A growing campaign is pushing New York City to make Citi Bike more affordable, with Transportation Alternatives calling for a $3 price cap on 45-minute electric-bike rides for members, the same amount riders pay for a subway or bus trip.

At present, Citi Bike members can pay $12.15 for a comparable ride, while non-members face even higher costs.

“My daughter, who recently moved to the city in her early 20s, really wants to use these for transportation,” Citi Bike rider Sarah Max said. “And we were actually just chatting about it the other day, that it’s almost as much as a taxi.”

Citi Bike’s revenue has climbed sharply since Lyft took over the system. In 2021, about a year after the takeover, the program generated roughly $88 million annually. By 2025, that figure had increased to $229 million, while Citi Bike prices have also risen every year.

Brooklyn City Council Member Lincoln Restler said Citi Bike has become the most expensive bike-share system among major cities.

Restler has introduced legislation aimed at bringing down the cost, though the measure has not yet advanced.

“We are the only major city with a large bike-share program that doesn’t offer public subsidy for bike-share,” Restler said. “And it’s time that we revisit that.”

“We subsidize every other form of transit, from our ferries, to our express buses, to the subways,” he added. “We should be doing the same for Citi Bike.”

Under the city’s current arrangement, New York shares Citi Bike revenue with Lyft. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has previously expressed support for reducing the cost of the service, but so far has not presented a specific plan to do so.

Lake Powell is now holding less water than at any point since it was built, which means less water for farms and cities across the Southwest and less electricity coming out of the dam that holds it back. The lake’s levels fell to 3519.91 feet on Saturday — low enough to break the record of 3,519.92 feet set in April 2023, according to a reading published Sunday by the Bureau of Reclamation.

The margin is thin enough that the number may move. Federal water officials caution that the daily water level figure is “provisional and subject to revision” and the new record could be walked back considering its razor-thin margin. But even if Saturday’s reading doesn’t hold, the lake’s downward trend means the actual record low is just days away.

Powell is one half of a system the West runs on. Plummeting water levels pose a major threat to the Colorado River Basin, which is a key resource for wildlife, hydropower and more than 40 million people in seven U.S. states. Those states — California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado — have been trying for years to agree on how to divide a river that no longer delivers what the original math assumed.

The other half hit bottom first. Only a little over a week ago, Lake Mead also hit a milestone, dropping to its lowest elevation on record. It was sitting at 1,040.50 feet above sea level on Aug. 6 — which is the least amount of water in the reservoir since it was filled in the 1930s. The last time their combined storage was this small was in May 1957 when Glen Canyon Dam that holds back Powell was being built.

Put simply, Powell is running at roughly one-fifth full. The reservoir sits about 180 feet below its full mark and has dropped close to 32 feet in the past year alone. The number that matters for the electric grid is 3,490 feet — the point at which the dam’s turbines can no longer generate power reliably. The lake is now roughly 30 feet above it. Another year like the last one closes that gap entirely.

Timing works against a quick recovery. While Lake Mead usually starts to refill at this point in the season, Lake Powell won’t do so until spring. That leaves months of evaporation and drawdown before mountain snowmelt has any chance to help.

The commercial damage is already visible on the shoreline. The depletion has also impacted Lake Powell’s substantial tourism industry, forcing marinas in the reservoir to adapt. Boat ramps have closed or moved, new ones are being added and marinas have been temporarily relocated to deeper waters. For the towns around Page, Arizona, that boating season is the economy.

Fixes are underway but slow. The seven basin states and the federal government are still negotiating new sharing rules to replace guidelines that expire, and Reclamation has been holding back releases from upstream reservoirs to protect Powell’s power pool. Farmers in Arizona and California, who use the largest share of the river, are being paid to fallow fields and switch to lower-water crops.

For businesses outside the region, the exposure runs through produce prices and power costs. The Colorado River irrigates a large share of the nation’s winter vegetables, and hydropower lost at Glen Canyon has to be replaced with more expensive generation across the Western grid.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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A 7-year-old boy was murdered and his 4-year-old cousin was critically wounded Monday afternoon in a horrific stabbing in Beit Shemesh, after a neighbor allegedly entered the property and attacked the children during a family birthday celebration.

The two children were in the yard of a home on Emek HaZeitim Street, where the birthday party was taking place. According to details emerging from the initial investigation, a 15-year-old relative who was watching the children witnessed the attack. The father of one of the children subsequently arrived and found the two youngsters wounded near the swimming pool in the yard.

Magen David Adom and United Hatzalah emergency personnel rushed to the scene and provided initial medical treatment. The 7-year-old was listed in critical condition and transported to Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center in Yerushalayim while undergoing resuscitation efforts. His 4-year-old cousin was also evacuated to the hospital in serious condition.

Despite continued attempts to save the older child, doctors at the hospital were ultimately forced to pronounce the 7-year-old dead.

United Hatzalah EMTs Yaakov Jungreis, Moshe Siroka and Eliya Asulin, who were among the first responders at the scene, said earlier: “We were told at the scene that they were injured as a result of violence. With the assistance of additional EMTs, we provided initial medical treatment at the scene to two victims whose conditions were defined as critical and serious, and they were then evacuated to the hospital for further medical treatment.”

Members of United Hatzalah’s Psychotrauma and Crisis Response Unit were also dispatched to the scene to provide emotional assistance to relatives and witnesses following the traumatic attack.

Police arrested a neighborhood resident in his 20s shortly after the stabbing on suspicion of attacking the two children. The suspect’s father was questioned at the scene as investigators worked to determine what may have led to the deadly assault.

Authorities are examining several possible motives. Investigators are looking into whether the suspect may have been suffering from an unstable mental state, as well as whether an earlier dispute between the suspect’s family and the children’s family may have played a role. Police stressed that these remain investigative possibilities and that no motive has yet been established.

According to the preliminary investigation, the suspect arrived at the home where the children were gathered and, at some point, allegedly attacked them with a knife. Investigators are collecting testimony from family members and eyewitnesses, including the 15-year-old relative who was present when the attack occurred.

The emergency unfolded shortly after 4:40 p.m., when Magen David Adom’s 101 dispatch center received a report of two injured children on Emek HaZeitim Street. Initial reports from the scene were incomplete and included conflicting information about the children’s ages. The full circumstances and severity of the attack became clear only later.

Police are continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder and the stabbing.

{Matzav.com}

TAMARAC, Fla. (AP) — Sporting red-white-and-blue sneakers and a matching bedazzled manicure ahead of Florida’s primaries on Tuesday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz smiles and tells voters she is “running for reelection to Congress.”

That’s true — with a caveat. Wasserman Schultz is seeking her 12th term by running in a new district after Republicans scrambled the state’s congressional map earlier this year.

The fallout pushed Wasserman Schultz, a former national party chair with powerful ties in Washington, to cross district lines from her Fort Lauderdale exurb and be the only white candidate against four Black candidates in an area of Broward County that has helped send Black Democrats to Congress since 1992. That’s yielded an uncomfortable fight following the U.S. Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act provisions undergirding minority voting strength and effectively cleared Old Confederacy states, including Florida, to reshape House districts.

“For her to come in like this is just another Broward seat, it’s a complete erasure of our history, our fight for Black access,” said former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, 47, who resigned from the seat in April while facing an ethics investigation but now wants it back.

Another candidate, 27-year-old progressive organizer and substitute teacher Elijah Manley, said Republicans’ redistricting ploy is not Wasserman Schultz’s fault. But she “had other options,” Manley added, including running in her new home district, which was gerrymandered to include the more conservative Gulf Coast.

“Instead, she stabbed us in the back, trying to take away Black representation,” Manley said, pointing to Congressional Black Caucus warnings that it could lose more than a quarter of its 60-plus members this fall.

Wasserman Schultz, 59, is by far the best funded out of five Democratic candidates and benefits from Florida rules that do not require a majority to win primaries.

She argued that she can ably advocate for the whole region after representing wide swaths of Broward as a state and federal legislator across three decades. “I’m not air dropping myself into this district,” she told The Associated Press. “I have represented diverse communities. I know how to tailor my service to them and represent a district more broadly.”

A win by Wasserman Schultz would be a rarity
President Donald Trump started pushing Republican-run states to redraw House boundaries last year to help preserve the party’s fragile majority. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded with an effort that clusters southeast Florida Democrats together, intending to reduce five Democratic seats to three. Broward, the state’s most Democratic county, situated between Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, now has just one presumed-Democratic district anchored in and around Fort Lauderdale.

Nationally, white lawmakers typically hold some of the 115-plus House seats where the voting-age population is majority non-white. Wasserman Schultz does it in her existing north Broward-Palm Beach district, which was drawn after the 2020 census to be 42% Hispanic, 18% Black and about 6% Asian American. White voters compose the remaining third.

But a white lawmaker is a rarity for majority or plurality Black districts, like the new Florida 20th. The district is 42% Black, 23% Hispanic and 4% Asian, the rest white. The Black share includes a large Caribbean population, most notably Haitian Americans.

Going into November, an Associated Press analysis found that Wasserman Schultz is the only white Democrat positioned to represent any of the remaining districts with a Black majority or plurality.

Cherfilus-McCormick said she can win, despite losing Black constituents she previously represented in Palm Beach County. She dismissed concerns over federal criminal charges accusing her of stealing $5 million in federal disaster funds. She has pleaded not guilty and has denied alleged violations of House rules.

The criminal case and redistricting fit together, she insisted, and “the people see what’s going on — them trying to silence the only Haitian member of Congress and take away our voice.”

Manley, though, was more circumspect about Wasserman Schultz’s status as the favorite. He mused about upsetting the veteran congresswoman on Tuesday yet looked ahead to the 2028 elections, hoping Black Democrats rally around one candidate rather than four. The current field also includes former 2 Live Crew rapper Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell and real estate broker and former local elected official Dale Holness.

Von Howard, a Black resident of Plantation, said the choice was wrenching. He declined to disclose his vote but said he wanted someone who “understands the totality of the district.”

