US Job Market Weakens as Unemployment Reaches Four-Year High

Trump Addresses Nation on Venezuela Regime Change Operation

‘It’s rough out there’: Enten runs numbers on US job market

Trump says US will run Venezuela following Maduro's capture

 https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/venezuela-explosions-caracas-intl-hnk-01-03-26

President Donald Trump said Saturday that the US is “going to run” Venezuela in the immediate aftermath of the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” he said during a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. “We don’t want to be involved with having someone else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country.”

Trump did not offer a timeline for how long he anticipated such a transition of power would take.

Maddow’s instant reaction to Trump 'capturing' Maduro

Science vs Engineering Torah Scholarship Seems closer to Engineering

 Hi – I'm reading "The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans" by Bill Hammack Ph.D. and wanted to share this quote with you.

"Put another way, the two methods have different goals: the scientific method wants to reveal truths about the universe, while the engineering method seeks solutions to real-world problems. The scientific method has a prescribed process that we all learn in school—state a question, observe, state a hypothesis, test, analyze, and interpret—but it doesn’t know what will be discovered, what truth revealed. In contrast, the engineering method aims for a specific goal—an airplane, a computer, a cathedral—but it has no prescribed process. The engineering method cannot be reduced to a set of fixed steps that must be followed, because its power lies exactly in the fact that there is no “must.” The specialized skill of an engineer is to find the correct strategy to reach a goal, to select among, combine, and create the many rules of thumb that will lead to a solution. Most often a rule of thumb results in a numerical estimate of some quantity, but it also guides an approach to problem-solving. A common one that illustrates the flavor of this class of rule is “break complex problems into smaller, more manageable pieces.” Thus, the engineering method is best described as an attitude or approach or even a philosophy of creating a solution to a problem."

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/2xb42ZU

Israel Spiritual life outside

Rav Tzadok (Vayechi 47:28) Yakov lived in Egypt for 17 years, It says in the Zohar  that these 17 years  were the main ones of his life.He did not suffer and was not bothered by the yetzer harah.and it was like Olam HaBah.  

Trump says the job market is booming for U.S.-born. The data doesn’t show it.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/02/trump-americans-jobs-immigrants-labor/

President Donald Trump and White House leaders say that American workers are winning because of his immigration crackdown. But the data doesn’t back that up.

Since the summer, Trump officials have been trumpeting the idea that job creation is booming for U.S.-born workers. Trump said so, too, during a prime-time address last month aimed at assuaging Americans’ concerns about the economy.

In fact, data shows that U.S.-born workers are doing moderately worse under Trump than they were under President Joe Biden because the labor market has weakened — partly due to a sharp slowdown in immigration.

“The unemployment rate has been rising for both native-born and foreign-born adults,” said Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Commerce Department economist.

Joe Rogan Trashes Trump Admin Deporting Long-Term US Residents

 https://www.newsweek.com/joe-rogan-trashes-trump-admin-deporting-long-term-us-residents-11296338

Podcaster Joe Rogan criticized the Trump administration's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement operations during an episode of his show, pointing to what he described as a focus on quotas rather than targeting serious criminals.

Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, interviewed the GOP leader on his podcast and attended his inauguration. Trump campaigned on a tougher immigration platform, promising to deliver what he called the largest mass deportation in American history.

 "Think what's going on with ICE is one of the things that's going on with quotas for speeding tickets and things along those lines, is that they have numbers that they want to achieve," Rogan said on a podcast episode with Josh Dubin, a civil rights attorney, shared on December 30 . "They've openly talked about this—they want to remove a certain amount of people per week. And when they do that, I think everything's on the table."

"Then they start showing up at Home Depot instead of like looking for gangbangers and looking for criminals and cartel members. They go to whatever's easiest pickings so they can get numbers up," he said.

‘Locked and loaded’: Trump and Iranian officials exchange threats over protests

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/locked-and-loaded-trump-and-iranian-officials-exchange-threats-over-protests/

US President Donald Trump and top Iranian officials exchanged dueling threats Friday as widening economic protests swept across parts of the Islamic Republic, further escalating tensions between the countries after America joined Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear sites in June.

Trump initially wrote on his Truth Social platform, warning Iran that if it “violently kills peaceful protesters,” the United States “will come to their rescue.” At least seven people have been killed so far in violence surrounding the demonstrations, sparked in part by the collapse of Iran’s rial currency.

