A Tunisian minister wished a Merry Christmas to the country’s tiny Jewish community. “I want to wish all the Jews of Tunisia a happy holiday tonight, it is a big holiday all over the world,” Houcine El Jaziri, Tunisia’s state secretary for immigration and Tunisians living abroad, said while participating in the talk show “Attasia”…
Estee Ackerman, an 11-year-old table tennis star, was disqualified from the national finals when her match fell on Friday evening and she chose not to play, the New York Post reported. “I practiced and trained for six months for this,” the sixth-grader from West Hempstead, L.I. told the paper “Ping pong is important to me,…
In a matter of months, Yair Lapid has turned from heartthrob television news anchor into a rising star of Israeli politics, leading a new centrist party into elections on Jan. 22. Lapid, 49, may prove an attractive coalition partner for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, which is widely forecast to lead the next…
The U.S. House of Representatives adjourned on Tuesday night without acting on a $60.4 billion Superstorm Sandy disaster aid bill, prompting angry denunciations from members from the states hardest hit by the storm. “I have just been informed that we will be having perhaps no further votes in this Congress,” said Democratic Representative Steny Hoyer…
The United States averted economic calamity on Tuesday when lawmakers approved a deal to prevent huge tax hikes and spending cuts that would have pushed the world’s largest economy off a “fiscal cliff” and into recession. The agreement hands a clear victory to President Barack Obama, who won re-election on a promise to address budget…
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett said on Tuesday he will file a federal lawsuit against the NCAA over sanctions it levied against Pennsylvania State University in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal. Corbett is scheduled to hold a news conference on Wednesday at the Nittany Lion Inn on the Penn State campus to…
Washington’s last-minute scramble to step back from a “fiscal cliff” ran into trouble on Tuesday as Republicans in the House of Representatives balked at a deal to avert a budget crisis. Republican leaders in the House said they might try to change the bill approved by the Senate which voted to raise taxes on the…
Congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church cried out in testimony, prayer and song at a New Year’s Eve service recalling the vigils held by blacks 150 years ago as they awaited President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The document that helped end slavery in the United States resonated deeply in Charleston, where…
Pope Benedict said in his New Year’s message on Tuesday he hoped 2013 would be a year of peace and that the world was under threat from unbridled capitalism, terrorism and criminality. The 85-year-old pope rang in the new year with a mass for about 10,000 people in St Peter’s Basilica on the day the…
Likud Party activist Moshe Feiglin was detained and later released by Israel Police after praying on the Temple Mount. Feiglin, who was placed in a realistic spot on the joint Likud-Beiteinu Party list for the upcoming election, reportedly bowed down on the Temple Mount and was removed from the site by an undercover policeman. He…
The leaders of two historic synagogues will hold a settlement conference over a set of ritual Torah decorations. A federal judge in Rhode Island will meet with the leaders of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., and Congregation Shearith Israel of New York on Thursday to discuss a set of 18th century Torah bells, The…
