The USA Moving Away From Free Speech as Google Play suspends Parler, Apple threatens to

 The app for a favorite social network of President Trump supporters will no longer be sold on Google Play — and Apple is also threatening to pull it, according to reports.

Parler, which bills itself as “an unbiased social media focused on real user experiences and engagement,” can’t be sold on Google Play until the platform develops some moderation policies, according to Axios Tech Reporter Ashley Gold.

Apple, meanwhile, is giving the app 24 hours to introduce policies before pulling the plug, BuzzFeedNews reports.

“We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property,” Apple wrote to Parler, according to the news site. 

“The app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”

Trump falsely claimed he won the election and was the victim of unsubstantiated election fraud on the Twitter-like service, which gained millions of users after Election Day, according to ABC News.

Google and Apple’s moves against Parler come after Twitter and Facebook suspended the president’s accounts indefinitely.

On Friday, YouTube banned alt-right leader Steve Bannon’s podcast “War Room,” following an appearance by the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani where he continued to make baseless claims about election fraud.

On Friday, Twitter suspended the accounts of former Gen. Mike Flynn and lawyer Sidney Powell for spreading the same misinformation.

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Jewish woman, 102, describes disturbing memory of her neighbor — Adolf Hitler

 

A Jewish woman who revealed last year that she used to live next door to Adolf Hitler prior to World War II, has provided new details about the Nazi leader’s life.

Alice Frank Stock, who recently turned 102, said that she spent her early years living near Hitler in Munich during the 1920s and 1930s, according to British news agency SWNS. Stock, whose family lived on Prinzregentenplatz, added she saw a coffin coming out of Hitler’s apartment, rumored to contain his niece, Geli Raubal.

“We heard many [rumors], from the cook and others,” Stock said. “We saw a coffin being carried out of the entrance. I think a niece of Hitler’s was living there and then she died. There was speculation of how and when she died. I think there was truth in it that the coffin was carried out and in it was a woman.”

This is Adolf Hitler with his class as he attended high school at the age of 14, circa 1904. Hitler is at the extreme right in the upper row.

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Sheldon Adelson Undergoes Cancer Treatment

Las Vegas Sands chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson is taking a break from the job to undergo cancer treatment.

The billionaire casino magnate and Republican megadonor started a medical leave of absence after resuming his treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the company said Thursday.

Adelson, 87, first announced in March 2019 that he was being treated for the disease. Las Vegas Sands didn’t disclose how long he would be away, but the company said president and chief operating officer Robert G. Goldstein will serve as acting chairman and CEO in Adelson’s absence.

Adelson’s casino empire has taken a massive hit from the coronavirus pandemic, which essentially emptied the Las Vegas Strip last year and sparked a gambling shutdown in Asia.

In October, Las Vegas Sands said it was considering selling its Vegas properties — the Venetian Resort, the Palazzo and the Sands Expo Center — which would leave it with a half-dozen sites in the larger Asian markets of Macau and Singapore.

Adelson’s family owns more than half of Sands’ stock, and his son-in-law Patrick Dumont is the company’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Las Vegas Sands shares dropped 1.1 percent to $57.50 as of 12:58 p.m. Friday after the company announced Adelson’s medical leave.

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Rush Limbaugh deactivates Twitter account Taking With him 88.6 million Followers

 Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh deactivated his Twitter account on Friday, soon after the social media giant permanently banned President Trump from posting.

Twitter confirmed to Fox News that the radio host and Trump backer had taken down his account, which had 88.6 million followers.

On Friday, Twitter suspended the accounts of former Gen. Mike Flynn and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.

Some prominent Trump supporters have been fleeing to Parler as an alternative, but that conservative social media platform was also sanctioned by app stores Friday.

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Trump fans ditch Twitter en masse after president’s suspension

 Trump superfans are heading for the exits. 

Just hours after President Trump was permanently banned from Twitter, his diehards on the platform vowed they would move on as well.

“Goodbye Twitter” trended during the early morning hours Saturday as people continued to come to grips with the leader of the free world being deplatformed.

“Goodbye Twitter friends. See you @parler,” said one user, citing a more pro free speech social media alternative to Twitter that is popular with conservatives. 

“I’m a small MAGA account and I have lost 400 followers in 3 days. Goodbye Twitter. You don’t want me, I don’t want you. I’m at Parler @snakeoil. I hope PATRIOTS will come join me! Flag of United States.” said another unhappy user.

Moments after Trump was dumped, the website for Parler crashed, likely as a result of a crush of new users overwhelming their servers. The outage lasted less than an hour. Even before recent tumult, Parler had become a popular spot for conservatives, with more than 2 million daily active users in October, according to CNN. 

Multiple high profile conservative-leaning and pro-Trump accounts have reported sudden and unexplained drops in follower count.

“Now, down nearly 29,000. I think about 1500 of that came slowly between election and early January, when I was writing that results showed Biden victory and Trump legal options narrowing, then finished. Angered some followers. But big, precipitous drop has come in recent hours,” said conservative columnist Byron York.

Ryan Fournier, founder of Students for Trump, said he was off by 60,000 over a three day period.

The topic was also a subject of conversation for platform lefties, who said they were happy to see pro-Trump accounts go.

“Trump supporters really trended “goodbye twitter”?? as if we cared, god they’re so embarassing [sic],” said one.

In a statement, Twitter confirmed they are also purging accounts without verified ID information, which is likely adding to the exit count. 

“As part of our work to protect the integrity of the conversation on Twitter, we regularly challenge accounts to confirm account details such as email and phone number. Until the accounts confirm additional account information, they are in a locked state and do not count towards follower counts,” a spokesperson told The Post.

