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“I don’t speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don’t have the power to remain silent.” Rav Kook z"l
A 78-year-old man who has been blind in both eyes for 10 years has regained his sight after receiving the first implant of an artificial cornea developed by Israeli startup CorNeat, the company announced Monday.
The CorNeat KPro implant is designed to replace deformed, scarred or opacified corneas, and it integrates with the eye wall with no reliance on donor tissue.
Professor Irit Bahar, head of the Ophthalmology Department at Rabin Medical Center (formerly Beilinson Hospital) in Petah Tikva, performed the procedure.
Once the bandages were removed, the patient was able to recognize family members and read text.
Watch the terrifying Summer riot in Washington as angry, lawless anit-Trump protestors tried to enter the White House.
There were times overnight when America's capital city descended into chaos, with running battles between protesters and police through the streets.
The Black Beauty Cori "I love killers" Bush |
Rep. Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist turned member of Congress as of earlier this month, was a welcomed addition to the Squad, the small but influential group of Democratic radicals in Congress led by Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
And in keeping with the ultra-progressive thinking of the Squad – especially on the criminal justice system – the Missouri Democrat looked at the Trump administration’s recent execution of convicted murderers and opted to side with … the killers.
Early Saturday in Indiana, the government put to death Dustin Higgs, the last of a baker’s dozen, to see their sentences fulfilled under President Donald Trump. News reports noted the federal government put more Death Row inmates to death under Trump than it had in the previous 56 years.
On Saturday night, Bush – an advocate of defunding the police and abolishing the death penalty – tweeted:
“The 13 people murdered by Trump’s death row killing spree: Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, Dustin Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, William LeCroy Jr., Christopher Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson, Dustin Higgs. Say their names.”
Rep. Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist turned member of Congress as of earlier this month, was a welcomed addition to the Squad, the small but influential group of Democratic radicals in Congress led by Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
Conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby tweeted to Bush in reply:
“Not one was murdered. Each was convicted unanimously of 1st-degree murder & sentenced to death by a jury. Each had extensive due process of law, including years of legal appeals. The names you should say are those of their victims. Do you know — or care — who those victims were?”
Jerry Dunleavy, a reporter for the Washington Examiner, also wrote on Twitter,
“How about we say the names of their victims too? For instance, Daniel Lee was a white supremacist who murdered William & Nancy Mueller & her 8-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell, by shooting them w/ a stun gun, duct-taping plastic bags around their heads, & drowning them in a bayou.”
Twitter user Hawkus Aurelius did just that, replying to Bush with a tweet containing the names of 20 of the victims of some of the inmates who were put to death.
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GERMANY’S worst Covid rule breakers will be held in detention centres under new proposals being drawn up by a number of state governments.
The move forms part of the country’s efforts to stop the spread of the more contagious mutant strain of the virus detected in the UK last month.
In the eastern state of Saxony, people who ignore lockdown measures will be held in a cordoned-off part of a refugee camp being built next week.
State authorities have said the centre will only be used for those who repeatedly breach self-isolation requirements.
A similar scheme will be used in neighboring Brandenburg, while in northerly Schleswig-Holstein rule breakers will be held in a part of a juvenile detention center.
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A migrant traveling with a caravan that left Honduras on Friday told a reporter he was headed to the U.S. because soon-to-be President Joe Biden is "giving us 100 days to get to the U.S."
The migrant, seen in an interview shared by The Hill, did not provide his name but said he was from Roatán, a tourist island off the northern coast of Honduras.
He appeared to be citing Biden’s pledge to place a 100-day moratorium on deportations – one of several items on his agenda that will reverse some of President Donald Trump’s signature policies.
The migrant told a reporter he was fleeing a "bad situation" that was made worse by the coronavirus pandemic, hurricanes, and a president who is not helping the people.
When asked what he wanted for "his people," the migrant said it was "to get to the U.S. because they’re having a new president."
"He’s gonna help all of us," the migrant said of President-elect Joe Biden. "He’s giving us 100 days to get to the U.S." to get legal status and "get a better life for our kids and family."
Biden has promised a pathway to legal permanent residency for those in the country illegally and a suspension on deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
But any migrants who arrive at the U.S. border within the first 100 days of the new Biden administration will likely be disappointed. On Sunday, an unnamed Biden transition official said the migrants hoping to claim asylum in the U.S. during the first few weeks of the administration "need to understand they’re not going to be able to come into the U.S. immediately," NBC News reported.
The Biden transition official told NBC News that while "there’s help on the way," now "is not the time to make the journey."
"I said if Biden became president, this would happen," Thomas Homan, former acting director of ICE, told Fox News. "The things he said, the promises that he made … like ending the remain in Mexico program, and getting rid of private detention, putting a moratorium on deportations, stopping ICE from doing worksite enforcement operations, offering free healthcare. When you throw those kinds of enticements out, who’s not going to come to the greatest country on Earth?"