A Submarine, Some Suitcases, and Salvation: On Increasingly Inaccessible Testimony and the Perfection of the Dunera Story

 https://www.academia.edu/48906680/A_Submarine_Some_Suitcases_and_Salvation_On_Increasingly_Inaccessible_Testimony_and_the_Perfection_of_the_Dunera_Story

According to a story that is popular in religious Jewish circles, the HMT Dunera, transporting Germanspeaking Jewish internees to Australia in the summer of 1940, was miraculously saved from destruction because the captain of a German submarine discontinued his torpedo attack on the ship. He did so because he inferred, from German-language materials in suitcases floating in the sea behind the Dunera, that the ship was full of German POWs. In fact, however, the ship was full of Jewish internees, whose suitcases had been thrown overboard by corrupt and cruel British guards. Thus, the story illustrates the wondrous ways of divine providence and, accordingly, man's inability to judge God's administration of events, for what the internees perceived as a catastrophe, namely the loss of their property, was in fact the instrument of their salvation. This study of the story's origin, and of its growth and perfection over time, focuses on two points: (1) over time, the authority claimed for the story has become less and less susceptible to corroboration (and, hence, to refutation); (2) those who tell the story are not liars,

However, it seems that we should also recognise that among those who tell the story, for many or perhaps even most, the question of historical truth is not a central one, for they are involved in teaching another type of truth, which Christian theologians aptly term ‘kerygmatic truth’ – the type of truth that is ‘proclaimed’ (Greek: kēryssō) by religion.85 Namely, just as many Dunera Boys  were starting to give up on the story, it wandered – on the basis  of the impetus afforded by Patkin’s 1979 volume – into the centres of ultra-Orthodoxy in New York and Israel. For writers in those contexts, what was important for the story is what beliefs  it preaches, not its historical truth

The case of the Dunera suitcase-salvation story thus seems to be similar to the one sensitively reconstructed by Baumel and Schacter in their study of a much better-known Holocaust story –that of the 93 Bais Yaakov martyrs of Cracow, young women who committed suicide to avoid enslavement in a Nazi brothel. That story too, which they are, in the end, unable to confirm or to deny, but which they tend to doubt as history, is one that is believed and circulated because it fulfils an edifying function and corresponds to other great stories of the Jewish past – and so it is disseminated by those who believe it and repeat it. In that case the story contributes to fitting the Holocaust into a long tradition of Jewish martyrdom; in ours – into a long tradition of salvation stories, of stories of miraculous reversals, of blessings in disguise. In both cases, to call those who disseminate the stories ‘liars’ is not only to assert more certainty about the stories’ historical untruth, and about the storytellers’ awareness of that, than is actually warranted. It also amounts to mixing categories improperly, for what they really claim for the story is kerygmatic truth. Historical truth might be taken for granted, but is not the point.

Here too, finally, the same distinction between historical truth and kerygmatic truth applies. How many people who watch the Aish HaTorah movie, for example, would assert that it is historically true? To assume that numerous viewers would make that assertion, we would have to assume that they would uncritically accept the blatantly vague report that ‘in approximately 1980 somebody opened the German navy archives from the Nazi era, and somebody was able to find the handwritten diary [of] a German submarine commander in the English Channel [sic] in July of 1940’ – but how many of them would depend on such vague statements in making any decisions about their own lives or businesses? Presumably, very few. And even if they were happy to believe the story, would they be willing to testify to its truth, or to invest money on the premise that it is true? Perhaps some would. But probably many more would respond with something like ‘I really don’t know, but “they” say it is true, and as far as I know it hasn’t been disproven; anyway, “se non è vero, è ben trovato”, by which I mean that even if it didn’t happen, it could have happened. What is important, for me, is that the lesson it teaches – that even in the face of tragedy we should remain optimistic and retain our faith in a providential God – is one that we believe is true and important to disseminate.’

Donald Trump proves he’s the stupidest man in the Situation Room

My Parents’ Secret for Living Well Into Their 90s: Embracing Strangers

 https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/my-parents-secret-for-living-well-into-their-90s-embracing-strangers-6586769b?mod=hp_lead_pos9

I have spent my career studying what makes people live healthier and longer. My mom and dad are proof that the key is staying socially connected.

I have spent my professional life studying what makes people live healthier and longer. I have analyzed data sets on longevity the world over and reviewed hundreds of clinical studies. I have heard numerous new claims about supplements, diets and tech devices that are supposed to extend life. But nothing I have read in the scientific literature explains longevity better than the lives of my incorrigibly social parents, Benjamin and Marsha Emanuel.

More than 69,000 Israelis left Israel in 2025, as population reached 10.18 million

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/more-than-69000-israelis-left-israel-in-2025-as-population-reached-10-18-million/

More than 69,000 Israelis left the country in 2025 under the shadow of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, leading the country to record a negative migration balance for the second straight year, the Central Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday in a year-end report.

According to the CBS, about 24,600 new immigrants arrived in 2025, 8,000 fewer than in 2024. (That’s more than the 21,900 the Immigration and Absorption Ministry announced Monday.) Most of the decline was attributable to a sharp drop in immigrants from Russia, after numbers from that country spiked following the start of Russia’s war with Ukraine in 2022.

Meanwhile, some 19,000 Israelis returned to Israel after an extended time living abroad, and 5,500 people arrived for family reunification purposes, the CBS said. That brought the total migration balance to a net loss of about 20,000 people.