BALTIMORE — More than a dozen people were arrested during Saturday's protests held in Baltimore in wake of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota. Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said Saturday's demonstrations were largely peaceful, but 12 adults and two juveniles were arrested on charges related to the protests that include burglary, aggravated assault, attempted arson and failure to obey a lawful order. "If you're coming Baltimore to protest peacefully, we welcome you. But if you're coming here to throw bricks or break storefront windows or break police vehicles, you're going to find yourself in a jail cell. That's a promise," Mayor Jack Young said Sunday. Hundreds of demonstrators began the afternoon with a motorcade t...
The suspected Iranian cyber attack on a minor water facility in central Israel earlier this month was “designed to trigger a humanitarian disaster,” according to Israel National Cyber Directorate head Yigal Unna. “The word ‘fast’ doesn’t do justice to the hectic pace at which things are happening in the cyber sphere. We will remember this past month as a point of change in the history of modern cyberwars,” Unna said on Friday at an international conference on cyber technology. “The attempt to attack Israel was coordinated and organized with the aim of crippling our humanitarian water system. This is not critical state infrastructure and we were able to prevent the attack, but had it been successful, we would have found ourselves—in th...
There are growing signs that COVID-19 may have lingering effects, called sequelae in medical terminology. Early studies have found decreased lung function that might not be reversible, and damage to the heart, kidneys, gut or liver. Experts say it is not unusual for diseases to have lasting impacts on those who contract them. Studies in the wake of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa found a significant number of survivors suffered from eye trouble or severe arthritis. Other diseases that cause pneumonia can cause permanent damage to the respiratory system. Another coronavirus, SARS, caused victims sustained lung damage even after they recovered. “Most of the sequelae that we’re seeing are the same types of sequelae that we see with any cause of pneumonia,” said Amesh Adal...
Baltimore, MD - May 31, 2020 - An interview with former Baltimorean Jeremy Staiman about his new song, Refaeinu BJL: What’s the story behind your new song? JS: Well, the real story is that it’s not new at all. I wrote the tune to Refaeinu in the late 1980s, but I never did anything serious with it. Once it became apparent recently that people were going to be shut inside and surrounded by illness and death, I felt that since it’s a song based on our daily prayer for health, this was the right time to bring it out. It was also clear that the music industry was going to be one of the hardest hit sectors, so this way I could at least pay a few shekels to some musicians along the way. It’s a drop in the bucket of what they need, but every drop counts. BJL: How d...
Question #1: Why is this brocha different? “Why is the brocha for duchening so different from all the other brochos we recite before we perform mitzvos?” Question #2: Hoarse kohein “If a kohein is suffering from laryngitis, can he observe the mitzvah of Birkas Kohanim?” Question #3: The chazzan duchening “If the chazzan is a kohein, may he duchen?” Answer: For the next several weeks, the Jewish communities of Eretz Yisroel and of chutz la’aretz are reading different parshiyos, and I am choosing topics that are applicable to both areas. This week I chose the topic of duchening, partly because I have not sent an article on the topic in many years, and because the mitzvah is in parshas Naso, and kohanim feature significantly both in parshas Nas...
Baltimore, MD - May 31, 2020 - Today we were informed of the petira (death) of Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm who lead my alma mater Yeshiva University for many years including my years in Rabbinical School. Dr. Lamm was a scholar of both Jewish and secular knowledge, and a gentleman, exceptionally sensitive to others. He served a pulpit "out of town- pringfield, MA", as well as one of the most prestigious congregations in America, the Jewish Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan before becoming President, Rosh Yeshiva, and eventually Chancellor of the The University and the Rabbinical School. Every potential Rabbi had to have a personal meeting and a one-on-one test of our learning, among other topics with him in his office. Later my Rabbinical Class all went to Dr. Lamm's  (and h...
On paper, it sounds like just another startup. A young company developing advanced technology, being managed with great secrecy. In fact, Tomer is a company owned by the government of Israel that is meant to act as a center of national expertise in the field of rocket propulsion. Tomer was set up in advance of the privatization of state-owned Israeli arms manufacturer IMI Systems (Israeli Military Industries). The Ministry of Defense feared that the company could be sold to foreign owners together with classified technologies so it set up a new state-owned company that wouldn’t be part of the privatization to safeguard them. Ultimately, it was Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems that acquired IMI back in November 2018, paying what was at the time approximately $495 million (NIS...
Things are falling apart in Minneapolis and, as they collapse, our leadership class seems thrilled by it.
Jews arrived in droves to ascend to the har Habayis in Yerushalayim this morning, the first time the sacred site was reopened to Jewish visitation since being closed due to COVID-19 concerns over two months ago. Among the hundreds of Jews who went up to the holiest site in the Jewish religion today were MKs Uri Ariel and former MKs Yehuda Glick and Shuli Muallem-Refaeli. “After 70 days during which the Temple Mount was closed to visiting and prayer, tomorrow it will open!” tweeted Muallem-Refaeli. “I invite you all with great excitement to join me tomorrow to go up in purity at 8:30 a.m. I have a strong longing for the holy place, to go up together with many people from all parts of Israeli society and especially to pray for recovery and peace for all.” The Jewis...
