Survey of scholars places Trump as third worst president of all time

usatoday

In its sixth presidential ranking since 1982, 157 scholars surveyed by the institute ranked Trump the third worst president of all time after Andrew Johnson (who was impeached) and James Buchanan (whose presidency was followed by the Civil War). 

The Siena survey, released Thursday, is conducted after each new president has had a full year in office. It asks presidential scholars, historians and political scientists to rank the presidents according to 20 different categories. 

Because the survey is conducted after only one year in office, the sitting president normally comes in somewhere toward the middle of the pack as "scholars begin to observe their accomplishments, assess their abilities and study their attributes," said Don Levy, the institute's director, in a press release. 

פסק הלכה מרעיש ממרן פוסק הדור הגר"מ שטרנבוך שליט"א: אסור לעשן סיגריה אלקטרונית בלי הכשר

פסק הלכה מרעיש מתפרסם היום ממרן פוסק הדור הגאון רבי משה שטרנבוך שליט"א על הצורך בכשרות לנוזל האידוי המתאדה עם שאיפת המעשן בסיגריה אלקטרונית.
לאחרונה חלה תפנית אצל מעשנים רבים המחליפים מעישון רגיל בסיגריות הטבק לעישון בסיגריה אלקטרונית. לפי ההערכות ארגון הבריאות העולמי ועמותת הלב האמריקאית, השימוש בסיגריה אלקטרונית פחות מסוכן באופן משמעותי מאשר עישון טבק, כמו כן במחקרים שונים שנערכו נמצא כי שימוש בסיגריה אלקטרונית מגדיל את הסיכויים לגמילה מסיגריות טבק רגילות.

מבחינה טכנולוגית, הסיגריה האלקטרונית היא התפתחות של מכשיר האידוי. בתוך הסיגריה קיים 'נוזל אידוי' המתאדה עם שאיפת המשתמש ונכנס לתוך פיו. 'נוזל האידוי' מיוצר בדרך כלל מפרופילן גליקול (PG), גליצרין (VG), ולפעמים גם מפוליאתילן גליקול 400 (PEG400), ניקוטין וחומרי טעם וריח בריכוזים שונים, והשבוע עלתה לראשונה שאלת כשרות החומרים הקיימים בנוזל האידוי על שולחנו של מרן פוסק הדור הגאון רבי משה שטרנבוך שליט"א.

יצויין כי נושא כשרות הסיגריות הרגילות כבר עלו בעבר על שולחנם של גדולי בעלי ההוראה אשר הכריעו כי הסיגריות רגילות אינם צריכות הכשר משום שרוב החומר נפסל לאכילת כלב, וכמו כן שאיפת העשן מוגדרת על פי ההלכה כ'הנאה' ולא כ'אכילה'. אך לעומת זאת בסיגריה אלקטרונית רוב החומר ראוי למאכל אדם ולא נפסל ממאכל כלב, וכמו כן שאיפת ה"אדים" מוגדרת כאכילה – בניגוד ל"עשן" המוגדר רק כהנאה ולא כאכילה, ומכאן עלתה בפני מרן פוסק הדור הגאון רבי משה שטרנבוך שליט"א שאלת כשרות נוזל האידוי הנמצא בתוך הסיגריות האלקטרוניות.

במכתבו המתפרסם היום לראשונה, כותב מרן פוסק הדור הגאון רבי משה שטרנבוך שליט"א, כי אכן הסיגריה האלקטרונית צריכה הכשר מכיון שנוזל האידוי מכיל טעם טוב הנהפך לאדים וטעמו מורגש בתוך הפה, וכי עפ"י כללי ההלכה הדבר נחשב כטועם בפיו את גוף החומרים,  היות ש"זיעה דינו כממש".

פסק ההלכה עורר הדים רבים ברחבי העולם היהודי בארץ ובחו"ל, ובפרט לאור העובדה כי המעשנים כבר הורגלו שנים רבות כי הסיגריות אינם זקוקות להכשר, וכעת התוודעו לראשונה לעובדה כי חומרי נוזל האידוי הקיימים בתוך הסיגריה האלקטרונית עלולים להיות בעייתים מבחינה כשרותית, וכי שאיפת נוזל האידוי מוגדרת מבחינה הלכתית כ"אכילה" ולא כ"הנאה", ואין להשתמש בה ללא הכשר מהודר.

haaretz

jpost.

MK LITZMAN ACCUSED OF USING POWERS TO PREVENT EXTRADITION OF PEDOPHILE

According to reports, Litzman is suspected of trying to obtain medical evaluations that would prevent the extradition of Malka Leifer.

