Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Mattis ignored orders from Trump, White House on North Korea, Iran: report
Former Defense Secretary James Mattis declined to carry out orders from President Trump or otherwise limited his options in various attempts to prevent tensions with North Korea, Iran and Syria from escalating, The New Yorker reported Monday, the latest account of Trump’s own officials trying to check his worst instincts.
"The president thinks out loud. Do you treat it like an order? Or do you treat it as part of a longer conversation? We treated it as part of a longer conversation," a former senior national security official told The New Yorker.
"We prevented a lot of bad things from happening."
In 2017, following a series of North Korean ballistic missile tests, Trump ordered the Pentagon to begin removing the spouses and children of military personnel from South Korea, where the U.S. military has a base. An administration official told the magazine that "Mattis just ignored" the order.
In another instance in the fall of 2017, as White House officials were planning a private meeting at Camp David to develop military options for a possible conflict with North Korea, Mattis allegedly stopped the gathering from happening. He ignored a request from then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster to send officers and planners, according to a former senior administration official.
In first, Israel jails divorce-refuser on criminal charges
.timesofisrael
For the first time in its history, Israel will jail a divorce-refuser on criminal charges, at the prodding of the state-run rabbinical courts, and against the wishes of his former wife, who secured a private religious annulment of their marriage nearly a year ago.
The Jerusalem Magistrates’ Court ruled Tuesday that Meir Gorodetsky will be incarcerated for 15 months on charges of violating a court order, over his refusal — spanning over two decades — to abide by state rabbinical court orders to grant his wife a divorce. He was convicted on the charge earlier this month.
Little Evidence to Suggest Orthodox Jewish Community Affected by Measles Is Undervaccinated
.the epochtimes
Orthodox Jews have customs and beliefs very different from those of the mainstream, so when measles started to spread among them, the rest of the world jumped to the conclusion that this was because many of them eschew vaccination.
Stoked by fear of a disease that health officials could not stop, many media reports and even the New York mayor’s office have reinforced this narrative.
To date, city officials have reported 390 cases of measles in Brooklyn and Queens since the outbreak started in October, and media and government officials have implied that low vaccination rates are responsible.
To fix this apparent failure to vaccinate, Mayor Bill de Blasio mandated MMR vaccination in neighborhoods affected by the outbreak as well as in surrounding neighborhoods encompassed by four zip codes. This mandate overruled established New York law that gives parents the right to opt not to vaccinate their children based on religious reasons.
Furthermore, because of the belief that there is widespread abuse of the religious exemption among Jews, some New York state senators now are calling for an end to the exemption.
A record-breaking measles outbreak owes its existence to the anti-vaccination movement
salon
The report states that more than 500 of the people infected in 22 states were not vaccinated. Sixty-six people have been hospitalized. The biggest outbreaks have occurred in two communities in New York: Rockland County and Brooklyn, New York. Both have strong Orthodox Jewish communities, where misinformation about vaccinations has been spreading. Other cases that have been reported to the CDC have occurred in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, and Washington.
Trump says measles vaccine ‘so important’; in the past, he warned about autism
.timesofisrael.
President Donald Trump on Friday urged Americans to get vaccinated as a measles outbreak spread across the country, reaching the highest number of cases in the country since 2000.
“Vaccinations are so important,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “They have to get their shots.”
The scale of the measles outbreak in the United States — with 695 recorded cases since January 1 — is dwarfed by the situation in Ukraine, which has some 25,000 patients and Madagascar with 46,000 cases of the disease.
But anti-vaccine sentiment, often fueled by disinformation, has sent immunization rates plummeting in so-called pockets.
This year’s US caseload, the highest since the disease was declared eliminated almost two decades ago, has been concentrated in three heavily Jewish areas in Brooklyn, Rockland County near New York, and near Detroit, and in a Russian-speaking community in Washington State.
Earlier this month New York’s mayor declared a public health emergency in heavily Orthodox Jewish parts of Brooklyn, ordering all residents to be vaccinated.
Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism,” Trump said on Twitter in 2012.
He reiterated that message while running for president in 2015.
“Autism has become an epidemic. Twenty-five years ago, 35 years ago, you look at the statistics, not even close. It has gotten totally out of control. I am totally in favor of vaccines. But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time,” Trump said during a presidential primary debate on CNN.
Global Spread
The anti-vaxxer movement, based on a scientifically debunked 1988 British report linking the MMR vaccine to autism, has surged in recent years with the rise of online conspiracy theories on social media.
Repeated studies, the most recent involving more than 650,000 children monitored for more than a decade, have shown that there is no such link.
An estimated 169 million children missed out on the vital first dose of the measles vaccine between 2010 and 2017, according to a UNICEF report.
The number of cases of the disease had risen 300 percent worldwide in the first three months of 2019 compared to the same period last year, the UN said.
Measles, mumps and rubella vaccines are seen in a cooler at the Rockland County Health Department in Pomona, New York, March 27, 2019 (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
The anti-vaxxer movement has adherents across the Western world but is particularly high profile in the United States.
The US outbreak has been blamed in part on unvaccinated visitors contracting the disease during visits to both Israel and Ukraine.
The New York outbreak has been traced to Orthodox Jews from Brooklynvisiting Israel, then spreading the highly infectious disease through synagogues, schools and apartment blocks to children whose parents had not had them inoculated.
In Clark County, Washington, the disease has spiked among the Russian-speaking community after a child brought the virus back from Ukraine in December and it spread to 74 other people, mostly children, through schools, supermarkets and a bowling alley.
Ukraine, which has experienced five years of simmering conflict with Russia on its eastern border region, has had at least 11 people die from the illness.
Measles is one of the world’s most contagious viruses. Spread by coughing or sneezing, the virus can linger in the air long after an infected person leaves a room.
Monday, April 29, 2019
יענקי ברגר ריצה עונש מאסר לאחר שהורשע בעבירות מס בתלמודי תורה שניהל
mobile.kikar
• הוא מספר ב'מונולוג חג' ל'כיכר' מה חיזק אותו בין כותלי הכלא, וגם מזהיר אותנו (כיכר TV פסח)
A report card for Trump's economy
cnn
President Donald Trump claims full credit for the strong economy and stock market.
In his telling, everything was set to tank when he moved into the White House and took over from President Barack Obama.
Assessing that argument requires giving Trump's current economy a sort of report card as well as comparing what he's done with what Obama did. Let's get started.
5 things to know about the US economy during Trump’s State of the Union
vox
During the State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Donald Trump tried to persuade Americans that the US economy is booming — and that it’s all thanks to him.
“In just over two years since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom, a boom that has rarely been seen before. There has been nothing like it,” Trump said at the beginning of his speech. “An economic miracle is taking place in the United States.”
By the end of his speech, he’ll likely point to the low unemployment rate and robust job growth as evidence of his business skills. He’ll probably remind Americans that the US stock market had a great month in January — even though 2018 was the worst year for stocks in a decade. (He’ll also definitely leave out the fact that manufacturing jobs are far from “roaring back to life” as a result of his new trade deals.)
Here’s the truth: The US economy under Trump is doing just fine. The president has overseen a slow but steady economic expansion, albeit one that started under President Barack Obama.
There is one major problem, though — that growth has mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans, while average workers have barely seen their paychecks grow.
Taking that into account, it’s no surprise that many Americans are concerned. Nearly half —48 percent — of Americans say they believe economic conditions are worsening, up from 45 percent in December and 36 percent in November, according to a January poll by Gallup, a Washington, DC-based consulting firm.
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