“If you’re not of the people, and you just want this for the clout, in some instances, that could be a turnoff,” the 47-year-old said.

Broward NAACP President Marsha Ellison was more direct, without endorsing any candidate.

“The whole mission was to take away Black power, so we don’t have representation to understand our lived experience,” she said. “That may not be important to Debbie, but it’s certainly important to us.”

There’s a debate over what representation means
Wasserman Schultz said she occasionally hears those concerns from voters. Her response is that “lived experience matters, but experience broadly matters” as well.

She notes her Appropriations Committee seat, which could be even more influential should Democrats win a House majority. She recalls programs impacting Black communities she helped create and fund since her first years in the Florida Legislature.

“I fight every single day to help improve the lived experience of the people that I represent,” she said.

Wasserman Schultz also said she’s worked to connect across race and culture in Broward. Because of her existing district makeup, “I spent six years learning Spanish,” to converse with individuals and in town halls, news conferences and interviews broadcast on Spanish-language stations.

“Out of respect,” she said, “anything I can do to inspire people’s confidence that the person representing them understands them.”

Wasserman Schultz is a recognizable figure
Several times outside of early voting sites, Black, white and Hispanic voters waved or stopped to talk to the congresswoman. Among them were Broward County sheriff’s deputies who wanted photos and a trio of women who lamented they had been drawn into a new Republican-leaning district.

Yusdefs Delgado, a naturalized citizen from Colombia, told Wasserman Schultz that he enjoys her social media posts but wants to hear more about policy and less about the president.

“We know Trump sucks,” he told her, smiling and confirming that he voted for her. “I don’t agree with her on everything, but she’s closest to where I am, and I trust her to try to do the right thing for us,” Delgado explained later.

Cherfilus-McCormick and Manley said that’s not enough given the environment after the Supreme Court decision, Trump’s attacks on diversity initiatives and his push to rewrite how the U.S. tells its history on race and racism.

“We’re not at a place in this country where we can be completely colorblind politically,” Manley said. “We’re just not.”

Wasserman Schultz said the new district “is drawn in a way that the plurality population has the ability to elect the person of their choice” — language that alludes to the now-diminished Voting Rights Act. Voters, she said, can “consider all of the qualities that matter to them.”

As for putting herself on the ballot again, she remained unapologetic.

“Trump and DeSantis did this to our community,” she said, adding, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them steal Broward’s political power, de-unify us and prevent us from standing up for our community’s values.”

President Trump issued a stark warning to Oman on Monday, threatening devastating US military action if the American ally interferes in the escalating confrontation with Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz.

“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the [garbage] out of them,” Trump said bluntly in an interview with Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst, delivering the warning as a tentative ceasefire between the United States and Iran nears its expiration.

Trump’s comments come as the future of the Strait of Hormuz remains at the center of negotiations involving Iran and Oman. Tehran said last week that discussions with Muscat were underway over a potential arrangement to reopen the critical shipping passage, which has repeatedly become a flashpoint since the war began.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei announced Monday that Iran and Oman had reached an “understanding” while negotiators work to finalize the details of a broader agreement.

“This is a highly complex issue, and for the first time a mechanism is to be established that both safeguards the sovereignty and sovereign rights of the two coastal states (Iran and Oman) and ensures the safe passage of commercial vessels through this waterway,” he added.

A major sticking point remains Iran’s insistence that reopening the Strait of Hormuz be accompanied by the establishment of a new toll system, a demand opposed by the United States.

Oman, despite being a US ally, indicated in late June that it was receptive to an arrangement under which “voluntary” fees could be collected from vessels traveling through the strategic waterway. The proposal was described as being modeled on systems operating in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore.

Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi has defended the proposed charges, arguing that the money is needed to ensure safe navigation through the strait.

The dispute is not the first time Oman’s position on shipping fees has drawn an extraordinary warning from Trump. In May, after Muscat repeatedly expressed willingness to participate in collecting fees in the Strait of Hormuz, Trump threatened to “blow up” the allied country if it did not “behave.”

The Strait of Hormuz has become one of Iran’s most powerful pressure points during the conflict. Nearly one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the narrow waterway, allowing disruptions there to reverberate rapidly through global energy markets and push gasoline prices higher as the November midterm elections draw closer.

Trump escalated his rhetoric over the strategic passage even further on Friday. Speaking at a Long Island rally for Republican candidates, the president said that once the war is over, he intends to declare the Strait of Hormuz “a territory of the United States.”

An Israeli Home Front Command delegation is carrying out major search-and-rescue operations in Colombia following the devastating earthquake that left nearly 300 people dead and approximately 13,000 homes destroyed.

The “Bridging Worlds” delegation arrived in Colombia 96 hours after the disaster and is the largest foreign aid delegation to reach the country.

Israeli forces are operating at three of the five major destruction sites in Cali, working alongside local rescue teams and volunteers to locate and rescue people still missing beneath the rubble.

The experience gained by the Israeli delegation during earthquake rescue operations in Venezuela approximately three weeks ago is now being used to assist the efforts in Colombia.

Alongside the search-and-rescue mission, Israeli engineers are leading efforts to map and assess damaged buildings together with Colombian and international teams, determining which structures can safely be returned to use.

The delegation is also providing Colombian authorities with expertise and technological tools to manage the disaster response, establish priorities and support decision-making, while working closely with municipal officials and government ministers.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

The Trump administration has returned more than $100 billion to U.S. businesses and importers that paid his global tariffs, and the money is quickly heating up the economy.

The refunds are already boosting bottom lines, and 40 companies in the S&P 500 have recorded $9.6 billion, with Apple alone reporting nearly $2.2 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal tally. Other top recipients include Nike, FedEx, Amazon, and General Motors.

“Not only are tariff refunds boosting corporate earnings, they are also boosting GDP growth,” Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok said in a note on Saturday.

He estimated that the refund money will contribute about 0.2 percentage point to third-quarter GDP growth, which the Atlanta Fed says is tracking toward 4.3%.

That represents a steep acceleration from the second quarter’s gain of just 1.5%, which was skewed by high AI-related imports, as well as 2.1% in the first quarter.

In the current quarter, the tariff refunds are combining with other positive factors, such as the ongoing AI spending boom, tax cuts from the the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the reshoring of U.S. manufacturing.

“The bottom line is that the U.S. economy continues to be supported by a growing set of tailwinds,” Slok added.

The surprisingly weak jobs report for July doesn’t signal the economy is losing momentum, he wrote, attributing sharp drops in government payrolls and hospitality employment to quirks in seasonal adjustments.

After backing out those sectors, the economy would’ve added 70,000 jobs, in line with Wall Street’s consensus, instead of losing 23,000 jobs.

In addition, jobless claims have hovered around 200,000 a week, and the number of job openings has been rising over the past six months, Slok pointed out.

“In short, the market is underestimating how strong growth is right now,” he said. “As a result, rates will stay higher for longer.”

The refunds so far represent about 60% of the $166 billion in revenues collected from import taxes under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in February.

But some U.S. consumers want to see some of that money reach their own wallets and are filing lawsuits against companies to demand it. Firms such as Amazon, FedEx and UPS, however, have vowed to return the funds to customers.

Earlier this month, analysts at Bank of America said in a note that retailers are using the money that’s been returned to them to fund promotions as well as offset freight and other supply-chain costs. 

BofA also expects some retailers will work with brands to recoup some tariff money, either via direct payments or future purchase order negotiations.

“Outside of this, companies have the optionality to use refunds to invest in the business (i.e. AI/tech) or return capital to shareholders,” analysts added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department’s internal watchdog on Monday announced a review of a controversial tactic in which federal law enforcement allowed fentanyl to hit the streets to build bigger cases against drug traffickers.

The review will examine government policies and wiretap investigations in which the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration may have learned of fentanyl deliveries before they happened but stood down to avoid jeopardizing larger prosecutions.

Current and former agents said that investigative strategy — known as allowing drugs to “walk” — amounts to a gamble with public safety and may have violated Justice Department rules intended to safeguard communities from a synthetic opioid the White House last year designated as a “ weapon of mass destruction.”

The review comes less than two months after an Associated Press investigation found DEA agents repeatedly monitored — but did not seize — major fentanyl shipments in New Mexico between 2023 and 2025. It was disclosed in a news release by Justice Department Inspector General Don Berthiaume, one of his first official actions since being sworn in on Friday.

The DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. DEA Administrator Terry Cole requested a narrower inspector general inquiry following AP’s reporting, including a review of his agency’s handling of a whistleblower complaint brought by Agent David Howell.

Cole wrote in an earlier statement that his request for an outside inquiry “should not be interpreted as reflecting any lack of confidence in the professionalism or integrity of DEA personnel.”

Howell told AP that federal authorities “poisoned our community to make cases” in New Mexico. An internal DEA report reviewed by AP detailed how the DEA watched and declined to interdict a fentanyl delivery of 74,000 pills in a mobile home park in Albuquerque.

The fentanyl went unseized amid the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history and as DEA led a public awareness campaign — “One Pill Can Kill” — emphasizing that even a few milligrams of the substance can be lethal.

The inspector general said the review will focus on the Justice Department’s actions over the past two years. It could determine whether the DEA permitted similar drug shipments to occur in other cities.

Howell said he expects the review to show federal authorities “endangered the public through willful inaction.”

The new review comes as New Mexico authorities continue an investigation into whether DEA agents broke state law by allowing hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach the streets of Albuquerque. Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, recently threatened to sue the Justice Department after it refused to provide a list of records he requested. The DEA also has not allowed Howell to be interviewed by state authorities.

“The state is bearing the societal and financial harms of an influx of fentanyl into its communities,” Torrez wrote in a letter to federal authorities earlier this month.

Two additional DEA whistleblowers in New Mexico have come forward in recent weeks, including one who said his colleagues there failed to seize 350,000 fentanyl pills that they learned about during the very first call they intercepted in a 2024 wiretap. That shipment was part of an investigation that resulted in the largest fentanyl seizure in DEA history. Court records show agents had the opportunity to seize thousands of fentanyl pills but allowed trafficking to continue for months as they investigated.