"I briefed the White House numerous times on what’s causing the surges. So, he knew by throwing all those promises out, to cater to the left to win an election, he put his own political ambitions ahead of the country."
Asked what he thought about the Biden transition official telling migrants that now is not the best time to come to the U.S., Homan said: "Too little, too late."
"They’re already on their way. They’re not going to wait in Mexico. They’re going to try to come across the border," Homan said. "Sooner or later, even if they do gather up in Mexico city, (Biden) is going to open the flood gates."
Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a migrant rights group, issued a statement on behalf of the caravan, saying it expects the Biden administration to take action.
The group is expected to hold a virtual press conference in Tijuana Tuesday afternoon, where they will call on the incoming administration to reverse President Trump’s policies and immediately allow asylum seekers to continue the asylum process in the U.S.
In a statement released Monday, the group assailed Trump’s "Remain in Mexico" policy, which compels migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to wait in Mexico while their case is being reviewed.
Pueblo Sin Fronteras said at Tuesday’s press conference it will release a petition for the Biden administration. Items on the list include a demand the U.S. border be open to people who are seeking asylum, the elimination of the Remain in Mexico policy, an end to the separation of migrant families, and the "guarantee" of legal representation for asylum seekers.
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Beit Shemesh News reports that the women are all from Chareidie families!
Ten pregnant women and new mothers who recently gave birth are currently hospitalized in serious condition with the coronavirus across the country as of Tuesday morning.
Four of the women are hospitalized at the Mayanei HaYeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak, with another woman, in her 31st week of pregnancy, who was hospitalized at Laniado Hospital in Netanya, being transferred last night to Petah Tikva’s Beilinson Hospital after her condition worsened.
Following her arrival at Beilinson, the woman, who is in her mid-30s and has no history of known existing conditions, was put on a respirator and the baby delivered with an emergency Caesarian section.
The baby was listed in stable condition after the delivery, and was transferred, while on assisted breathing, to the Shneider Children Hospital’s ward for premature births, and is currently in the coronavirus intensive care unit, and is listed in critical condition.
The mother’s condition is very serious and not stable, hospital officials said, with doctors fighting to save her life.
“This is a more intense and violent wave [of infections] than before which is now also afflicting pregnant women,” said director of Beilinson Hospital’s women’s health department, Prof. Arnon Vizhnitzer.
Another woman in her mid-30s, who is her the 21st week of her pregnancy, is currently being treated at Sheba Medical Center’s coronavirus intensive care unit. She is listed in serious condition following a recent deterioration.
“In this wave we see again and again cases of young people with serious infections which is unquestionably harming them to the point of being life-threatening,” said Dr. Yael Haviv, chief of Sheba Medical Center’s intensive care ward.
“This is no longer a disease which only afflicts elderly people with preexisting conditions.”
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Sheldon Silver, the disgraced former speaker of the New York State Assembly, is among the last tranche of people President Donald Trump will grant clemency before he leaves office Wednesday.
The New York Times reported Monday that Trump was set to pardon or commute the sentences of between 60 and more than 100 people.
The names will likely be a mix of people that justice reform activists say have been wronged by the criminal justice system, and figures who have paid intermediaries to lobby Trump for clemency, or whom Trump knows.
It’s not clear why Silver, a Democrat who was prominent in Orthodox Jewish circles on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, would get clemency, although the Times noted that he has a professional connection with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Silver, 76, for years a fearsome power broker in New York politics, was sentenced in 2018 to seven years in prison in a federal fraud case involving kickbacks for using his influence as the Assembly speaker to dispense favors.
The Times also noted that Silver’s prosecutor was Preet Bharara who has emerged as a prominent Trump critic.
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Shulim Weiss Then |
Shulem Weiss now! |
Shulem Weiss was a budding singer in the Eda Chareidis with a bright future ahead of him. A grandson of Rabbi Shimon Weiss, the director of the highly accredited Badatz Eda Chareidis kashrus organization and a great-nephew of Rabbi Yitzchak Tuvia Weiss, the leader of the Eda Chareidis, Weiss’s route to success was well prepared. However Shulem had a secret dream – he wished to enlist in the IDF, an anathema for his close-knit, anti-Zionist community. After Weiss revealed his dream, he found himself without a place to live and his family cut off all relations with him.
At the same time, Weiss decided together with his wife (whom he married at a very young age) to leave orthodox Judaism. The two eventually divorced and Weiss wandered around the streets of Eilat, hoping to be conscripted by the army despite the fact that he had been granted an exemption a few years earlier.
