Israel -The Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee changed the bill introduced by MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) that sought to give ultra-Orthodox schools preferential treatment. According to the original law proposal, the two existing ultra-Orthodox school systems which function independently from the state system would have received full funding of their activities instead...

New York, NY - The billionaire mayor is a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent. He has already secured two ballot lines for this year's election -- the Republican line and the Independence Party line. But his campaign is collecting signatures for something called the Jobs and Education Party. It's essentially a marketing trick. Bloomberg is already running on two lines, so the...

New York - Marc Dreier, the New York law firm- founder, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for defrauding hedge funds of more than $400 million and stealing money from his clients. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan today sentenced Dreier, 59, to a term far shorter than the 145 years sought by prosecutors. Dreier’s lawyers asked for a sentence of as few as 10 years. Dreier was also...

Washington - In the Roosevelt Room this afternoon, President Obama met with 16 leaders of the American Jewish community for approximately an hour, discussing the Middle East peace process, Iran, health care reform and global hunger. Ira Forman, CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, tells ABC News that the president -- joined by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser...

Long Branch, NJ - Long Branch Police Department confirmed to VIN News, that a 30-year-old woman pulling into her driveway early this morning struck and killed the neighbors child. Jersey Shore Hatzolah responded to the scene at Highland Avenue, and transported the 20-month-old boy in traumatic arrest to Monmouth Medical Center, where doctors pronounced him dead. According to Monmouth County...

Borough Park, NY - The head of an Orthodox Jewish group has agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge stemming from what prosecutors say was a decade-long tax fraud and money laundering scheme. Naftali Tzi Weisz could face up to five years in prison after signing a plea agreement last week that is contingent on other co-defendants also pleading guilty to various charges. An e-mail...

Wahington - Israeli authorities say they have nabbed a wanted American fugitive in Tel Aviv and are preparing to deport him back to the U.S. Sabine Haddad of Israel's Interior Ministry says immigration officers received a tip from Interpol on Monday on the whereabouts of 33-year-old Micky Louis Mayon. Mayon, is wanted in the U.S. for many federal crimes , among them membership in the...

New York - Stocks jumped nearly more than 2 percent after as a bullish banking call by analyst Meredith Whitney helped lift a market that had been struggling under a cloud of economic weakness. Despite Whitney's prediction that the unemployment rate would hit 13 percent, investors instead focused on her forecast that bank stocks are in for at least a short-term gain of 15 percent as the...

New York - Convicted swindler Bernie Madoff is on his way to federal prison in Butner, NC, where he is sentenced to spend the next 150 years, CNBC has learned. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons Web site, the Butner facility houses a total of about 3,400 inmates. Well-known inmates housed at Butner include Omar Abdel-Rahman, the terrorist known as the "Blind Sheik" who masterminded...

Washington - Treading into Middle East foreign policy, a federal appeals court in Washington upheld the dismissal of a suit where a U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem wants "Israel" identified as the birth country. The federal government does not recognize any one country or political body as having sovereignty over Jerusalem, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit...

Washington - The U.S. budget deficit topped $1 trillion for the first nine months of the fiscal year and broke a monthly record for June as the recession subtracted from revenue and the government spent to rejuvenate the economy. The shortfall for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 totaled a record $1.1 trillion, the Treasury said in Washington. The excess of spending over revenue for June was...

Paris, France - Fourteen of 27 those convicted in the Paris murder of French Jew Ilan Halimi some three and a half years ago will be retried on appeal. The French prosecutor general announced that among those being retried are two of the perpetrating gang leader Youssef Fofana's cohorts. The two were sentenced to 15 and 18 years imprisonment. The retrial decision was made after a mass...

New York City - Physically fit students tend to outscore their peers who are less-fit on academic tests, according to a new report from New York City’s Health Department and Department of Education (DOE). The observation comes from an analysis of data from NYC FITNESSGRAM, the comprehensive fitness assessment that New York City public school students participate in each year as part of their...

Jerusalem - The Supreme Court today harshly criticized Jerusalem District Court judge Moshe Drori for his decision not to convict a yeshiva student who ran over Ethiopian-Israeli parking lot cashier Noga Zoarish. The decision was apparently made in order not to harm the man's chances of being appointed as a judge in the rabbinic courts. The State Prosecution appealed the acquittal. "This...

New York City - The city is plunking down nearly $1 million on typewriters for its keystroke cops. That's right -- typewriters. Despite the adoption of high-tech equipment that can read license plates from the air and detect radiological events before they happen, manual and electric typewriters continue to be used throughout the NYPD -- and they won't be phased out anytime soon, officials...