https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-us-trump-trade-war-retaliation-70523b7c?mod=hp_lead_pos10
Beyond legal maneuvers, China is turning to other sources of asymmetric strength to strike back at the U.S., such as its advantage in the supply chain for drones and the production of certain critical minerals that play a key role in semiconductors, batteries and defense equipment.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/400611
12-year-old boy murdered, two people moderately injured, and two lightly injured as terrorist opens fire on a bus near the Al-Khader Junction, before fleeing the scene. Security forces are searching for him.
Are liberals still in their McCarthyite phase? The ugly criticism of Tulsi Gabbard as a “likely Russian asset” (Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz) might convince Trump supporters that she is being maligned, as President Trump was, because she’s on board with his agenda.
The truth, which has Republican Senators concerned, is the opposite: Ms. Gabbard is on ample record as a dogmatic opponent of the policies that made Mr. Trump’s first-term foreign policy a success and that Democrats resisted. The former Democrat would be a risky fit as director of national intelligence (DNI).
In court papers, the government said the leak caused Israel to delay its attack plans. Edwards said the volatile nature of the Middle East made the leak exceptionally dangerous.
“It is hard to overstate what other circumstances present graver risks of danger to human life than unilaterally deciding to transmitting information related to plans for kinetic military action between two countries,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.
In 1981, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the most outstanding rabbinical authority in the United States at that time, was asked by the Governor of New York (Hugh Carey) to present the Orthodox Jewish approach to capital punishment, which was then (as ever) a controversial topic in the state. In his answer (volume II of Choshen Mishpat number 68), Rav Moshe constantly emphasizes not the underlying liability to capital punishment but rather the many different practical obstacles that the Torah justice system, as explained in the Talmud, places in the way of actual execution of this punishment.
https://newrepublic.com/article/142389/donald-trumps-enduring-corruption-presidency
Trump’s transformation of the presidency into a kleptocracy has unfolded at a dizzying and dismaying pace. “The Trump family and assorted cronies are using the highest office in the land to stuff their pockets,” Tim Egan wrote Friday in the Times. “The presidential sleaze involves everything from using public money to promote and enrich Trump properties to pay-to-play schemes that allow companies to buy influence at many levels.”
There are near-daily examples of such corruption: the use of his private resort, Mar-a-Lago, both as a presidential social club and insecure diplomatic compound (one that was promoted on a State Department website, no less, and which doubled its membership fee after Trump became president); the refusal to keep a log of who is visiting Mar-a-Lago; the nepotistic hiring of son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump as White House employees; the hawking of Ivanka’s products by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway; the expansion of Trump’s brand (and Ivanka’s brand) into countries that he is also negotiating with; Kusher’s 400 million dollar partnership with the Anbang Insurance Group (described by Bloomberg as a firm whose “murky links to the Chinese power structure have raised national security concerns over its U.S. investments”); Trump’s failure to disentangle himself from his businesses, including the unannounced modification of the terms of Trump’s trust, allowing him to withdraw funds from his businesses without public disclosure; and the relentless financial secrecy, so that the public can’t even gauge conflicts of interest.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-second-term-mafia-state/676128/
Donald Trump and his cronies left his first administration with a playbook for self-enrichment in a second term.
In the annals of government ethics, the year 2017 exists in a bygone era. That September, Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, resigned in disgrace. His unforgivable sin was chartering private jets funded by taxpayers, when he just as easily could have flown commercial. Compared with the abuses of power in the years that followed, the transgression was relatively picayune. But at that early moment, even Trump felt obliged to join the criticism of Price.
During Trump’s first months as president, it wasn’t yet clear how much concentrated corruption the nation, or his own party, would tolerate, which is why Trump was compelled to dispose of the occasional Cabinet secretary. Yet nearly everything about Trump’s history in real estate, where he greased palms and bullied officials, suggested that he regarded the government as a lucrative instrument for his own gain.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/24/politics/trump-worst-abuses-of-power/index.html
Former President Donald Trump flouted the limits of presidential power unlike any of his recent predecessors, leaving behind a legacy of unmatched abuses that range from violations of longstanding norms to potentially criminal behavior.
It was hard to keep track amid the daily deluge of controversial tweets and distractions that were a hallmark of the Trump presidency. And some of the most egregious abuses of power weren’t clear at the time but came into focus after exhaustive investigations.
To chronicle Trump’s most consequential abuses of power, CNN spoke with a politically diverse group of constitutional scholars, presidential historians and experts on democratic institutions.
While these 16 experts did not agree on everything, there was consensus that Trump’s pattern of abusing his powers for personal or political gain reached an alarming level that hasn’t been seen in modern history, and will have long-lasting consequences for the future of American democracy.