Weiss found himself totally alone. “It’s very difficult, I didn’t know how to take it and how to move on from here. We are young people with no life experience but we do try to deal with everything. There’s no family, nobody to talk to and tell them about what’s going on with me and how I am managing.” Initially his family members stayed in touch with him but “recently nobody is in touch with me after they saw I was serious about my plans.”
After wandering for half a year, Weiss found out about the Osei Chayil association, which provides a foster family for Chareidi youths who have been thrown out of their homes due to enlisting or leaving their faith. Aharon Granot, an Israeli reporter and author, established special housing in different places in Israel for these youths and serves as a surrogate father to them. Granot says he has youths whose parents sat Shiva for them when they enlisted in the army. Others were thrown out in the freezing cold and ended up sleeping in synagogues until Osei Chayil picked them up off the streets.
“There are hundreds of such youths,” Granot adds, and he works as a one-man organization to provide them with basic equipment, accomodation and a family atmosphere, as well as providing support while they are in the army, “like a father accompanies his children.” Even after they complete their service Granot, a father of 5 himself, is there to receive them. “Nobody is going to receive them so we support them, prepare them for further studies and give them basic requirements.”
Granot says that he has both Chareidi youths who observe all the Mitzvos as well as totally secular youths. “I’m not G-d’s policeman, everyone does what he wants,” Granot, a self-styled Gerer Chasid who wears a huge knitted kippah, adds. “Our soldiers have paid the highest price for their wish to serve in the IDF.”
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Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking |
Two well-known Polish Holocaust historians are on trial for alleged defamation over their claim that late mayor of a town near Warsaw who saved one Jewish woman was involved in the murder of 22 other Jews.
Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking were sued last year in civil court by a niece of the mayor for what they wrote about him on their 2018 book “Night Without an End,” about Polish collaboration. Their trial opened on Jan. 12, the OKO news site reported Saturday.
The late mayor, Edward Malinowski, was acquitted in a trial after World War II of collaborating with Nazis in the town of Malinowo, which he headed and which is located about 70 miles northwest of Warsaw.
During the trial, the issue of the 22 murdered Jews arose. But a Jewish woman he saved, allegedly in exchange for payment, Estera Siemiatycka, testified in favor of the mayor, and he was acquitted.
In their book, Grabowski and Engelking revisit those charges, writing that in 1944, “It was said in the village that a group of 22 Jews was hiding in a nearby forest, had been betrayed by Poles and murdered by the Germans. It was said that the mayor of Malinowski was involved in this.“
Asked by OKO whether it was certain that the mayor was involved in the murders, Engelking said it was not certain. “I didn’t write that I thought he had betrayed the Jews. I reported on the witness’s opinion,” she said.
Engelking added: “I think that despite the fact that she [Siemiatycka] had a bad opinion of him [Malinowski], she wanted to do him a favor and show her gratitude for saving her life.”
In subsequent testimonies, Siemiatycka said the person responsible for betraying 22 local Jews to the Nazis was a gamekeeper from a nearby village, who was killed, reportedly by partisans, TVP reported. Her testimony was corroborated by several witnesses, including Jewish ones, the news organization also reported.
In 2019, the Polish parliament passed a law that makes it illegal for to blame the Polish nation for Nazi crimes and exposes those who do to civil lawsuits. Critics of this law, including the Yad Vashem museum in Israel, said it risks stifling historic research into World War II in Poland.
Malinowski’s niece, Filomena Leszczyńska, filed suit under the new law. She is demanding compensation of about $26,000. A ruling is expected next month.
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Israeli authorities on Sunday advanced plans to build nearly 800 homes in settlements in Yehuda and Shomron, in a last-minute surge of approvals three days before the friendly Trump administration leaves office.
COGAT, the Israeli defense body that authorizes settlement construction, confirmed the approvals, saying that about 780 homes have been approved.
Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan called the approval a “historic achievement.”
Netanyahu’s office said last week he would seek approvals for the latest construction projects. They include 100 homes in Tel Menashe, a settlement where an Israeli woman was brutally murdered by a Palestinian Arab last month.
A string of U.S. administrations, along with the rest of the international community, opposed settlement construction. But Trump, surrounded by a team of advisers with close ties to the settler movement, took a different approach. His administration did not criticize Israeli settlement announcements, and in a landmark decision, announced in 2018 that it did not consider settlements to be illegal under international law.
As a result, Israel approved plans for over 27,000 settler homes during Trump’s four-year term, more than 2.5 times the number approved during the Obama administration’s second term, according to Peace Now, a left-wing anti-Israel watchdog, which condemned the move.
“By promoting hundreds of settlement units, Prime Minister Netanyahu is once again putting his personal political interests over those of the country,” it stated.