The other whistleblower filed a complaint this month alleging his colleagues monitored — but did not arrest — a drug courier who made repeated deliveries of fentanyl from Phoenix to Albuquerque between 2022 and 2023. Agents estimated each delivery to contain between 50,000 and 100,000 fentanyl pills that went unseized.

The attacks began on a July weekend and have continued for a month, stretching from Moscow and St. Petersburg, to cities in the south, and eastward to the Ural Mountains. The targets weren’t oil refineries, maritime hubs or arms plants hit by other Ukrainian strikes, but warehouses that bring the convenience of online shopping across the breadth of Russia.

Ukraine’s drones have pummeled the giant depots belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s biggest online retailer, burning billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise and bringing the war home to the broad public.

The attacks on about 20 Wildberries facilities have underlined Kyiv’s ability to strike far and wide inside Russia and posed a new challenge to President Vladimir Putin nearly 4½ years into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

They have badly shaken the empire built by Tatyana Kim, the country’s richest female entrepreneur, whose fortune has been estimated at $8.1 billion.

Hundreds of thousands of individual sellers have lost their merchandise, sending shock waves across Russia’s economy. Wildberries has drawn massive loans from VTB and other banks as it expanded and likely will have trouble repaying them, putting more pressure on the financial system.

Kim, 50, was born in Grozny, the capital of the province of Chechnya, to an ethnic Korean family of an engineer and a teacher. She launched Wildberries in 2004 from her Moscow apartment soon after giving birth to her first child while working as an English teacher.

“The idea was born from my own needs, and turned out to be needed by hundreds of thousands,” said Kim, now a mother of seven. “If a product or service makes your own life easier, you’re on the right track.”

Wildberries initially sold clothing before expanding to appliances, household items, cosmetics, books and more. The platform with its distinct purple logo has become an undisputed leader in e-commerce, accounting for about half of all online orders in Russia. Businesses big and small use it to store, ship and deliver merchandise across the country’s 11 time zones.

An estimated 500,000 to 800,000 sellers use Wildberries, often described as Russia’s Amazon. After Western brands fled following the war in Ukraine, online retailers filled the void with merchandise from China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere.

The company also acquired a bank, expanded to tourism and even considered buying an airline.

In 2024, Kim divorced her husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk, triggering a fight for control of the company. Bakalchuk sought the support of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his feared paramilitary forces but eventually lost the battle, which peaked in a shootout at a business center near the Kremlin that left two people dead and several wounded.

The company has prided itself on relying on about two dozen mammoth warehouses as the core of its vast logistical network stockpiling the goods before shipping to about 100,000 storefront distribution points nationwide.

Rival online retailers Ozon and Yandex Market use smaller depots spread over a wider network.

As Ukraine embarked on a strategy of using long-range drones to attack deep inside Russia, it has expanded from striking military bases, oil refineries and other infrastructure to Wildberries warehouses, which provided particularly soft targets.

Since the first attack July 18 in Elektrostal, just east of Moscow, and in the southwestern Tambov region, Wildberries depots burned one after another in massive fires that flooded social media.

The depots, some as big as 300,000 square meters (about 3.2 million square feet) were unprotected and easy to set ablaze. It took three days to extinguish the fire in the Elektrostal depot, the Moscow region’s main hub.

“These are not military and high-value political targets, therefore they’re not especially secured, they’re not really built to be able to shrug off drone strikes,” said podcaster Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert who heads the Mayak Intelligence consultancy.

The strikes have stretched from the European part of Russia to Yekaterinburg, over 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles) from Ukraine’s border.

There’s scarce public data, but some estimates indicate that up to 20% of the company’s total warehouse space has been destroyed, with assessments of losses running as high as $6 billion.

Kim said Wildberries’ sites have been “reinforced and strengthened” defensively, but the attacks continued. Some warehouses suffered only minor damage, and Ukraine tried to hit them again.

Wildberries said it’s rearranging supply chains to create “partner hubs” for storing merchandise — a long and challenging process, given its dependence on big depots.

Ukrainian officials have said Wildberries sells gear and technical components, including drones, to the military. Moscow denied it, but such dual-use items as drone components, flak jackets or thermal weapon sights remain available on the platform.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the attacks were designed to disrupt military supplies, breed popular discontent and cause a domino effect in the Russian economy by putting stress on major banks, including VTB and Sberbank, that made massive loans to Wildberries.

Wildberries’ debts were estimated at the equivalent of about $15 billion at the end of 2025.

Russia’s small and medium businesses already have been hit hard by tax increases, regulatory hurdles and, most recently, a fuel crisis from attacks on oil refineries.

The strikes on Wildberries have further exacerbated the business environment, said Chris Weafer, CEO of Macro-Advisory Ltd. Consultancy.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a nail in the coffin because we’re not there yet, but it’s certainly another enormous difficulty on top of what has already been a very difficult situation for small enterprises,” Weafer said.

Wildberries had recently changed its seller policy, exempting it from liability for stock damaged by a “force majeure” that includes drone attacks.

Kim pledged to support sellers with discounts on storage, free transfer of goods to other sites, discounted loans and other measures. Wildberries also issued some reimbursements but they covered only a fraction of the losses.

Russia’s Central Bank has asked lenders to restructure loans to small and medium businesses that lost merchandise.

Meanwhile, many owners of Wildberries pickup points face lost revenue amid the plunging deliveries. Some vented frustrations on social media about going out of business.

The lost goods mean tens of thousands of small businesses can’t continue to operate, service their loans or pay taxes. Many are pleading for government support.

Galeotti said the strikes reflected Kyiv’s effort to bring the war home to Russia.

“It’s not just about seeing great clouds of black smoke over your cities because of some oil refinery on the outskirts being hit,” he said. “You might be a small business whose inventory has just gone up in smoke in one of the Wildberries’ warehouses. Or else you just simply might be an ordinary consumer who just suddenly is no longer going to get the goods that you plan to buy.”

Some analysts warn that instead of provoking discontent, the attacks could fuel stronger anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western fervor.

The Wildberries attacks have played into the hands of Russian hawks who urge escalating the war, said pro-Kremlin political expert Sergei Markov.

“It strengthens the view that it’s necessary to hit Europe,” he said. “And better sooner than later.”

Former President Dmitry Medvedev sought to stir up anger at Ukraine for trying to destroy an essential part of daily routine for millions.

“Our enemy is fighting not the Russian leadership or the army, but ordinary citizens,” he said.

(AP)

The Trump administration is significantly scaling back some of its demands on Iran, focusing primarily on preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and maintaining stable energy prices as the current U.S.-Iran understandings approach their expiration.

President Donald Trump made clear that one red line remains unchanged: “Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a nuclear weapon.”

However, CNN reports that after six months of conflict, Washington is prepared to move away from some of its broader original objectives, including regime change in Tehran and ending Iranian support for its regional proxies.

The administration is now reportedly concentrating on two primary goals: preventing Iranian nuclear armament and maintaining stability in global energy prices.

According to CNN, Trump believes Iran’s nuclear program has been sufficiently damaged and that its nuclear materials remain buried deep underground. The administration is reportedly no longer insisting that Iran surrender the materials and could instead accept monitoring them from space.

The shift comes as tensions continue surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. Iran closed the strategic waterway in protest of an American effort to establish an alternative route, bringing commercial shipping to a complete halt on Sunday. Traffic later resumed, but the disruption highlighted Tehran’s ability to exert pressure on global energy markets and trade.

Meanwhile, Iran’s economy continues to face mounting pressure, with its currency weakening and inflation remaining high. An Iranian vice president warned of an “economic war” and called on government institutions to prepare plans to confront the pressure, while data from tracking firm Kpler indicated a sharp slowdown in tanker traffic in the Gulf.

Iran, however, disputes the claim that a deadline for the understandings is approaching. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said Monday that the memorandum does not specify a 60-day period and that Tehran would not accept pressure based on time constraints.

“The United States has not fulfilled its commitments under the memorandum, therefore the issue of the 60 days is irrelevant and our forces are prepared to respond,” Baghaei said.

Despite the tough rhetoric, there are growing indications that both sides are seeking additional time. Sources told Saudi outlet Al Arabiya that there are reports of an agreement to extend the temporary U.S.-Iran ceasefire for another 60 days.

Such an extension would signal that Washington currently favors a narrower agreement over pursuing all of its original objectives, while Trump’s central demand — preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — remains unchanged.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

Shas MK Moshe Abutbul is pushing back against growing criticism within the Chareidi community over the draft crisis, arguing that Chareidi lawmakers did take significant action over the past four years but repeatedly encountered obstacles from Israel’s judicial system.

Speaking in an interview as Israel moves closer to elections, Abutbul acknowledged that Shas and United Torah Judaism face difficult questions from Chareidi voters over what they accomplished to protect the status of bnei yeshivos.

Abutbul said he recently participated in panels with bnei Torah and baalei batim, where he encountered people demanding answers about the actions of their elected representatives.

“There are very pointed questions there,” Abutbul said, adding that once the sequence of events is explained, the picture becomes considerably more complicated. “The public is very, very thirsty for answers.”

According to Abutbul, much of what Chareidi representatives actually did over the past several years was never adequately communicated to the public.

One of the central questions facing Shas and UTJ as elections approach is what they accomplished during the past four years toward resolving the status of bnei yeshivos. Abutbul argued that the war dramatically altered the political and public environment in which the issue was being addressed.

“During a war, it is not exactly the time when you can talk about an exemption from military service or anything else, when an Israeli mother is sending several sons to the battlefield,” he said.

Abutbul said the government’s effort to overhaul the judicial system was also intended, in part, to create a legal framework that could withstand a future High Court challenge to legislation governing the status of bnei yeshivos.

He maintained that the fundamental obstacle is not necessarily a lack of political votes in the Knesset, but the judiciary’s ability to overturn or obstruct legislation passed by elected lawmakers.

