Israel’s national anthem “Hatikvah” was played in an Abu Dhabi arena on Saturday after Alon Leviev, 17, took home the gold in the junior category at the Ju-jitsu World Championship. Leviev, who competed in the 55-kilogram-and-under weight category, beat an athlete from Abu Dhabi in the final round of the competition, according to The Times of Israel. Following the medal distribution, “Hatikvah” was blasted in the arena. After the medal ceremony, Leviev wrote on Instagram, “For me it was very special to compet [sic] here in Abu dhabi, leave politics behind and do what we love to do. Amazing feeling to sing the israeli national anthem in Abu dhabi. It was great experience and im looking forword [sic] for the next year.” The United Arab Emirates la...
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was set to announce the shift, which may doom peace efforts, on Monday afternoon. WASHINGTON — The Trump administration was set to declare on Monday that the United States does not consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law, officials said. The policy shift may doom any peace efforts with Palestinians. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was scheduled to announce the move on Monday afternoon. A senior State Department official confirmed the decision, which was first reported by The Associated Press. The United States has in the past described the settlements as illegitimate, and Palestinians have demanded the land for a future state, a goal that has been backed by the international community. But President Trump ha...
A agricultural worker fell from heights in a field near Sedot Yam. United Hatzalah volunteer Yitzchak Ben Asayig related from the scene: When I arrived at the scene together with EMS volunteers, bystanders told us that the man fell from a ladder over 7 meters high while he was working to build a greenhouse. After a lengthy rescusitation process we unfortunately had to pronounce his death due to the severity of the injuries he suffered.”
DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) — Ford is unveiling its first all-electric SUV, marking the start of an avalanche of battery-powered vehicles coming from mainstream and luxury automakers during the next two years that industry analysts say will boost electric vehicle sales. The “Mustang Mach E,” which will go 230 miles to more 300 miles per charge depending on how it’s equipped, will be unveiled Sunday night ahead of the Los Angeles Auto Show press days. There are 18 now for sale in the U.S., and IHS Markit expects that to grow to 80 in 2022, including pickup trucks and SUVs that are in the heart of the American market. Yet last year, pure electric vehicles made up only 1.5% of new vehicle sales worldwide, and the consulting firm LMC Automotive predicts that will rise to 2.2...
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...
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