New York, NY - The city's noisy tourist helicopter flights are getting chopped. The city Economic Development Corp. said Friday it has brokered a deal to curb air tours and appease critics, who say the choppers make the city sound like a war zone. After much protest, and some claiming their sound can cause brain damage, the helicopter nightmare over Brooklyn may be coming to an end...

Washington - It sounds simple enough. Knock on some doors, ask some questions, get some answers. But for the more than 600,000 people going door-to-door to reach those who haven't mailed in their census forms, it's not. As census enumerators set out check 48 million addresses on Saturday, they were likely to encounter a range of responses. People who never seem to be home. People who don't...

New York, NY - The clear and present danger of homegrown Islamist terrorism grows weekly. Plots are coming at New York and America from every which way and at increasing speed. Hard on the heels of Najibullah Zazi's subway bomb try, the Manhattan U.S. attorney has indicted two Brooklyn men, U.S. citizens, for allegedly conspiring to abet Al Qaeda's communication needs and its capacity to...

Boston, MA - A "catastrophic" break Saturday in a relatively new, 10-foot wide steel pipe rendered the water undrinkable in Boston and more than two dozen of its suburbs, forcing Gov. Deval Patrick to declare a state of emergency. The state issued a boil-water order for drinking water in the 30 affected communities, which include 2 million people in 700,000 households. The Massachusetts...

Manhattan, NY -Police found a suspected car bomb in a smoking sport utility vehicle Saturday evening in Times Square, then cleared the streets of thousands of tourists milling through the landmark district so they could dismantle the device. A white robotic police arm broke windows of the black Nissan Pathfinder to remove any explosive materials while heavily armed police and emergency...

Montreal -Some members of Montreal’s visible Lubavitch community residing in the Côte des Neiges district of Montreal are afraid to go out of their homes, even during the daytime, in the wake of a number of reported acts of violence. In addition, three locations in the Montreal suburb of Outremont – home to a large segment of visible Chassidic Jews – had swastikas spray painted on or...

Venice, LA - A sense of doom settled over the American coastline from Louisiana to Florida on Saturday as a massive oil slick spewing from a ruptured well kept growing, and experts warned that an uncontrolled gusher could create a nightmare scenario if the Gulf Stream carries it toward the Atlantic. President Barack Obama planned to visit the region Sunday to assess the situation amid growing...

Israel - Some 900 people on Saturday participated in a conference of the Jehovah's Witnesses denomination in the central city of Holon. The event was held under tight security at a municipal basketball hall in the Kiryat Sharet neighborhood. At around 11 am, about 100 ultra-Orthodox men arrived in the area and began hurling stones and potatoes at the building, smashed its windows and tried to...

Johannesburg, S. Africa - Justice Richard Goldstone attended his grandson's bar mitzvah in Sandton, despite warnings that there might be protests. Justice Goldstone initially decided not to attend his grandson's coming-of-age ceremony, but after negotiations involving the SA Zionist Federation and SA Jewish Board of Deputies, it was agreed that he would attend. Members of the congregation...

Jerusalem - Hundreds of thousands of Jews are making their way to the Galilean city of Meron Saturday night and Sunday, participating in the annual celebration of Lag Ba'Omer. Police in the quiet town situated just one mountain away from the mystical city of Tzfat are expecting half a million Jews to arrive, traveling in busses, private cars, and some even on foot. As of 9:30pm Saturday...

Meron, Israel - Aaround 30,000 revelers thronged the night's Hillula ceremony marking the Lag Ba'omer holiday at the tomb of Shimon bar Yohai on Mount Meron in the Upper Galilee. As this year's holiday fell on a Saturday, many arrived at the shrine honoring the first-century mystic only in the evening hours. Motti Bukzin, a volunteer with the ZAKA emergency-response organization, has been at...