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January 26, 2020 at 4:49 pm
The Israeli military has been placed on alert in anticipation of the release of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, currently scheduled for Tuesday.
The Israel Defense Forces Central Command has already deployed six battalions to Judea and Samaria, according to an Army Radio report on Sunday, and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi cancelled a symposium on operational and combat systems upgrades which was to have been attended by all IDF brigadier-generals.
Combat battalions have been attached to every regional brigade and are ready to activate within hours, to prevent attacks, fend off violent riots and protect Jewish communities, according to the report.
Meanwhile on Sunday, the IDF struck Hamas several targets in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for a slew o...
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January 26, 2020 at 4:27 pm
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s Interior Ministry said Sunday that it will now allow Israelis to travel to Saudi Arabia for religious or business visits.
The announcement is the latest sign of quiet but warming relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It also came days before the White House is to announce its Mideast peace plan — which is expected to seek Saudi support.
Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have formal diplomatic relations. But the two sides have found common ground in their shared animosity toward Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frequently boasts of back channel relations with Arab countries that do not have formal ties with the Jewish state. Israel has peace deals with only two Arab countries — Egypt and Jordan.
Under Sunday’s annou...
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January 26, 2020 at 4:22 pm
WASHINGTON (VINnews) — After accusations have been swirling for quite some time that Rep. Ilhan Omar legally married her brother in order for him to obtain a green card, the FBI has now opened an investogation into the matter, according to a report by The Post.
According to a source with knowledge of the event, two FBI agents held a meeting for several hours with an individual who handed over a trove of documents relating to Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
At this meeting, the agents discussed the allegation that Omar married Elmi, a British citizen who is suspected of being her brother, in order for him to obtain a green card and study in America.
While the agents would not commit to launching an official investigation into Omar, they did say they would share t...
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January 26, 2020 at 4:18 pm
Senator Bernie Sanders has jumped to the lead in Iowa over Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden, while support for Elizabeth Warren has slipped, according to a New York Times/Siena poll released on Saturday.
Sanders had the support of 25% of likely caucus-goers, up six points since the previous version of the survey in late October — chiefly at the expense of fellow progressive Warren.
He’s pulled ahead of former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Buttigieg at 18% and former Vice President Biden at 17%. Warren was at 15%, down from 22% in October, and Senator Amy Klobuchar was at 8%, days after the two U.S. Senators received a joint endorsement from the newspaper.
Even with Sanders in the lead, the poll showed that 55% of those surveyed preferred a Democratic standard-bearer who is “m...
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January 26, 2020 at 4:17 pm
U.S. President Donald Trump issued a proclamation on Friday commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, formally declaring a “National Day of Remembrance of the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz.”
“Driven by virulent hatred and unspeakable cruelty, the Nazis implemented a systematic and methodical plan to exterminate the Jewish people and others they deemed undesirable. Two out of three Jews in Europe and millions of other people were murdered. They were sent to ghettos, concentration camps and death camps where they were persecuted, imprisoned, starved, tortured and executed. It is simply unthinkable that such barbarity occurred just 75 years ago,” it states.
The proclamation goes on to...
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January 26, 2020 at 4:13 pm
Chinese health authorities are extending the holidays and deploying more than a thousand doctors and military personnel to the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak as the number of infections skyrocket and desperation grips the quarantined province of Hubei, where more than 50 million people are stranded with a severe shortage of medical supplies.
The United States, meanwhile, announced a third case of the coronavirus – a Chinese traveler from Wuhan who took ill in Orange County, California. Authorities say he is under care in isolation and the “risk of local transmission is low.”
In China, however, the rate of infection has been increasing daily, with a 50 percent jump in cases on Sunday, and local authorities expect a similar leap on Monday.
The national health comm...
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January 26, 2020 at 4:07 pm
BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- Baltimore Police need help identifying two suspects wanted in connection to several robberies that occurred in the northwest district Friday.
