration (TSK) representatives agreed today. The Jewish community, who initiated the project, will return the stones removed from the streets to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s Žižkov district. Jewish community of Prague chairman Frantisek Banyai told Czech News Agency (CTK) that if such stones are found and identified, they will be ritually returned to a place of reverence. He added that the community welcomed the city’s decision and hopes such cooperation will continue. The Jewish communit...
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Sunday that the Trump administration officials who provided information to the anonymous whistleblower about the president’s efforts to pressure Ukraine “exposed things that didn’t need to be exposed.” “This would have been far better off if we would’ve just taken care of this behind the scenes,” Johnson said in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “We have two branches of government. Most people, most people wanted to support Ukraine. We were trying to convince President Trump.” Johnson’s comments come days after the first public hearings in the impeachment inquiry. Democrats are seeking to prove that Trump leveraged military assistance and an Oval Office meeting in exchan...
Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has moved toward joining the Democratic presidential race, apologized Sunday for his handling of stop-and-frisk, a controversial policing tactic that has been criticized as a kind of racial profiling and which Bloomberg defended as recently as early this year. Bloomberg expressed regrets at a predominantly black megachurch he has visited many times, telling congregants that he didn’t understand the full effects on African American and Latino communities quickly enough and should have curtailed the program sooner. “I’m sorry we didn’t,” said Bloomberg. “I can’t change history. However, today I want you to know I realize back then, I was wrong.” The speech served as one of the clearest indicators ...
The Supreme Court has issued a temporary stay of an appeals court ruling that granted House Democrats access to President Trump's financial records, Chief Justice John Roberts announced on Monday. Trump's lawyers had appealed the ruling, which was set to go into effect on Wednesday. The subpoena from the House Oversight Committee will be unenforceable while the Supreme Court decides whether to take up the case. The panel is seeking eight years of Trump's financial records from his accounting firm. Trump's lawyers argue that the committee has no legitimate purpose in seeking the documents. “For the first time in our nation’s history, Congress has subpoenaed the personal records of a sitting president from before he was in office,”&nbs...
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