As an example, Abutbul pointed to legislation concerning arrests that was advanced by Shas chairman Aryeh Deri. He said that despite securing sufficient political support for the measure, it ultimately encountered a legal barrier.

“This is not only a political problem; it is a fundamental legal problem that must be addressed at its root,” Abutbul said.

Without fundamental change, he argued, legislative achievements can ultimately prove meaningless.

“It is like a person who comes and fills a bag with something, but at the bottom you have a very large hole,” he said.

Abutbul therefore identified the judicial system as one of the central issues Chareidi parties must address in the coming election and the next government.

“We must change and reshape the face of the High Court, so that it will be a body that does not interfere in things that are legislated,” he said.

Asked why changes that were not completed during the outgoing government should be expected to succeed during the next term, Abutbul said the war made far-reaching reforms considerably more difficult and argued that voters now understand what is at stake.

“Everyone knows that 90 percent of this issue is fundamentally addressing the judicial system,” he said.

Abutbul added that steps have already been taken in areas involving the powers of legal advisers, the Police Internal Investigations Department and other components of the legal system.

During the second part of the interview, Abutbul turned from politics to the olam haTorah, describing a major Torah project he has initiated involving the study of Shas.

The project is intended to compile, alongside each masechta, relevant sugyos appearing elsewhere throughout the Talmud, allowing a person learning a particular subject to easily access related discussions found in other masechtos.

According to Abutbul, approximately 200 avreichim have worked on the undertaking and have already identified nearly 8,000 references and connections between different sugyos throughout Shas.

The plan calls for approximately 100 to 150 supplementary pages to accompany each masechta. The existing text of the Gemara will remain unchanged, while the additional material will present parallel and related sugyos from elsewhere in Shas.

Abutbul said the Otzar HaChochma project has assisted in making the material available to the public, enabling lomdim to review the work, submit comments and suggest additions as the project moves toward completion.

He added that the initiative has received endorsements from leading gedolei Torah, including the Moetzet Chachmei HaTorah.

Abutbul concluded by saying that despite the political and legal battles facing the Chareidi community, he believes its most fundamental response remains strengthening Torah learning.

“Our remedy against all these blows, truly, truly, is, with Hashem’s help, to learn Torah, to add Torah, to add batei medrash, to add batei knesses.”

{Matzav.com}

NEW YORK (VINnews) — Author and political commentator Dr. James Lindsay issued a stark warning about the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America, arguing in a wide-ranging interview with Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch that the organization is attempting to capture the Democratic Party from within and push the United States toward a far more radical political system.

Lindsay, co-founder of New Discourses and a longtime critic of Marxism and progressive ideology, compared what he sees happening inside the Democratic Party to the strategy employed by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks more than a century ago.

“The DSA’s openly stated goals are to hollow out and take over the Democratic Party apparatus,” Lindsay said. He argued that a separate revolutionary socialist party would have little chance of succeeding nationally, making control of an established political party and its resources a far more effective strategy.

Schonbuch pointed to a series of proposals discussed during the interview, including abolishing the Senate, fundamentally changing the presidency and Supreme Court, abolishing ICE, eventually eliminating national borders, defunding the Pentagon, transforming the prison system and expanding public ownership of major corporations. Lindsay said these ideas draw inspiration from a mixture of Marxist, Leninist, Maoist and other communist traditions.

According to Lindsay, one of the most misunderstood phrases in American politics is “democratic socialism.” He argued that the word “democratic” can conceal a fundamentally different conception of democracy than the traditional American understanding of equal political rights.

Lindsay traced that conception to Leninist political theory, arguing that under revolutionary socialism, political rights historically became increasingly reserved for those supporting the socialist project while opponents could lose political influence, property rights and freedom of expression.

The conversation also focused heavily on New York and the ability of the DSA to organize nationally while fighting elections locally.

Lindsay argued that the movement’s strength is not simply ideological but organizational. He described a system in which activists and resources from around the country can be concentrated on individual local races.

“Their ground game is of national scale at the local level,” Lindsay said, warning that establishment Democrats have been too weak to resist the movement while Republicans have often failed to appreciate the sophistication of its organizing operation.

But Lindsay rejected the idea that the DSA’s rise is inevitable.

He argued that dramatically higher voter participation—particularly in lower-turnout congressional, state and local elections—could stop socialist candidates and simultaneously empower moderate Democrats to challenge the DSA’s growing influence within their own party.

“If we show up,” Lindsay said, voters “can actually block this.”

The interview also turned to another threat Lindsay believes Americans are badly underestimating: information warfare and foreign manipulation of social media.

Lindsay argued that hostile foreign actors do not necessarily need to directly pay prominent American influencers. Instead, networks of bots and coordinated accounts can artificially amplify particular messages, increasing engagement and indirectly encouraging creators to produce increasingly sensational content because that content becomes profitable.

He specifically discussed Russia and Iran, describing sophisticated efforts to manipulate Western perceptions through social-media ecosystems.

The problem, Lindsay suggested, extends beyond the political left.

During the discussion, Schonbuch raised the influence of figures including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Lindsay expressed concern about a faction of the American right that he described as increasingly isolationist and, in some cases, antisemitic. He warned that polarization could push mainstream Americans either toward political disengagement or toward increasingly radical alternatives.

For Lindsay, that possibility creates a dangerous cycle: radicalism on one side produces radicalization on the other, while the political center becomes increasingly paralyzed.

His central message, however, was that Americans still have a peaceful and democratic mechanism for stopping that cycle: participation.

The battle, Lindsay and Schonbuch agreed, must ultimately be fought at the ballot box. Schonbuch specifically urged the Jewish community and other Americans concerned about the country’s direction to become politically engaged rather than assume someone else will stop the movement.

“Without that action, without that activity, we cannot defeat the DSA,” Schonbuch said.

The full interview with James Lindsay was conducted by Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch, LMFT, host of the Viktor Frankl Podcast.

Follow Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch and the Viktor Frankl Podcast at YouTube.com/@rabbiforamerica

Two large investors are suing UnitedHealth Group’s directors, arguing the board saw the warning signs of fraud, weak cybersecurity and bad claims practices for years and did nothing about them.

The case is what lawyers call a derivative suit, meaning the shareholders are suing the directors on the company’s behalf rather than for themselves — any money recovered goes back into UnitedHealth. The plaintiffs include Rhode Island’s public employee retirement system and Swedish asset manager Länsförsäkringar Fondförvaltning, which holds more than $123 million of UnitedHealth stock. They accuse directors and officers of missing red flags of misconduct and serious regulatory problems and taking no steps to fix them.The complaint covers conduct from September 2021 through July 2025 and says the fallout erased more than $277 billion in shareholder value between December 2024 and August 2025.

The cybersecurity piece is the part most readers will recognize. Plaintiffs say the company misled a federal court about data firewalls during its $13 billion purchase of Change Healthcare, and that weak security helped cause the 2024 ransomware attack that exposed data on roughly 190 million people — better than one in two Americans. Change Healthcare processes a large share of the nation’s medical claims, and the attack froze payments to doctors and hospitals for weeks.

Some of the new allegations come from former Change Healthcare employees identified in the filing as confidential witnesses, two of whom described lax security practices. The filing is an amended version of a suit first brought in 2024, and shareholders reviewed company books and records before filing it, though much of that material is blacked out in the public copy.

On the billing side, the suit alleges UnitedHealth inflated Medicare Advantage revenue by making members appear sicker than they were through diagnoses the plaintiffs call unnecessary, pulling in $8.7 billion in federal money in 2021 alone, and that it used automated algorithms to deny rehabilitation care after hospital stays. It also claims executives including Stephen Hemsley, Andrew Witty and the late UnitedHealthcare chief Brian Thompson sold more than $237 million of stock while the alleged problems were still hidden from investors.

None of this has been proven. The next step belongs to the judge, who decides whether the claims are strong enough to proceed to discovery — the stage where internal emails and board minutes get pulled into the open. That is the real pressure point in a case like this, and it is usually where settlements start.

UnitedHealth is fighting on more than one front. A separate securities fraud case led by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System is awaiting a ruling on the company’s motion to dismiss, and the company, based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, is facing several shareholder suits tied to the stock’s slide from its 2024 record.

For investors, the practical question is cost. Shares were quoted near $399 in recent trading, up more than 20 percent this year but still well under the 2024 high. Legal exposure of this size tends to land as settlement charges, higher insurance costs and tighter oversight requirements — expenses that eventually show up in premiums.

JBizNews Desk | New York

© JBizNews.com All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution without written permission is prohibited.

A large crowd filled the Torah Links bais medrash in Lakewood on Sunday night, ohr l’daled Elul, for a maamad marking 100 years since the petirah of Rav Meir Simcha HaKohen of Dvinsk zt”l, author of the Ohr Somayach and Meshech Chochmah, with close to 500 more joining via live hookup.

The event was organized by Lakewood’s Machon Aleh Zayis at the initiative of R’ Dovie Safier and Rabbi Moshe Dembitzer, and sponsored primarily by R’ Dovie Safier and R’ Tzvi Tress.

Speakers included Rav Lipa Geldwerth, Rav Yaakov Drillman and Rav Uren Reich; Rabbi Shimon Szimonowitz of Machon Aleh Zayis led the program. Rav Dovid Greenwald, who discovered Rav Meir Simcha’s manuscripts in the National Library in Jerusalem in 1967 and published them, traveled from the Catskills to attend.

Machon Aleh Zayis’s new English translation of the Meshech Chochmah on Bereishis, with commentary by Rav Avrohom Wagner – the first comprehensive translation of the sefer – was released for the occasion.

The next time you face adversity in your career—whether it’s a missed promotion, a difficult boss, or a deal that falls through—United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has a simple but effective mantra: “No excuses.”

“Once you learn that, it’s just so transformative to everything in life because then you pivot from feeling bad for yourself, feeling sorry for yourself, to how do I go overcome it?” he said in an Instagram post after a group of summer United interns which lessons have shaped his career and personal life.