Police say, around 7 p.m., two suspects entered the Khal Chassidim Synagogue on Park Heights Avenue, pointed a gun at a man and attempted to rob him.
“The man who had the gun pointed at him dove at the guy and tried to swat the thing away and then they ran away,” Heshie Klein with the Khal Chassidim Synagogue said. “Honestly I don't even know if they knew this was a Synagogue."
Police are also investigating two other robberies that occurred in the same area, one on Clover Road and the other on Park Heights near Glen Avenue.
Police believe the same two suspects are responsible for all three robberies.
...
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January 26, 2020 at 3:33 pm
Amid all the planning, predictions and even prayers for the 13th Global Siyum Hashas, not a single member of the massive team that planned the worldwide celebration of limud haTorah ever expected things to turn out quite the way they did.
Starting on December 16th in Melbourne, Australia and moving on days later to Mexico City, the Global Siyum HaShas of Daf Yomi began a month-long trek across the planet, igniting an unprecedented passion for Torah in every city, at every siyum. Throughout North America, Europe, Australia and Israel, well over 500,000 people participated in multiple siyumim and like the mountaintop flames in Mishnaic times that signaled the coming of Rosh Chodesh from one locale to another, the torch of Torah circled the globe, setting hearts and souls on fire.
Rav...
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January 26, 2020 at 2:54 pm
This article is adapted from my newly released sefer, “What Can I Say... Today?” (The sefer can be ordered online at Feldheim.com and is coming to Baltimore this week, b’ezras Hashem!) All halachos mentioned herein are complex and part of a larger framework. The purpose of the article is to raise awareness of these essential halachos. Hence, one should not draw any practical conclusions without first consulting a Rav.
Over the course of writing the sefer, I had the privilege of submitting questions to Rav Yitzchak Berkovits shlit”a, one of the leading poskim in the halachos of Shmiras Halashon, and receiving responses. I was also given access to other responsa of Rav Berkovits regarding these halachos. The following are questions and answers that were reviewed by ...
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January 26, 2020 at 2:38 pm
Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Palestinian leaders threatened Sunday to withdraw from key provisions of the Oslo Accords, which define arrangements with Israel, if US President Donald Trump announces his Middle East peace plan next week.
Trump was scheduled to unveil the plan ahead of his meeting in Washington this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu, who has called Trump "the greatest friend that Israel has ever had", said he hoped to "make history" in Washington this week.
But the Palestinian leadership was not invited to the talks and has rejected Trump's initiative amid tensions with the US president over his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital.
World powers have long agreed that Jerusalem's fate should be set...
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January 26, 2020 at 2:35 pm
The German government on Wednesday returned three works of art stolen from a Jewish lawyer and collector during the Nazi occupation of France to descendants of their original owner, reported France 24.
The two paintings—Dame en Robe du Soir (“Woman in an Evening Gown”) and Portrait d’une Dame (“Portrait of a Woman”), both by Jean-Louis Forain, were handed over to the relatives of Armand Dorville, along with a drawing by Constantin Guys, a Dutch-born Frenchman who was a Crimean war correspondent.
Dorville died in 1941. His works were distributed to museums and private collectors, according to France 24. His family was unable to flee France when it was occupied by the Nazis from 1940-44; most of them were killed.
“It is no longer possible to make ...
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January 26, 2020 at 2:28 pm
A volley of rockets landed near the US embassy in the Iraqi capital Baghdad Sunday, two security sources told AFP, in the latest unclaimed attack on American installations in the country.
AFP reporters heard loud thuds emanating from the western bank of the Tigris, where most foreign embassies are located.
One security source said three Katyusha rockets hit near the high-security compound while another said as many as five struck the area.
Read more at ndtv.
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January 26, 2020 at 2:24 pm
The coronavirus now has a whistleblower — a nurse in Wuhan who insists in a shocking online video that close to 90,000 people in China have the disease, far more than the 1,975 reported by officials.
“I am in the area where the coronavirus started,” her video begins. Wuhan is the epicenter of the outbreak.
