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.
Trump: Fox’s Napolitano Asked for Supreme Court Seat, Pardon for His Friend
President Donald Trump slammed Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano on Saturday night, accusing the former judge of getting angry when the commander in chief refused to nominate him to the Supreme Court. Trump also claimed that he rejected a request to pardon one of Napolitano’s friends.
In a pair of tweets after his campaign rally in Wisconsin, Trump said that Napoitano had become “very hostile” toward his administration after he rejected his requests. “Ever since Andrew came to my office to ask that I appoint him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I said NO, he has been very hostile! Also asked for pardon for his friend. A good ‘pal’ of low ratings Shepard Smith,” the president said, referring to another member of Fox News who has been more critical of Trump.
Measles Misinformation Gets an Immigration Twist
factcheck
The outbreak of measles in the U.S. and around the world is due largely to inadequate vaccination rates in some communities, not illegal immigration, as one popular meme on Facebook claims.
The meme shows a picture of a baby who appears to be infected with measles and says: “Thanks to a highly effective vaccination program the Measles virus was eliminated from the U.S. in 2000. Thanks to the immigrants who illegally cross the U.S. Mexican border, and the Democrats who refuse to stop them, the Measles virus has been declared a public health emergency in 2019.”
The first part of that claim is correct. Measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000 and it was eliminated across both North and South America in 2016.
Elimination means cases can still occur, but the disease isn’t being continuously spread for a year or more in a specific area.
The second part of the claim, however, is incorrect.
The virus has been brought into the U.S. by people who have traveled to places where there is an outbreak or where the disease is still common, such as parts of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From those travelers, the disease can then spread in U.S. communities that have unvaccinated people, according to the CDC.
For example, the New York City health department declared a public health emergency on April 9. That measles outbreak, which started in 2018 and spread in the Orthodox Jewish community, was brought on by travelers who had been in Israel, where a large outbreak is occurring, according to the Pan American Health Organization.
Does a ‘Leaked’ British Intelligence Document Prove Trump Wiretapping Claims?
truthorfiction
A faked letter has been used to bolster claims that the Obama administration sought to wiretap Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, using British intelligence services as a proxy.
Synagogue Shootings Shattered Our Illusion. America Is No Safe Haven For Jews
Forward
On Saturday, April 27, a few hours before the shooting at the Chabad in Poway, California, I walked from my hotel in Amsterdam—where my family has been on vacation—to a synagogue I found online. I arrived at a building with no external Jewish markings. The door was locked. When I tried to open it, a man with a walkie-talkie showed up and explained that he was from the community security service.
He asked me where I was going. I said I was going to shul. He asked me if I knew what day it was on the Jewish calendar. I said it was Shabbat and the last day of Passover. He asked me to describe a Shabbat service and the rituals Jews perform on Passover. Then he said, “Complete this sentence: Shema Yisrael….”
Finally convinced that I was indeed a would-be shul-goer, not a would-be terrorist, he explained, “It’s different here than in the US. There’s a lot of anti-Semitism.”
He mentioned that he had recently visited New York. I asked where he had davened there. He replied: Chabad.
I’ve gone to shul many times in Europe, usually to unmarked, locked, guarded buildings. And it has long reinforced my American chauvinism.
Europe’s synagogues remind me of Europe’s Jews: every bit as Jewish as their American brethren in private, but publicly more cagey and discreet.
During my time as a graduate student in Britain, a dispute broke out over the construction of an eruv—an enclosure created so observant Jews can carry on Shabbat—in part of London. Many of the fiercest opponents were British Jews themselves. They feared the eruv would mark their neighborhood as different, and thus bring unwelcome attention from the public at large.
Had you asked me back then why American and European Jews were different, I would have replied that it was because America and Europe were different. The United States, while deeply racist against blacks—long the quintessential American “other”—was far more welcoming of immigrants.
Even American conservatism, I told my European friends at the time, was surprisingly inclusive. Look at George W. Bush and his political advisor, Karl Rove, who were welcoming Jews, Muslims, Asians and Latinos into the Republican Party in a bid to create an ecumenical conservative coalition that could triumph in an increasingly racially and religiously diverse America.
In retrospect, my analysis was self-satisfied and naïve. The Chassidic tradition teaches that just as Jews should clean their homes of chametz (leavened material) in preparation for Passover, we should also cleanse ourselves of our inflated sense of self, and become modest and humble like matzah.