It’s a lesson many Gen Z may have already learned the hard way, having entered the workplace amid shifting workplace norms, waves of layoffs, and a particularly tough job market. But Kirby’s advice is less about avoiding adversity than how to respond when it inevitably arrives.

It’s a philosophy the 58-year-old first learned while training as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force Academy—and one that was put to the test most publicly when he became United’s CEO in May 2020, just as the pandemic was bringing the airline industry to a standstill. With U.S. passenger traffic plunging by 60%, United operating revenue fell by 64.5% in 2020 and the company posted a $7.1 billion net loss. Kirby was forced to slash flights, burn millions each quarter in cash, and even take out a $6.8 billion loan using United’s loyalty program as collateral. He also took a 100% salary cut.

“You’re going to encounter challenges in business and in life,” he added as an Instagram caption. “You can spend your time explaining why it happened, or you can spend your time figuring out how to overcome it. I’ve always believed the second approach is better.”

From mowing lawns and selling fireworks to leading a $60 billion airline giant

Kirby grew up in a middle-class family in a farming community outside of Dallas, Texas, and has said he never had a grand career plan but developed an entrepreneurial streak early.

“I was always trying to earn money as a kid by mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, and, once I tried to start a company with a buddy,” Kirby told the East Valley Tribune in 2007. “We sold firecrackers—and we nearly blew ourselves up!”

After graduating from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and operations research, Kirby worked as a budget analyst at the Pentagon and later moved into the airline industry. He joined American West Airlines in 1995 and rose through the ranks, eventually becoming president of U.S. Airways in 2006. Following U.S. Airways’ merger with American Airlines in 2013, Kirby became president of the combined airline. He joined United as president in 2016 and was named CEO in 2020.

Above all, Kirby is a believer that self-confidence will lead you down a pathway toward success.

“I also believe in self-fulfilling prophecies,” he said. “By saying you’re going to do incredible stuff, you make it a whole lot more likely that it’s going to happen.”

An additional core part of Kirby’s leadership strategy has been surrounding himself with people who share his approach to work—and who genuinely care about one another. When he was looking to strengthen United’s pilot-hiring process, Kirby asked his head of flight operations to select a dozen well-liked pilots to help interview candidates.

“I told this group of pilots, ‘Your job is just to assess: Is this interviewee someone I would like to take a four-day trip with? And if you say no, then they’re out. You get a veto vote,’” Kirby said in a recent interview with McKinsey.

“The idea is to pick people who care about others, who you want to hang out with, who you want to be with.”

United has since emerged from the pandemic in a much stronger position. Its market capitalization is now roughly $41 billion, just behind rival Delta, at $60 billion. Fortune reached out to United Airlines for further comment.

The CEOs of Delta and Nvidia agree: don’t shy away from adversity

Kirby isn’t the only business leader who believes adversity can be a catalyst for growth.

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian has similarly emphasized the role of humility in navigating crises.

“Our motto is to keep climbing, and to always keep growing and keep learning and keep aspiring, and keep focused on where we’re going,” he told The Wall Street Journal, adding that crisis—whether the pandemic or the rise of jet fuel, “can make you stronger or they can make you fall back to the pack.” 

“We’ve always tried through learning, through humility to try to take from whatever we’ve encountered [and] become more resilient, become more differentiated, become more distinctive in how we deliver our service.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has taken a similarly counterintuitive view of adversity, arguing that having low expectations can actually make someone more resilient.

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 2024. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.”

Huang added, “I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

About six months after Islamist organizations in Turkey launched a social media campaign against Israelis with dual citizenship and leaked his personal information, Matan, a 27-year-old Turkish-Israeli citizen from central Israel and former police volunteer, traveled to Turkey to visit family.

Upon arriving in Antalya, a local police officer warned him to conceal his Israeli identity, telling him that extremists were looking to target Israelis.

During his visit, photos of Matan in IDF uniform and posters identifying him as a wanted man circulated online. Several weeks after his arrival, at 4 a.m., eight plainclothes counterterrorism officers raided his family’s apartment. Matan was arrested on suspicion of espionage and insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

“The investigators said they had received a report that I had come to Turkey to gather information on Turkish police officers and soldiers for Israel,” Matan recalled.

Matan said investigators accused him of murdering Palestinians, including women and babies, participating in genocide and committing war crimes as part of a special force that had raided a Gaza-bound flotilla.

He said he was held alone in a cell and subjected to physical abuse, recounting that one police officer deliberately slapped areas of his body that had been badly sunburned.

After approximately 24 hours in custody, a local judge ordered Matan’s release under restrictive conditions but barred him from leaving Turkey. His family subsequently worked with Turkish and Israeli attorneys, in coordination with Israel’s Foreign Ministry, to secure permission for him to leave the country.

About a month and a half later, he was finally permitted to return to Israel.

“We got on the first flight to Israel, and I screamed with joy,” Matan told Mako. “The investigation against me in Turkey is still ongoing, and I don’t know how it will end, but I will never go back there.”

He said the threats against him have continued even after his return to Israel.

“Every day I receive messages on social media threatening my life and the lives of my family members and claiming that I am an Israeli spy.”

Earlier this year, a former IDF female soldier with dual Turkish-Israeli citizenship was quietly rescued from Turkey after being detained while visiting her parents,

Antisemitic billboard in Turkey.

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)

PITTSBURGH — The New York Post profiled Chaim Galbut on Monday, highlighting the 19-year-old Orthodox Jewish basketball player from Miami as he prepares to begin a rare Division I career at Duquesne University.

Galbut, a 6-foot-7 forward, is expected to become one of the few Orthodox Jewish players to compete at the Division I level while maintaining strict religious observance, including wearing a yarmulke and observing the Jewish Sabbath.

His observance means he will be unable to participate in games or team activities that take place during Shabbat, from Friday evening through Saturday evening.

The Post reports that Galbut spent a gap year in Jerusalem studying Talmud while continuing to pursue basketball. He had not received a Division I offer when he graduated high school in 2025.

His opportunity came after he joined JDS Elite, an AAU program that gives Jewish day school players exposure to higher-level competition and college scouts.

Duquesne assistant coach Chase Goldstein became interested after seeing Galbut’s highlight video. The Post reports that Goldstein viewed Galbut’s recruitment as an opportunity to demonstrate what an Orthodox Jewish athlete could accomplish at the highest level of college basketball.

Galbut ultimately chose Duquesne over continuing at Yeshiva University, where he would have faced fewer conflicts between basketball and Sabbath observance.

“I’m a basketball player and I’m a Jew. Not one or the other,” Galbut said, according to the Post.

His demanding routine includes morning prayers, basketball practice, online classes, Talmud study and additional workouts.

The Post reports that Galbut is expected to be the first yarmulke-wearing, Sabbath-observant player on a Division I men’s basketball team since Tamir Goodman played at Towson in 2001.

For Galbut, the challenge is about more than making history. He hopes to demonstrate that his religious commitments and basketball ambitions can coexist.

“I’m a basketball player and I’m a Jew,” he said. “Not one or the other.”

Plans for the historic bar mitzvah of the oldest grandson of the Rachmastrivka Rebbe have undergone a last-minute change, with the originally scheduled venue at the large Karlin-Stolin Bais Medrash in Givat Ze’ev canceled following pressure from extremist elements.

The major simcha is scheduled to take place on Sunday, 11 Elul, during the week of Parshas Ki Savo. The bar mitzvah boy is the oldest grandson of the Rachmastrivka Rebbe and a son of the Rebbe’s son-in-law, Rav Shmuel Abba Twersky.

The occasion is particularly significant for Rachmastrivka, as it will mark the first bar mitzvah among the Rebbe’s descendants. The Rebbe has two daughters, who are married to Rav Shmuel Abba Twersky and Rav Dovid Yitzchok Yaakov Biderman, and this will be the first time that one of his grandchildren reaches the age of bar mitzvah.

With thousands of chassidim and admirers expected to arrive from across Eretz Yisroel and abroad, Rachmastrivka askanim had been searching for a large venue capable of accommodating the anticipated crowds.

After considerable effort, arrangements were finalized to hold the simcha in the expansive main bais medrash of Karlin-Stolin in Givat Ze’ev.

The decision generated considerable attention in the chassidishe community, particularly because of opposition from extremist groups to holding the event at the Givat Ze’ev location. In the past, the Toldos Avrohom Yitzchok Rebbe held two weddings for his descendants at the same venue despite significant pressure from those elements.

Now, however, the pressure has apparently succeeded. Organizers were forced to cancel plans to use the Karlin-Stolin complex and are working urgently to secure an alternative location ahead of the major event.

According to current plans, the historic bar mitzvah will likely be held in a massive tent to be erected near the Slonim Bais Medrash in Yerushalayim.

{Matzav.com}

Berkshire Hathaway is increasing the size of its stake in Google’s parent company and beefing up its holdings in homebuilders, according to the conglomerate’s latest snapshot of its investment portfolio.

The Omaha, Nebraska-based company also continued to pare its stake in financial companies and a number of other stocks in the April-June quarter, according to a regulatory filing filed late Friday.

CEO Greg Abel, who took over from Warren Buffett at the start of the year, agreed in June to make a $10 billion stock investment in Alphabet, expanding on the stake that Berkshire started to build last fall.

In the second quarter, Berkshire picked up roughly 48.1 million shares in Alphabet, bringing its total shares in the tech giant to roughly 106 million. That stake was valued at about $37.76 billion as of June 30, according to the filing. As recently as the end of December, Berkshire held only 17.8 million Alphabet shares worth $5.6 billion.

Alphabet has said it plans to raise $80 billion to pay for the computing infrastructure needed to power its AI offerings.

Beyond tech, Berkshire continued to boost its investments in the U.S. homebuilding sector. Its stake in homebuilder Lennar increased nearly 30% in the second quarter. Berkshire also established a small new stake in D.R. Horton that was worth $580,504 at the end of June.