BY MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN

 FEBRUARY 14, 2019 18:05

2 minute read.

 

Health Minister Ya'acov Litzman at the Knesset August 8, 2018. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)

Deputy Health Minister MK Ya’acov Litzman was questioned Thursday at the National Fraud Investigation Unit in Lahav on suspicion of committing offenses of integrity, following a covert investigation that began several months ago.

The investigation is being conducted under the supervision of the Jerusalem District Attorney’s Office and with the approval of the attorney-general.

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Litzman is suspected of obstructing legal proceedings by working to obtain false papers in order to prevent the extradition of Malka Leifer, an ultra-Orthodox pedophile who was arrested in Israel in February 2018. Victorian police fought to bring Leifer back to Australia to face 74 charges of child sexual abuse.

According to reports, Litzman is suspected of trying to obtain psychiatric medical evaluations psychiatric medical evaluations that would prevent her extradition.

His office said that he was “summoned to the police today for an affair related to a public request for help, and he gave his full testimony and answered all the questions as required.”

But Manny Waks, CEO of Kol V’Oz, said, “We have long suspected high-level interference in the Malka Leifer case, and these serious allegations against Israel’s Deputy Health Minister, Rabbi Ya’acov Litzman, confirms the ongoing suspicion many have regarding this case.”

Waks said that while he would view Litzman as innocent until proven guilty, the minister’s “appalling track record speaks for itself,” noting that Litzman defended a recent visit to convicted sex offender Rabbi Eliezer Berland. He said that the minister likewise informed Leifer’s alleged victims in a chance encounter at the Knesset that he does not support them or Leifer’s extradition.

“Litzman has shown his true colors in the past, and hopefully he will now be brought to full account,” Waks said.

Indicted US intelligence analyst defector wore many faces in Iranian media

https://www.timesofisrael.com/indicted-us-intelligence-analyst-defector-wore-many-faces-in-iranian-media/

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The former US Air Force intelligence analyst, her brown hair now hidden underneath a mandatory hijab, stood before an Iranian ayatollah as a television camera filmed behind her.

It was 2012 and Monica Elfriede Witt offered Ayatollah Hadi Barikbin the pledge of faith all Islam converts must recite: “There is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger.”

Yet amid congratulations for her conversion, Witt — who once held a top secret security clearance — allegedly had a dark secret: She was being recruited by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to betray her country, according to federal prosecutors.

Private Mossad for Hire

newyorker/magazine/

One evening in 2016, a twenty-five-year-old community-college student named Alex Gutiérrez was waiting tables at La Piazza Ristorante Italiano, an upscale restaurant in Tulare, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Gutiérrez spotted Yorai Benzeevi, a physician who ran the local hospital, sitting at a table with Parmod Kumar, a member of the hospital board. They seemed to be in a celebratory mood, drinking expensive bottles of wine and laughing. This irritated Gutiérrez. The kingpins, he thought with disgust.

Gutiérrez had recently joined a Tulare organization called Citizens for Hospital Accountability. The group had accused Benzeevi of enriching himself at the expense of the cash-strapped hospital, which subsequently declared bankruptcy. (Benzeevi’s lawyers said that all his actions were authorized by his company’s contract with the facility.) According to court documents, the contract was extremely lucrative for Benzeevi; in a 2014 e-mail to his accountant, he estimated that his hospital business could generate nine million dollars in annual revenue, on top of his management fee of two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month. (In Tulare, the median household income was about forty-five thousand dollars a year.) The citizens’ group had drawn up an ambitious plan to get rid of Benzeevi by rooting out his allies on the hospital board. As 2016 came to a close, the group was pushing for a special election to unseat Kumar; if he were voted out, a majority of the board could rescind Benzeevi’s contract.

Gutiérrez, a political-science major, was a leader of the Young Democrats Club at the College of the Sequoias, and during the 2016 Presidential campaign he attended a rally for Bernie Sanders. Gutiérrez grew up watching his father, a dairyman, work twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, and Sanders’s message about corporate greed, income inequality, and the ills of America’s for-profit health-care system resonated with him. Seeing Benzeevi and Kumar enjoying themselves at La Piazza inflamed Gutiérrez’s sense of injustice. He spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s knocking on doors and asking neighbors to sign a petition for a recall vote, which ultimately garnered more than eleven hundred signatures. Gutiérrez later asked his mother, Senovia, if she would run for Kumar’s seat; the citizens’ group thought that Senovia, an immigrant and a social worker, would be an appealing candidate in a community that is around sixty per cent Hispanic.