“I’m here to tell the truth,” the anonymous nurse says in the video, which shows her wearing a full-head face mask.
“At this moment, Hubei province, including the Wuhan area, even China, 90,000 people have been infected by a coronavirus.”
Read more at NY POST.
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January 26, 2020 at 2:22 pm
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Sunday offered for the first an apology for the war-time persecution of Jews on behalf of his country.
“Now the last survivors are still with us, I apologize today in the name of the government for what the authorities did at that time,” Rutte said.
Rutte was giving an address in Amsterdam in memory of victims of the Holocaust on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Only 38,000 of the 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands survived World War II, but no government apology has been offered for the role the authorities played.
Read more at i24NEWS.
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January 26, 2020 at 11:16 am
NEW YORK (VINnews) — Robert Holden, a New York city councilman, met with officials in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York after he had called on the FBI to launch a probe into what he termed the “deep-rooted fraud” in the New York Department of Education (DOE).
“I’m encouraged by my meeting with the US Attorney. His team is taking this seriously,” Holden told The New York Post.
FBI agents have already contacted several whistle-blowing teachers whose names he provided after Holden had charged the DOE with “an apparent pattern of conspiracy to cover up” grade-fixing, cheating and other wrongdoing. Holden claimed that this behavior warranted an investigation under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizat...
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January 26, 2020 at 11:13 am
US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib lost no time Saturday retweeting the post of Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official who wrote, “The heart just shatters. The pain is unbearable. No words.” while retweeting the words of a fake activist who created a modern-day blood libel against the Jews of Jerusalem.
“KIDNAPPED & EXECUTED” wrote “realSeifBitar” whose account has since been suspended by Twitter. “7 year old #Palestinian child Qusai was kidnapped by a Herd of violent #Israeli settlers, assaulted & thrown in a water well was found this morning frozen to death in Beit Hanina, #Jerusalem after #Israeli forces assaulted search teams”
Ashrawi, a seasoned politician with a reputation for false anti-Israeli stat...
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January 26, 2020 at 11:07 am
The Palestinian Authority reacted angrily to the invitation the Trump Administration extended to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader MK Benny Gantz to the White House next week to discuss the administration’s peace plan.
Nabil Abu Roudina, spokesman for PA president Mahmoud Abbas emphasized the PA’s “total opposition” to US resolutions which, among other things, recognize Yerushalayim as the capital of Israel.
He warned: “If this deal (Deal of the Century) is declared in its unacceptable form, the Palestinian leadership will announce a series of steps aimed at preserving our legitimate rights, and we will demand that Israel bear its full responsibility as an occupation government. We warn Israel and the US government against crossing ...
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January 26, 2020 at 11:06 am
George Soros, American-Jewish philanthropist and investor, announced a new $1 billion educational initiative aimed at promoting free and open societies at World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday.
The initiative aims to establish the Open Society University Network, which would “reach the students who need it the most” and “promote the values of open society — including free expression and diversity of beliefs.”
It also seeks to “strengthen foundations of open society amid authoritarian resurgence” in the world and foster a global research network countering polarization through “educating students to examine issues from different perspectives and advance reasoned arguments.”
Read more at i24NEWS.
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January 26, 2020 at 11:04 am
Israel’s foreign minister told a leading Russian news outlet on Wednesday that the Jewish state “probably would not exist” had it not been for the “victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany” in 1945.
Speaking ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Jerusalem for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz told the newspaper Izvestia that the people of Israel remembered “the contribution of Soviet soldiers to the fight against Nazi persecutors.”
The foreign minister’s interview was widely reported in the Russian press, with the Tass news agency highlighting Katz’s observation that “the victory gained by the Red Army and the anti-Hitler coalition wa...
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January 26, 2020 at 11:02 am
Neil Quinter, former chief counsel to Sen. Feinstein, weighs in on Trump’s defense team giving opening arguments during the impeachment trial.