In July, Berkshire completed a $6.8 billion acquisition of homebuilder Taylor Morrison.

Berkshire also sharply increased its shares in Delta Air Lines and Macy’s in the second quarter. The stakes were worth about $5.37 billion and $173 million, respectively, as of June 30.

Berkshire also pruned its investment portfolio in the second quarter, reducing its stake in several companies relative to where they stood in the first quarter, including supermarket operator Kroger, steel manufacturer Nucor and dialysis giant DaVita.

The company also dumped all its holdings — 632,890 shares — in beverage company Constellation Brands.

Berkshire also pared its shares in several financial companies. Its stakes in Bank of America and Ally Financial declined by around 6% and 6.9%, respectively, and it slashed its shares in Capital One Financial by 58%.

Many investors have followed Berkshire’s portfolio closely over the years because they liked to copy Buffett’s moves. He remains the company’s chairman and largest shareholder.

But Berkshire, which owns dozens of businesses including major insurers like Geico and BNSF railroad, never comments on the moves it makes to its stock portfolio from quarter to quarter because it doesn’t want to discuss what it is buying and selling.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Buc-ee’s planted its flag in Arkansas on Monday, opening its first location in the Natural State as the Texas-based travel center chain continues an aggressive expansion across the U.S.

The new Buc-ee’s in Benton opened its doors at 6 a.m. CT and spans 74,000 square feet, with 120 fueling positions. The company said the sprawling travel center will create more than 200 jobs.

The Arkansas debut brings Buc-ee’s to 58 locations nationwide, further extending a brand that began as a Texas roadside institution into new markets across the country.

Located at 1400 Highway 229, the store offers the chain’s signature assortment of Texas barbecue, homemade fudge, kolaches, Beaver Nuggets, jerky and fresh pastries, along with the famously clean restrooms that have helped turn Buc-ee’s into a roadside destination.

“We obviously picked Benton, the ‘Heart of Arkansas,’ to be the first Buc-ee’s in the Natural State,” Stan Beard of Buc-ee’s said ahead of the opening.

“Folks on their way to or from Hot Springs or any number of beautiful destinations around Benton and Little Rock will stop in for our great Texas BBQ, the cleanest restrooms in the universe, and a pit stop beyond their wildest expectations,” Beard added.

Founded in 1982 and headquartered in Texas, Buc-ee’s operates 37 stores in its home state, according to the company. Its footprint now also includes locations in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

The Benton opening came just five days after Buc-ee’s opened a new location in San Marcos, Texas, on Aug. 12, underscoring the pace of the company’s expansion beyond its longtime Texas base.

Earlier this year, Buc-ee’s entered two other new markets, opening its first Ohio location in Huber Heights in April before making its Arizona debut with a new travel center in Goodyear in June.

More growth is already in the pipeline. Buc-ee’s is expected to open another travel center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on Nov. 16, followed by several additional locations across the country in the coming years.

Six locations are slated for 2027, including Ruston, Louisiana; Kansas City, Kansas; Gallaway, Tennessee; St. Lucie, Florida; Boerne, Texas; and Monroe County, Georgia. Another two are planned for 2028 in Mebane, North Carolina, and Lafayette, Louisiana.

Additional locations are scheduled for 2029 and beyond, including West Memphis, Arkansas; Ocala, Florida; and Oak Grove, Kentucky, in 2029, followed by Hardeeville, South Carolina, in 2031.

A prominent Russian economist has been fired after delivering an unusually sharp assessment of the country’s economic condition, warning that the mounting costs of the war in Ukraine could ultimately trigger a “social crisis” at a time “when no one particularly expects it.

Andrei Klepach, chief economist at Russia’s state development bank VEB, was dismissed after remarks from a speech he delivered to fellow economists in May were reported by Russian media. Klepach had served as VEB’s chief economist since 2014.

In the speech, Klepach warned that Russia was losing ground economically and technologically to China and the United States and, “in some ways,” even to Ukraine. He also rejected expectations that Ukraine’s economy was approaching collapse.

“We will not win the competition in this war of attrition,” Klepach said. “We have the illusion that everything there will collapse. It has not collapsed and will not collapse. Our costs are mounting.”

Klepach warned that the economic pressures facing Russia could ultimately produce a “social crisis” that would emerge “precisely when nobody is particularly expecting it.”

His comments represented a rare public criticism from a senior figure at a Russian state institution and challenged President Vladimir Putin’s insistence that the Russian economy remains stable despite the pressures created by the war.

VEB confirmed that Klepach was no longer its chief economist but did not publicly provide a reason for his dismissal. Klepach also confirmed his firing to Reuters. The independent Russian outlet The Bell reported, citing sources, that he was fired on orders from the Kremlin and that the decision was directly linked to his May speech.

The dismissal comes amid mounting pressure on Russia’s economy from massive wartime spending, Western sanctions and Ukrainian attacks on energy and logistics infrastructure.

During the first four months of 2026, Russia’s budget deficit reached 5.87 trillion rubles, approximately $81 billion — already well above the government’s 3.79 trillion-ruble deficit target for the entire year. Several of Putin’s closest advisers have also privately warned him that the current level of wartime spending is becoming unsustainable, The Guardian reported.

Recent Ukrainian strikes have hit dozens of warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce retailer, destroying inventory worth billions of dollars. The attacks have raised questions about the company’s financial stability and dealt a severe blow to thousands of independent sellers who rely on the platform for their livelihoods.

Despite the mounting economic pressure, Putin has given no indication that he intends to scale back the war or rein in spending. The Kremlin has instead sought additional revenue by raising taxes on smaller businesses and pressuring oligarchs to contribute more toward the war effort.

At the same time, the surge in oil prices this year following the U.S. war with Iran has provided Moscow with billions of dollars in additional revenue, helping cushion some of the growing economic pressure.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

One of two children stabbed in a violent incident on Emek HaZeitim Street in Beit Shemesh has died from his injuries. Police arrested a suspect and launched an investigation into the circumstances of the stabbing.

Separately, a 4-year-old boy from the Toldos Aharon community was pronounced dead after being struck by a vehicle on Rabbi Chanina Street in Ramat Beit Shemesh Daled. He was transported to the hospital while undergoing resuscitation efforts.

He has been identified as Asher Anshel Fish Z”L.

Asher Anshel Z”L was the only son of R’ Moshe Aryeh Fish, a respected member of the Toldos Aharon kehillah in Beit Shemesh, and his mother, a member of the Sachs family and granddaughter of R’ Moshe Braun.

The family had lived in Yerushalayim until approximately two months ago, when they moved to Ramat Beit Shemesh Daled.

In a separate incident in Hadera, a one-and-a-half-year-old girl was seriously injured after falling from playground equipment at a shopping center.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

Veteran Likud activist Chilik Attias pushed back against efforts to make the Chareidi draft controversy a central election issue, while also sharply criticizing divisions on the political right and expressing opposition to reserved slots on the Likud slate ahead of the party’s upcoming primaries.

Speaking with Avi Mimran on Kol Chai’s main news program ahead of the Likud primaries, Attias discussed the internal battles within the party, defections from the right-wing bloc, the draft issue, judicial reform and the balance between party activists and Likud members in determining the party’s electoral slate.

Attias began by criticizing the media’s focus on rumors and internal political battles surrounding the primaries.

“We are currently a party holding primaries, democratic primaries, a celebration of democracy, something that truly does not exist in any other party,” he said.

Asked about reports surrounding Nir Barkat, Attias said that “anything is possible,” but argued that attention should be focused primarily on the democratic process itself rather than the political confrontations surrounding it.

Attias was particularly critical of figures who have left Likud or are reportedly considering doing so, including Yuli Edelstein and Gilad Erdan, comparing their moves to Gideon Sa’ar’s earlier departure from the party.

“They are making a mistake. Instead of seeing what happened to Gideon Sa’ar, they are now making the same mistake,” Attias said.

He argued that even serious ideological disagreements should be fought from within Likud rather than by abandoning the party.

“They could have fought within Likud for the things they believe they are right about,” he said.

Turning to Erdan, Attias added: “He was with us all along… and today he is doing exactly the same thing. For what? To weaken the right-wing camp?”

The conversation also turned to the Chareidi draft issue and political efforts to capitalize on opposition to the Chareidi community. Attias dismissed the strategy outright.

“It’s nonsense, this Chareidi issue,” he said.

“The Chareidim need to sit down and see — those who are not enlisting should enlist. Those who learn Torah and are capable of learning should do so in an organized manner,” Attias said.

He predicted that even political figures currently positioning themselves against the Chareidi parties will ultimately seek their support when coalition-building begins.

“Even Eisenkot will come to the Chareidim and offer everything,” Attias said.

On the judicial system, Attias struck a more cautious tone than some other figures on the Israeli right, saying he does not favor the terminology that has dominated the debate in recent years.

“The word ‘reform,’ in my opinion, is a somewhat harsh word,” he said, suggesting instead that the discussion focus on “corrections” and “changes regarding the judiciary.”

Nevertheless, Attias said significant changes are necessary, including to Israel’s judicial seniority system.

“It cannot be that seniority transfers a kingdom from one person to another,” he said.

At the same time, he cautioned against attempting to overhaul the system all at once.

“It needs to be done carefully, intelligently, with agreements, gradually… You cannot turn everything upside down in one day,” Attias said.

Attias reserved some of his strongest criticism for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s use of reserved slots on the Likud electoral slate. He said the original understanding was that the impact of those slots would be offset by opening district positions to sitting ministers and Knesset members.

“What happened in practice? They didn’t get the districts… and they also got the reserved slots. They both ate the stinking fish and were thrown out of the city,” Attias said.

He argued that the number of reserved positions should have been reduced or that the original agreement should have been honored.

When Mimran raised the argument that Netanyahu needs new political “stars” to strengthen Likud’s candidate list, Attias defended the right of registered party members to determine who represents them.

Referring in part to reports involving Likud MK Tally Gotliv, Attias said: “Either you trust the party members, 160,000 party members, or create an appointments committee.”