The recall was a clear threat to Benzeevi’s hospital-management business, and he consulted a law firm in Washington, D.C., about mounting a campaign to save Kumar’s seat. An adviser there referred him to Psy-Group, an Israeli private intelligence company. Psy-Group’s slogan was “Shape Reality,” and its techniques included the use of elaborate false identities to manipulate its targets. Psy-Group was part of a new wave of private intelligence firms that recruited from the ranks of Israel’s secret services—self-described “private Mossads.” The most aggressive of these firms seemed willing to do just about anything for their clients.

Netziv nature of halacha

file:///C:/Users/yadmoshe/Documents/Hebrewbooks_org_31768.pdf



file:///C:/Users/yadmoshe/Documents/HebrewBooksOrg_31768_page_8.pdf

Please advise Re: Lev vs. Ruach

Shalom,

Perhaps you can help me. 

I am looking at the Gemara Sota 5a and the Rashi there regarding Chizkiya's statement regarding tefilla.

אמר חזקיה אין תפלתו של אדם נשמעת אא"כ משים לבו כבשר שנא' (ישעיהו סו, כג) והיה מדי חדש בחדשו [וגו'] יבא כל בשר להשתחוות וגו'

I've seen multiple pasukim and sources but I do not have clarity.  Can you please tell or direct me to sources the explain what the Ruach and Lev do in terms of decision making and especially in regards to prayer?

Pelosi, Dem leaders condemn Rep. Omar for 'anti-Semitic' language

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democratic-lawmakers-slam-rep-omar-over-deeply-hurtful-and-offensive-israel-comments

In an unprecedented rebuke under the new Congress, House Democratic leaders on Monday roundly condemned Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for statements about supporters of Israel that were widely viewed as anti-Semitic and called on her to apologize.

The statement issued by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership team followed the latest in a string of controversial comments from the freshman lawmaker -- as well as pressure from Republican leaders to speak out.

Muslim patrol group in New York faces backlash including far-right conspiracy theories

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-patrol-group-community-new-york-police-far-right-conspiracy-a8762056.html

Maeen Ali remembers the worry he felt when he first spotted the “Punish a Muslim Day” screed online.

The letter, mailed last spring throughout England, encouraged violence that ranged from pulling off a woman’s head scarf to bombing mosques. Each attack, the letter instructed, would be rewarded with points. The hate campaign prompted the police in New York and other big cities to expand patrols around mosques and Islamic centres on the specified day.

Mr Ali, who lives in downtown Brooklyn, said he was consumed by thoughts of his four children’s safety.

“That just boiled inside of me,” said Mr Ali, who moved to the United States from Yemen in 1990. “That’s when I said to myself that it was really important to come out and protect Muslims in the community.”

As word of the new patrol has begun to spread, the backlash has been swift, even among some members of the Muslim community who have criticised the lack of information, and questioned the need for the patrol.

Like the Shomrim that patrols largely Hasidic neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Asian Safety Patrol that operates mainly in Sunset Park, the new group – believed to be the first of its kind in the country – hopes to function as extra sets of eyes and ears for the police.

The unarmed civilian patrol will offer translation services – its members are fluent in any of seven languages – explain cultural nuances, report suspicious activity, respond to traffic accidents and even help in searches for the missing. The patrol has the support of Brooklyn’s borough president, Eric L Adams, and assistant chief Brian J Conroy, the commanding officer of patrol borough Brooklyn South.

El Paso officials denounce Trump’s border comments ahead of his 1st 2019 campaign rally

The El Paso Times reported that violent crime rates in the city increased 17 percent between 2006 to 2011, even with construction of the border fence beginning in 2008. The city had the third-lowest violent crime rate among 35 U.S. cities with a population over 500,000 from 2005 to 2007 -– all before construction on the fence began. And, according to the Uniform Crime Reports from the FBI, between 1993 and 2006 the number of violent crimes dropped by more than 34 percent.

'It’s all about the Benjamins baby’: Ilhan Omar again accused of anti-Semitism over tweets

washingtonpost

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) again faced accusations of anti-Semitism on Sunday night after she suggested in tweets, which started with a Puff Daddy rap lyric, that members of Congress support Israel because of money from the pro-Israel lobby.

It’s the second time this month that Omar has become entangled in a Twitter controversyreplete with emoji and snarky clapbacks centered on the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Omar, who supports the anti-Israel movement called BDS, for “boycott, divestment and sanctions,” has persistently fought accusations of anti-Semitism by maintaining that her condemnation of the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians does not equate to condemnation of Jewish people. She has also claimed to be the victim of GOP attacks seeking to misrepresent her position on Israel as anti-Semitic.

But on Sunday, some Democrats also joined a chorus of critics rebuking Omar for using what some described as an ugly anti-Semitic trope: that Jews control politics through money.