And humility requires admitting that I was wrong.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
'THAT WAS ACTUALLY MY SICK IDEA': PRESIDENT TRUMP ON SENDING IMMIGRANTS TO SANCTUARY CITIES
Newsweek
President Donald Trump held a rally in Green Bay Wisconsin, on Saturday night, mostly touting his work in office, calling out Democrats, name-shaming Democrats and spinning a rolodex of cliches often heard at his rallies.
However, when addressing immigration and trying to shore up the southern border with Mexico, the president recalled his recent banter that he would start sending immigrants who overstayed their visits at holding facilities to the so-called sanctuary cities.
“Last month alone, 100,000 illegal immigrants arrived at our borders, placing a massive strain on communities and schools and hospitals and public resources, like nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said to the crowd. “Now, we’re sending many of them through sanctuary cities, thank you very much.”
“I’m proud to tell you that was actually my sick idea,” the president said.
Just two weeks ago, President Trump said detention facilities had become overcrowded, and that he would bus immigrant to sanctuary cities, which are actually cities, counties and states with laws and regulations that shield undocumented immigrants from being detained, incarcerated or removed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The very problematic view ofTtrump as a Jew or strongly influenced by them
The New York Times Apologizes for Publishing a Cartoon With 'Anti-Semitic Tropes'
The New York Times has apologized for an anti-Semitic cartoon that appeared in the newspaper’s international edition.
It showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dachshund wearing a Star of David collar and leading a blind and skullcap-wearing U.S. President Donald Trump.
One dead, three injured, in San Diego synagogue shooting
Multiple people were injured Saturday in a shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue.
Poway is approximately 20 miles north of San Diego.
The attack occurred at just prior to 11:30 a.m. local time.
All four of the patients were sent to the Palomar Medical Center.
The Daily Beast reported that two children were among those wounded in the shooting. Poway Mayor Steve Vaus told CNN that at least one person was killed in the attack.
Vaus also said members of the congregation engaged the shooter to prevent further violence, and added that the community was targeted by "someone with hate in their heart."
"I can tell you that it was a hate crime, and that will not stand. This community will come together," he said.
Eyewitness reports said one of the injured is the congregation's Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who was shot in his hand and lost two of his fingers.
According to the San Diego Sheriff's office, deputies investigated reports of a man with a gun, and a man was detained for questioning in connection with the shooting incident.
"We don't believe there are any other suspects," a spokesperson for San Diego police toldThe Daily Beast.
According to officials, the suspect is a 19-year-old adult white male from San Diego. Initially, he fled the scene, but later surrendered to police.
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
‘COUPLE OF FACEBOOK ADS’: JARED KUSHNER DOWNPLAYS RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE AS HE BLASTS INVESTIGATIONS
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner downplayed Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election Tuesday, suggesting it amounted to “a couple of Facebook ads.”
“When you look at what Russia did, buying some Facebook ads to try to sow dissent, it's a terrible thing,” Kushner said at the TIME 100 Summit in New York. “But I think the investigations and all the speculation that's happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple of Facebook ads.”
Kushner said that he spent about $160,000 on Facebook every three hours during the campaign, “so if you look at the magnitude of what they did and what they accomplished, I think the ensuing investigations have been way more harmful to our country.”
Fox News host DISMANTLES Jared Kushner live on air
Free at Last: after a bitter ordeal of abuse, Gov't cover up, and persecution, Rinas Bas Chedva finally receives her formal exemption from service in the IDF, B"H
Free at Last: after a bitter ordeal of abuse, Gov't cover up, and persecution, Rinas Bas Chedva finally receives her formal exemption from service in the IDF, B"H.
Attached: report in this week's Jewish Press Dispatch column.
Thank you all for all of your help. We now see what we can accomplish, and therefore have all that much more obligation to use our limited resources to do what we can for increasing numbers of teenage boys and girls being persecuted for doing the right things.
A good Moed, and a good Yom Tov,
Rabbi Noson Shmuel Leiter,
Help Rescue Our Children
The Mueller Report Was My Tipping Point
Let’s start at the end of this story. This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administrations.
If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.
Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Monday, April 22, 2019
Trump approval drops 3 points to 2019 low after release of Mueller report: Reuters/Ipsos poll
The number of Americans who approve of President Donald Trump dropped by 3 percentage points to the lowest level of the year following the release of a special counsel report detailing Russian interference in the last U.S. presidential election, according to an exclusive Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll
According to the poll, 37 percent of adults in the United States approved of Trump’s performance in office, down from 40 percent in a similar poll conducted on April 15 and matching the lowest level of the year. That is also down from 43 percent in a poll conducted shortly after U.S. Attorney General William Barr circulated a summary of the report in March.
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