If Likud is going to hold genuine primaries, he argued, its members should be permitted to make their choices without excessive interference from outside political or media forces.

Attias concluded by expressing hope for a strong turnout in the primaries and fewer backroom arrangements among candidates and party power brokers.

“I just hope that tomorrow, with Hashem’s help, a very large number of party members will actually come out, and they will make the decision about whom to choose,” he said.

“I hope that this time there will be no deals, and there will be nothing under the table and all kinds of things, and that they will truly vote for the best Knesset members.”

For many years, Oman was a country that rarely appeared in news about the Middle East. It didn’t have a conflict. There were no terrorist threats or extremism.

It was a friend of the West and a neutral country in the region. But in the last seven months, the US and Israeli war on Iran has plunged Oman into the spotlight.

Now US President Donald Trump has threatened to bomb the sultanate if it “gets in the way” of US policy regarding the Strait of Hormuz.

This is the second time that Trump has threatened Oman. It has not appeared fazed by these threats. It knows that it has to navigate a changed regional and international landscape.

The US war on Iran has accelerated changes to regional security and the world order. Many countries are now wary of unpredictable US behavior and threats.

Oman, which has been a US ally, is now also in the crosshairs of US threats. This is similar to how the US has threatened NATO allies and downgraded military drills with South Korea.

Oman knows that it can’t escape the Middle East. It is on the southern side of the Strait of Hormuz. It has to deal with the Iranians. Oman has had amicable relations with Iran in the past.

Oman’s quiet diplomacy has long shaped its foreign policy

The sultanate has pursued one of the Middle East’s most unique and pragmatic foreign policies.

Since Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said came to power in 1970 with British support, Muscat has maintained close security ties with the United Kingdom and the US. Rather than aligning itself fully with any one bloc, Oman developed a reputation as the region’s quiet mediator, facilitating negotiations that others could not.

It played a key role in US-Iran talks that paved the way for the 2015 nuclear agreement and has repeatedly hosted discussions on Yemen and other regional crises.

Oman has also maintained that it could improve its relationship with Israel. It has hosted Israeli officials in the past. For instance, it hosted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Muscat in 2018, for talks with Sultan Qaboos.

Although Oman has not joined the Abraham Accords, it has consistently argued that dialogue with Israel can contribute to regional stability, while continuing to support a two-state solution. As such, it was once believed that Oman might be a key to the Accords.

However, over the last few years, Oman has become more concerned about conflicts in the region, such as the war set off by the Hamas October 7 attack.

Under Sultan Haitham bin Tariq, Oman has largely continued a balanced approach. However, its role as a mediator has increasingly placed it under pressure as tensions between Washington and Tehran have grown. Most recently, Trump’s threats have turned a spotlight on Oman.

The Strait of Hormuz remains at the heart of the dispute

What may happen next: It is unlikely that the United States will actually attack Iran. After the attack on Iran, the US can ill afford new conflicts and wars.

The goal of the threats is to try to put Oman on notice that it shouldn’t do any backroom deals with Iran. Iran wants Oman to basically charge fees for ships using the Strait of Hormuz. The goal of Iran is to rope Oman into this process so that Iran can claim it has an excuse to control the Strait.

Countries in the region and the world don’t want this approach to be finalized because it would mean many strategic waterways would become dominated by the countries that border them.

The US has backed freedom of navigation for over a century. As such, ships need to be free to navigate the Strait of Hormuz. Iran wants to use pressure over the strait to bring America to the table to make a deal, or at least get it to stop threatening Iran.

This has now dragged the US into a war in the Middle East in which there is no easy out. The White House has lashed out at Oman, rather than trying to work with Muscat toward a solution.

The theory is that Oman can be threatened to stop talking to Iran.

US pressure could have wider consequences in the Gulf

This is unlikely to work. Oman can’t change its geography. It is near Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. It will always play a role in the area. Oman has been a responsible country in the past, working with the West and the region. It has important cultural and historic ties around the Indian Ocean.

These ties existed long before the US began to get involved in the Middle East.

The threats against Oman may put other US partners in the Gulf on notice. It is not clear whether the threats will succeed in getting those countries to shift their policies or serve to make them view the US as a less reliable partner. On the other hand, the threats may prevent Iran from advancing its push to control the Strait of Hormuz.

This post was originally published on here.

More than 60 mixed-income apartments are available at a new 18-story residential development on the border of Park Slope and Gowanus. Located at 74 St. Marks Place, aka 85 4th Avenue, Solace offers open-layout residences designed with wellness in mind, complemented by a full floor of health-focused amenities. New Yorkers earning 40, 60, and 130 percent of the area median income can apply for the units, priced from $992/month studios to $4,518/month two-bedrooms.

Designed by Stretke Architects, Solace offers a “quieter” residential experience, with a warm brick facade designed to maximize natural light. Previous reports identified Harry Einhorn as the project’s developer.

The building offers 247 thoughtfully crafted residences, each offering open layouts that blend living, dining, and entertaining spaces to ensure comfort.

A full-floor amenities suite dedicated to wellness provides space for movement, focus, and rest, including a fitness center, a yoga and dance studio, and a co-working space.

Apartments come equipped with high-end kitchen appliances, premium countertops and finishes, hardwood floors, air-conditioning, smart controls for heating and cooling, and intercom devices. Dogs and cats up to 65 pounds in weight are permitted.

Other features include a pet spa, bike storage lockers, shared laundry facilities, a media room, a business center, a children’s playroom, green space, a rooftop terrace and a covered parking garage with 37 spaces and electric vehicle charging stations.

SOLACE is conveniently located near the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center transit hub, served by the 2, 3, 4, 5, D, N, and R subway lines, the Long Island Rail Road, and several bus routes.

Einhorn first filed plans for the project in October 2019, according to The Real Deal. The plans called for a 12-story, 193-unit residential development with roughly 5,400 square feet of commercial space, nearly 2,000 square feet of community space, and parking for 79 cars and 100 bikes.

The developer began acquiring the nine tax lots that make up the site in 2011, first purchasing a collection of low-rise buildings along Fourth Avenue between Warren Street and St. Marks Place for just under $19 million.

Einhorn acquired the final property in May 2019 for roughly $5.5 million, after which Axos Bank provided a $25 million loan to refinance the lots. The most recent permit calls for an 185-foot-tall tower with 247 apartments.

Qualifying New Yorkers can apply for the apartments until September 3, 2026. Complete details on how to apply are available here. Preference for 20 percent of the units will be given to residents of Brooklyn Community District 6.

Questions regarding this offer must be referred to NYC’s Housing Connect department by dialing 311.

RELATED:

• New photos of Willets Point show off NYC’s largest all-affordable development in decades
• 96 supportive and affordable homes coming to Hunts Point
• East New York affordable development opens lottery for 200+ units, from $830/month

The post 18-story Park Slope rental opens lottery for affordable apartments, from $992/month first appeared on 6sqft.

Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company increasingly under scrutiny from lawmakers from both parties, civil liberties advocates and citizens across the U.S., announced Thursday that it is making changes to its platform intended to quell privacy concerns and address documented abuses of its system by some members of law enforcement.

The company operates a vast nationwide network of automated cameras that record the license plate numbers and other characteristics of all passing vehicles every day. Thousands of law enforcement agencies in 49 states can search and share Flock’s data across jurisdictions to aid their investigations.

Police have credited the technology as an important crime-fighting innovation that has helped locate missing people and track suspects in violent crimes. But some critics say its pervasiveness amounts to unconstitutional warrantless mass surveillance. Dozens of cities and agencies have nixed their relationships with Flock amid concerns that the data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used in unauthorized tracking, after a flurry of examples surfaced of law enforcement officers misusing the technology for personal searches.

CEO says changes will drive accountability

In an interview, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said many of the product changes will make what were once optional guardrails mandatory for its users to implement by Jan. 1.

Among them: All law enforcement customers will have to implement an audit tool that’s intended to flag abnormal search behavior. When the system detects abnormal behavior, the user would be locked out pending an internal review, the company said in a description of the changes provided ahead of Thursday’s announcement.

Flock, which says its customers own the data that the cameras record, is also shortening the standard data retention window from 30 days to seven. It said it will allow data to be preserved for longer when it is evidence tied to a case number.

Law enforcement users will now also be required to enter a code from their records management system tying each search to a specific case before it is run, something Langley said civil liberties advocates have long been calling for. Overrides for emergencies would be automatically flagged for review, the company said.

Customers will also be allowed to decide which offense types — such as homicide or arson — outside agencies can search their data for, which would allow a customer to block outside searches related to immigration enforcement, the company said.

Langley said that change will give individual cities and departments control to use the system in a manner “consistent with community values.”

Critics say updates still leave room for abuses, supporters urge balance

Critics of the company reacted skeptically to the changes, which they said appeared designed to address the growing bipartisan anger about the cameras but could still leave room for police to abuse the system.

The American Civil Liberties Union said in a blog post that the shortened evidence retention window could be “a step in the right direction,” but it characterized the other changes as “retreads” of inadequate safety measures.

Robert Frommer, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that’s led closely watched litigation over the technology, called the changes “window dressing” from a company in “panic mode.”

“This is window dressing that doesn’t address the fundamental problem, which is that police officers are the ones deciding who and when to search, and that should be done by judges with real warrants,” he said.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor at the George Washington University Law School whose scholarship has focused on policing, big data surveillance and the Fourth Amendment, said Thursday’s shifts were “better than the opposite” but called for further scrutiny of the technology in the form of “sustained democratic engagement with the rules and judicial checks on access at a minimum.”

Ferguson said he’s been surprised to see the “growing community backlash” against Flock specifically, given that the technology isn’t new and other companies sell it as well. But Flock and the movement against it have “captured people’s sense that maybe they don’t want to be surveilled all the time,” he said.

More than 50 agencies or jurisdictions have canceled, suspended or rejected a contract or deactivated their cameras since the beginning of the year, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, a grassroots group formed to track the use of license plate reader technology and push back against it. Cameras around the country have also been vandalized.