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Cover Up? Charedi newspaper photoshops masks onto picture of rabbis meeting

שמירה מלאה על ההנחיות: המבקר של עיתון 'המודיע' הדביק מסכות לרבנים שביקרו אצל הרבי מביאלא pic.twitter.com/ioP80OK5Kg

— משה ויסברג (@moshe_nayes) January 8, 2021

 An ultra-Orthodox newspaper was exposed Friday for having photoshopped masks onto the faces of a group of rabbis who were holding an indoor meeting in violation of the government’s health guidelines.

The widely-read Hamodia newspaper affiliated, with the United Torah Judaism party, included the photo alongside an article about a meeting Rabbi Bezalel Simcha Menachem Benzion Rabinowitz held in his home where he and his followers discussed ways to encourage the ultra-Orthodox public to study Torah in marking the anniversary of Maimonides’ death.

The photo of Rabinowitz, known as the Rebbe of Biala, was printed in several other newspapers, but those outlets used the original version. Ultra-Orthodox journalist Moshe Weisberg noted the difference and posted photos of it on Twitter.

Leaders of the ultra-Orthodox have come under fire in recent months for setting a poor example for their followers by violating public health guidelines or encouraging them to do so.

Ultra-Orthodox papers have been criticized in the past for photoshopping pictures, most notably blurring out, or removing women from images.

The Health Ministry official overseeing action to counter the coronavirus among Israel’s ultra-Orthodox population revealed earlier this week that the community has recently accounted for over a quarter of all the new cases diagnosed, even though it makes up little more than a 10th of the total population.

This week saw several instances of mass weddings going ahead in the community.

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Zera Shimshon Parshat Shmot

 

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A Brand New "Mikraos Gedolos" Published by Koren called "Mikraot HaDorot"

 

There are certain books that have served as the lynchpin of any Jewish library; a siddur and the Talmud are of course among them but, until now, generations of Torah commentaries have only been available in multiple volumes and many are yet to be translated into English.

 Indeed, the most common anthology of commentaries, the classic Mikraot Gedolot, provides commentaries only of the Medieval Period (Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Rashbam, Ralbag Seforno, etc.) – just a small slice of the corpus of Jewish commentators and require a certain level of analytical skill to full grasp. 

But now The Koren Mikraot HaDorot offers a broader scope of the commentaries spanning 2,000 years from the ancient times to modernity with an innovative layout and all new translation.

The Koren Mikraot HaDorot is slated to be a 48-volume series of the Humash that brings together two millennia of Torah commentary, from the Midrash and Onkelos to Rav Soloveitchik and Nehama Leibowitz, the series shows the breadth and depth of Jewish creativity and wisdom for the first time.

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Rabbi Berkowitz breaks silence on abuse in community

These were the dumbfounded words of Mrs. S, a young mother of 2 living in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood of Jerusalem. Mrs. S sends her son to a cheder in Sanhedria Murchevet, and was shocked to see video footage recently released by Rabbi Yizchok Berkowitz.

The security camera footage showed multiple cases of children being abducted and assaulted in the Sanhedria area, just a block away from Mrs. S’ son’s school. The videos were not released, of course, with the intention of ‘shock value.’ They have been shown to the public to highlight a community problem, and to highlight a solution. How the rabbanim came to discover this problem and begin to solve it is fascinating:

In 2018 the neighborhood of Sanhedria was overwhelmed by Friday night robberies. And so, several individuals, including Rabbi Yizchok Berkowitz, joined together to install security cameras on the street. What they saw was something far darker than robbery: Children were being picked up by pedophiles in broad daylight.

“Perhaps Hashem had sent us the burglaries, for the sake of being able to discover. Throughout the week, all sorts of individuals from outside the neighborhood are driving in and did awful things to children,” says Rabbi Berkowitz, in a direct video address. “We had absolutely no awareness of anything like this going on.”

Perhaps more surprising than the discovery of the assaults themselves was the fact that the cameras seemed to work. Awareness of the fact that the streets were being recorded caused a massive decrease in reported incidents. Those that did occur included evidence such as license plate numbers, and have led to arrests.

Unfortunately, the cameras are expensive to maintain, and funding them has been a community effort. Some months, the cameras have remained off. Rabbi Berkowitz, Rabbi Morgenstern, and Rabbi Soloveitchik have officially named their effort ‘Jerusalem Eye,’ and are raising money to keep the cameras on, increase the surveillance to further neighborhoods, and continue to keep the children of Jerusalem safe.

Readers can join them on this important mission by donating via The Chesed Fund. 

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Heshy Tishler Comments on DC Capital Fiasco “If I was actually in the front I wouldn’t have stormed, I would have walked in the doors

 Heshy Tischler, the pro-Trump provocateur of Orthodox Brooklyn, wasn’t at the U.S. capitol when a mob stormed it Wednesday — but not because he didn’t want to be.

Tischler was one of a throng of Orthodox Jews who traveled down to D.C. to join mass protests of the election results Wednesday. He had left the city before the protest turned into an insurrection that drove members of Congress and the vice president into hiding, and in which a woman was killed.

But that afternoon, unaware that his compatriots were now occupying the Senate chamber and its environs, he said that he, too, would like to take his complaint straight to the halls of Congress.

“We want to be there,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We just can’t get in.”

On his show Wednesday night, he condemned the violence, and said he would have handled the situation differently. “If I was actually in the front I wouldn’t have stormed, I would have walked in the doors,” he said.

Much of the Orthodox community had lined up behind Trump ahead of the election. Polls showed Orthodox voters supporting him by overwhelming margins. In the same week that mobs of young Orthodox men burned masks in the streets of Brooklyn in October, crowds of the young men carried Trump flags in their protests against lockdowns.

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