“Not only will this settlement activity erode the possibility for a conflict-ending resolution with the Palestinians in the long-term, but in the short-term it needlessly sets Israel on a collision course with the incoming Biden administration.”
Biden is expected to return to the traditional U.S. position of opposing settlements, setting the stage for a possible clash with Netanyahu.
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People who received both doses of the coronavirus vaccine produce between six to twenty times as many antibodies a week after receiving the second dose, the communication and information division at Sheba Tel Hashomer Medical Center reported Monday.
The announcement was based on the results of 102 people who had received the full vaccine. The antibody levels were also found to be higher than the levels recorded in people recovering from severe cases of coronavirus.
The survey also shows that only two of those tested have developed low antibody levels, which stand at between one and four times as many as before the vaccination. Prof. Gili Regev-Yohai, director of the Infection Prevention and Control Unit at Sheba Medical Center and editor of the survey, explained that these are people who have a suppressed immune system.
As part of the vaccination campaign at Sheba Medical Center, 7,106 people received the first dose and 4,484 have received the second dose so far. Prof. Gili Regev-Yohai stated: "The results of the survey are in line with Pfizer's experiment and even better than expected. I expect that the survey results of the other people who participated will be similar. There is certainly reason for optimism."
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Maybe for him to carry a gun may have been a good idea... just say'in
A prominent anti-gun violence activist in Baltimore was fatally shot at a public housing project, police and city officials said.
Dante Barksdale, 46, who worked as an outreach coordinator for the city’s Safe Streets campaign, was shot in the head early Sunday at the Douglass Homes in southeastern Baltimore.
He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was later pronounced dead, police said.
“The investigation is ongoing and we have no further updates to provide at this time,” a police spokeswoman told The Post in a statement early Monday.
Homicide detectives are handling the investigation, police said.
Barksdale, also known as “Tater,” was the “heart and soul” of the city’s anti-gun violence program, where he worked for nine years, Mayor Brandon Scott said.
“His death is a major loss to Safe Streets, the communities they serve, and the entire city of Baltimore,” Scott said in a statement, adding that Barksdale’s impact left an indelible mark on the community. “Dante’s work saved lives. This is a sobering reminder of how dangerous this frontline work is.”
Barksdale had delivered winter coats to residents at the complex where he was fatally shot just weeks earlier, one resident told the Baltimore Sun. The circumstances surrounding his death were not immediately clear, the newspaper reported.
Barksdale, who formerly served time in prison, was well-known throughout the community and had a personal connection to the struggle of ridding the city’s streets of guns. He was the nephew of Nathan “Bodie” Barksdale, an infamous Baltimore drug kingpin who served as inspiration for some of the characters in HBO’s “The Wire,” including Avon Barksdale.
Barksdale’s slaying shocked many community leaders, including former Safe Streets workers.
“His life was dedicated to preventing this type of stuff from happening,” James Timpson, a former program leader who now runs another violence prevention effort, told the Baltimore Sun. “Nobody can believe that this happened.”
A description of a suspect or a possible motive was not available late Sunday, a police spokeswoman told the newspaper.
The city’s police commissioner, meanwhile, lauded Barksdale for his crime-fighting efforts in the streets he served while sending condolences to his family.
“His work in outreach, mediating conflicts and reducing gun violence in our city was invaluable and he embodied a message of redemption and peace to the many young people of our city,” Commissioner Michael Harrison said.
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Jerry Nadler brought Zabar’s to the impeachment. pic.twitter.com/2Xf0GpMmr0
— Alex Richanbach (@AlexRichanbach) January 13, 2021
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Gideon Saar, currently the most popular anti-Netanyahu candidate, has hired the services of four American strategic consultants, all former Republicans, whose most recent endeavor has been The Lincoln Project, aimed at preventing the re-election of Donald Trump and defeating all the Republican Senators who were running in close races in 2020, Israeli journalist Amit Segal reported Monday.
The four, Steve Schmidt, Stuart Stevens, Reed Galen, and Rick Wilson, used to work for the election campaigns of GW Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But on Dec. 7, 2019, they announced in a NY Time op-ed by George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson, the foundation of the Lincoln Project political action committee. Other co-founders include Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslow, Reed Galen, and Mike Madrid. Stuart Stevens joined the project in May 2020.
The Lincoln Project is probably the deadliest political weapon ever introduced in US politics. Its aim was not to sway fellow Republicans – most of those reacted with disgust to the LP videos. They were aiming at Independents who were jolted by those short and effective messages, which were coming at them with an ever-increasing frequency.
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WHO inspector caught on camera revealing coronavirus manipulation in Wuhan before pandemic https://t.co/zf1zZZ6bYn
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) January 18, 2021
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Amazon banned Parler, but allowed people to buy this shirt from their website.
— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) January 16, 2021
Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/GDEzKlFV1L
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