Israeli schools will remain open despite a COVID-19 outbreak at a high school, the country’s Health Ministry said, but Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu warned that coronavirus curbs would be reimposed if infection rates increase. Israel has lifted many restrictions over the past few weeks as infection rates have dropped. But they rose sharply on Friday with 121 new cases being reported by Saturday morning—the majority of which originated at one Jerusalem high school—up from only four last Saturday. In a televised address, Netanyahu said it was still too early to say whether this showed a change in trend. The next few days, he said, would determine whether there was a significant rise in infection rates that would require a policy change. The prime minister stresse...
Rep. Ilhan Omar said on Sunday that while some Minneapolis residents felt safer with National Guard troops on city streets after demonstrations over the police-involved death of George Floyd turned violent, others “felt terrorized by the presence of tanks” while protesting. “I think last night, the community did feel safe to know that there will not be a burning of their businesses and their homes,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We are obviously worried and feeling terrorized about that prospect.” But, she added, there were “also many people who chose to demonstrate and not abide by the curfew, who felt like they also were terrorized by the presence of tanks, by the presence of the National Guard and a militarized police.&rdqu...
President Trump announced Sunday that the U.S. government will designate the far-left group Antifa as a terrorist organization. This comes as Trump has blamed Antifa for riots taking place across the country in response to the death of George Floyd, the unarmed black man who died May 25 while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn., after an officer kneeled on his neck for more than 8 minutes in an incident caught on video. "The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization," Trump tweeted Sunday afternoon. It remains unclear exactly who was behind the escalation what began as peaceful protests against police, with accusations lobbed against both far-left extremists and white nationalists. The president has been forceful in po...
As National Mental Health Awareness Month comes to an end, we at Amudim have recognized that the mental health-related crisis brought on by coronavirus has only just begun. While we had hoped to see a drop in the volume of mental health related cases as pandemic restrictions began to ease, exactly the opposite has happened. Many people who have started adjusting to their new realities in the United States, Israel and in other parts of the world have found themselves struggling with issues that they may have been too busy to focus on during the height of the outbreak. Domestic violence victims who were quarantined with their abusers are only now beginning to seek help; and the volume of calls from those struggling with addiction, who were at a higher risk of relapse during the lockdown, has...
Most kids are home-schooling these days with Zoom. Parents are giving their kids laptops and phones, trusting them to use it only for the right things. But GuardYourEyes.com has been getting hundreds of new cases of young teens (14-15 yrs old) who are turning to us for help, having discovered shmutz by mistake or through curiosity, through the devices their parents gave them to use for Zoom. Having a lot of time on their hands, they are falling in and finding it impossible to control themselves. When we suggest they speak to their parents about putting a filter on their device, they claim to be too ashamed to discuss it, lest their parents suspect they have a problem! Some are asking us to sponsor filters for them so that they can get a filter installed without their parents knowing&he...
The wife of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter after the death of George Floyd, has filed for divorce. According to a statement from Sekula Law Offices PLLC, Kellie Chauvin has officially filed for divorce. A lawyer for Kellie Chauvin added that she is distraught about the death of Floyd, CBS reported. “She is devastated by Mr. Floyd’s death and her utmost sympathy lies with his family, with his loved ones and with everyone who is grieving this tragedy,” the law firm said in a statement on behalf of Kellie Chauvin and her family. “While Ms. Chauvin has no children from her current marriage, she respectfully requests that her children, her elder parents, and her extended family be gi...
IDF soldiers from the Kfir Brigade’s Shimshon Battalion on Friday afternoon foiled a ramming attack near the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah. The attempted attack occurred during a road security operation near the Meir Spring, between Neve Tzuf and Nabi Salih. The terrorist, a 39-year-old Palestinian Authority Arab, was eliminated. None of the soldiers were injured. Read more at Arutz Sheva.
After a successful launch into orbit yesterday, SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavour spacecraft has docked at the International Space Station. Watch as astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley join the crew aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Don’t elect progressive Democrats if you want to be safe, says former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on ‘Hannity.’
New Jersey may have to cut half the state’s 400,000 public employees if the federal government doesn’t help make up a $10.1 billion revenue shortage through June 2021, Governor Phil Murphy said. “I don’t think there’s any amount of cuts or any amount of taxes that begins to fill the hole,” Murphy, 62, a retired Goldman Sachs Group senior director and Democrat who came to office in January 2018, told Bloomberg Television. Without federal help, he said, state and local governments will have to dismiss firefighters, police, emergency-medical personnel and others. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has made similar comments and calls for aid to fill revenue losses from the novel coronavirus. “The alternative to not getting that funding is a whole lo...
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