The announcement hit conspicuously soon after Trump Jr., 46, was pictured cozying up with Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson, 38.
Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle, 55, have not officially split—though the eldest child of the president-elect has reportedly made it no secret in Florida circles. Guilfoyle was previously married to California Governor Gavin Newsom before moving onto Trump Jr. in 2018.
https://www.bhol.co.il/news/1680680
סאגת פרשת היתר מאה הרבנים מגיעה לסיומה הדרמטי: הגט סודר בארה"ב בשעת לילה מאוחרת בבית הדין בשכונת בורו פארק | הקרדיט לדיין מישראל ולבן האדמו"ר מארה"ב | הרב כץ מטאהש מונסי צפוי לשוב לביתו בקרוב לאחר שעוכב יציאה בארץ והאישה מותרת להינשא בשעה טובה
In a recent article in Binah magazine an attempt was made to show that the discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 was a miraculous gift from G-d. However he neglects to mention that after Fleming discovered it became a mere medical curiosity since Fleming was more aligned with Homeopathy than real medicine. In addition it was deemed impossible to make large and therefore useful amounts of the substance. This changed through the efforts of two individuals ten years later, Florey and Chain, who received the Nobel prize with Fleming. So while it was a gift from G-d the path to being a useful tool was rather convoluted rather than the smooth obvious path depicted in the article.
Watson, Peter. The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (p. 368). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
The age of antibiotics had taken a while to arrive. The word antibiotic itself first entered the English language at the turn of the century. Doctors were aware that bodies have their own defenses – up to a point – and since 1870 it had been known that some Penicillium molds acted against bacteria. But until the 1920s, most medical attempts to combat microbial infection had largely failed – quinine worked for malaria, and the ‘arsenicals’ worked for syphilis, but these apart, there was a general rule that ‘chemicals’ in therapy did as much damage to the patient as to the microbe. This is why the view took hold that the best way forward was some device to take advantage of the body’s own defences, the old principle of homeopathy. A leading centre of this approach was Saint Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, in London, where one of the doctors was Alexander Fleming. To begin with, Fleming worked on the Salvarsen trials in Britain (see chapter 6). However, he dropped into the lab in Paddington one day in the summer of 1928, having been away for a couple of weeks on holiday, and having left a number of cultures in the lab to grow in dishes.32 He noticed that one culture, Penicillium, appeared to have killed the bacteria in the surrounding region.33 Over the following weeks, various colleagues tried the mould on themselves – on their eye infections, for example – but Fleming failed to capitalise on this early success. Who knows what Fleming would or would not have done, but for a very different man?
The result was that penicillin became an American product (the pharmaceutical companies took Florey’s results but did their own clinical trials). For many, penicillin has always been an American invention.36 Without the help of the U.S. pharmaceutical companies, penicillin would no doubt not have had the impact it did (or have been so cheap so early), but the award of the Nobel Prize in 1945 to Fleming, Florey, and Chain showed that the intellectual achievement belonged to the British-Australians and the Russo-German Jew Chain.
comment by Rabbi Spira
שו"ת אגרות משה אורח חיים חלק ב סימן קיא
אף שצריך להאמין שהשי"ת יכול ליתן פרנסה מכל אומנות שהיא כדאר"מ שם /קידושין פ"ב/ שאין עניות מן האומנות ואין עשירות מן האומנות אלא הכל לפי זכותו, משום דאינו יודע שמא הוא אינו זוכה להרויח באומנות אחרת אלא בכזו שיותר ראויה להרוחה, אבל ידע שכל מה שירויח אחר כל הדברים והשתדלות שעושה הוא רק מהשי"ת הנותן כח לעשות חיל ותרגם אונקלוס שנותן לך עצה למקני נכסין וכן כל דבר שעושה ומרויח בזה.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-no-lower-israel-us-airfares-on-the-horizon-1001496432
There seems to be a fading likelihood that El Al will face competition before April on its US routes, thus putting downward pressure on airfares. But even if Delta Airlines resumes Israel flights as planned in April 2025, many of its tickets are more expensive than the equivalent El Al tickets.
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-832900
Massad Boulos, President-elect Donald Trump’s advisor on Middle Eastern and Arab affairs, said that the United States would have to discuss laying out a “roadmap” to Palestinian statehood if it hopes to establish relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi officials have long made it known that they would not establish ties with Israel absent progress toward a Palestinian state. But for Boulos — a Lebanese-American billionaire and the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany — to emphasize the point is significant because other Trump appointees, in addition to Trump himself, are seen as close to the Israeli right, which rejects Palestinian statehood.
