Borough Park, NY - Guess those cunning mafiosi aren’t too sharp after all. The brainless mob got a taste of what it means to mess with the Jewish community when it tried to pull off an identity-fraud scheme in just about the stupidest place to try: Orthodox Jewish Borough Park Brooklyn, where eagle-eyed good citizens can spot a dirty trickster in seconds. First, a dope hung around a...

London - Low-cost carrier easyJet PLC said Wednesday that it will open new services from London to Israel and Morocco later this year. The airline said it will launch services six times a week from Luton Airport, just north of London, to Tel Aviv from November. A twice weekly service from London's Gatwick airport to Agadir, in southern Morocco, will begin in the same month. EasyJet, which...

Jerusalem - Israel must tear down its West Bank separation barrier, a senior U.N. official said today, marking five years since the International Court of Justice declared the barrier illegal and a violation of Palestinian rights. The barrier separates Israel from the West Bank and in places cuts into Palestinian territory. Israel started building it in 2002 to stop a wave of suicide bombing...

Crown Heights, NY - Sources say police are questioning a man accused of going up to women in Brooklyn and slapping their behinds. A series of complaints from several Hasidic Jewish women came to Shomrim Patrol and to police, who said they were groped by a sicko terrorizing the tight-knit religious community. Investigators say there have been at least a dozen incidents since June 19th. The...

Warsaw - Polish President Lech Kaczynski has recognized the importance of the issue of restitution of Jewish property confiscated during the Nazi and Communist eras in the country, during a meeting Tuesday in Warsaw with a delegation from the European Jewish Congress. "Mr Kaczynski agreed to hold another meeting of a more practical nature on the issue in November," Moshe Kantor, president of...

Haifa, Israel - A U.S. oil company drilling for natural gas off Israel's shores said the reserve appears to be far greater than initially estimated. Israeli media reports today that after drilling at the Tamar 2 site off the Haifa coast, Nobel Energy Inc. estimated the reserves were 25 percent to 30 percent greater than the initial assessment. The site may hold as much as 180 billion cubic...

Albany, NY - Gov. David Paterson is planning to appoint a lieutenant governor at 5 p.m. Wednesday. Paterson plans to take to the TV airwaves to speak to New Yorkers about the monthlong standoff in the state Senate, hoping the announcement of a newly appointed lieutenant governor will break the inaction in Albany. Paterson says the gridlock caused by a fight for control of the chamber is...

Dusseldorf, Germany - A German judge voiced surprise today that four young Muslims accused of a terrorist bomb plot have suddenly confessed in extraordinary detail. Police arrested two German converts to Islam and a third man in 2007 to thwart car bomb attacks on US bases. The accused only decided last month to tell police everything in a plea bargain. "Their evidence is much more...

New York - A Mega Millions ticket purchased in Queens is worth an estimated $133 million, according to www.nyslottery.org. Three of the 10 second-prize winners - players who got all five Mega numbers correct but failed to nail the correct Mega Ball - also were from New York, including one winner from Suffolk County. Each of those players will receive a prize of $250,000. The winner of...

New York - Yesterday VIN News posted an article from the Jerusalem Post quoting a ruling of former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu to religious IDF soldiers regarding remaining at events of Kol Isha – where a woman is singing. He ruled that they should choose imprisonment over hearing a woman singing during military events and ceremonies. Rav Eliyahu shlita was quoted as saying in...

Manhattan, NY - Ruth Madoff is finally free to skip the country. Court papers show that the wife of imprisoned Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff won permission to retrieve the passport she surrendered to help secure his bail. "The passport was returned to her in the normal course, now that the bail set for her husband is no longer in place," said the lawyer, Peter Chavkin. But he added his...

Karlsruhe, Germany - Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, awaiting trial in Germany, lost an appeal today against his deportation from the United States. Germany's Constitutional Court ruled that Demjanjuk had given no substantiated reason to back his appeal that his deportation had infringed his basic rights. The decision appears to clear the way for a trial of 89-year old...

Jerusalem - Dozens of government officials celebrated the bar mitzvahs of 107 orphaned children in a mass festivity, sponsored by Colel Chabad. The children celebrated their bar mitzvah at Jerusalem’s Western Wall in a ceremony that included over 30 separate Torah readings so that each boy could be called to the Torah on the milestone of his life. The Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, Rabbi Yisrael...