Albany, NY - New York's Democratic senators have occupied the Senate chamber and locked the doors, barring the press and public from the gallery. They say they'll let their Republican foes in before a special session ordered by Gov. David Paterson, but it wasn't clear Republicans would enter. Paterson called the session to break a two-week legislative stalemate and get the Senate moving on...

Israel - After Education Ministry investigations revealed that the system used for teaching childhood literacy in Israel is faulty, a private religious college has begun teaching the methods of the cheider or mori of traditional Jewish childhood instruction. The system for learning to read that has been in place in Israeli schools for 25 years, known as the Israel - Global Approach, is now...

Missouri - The daughter of a distinguished Jewish theologian said Monday that she opposed a plan to rename for him a stretch of Missouri highway that has been adopted by a group of neo-Nazis. She said that lending her father’s name to a road that Nazis cleaned would “dishonor” him. Missouri officials, thwarted in the past on free-speech grounds when they tried to keep the Ku Klux Klan...

Orange County, NY - As supervisors and mayors in southern Orange County, we have heard from many of our citizens who are concerned about the impact of the Village of Kiryas Joel's proposed pipeline to hook into the New York City water system. The pipeline would run 13 miles through many of our communities, causing major disruptions and impact to the environment. Five years ago when the...

Washington - U.S. President Barack Obama's demand for a settlement freeze includes Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, a State Department official said at a briefing. "We're talking about all settlement activity, yes, in the area across the line," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday in Washington. Kelly's responded to a question on where the construction freeze was to be...

New York - A new ethnographic study suggests that the aspects of knowing about a parent's or grandparent's Holocaust experiences and traumas are transmitted to other members of the family through unspoken and sometimes unintentional behaviours in the home. Lead researcher Dr. Carol Kidron, an anthropologist at the University of Haifa, says that this leads to a "knowledge" and presence of the...

New York - Bernard Madoff, awaiting sentencing for running a $65 billion Ponzi scheme, asked a federal judge to sentence him to between 15 and 20 years in prison, citing cooperation with federal officials. Madoff, 71, faces as many as 150 years in prison when he is sentenced June 29 after pleading guilty in March to a massive fraud, in which he paid off old investors with money raised from new...

Ramapo, NY - Town Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence is suing his Democratic primary opponent Bruce Levine over accusations that Town Hall is a corrupt patronage mill. St. Lawrence's lawsuit also names Levine's Town Board running mates, Veronica Boesch and Rodrigue Lustin, for exposing him to "public contempt, ridicule, aversion and disgrace." The lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in...

New York - At the urging of U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee has approved an increase of $5 million dollars in federal anti-terror funding to help safeguard civil, religious and community institutions from terrorist attack, for a total of $20 million in federal resources. Funding last year for The Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) non-profit program...

Israel - Rabbi Binyamin Adler, the kashrut supervisor of the Jerusalem Rabbinate instructed the Knesset's kashrut supervisor Rabbi Alex Hochman to remove the Knesset cafeteria's kosher status until sanitation on the premises is brought up to acceptable standards. The instruction follows an incident in which MK Yitzhak Vaknin discovered, to his horror, that a cockroach took residence in his...

Israel - Israel released today the Hamas speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Aziz Dweik, who was jailed for nearly three years over his ties to the Islamist group, his lawyer said. The release of Dweik came after the Israeli prosecutors failed to persuade a military court to extend his prison term, which was set to end in August. Israel detained Dweik, 60, and dozens of other Hamas...

Jerusalem - Ultra-Orthodox leaders in Jerusalem are threatening to cut off all ties with the municipal rabbinate if the city elects a Zionist chief rabbi. Mayor Nir Barkat recently declared that he is committed to appointing a Zionist rabbi for the city. "If there's a rabbi whose level or halachic views do not correspond with the haredim's demands – the spiritual leaders will call on the...

Staten Island, NY - The Parks Department did a shoddy job investigating a Nazi skit performed by workers at a Staten Island facility, where neglectful supervisors "may have contributed to a climate of bigotry," an administrative law judge has found. In a scathing report, the judge, John Spooner, called for firing one participant, Forestry Division veteran Chris Mullusky. A second, Charlie...

Washington - Nine people are confirmed dead and dozens of other injured after two trains collided on the Red line, and investigators still do not know why. FBI , NTSB, and Metrorail investigators spent Monday night at the scene assessing the damage, retrieving victims, and hoping to determine what went wrong. Investigators are searching the wreckage for the trains' devices that record...

Manhattan, NY - Roll out the red carpet. A Jewish student who can't attend her high-school graduation because it's scheduled for Saturday is getting the royal treatment from the Department of Education instead -- with a private graduation ceremony at Tweed Courthouse. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein offered to personally hand Li Morse, 18, her diploma from Mott Hall HS in Harlem as an...