The Progressive Assault on Israel

ny times

A movement that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely deaf when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence.

It happened again last month in Detroit. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators seized the stage of the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force’s marquee conference, “Creating Change” and demanded a boycott of Israel. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they chanted — the tediously malign, thinly veiled call to end Israel as a Jewish state.

They were met with sustained applause by the audience at what is the largest annual conference of L.G.B.T.Q.activists in the United States. Conference organizers did nothing to stop the disruption or disavow the demonstrators.

For Tyler Gregory, neither the behavior of the protesters nor the passivity of the organizers came as a surprise. Gregory is executive director of A Wider Bridge, a North American L.G.B.T.Q. organization that works to support Israel and its gay community. In 2016, his group hosted a reception at the Task Force’s conference in Chicago. The event was mobbed by some 200 aggressive demonstrators, and Gregory and his audience had to barricade themselves in their room while those outside were harassed.

“Whether you believe in the concept of intersectionality is beside the point,” Gregory told me recently, referring to the idea that the oppression of one group is the oppression of all others. “If this is your value system, you are not following it. As Jews we were denied our safe space. We were denied our place in a movement that fights bigotry.”

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/child-protect-18/m2UjiV2FqFE/l-0kkOy7DgAJ

Real Fears’ Over Child Victims Act, Say Charedim

Survivors and advocates say continued Orthodox opposition is meant as signal of intimidation.

By Hannah Dreyfus February 6, 2019, 9:43 am ET

In the wake of the passage [https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/topic/child-victims-act] last week in Albany of the Child Victims Act, Orthodox leaders are cautioning that “fears” of a barrage of potentially crippling lawsuits from alleged victims of child sexual abuse against yeshivas and camps “are real.”

“The fact that law firms are actively seeking child victims is reason enough for our concern,” Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for Agudath Israel, the large charedi umbrella group, told The Jewish Week in an email.

Agudath Israel issued a statement shortly after the bill passed on Jan. 28 that its “look-back window” — a provision that allows victims of any age to pursue claims during a one-year window that begins six months after the law takes effect, even if the statute of limitations has run out — “could literally destroy schools, houses of worship that sponsor youth programs, summer camps and other institutions that are the very lifeblood of our community.”

Rabbi Mark Dratch, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), the largest group of Orthodox rabbis in North America, expressed the same concern.

“We share the concern about the potential impact on institutions that the one-year window may have on schools and institutions but recognize and support the children who are the victims in these cases,” he wrote to The Jewish Week in an email.

In terms of what kind of settlements victims might receive, a recent case offers one example. That year Brooklyn Yeshiva Torah Temimah agreed to pay out $2.1 million to two former students, who said they were molested by their teacher, Rabbi Joel Kolko, when they were 6 years old.

While the RCA and other centrist Orthodox groups have been largely mum on the issue, the ultra-Orthodox community, alongside the Catholic Church, has consistently opposed the bill’s passage, for fear of the act’s possible financial impact. A divided state legislature in Albany allowed the bill to languish for years. But now, with the Democratic takeover of both houses of the legislature in November, the majority party moved quickly to pass the bill, which had long been a Democratic priority.

In addition to the one-year look-back window, the bill allows child victims of sexual abuse to file claims against abusers until the victims reach the age of 55 in civil cases, a significant increase from the previous age limit of 23. For criminal cases, victims can seek prosecution until they are 28.

And while groups that once opposed the bill, such as the Catholic Church, laid down arms and unequivocally praised the bill’s passage on Jan. 28, Orthodox groups stood alone in continuing to express objections — in formal statements and in a slew of articles across Orthodox media platforms.

Marci Hamilton, founder and CEO of Child USA, a nonprofit that works to prevent child abuse, said the conspicuous response of Orthodox institutions is “very telling.”

“The fact is that only the yeshivas are still complaining,” said Hamilton, who sees the “alarmist rhetoric” as an “attempt to claim they [the yeshivas] are the victims.”

“The bishops tried this years ago and failed,” said Hamilton. “The Orthodox community is proving itself to be behind the curve. These organizations are incapable of seeing beyond their own immediate needs to the needs of the victims they created.”

Still, while expressing serious concerns about the bill’s potential repercussions no longer has sway in Albany, charedi and Orthodox institutions may well be targeting another audience, said Hamilton: their own constituents.

“The statements and op-eds and hand-wringing about yeshivas going bankrupt is really a coded message about religious beliefs,” said Hamilton, a legal scholar, who pointed out that no bankruptcies have been linked to similar look-back provisions implemented in other states.

ראיון מצהירות דת