In Congress, Republican representatives filed at least two bills aiming to restrict the use of the technology in July.

Ian Adams, an associate professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina currently working on a Flock-related research study, said many of the concerns raised about how the company’s data can be used are not new concerns in law enforcement.

“Anyone with policing experience could have reasonably foreseen that what have been termed as ‘curiosity searches’ by officers, searches for private reasons not related to police work, were going to be a problem this technology faced,” he added, noting that other technologies and platforms like the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information had faced those issues.

Law enforcement experts said it’s a common tension of “policing in a democracy” — balancing useful technology that officers say helps solve and prevent crime with the community’s interest and right to privacy.

“It’s a balancing act. A community has a legitimate interest in how information is used, but it also has a legitimate interest in the effectiveness of a police department in preventing crime,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. “I think a balance can be struck, but it’s more likely to come from department policy than company changes.”

Successes and failures have captured attention

Flock, based in Atlanta, Georgia, often posts to its website what the company deems to be everyday examples of success stories for its cameras, including finding missing seniors and catching car thieves.

But the tech has also been used in high-profile cases that have garnered national attention, such as the search for a suspect in a fatal shooting at Brown University and in tracking and arresting a former North Carolina police officer who authorities say had made threats that he planned to carry out a mass shooting at a festival in Louisiana. A grand jury declined to bring charges in that case in June, and state authorities said the former officer’s family had taken him to a treatment facility out of state where he does not face further charges.

Abuses have also drawn widespread attention. The Washington Post reported earlier this month finding nearly 50 instances of police officers charged or accused of using the cameras for unauthorized purposes, many for tracking current or former romantic partners or family members.

Just this week, six employees — including four officers — of the Savannah Police Department in Georgia were fired after they were accused of searching for friends and family using the tool and allowing an officer from an outside agency to use the city’s cameras.

The Savannah department said it was made aware of the misuse through Flock’s voluntary audit function.

___

Lauer reported from Philadelphia.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

JERUSALEM (VINnews) —A Dutch Christian woman who risked her life to protect a Jewish baby during the Holocaust has been posthumously recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations more than eight decades after the rescue.

Jacqueline Meents-Lenstra cared for Efraim Kochba, born Ernst Bernard van Coevorden, after his Jewish parents entrusted their infant son to her and her Jewish husband, Max, in Nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1943.

Kochba, who is now 83 and lives in Israel, spent years trying to have Meents-Lenstra formally recognized for saving his life.

“It was a closing of the circle for me,” he said.

efraim and jacqueline, yad vashem (credit: COURTESY YAD VASHEM)

She disguised herself as a pregnant woman

Before Kochba’s birth, Meents-Lenstra reportedly pretended to be pregnant, using a pillow under her clothing to avoid suspicion from neighbors.

With assistance from members of the Dutch underground, she was able to enter an Amsterdam hospital and take custody of the newborn.

She then raised him as her own child while his biological parents went into hiding.

Meents-Lenstra kept a detailed diary documenting the baby’s development, preserving memories of his early childhood that his biological parents would never have the opportunity to see.

The diary included photographs and other personal mementos, including a lock of the child’s hair.

His parents were murdered

Kochba’s biological parents, Martha and Ziegfried Fritz van Coevorden, were eventually captured by the Nazis and murdered during the Holocaust.

Kochba never saw his mother again after being separated from her as an infant.

His adoptive father, Max, was also arrested and sent to a transit camp but escaped and eventually returned to his wife and the child. The family remained in hiding until the end of the war.

After liberation, Kochba became the subject of a custody dispute between his surviving biological relatives and the couple who had raised him.

The dispute was eventually resolved in favor of his biological family. Meents-Lenstra later died of cancer at age 32.

Kochba was brought to Israel by his uncle and aunt and raised with their family on a communal farm in central Israel.

He said he did not learn the full story of his childhood until he was a teenager.

A diary connected him to his past

After completing his military service, Kochba returned to the Netherlands and met his adoptive father in 1965.

During that visit, he received the diary Meents-Lenstra had kept while raising him.

For Kochba, the document provided a rare connection to a childhood he could not remember.

He later married and raised four sons of his own while maintaining contact with his adoptive father until his death.

Yad Vashem recognition

Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations program recognizes non-Jews who endangered themselves to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Meents-Lenstra’s name will be added to the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Joel Zisenwine, director of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations Department, said the institution continues to pursue cases involving rescuers even more than 80 years after the Holocaust.

More than 28,000 people from 51 countries have received the distinction, with the Netherlands among the countries with the largest number of recognized rescuers.

Kochba is now trying to locate descendants of Meents-Lenstra so he can personally give them the certificate honoring her.

He said the recognition belongs to her family as well.

“It is theirs,” he said. “I owe it to them.”

National Security Minister and Otzma Yehudit chairman Itamar Ben Gvir says his party will not join forces with newly established Chareidi political parties ahead of the elections, insisting that his party has succeeded by running independently and has no reason to change course.

Speaking in an interview with Kikar HaShabbat, Ben Gvir specifically addressed the new Achi party associated with Rav Abergel and the HaTzibbur HaChareidi party headed by Leitner of Beit Shemesh, making clear that Otzma Yehudit intends to maintain its own independent slate.

“Yishai, as of now — and not only as of now, I see this consistently — for four years Otzma Yehudit has run alone, and the results are good, the results are impressive, and I think you don’t replace a winning horse,” Ben Gvir explained. “I respect everyone, I truly respect everyone, but ultimately, Otzma Yehudit is a brand. Otzma Yehudit is something that appeals to all of Klal Yisroel. People feel how much I care.”

At the same time, Ben Gvir stressed that he has no intention of deliberately undermining the established Chareidi parties or attempting to pull away their core voters.

“I certainly don’t want to poke a finger in the eye of the Chareidi parties — let that be clear!” Ben Gvir said. “But I am saying explicitly: Whoever is not voting for the Chareidi parties should vote for me.”

Ben Gvir said he believes there is currently significant dissatisfaction among portions of the Chareidi community with its traditional political parties and urged those voters to support Otzma Yehudit rather than cast ballots for smaller parties that may not cross the electoral threshold.

“There is currently a certain amount of disappointment in various parts of the Chareidi community,” Ben Gvir said. “Those who aren’t going to vote for Chareidi parties should come to me. They shouldn’t go and waste votes.”

However, Ben Gvir emphasized that he is not calling on loyal supporters of the established Chareidi parties to abandon them, despite disagreements he has had with their leadership.

“On the other hand,” Ben Gvir said, “whoever votes for the Chareidi parties should vote for the Chareidi parties. There are sometimes disagreements, including with Aryeh, certainly with Gafni, and with various others. But ultimately, whoever votes for the Chareidi parties should vote for them. Whoever doesn’t — should come to Otzma Yehudit.”

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed 2,325 people, government data showed on Sunday, surpassing the toll from the 2018-2020 outbreak to become the deadliest in the country’s history.

Congo’s public health institute said in its latest report that confirmed cases had risen to 4,945, including 101 new cases detected in the previous 24 hours.

The outbreak, Congo’s 17th, was already the biggest in the country’s history in terms of number of cases – a milestone reached in late July. The latest government data shows that the total number of deaths has surpassed the 2,299 deaths recorded in Congo’s 2018-2020 outbreak, which was previously the country’s worst on record.

There are now 4,945 confirmed cases, the data showed.

Three months after it was formally announced, the outbreak is now dwarfed only by West Africa’s 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, in which 28,616 cases and 11,310 deaths ​were recorded across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the World Health Organization.

It took nearly five months from the declaration of ‌that outbreak ⁠to hit 1,000 deaths, whereas Congo’s current outbreak hit 2,000 deaths in less than three months.

No treatments available for rare Ebola species

The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, which has no approved vaccines or treatments. The outbreak has gained momentum since it was declared on May 15, as weak health infrastructure, community resistance, and instability hinder the effort to identify and respond to cases.

The proportion of people dying from the outbreak after a confirmed infection, known as the case fatality ratio, has risen from about 20% in early June to 46%, according to government data, meaning nearly one in every two confirmed cases is now fatal.

Experts say the trend does not indicate the virus has become more lethal. Instead, it points to persistent shortcomings in surveillance, case detection and access to care.

“Normally, as an outbreak progresses, the case fatality ratio should fall as contact tracing improves and patients are identified and treated earlier,” said Thomas Parisch, a public health specialist recently deployed to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Médecins Sans Frontières.

Small number of experimental vaccines, therapies evaluated

“Instead, we’re still seeing many cases detected very late, when treatment is less likely to succeed, with many identified only after they die in the community.”

A small number of experimental vaccines and therapies are being evaluated, while global health authorities assess whether existing Ebola treatments could offer protection. Evidence so far is limited to animal studies.

The outbreak earlier spread to neighboring Uganda, but authorities there managed to limit deaths to two and confirmed cases to 20 before declaring an end to the outbreak in that country last month. Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people, living or dead.

It can cause fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and, in severe cases, internal and external bleeding.

This post was originally published on here.

MILAN (AP) — An American tourist was killed by a lightning strike on Sicily’s Mount Etna while hiking in an area that was closed to visitors due to recent volcanic activity, Italian firefighters said Monday.

The 29-year-man from Kansas was rescued by helicopter after being struck Sunday evening in an exposed area above the tree line. He was later declared dead by medical personnel. His name was not released.

Authorities have closed vast areas of the volcano’s slope to hikers due to the volcano’s prolonged activity — which forced the closure of the airport in nearby Catania for most of last week.

Officials said that more people have died on Etna from lightning strikes over recent decades than from volcanic activity. The last eruption-related fatalities on Europe’s most active volcano were in 1987.

An Israeli man from Petach Tikvah was niftar in Peru after spending approximately three and a half years imprisoned in the country.

The 62-year-old was niftar while still in custody, prompting ZAKA’s International Unit to begin working together with Israel’s Foreign Ministry, the family and authorities in Peru.

The efforts are focused on completing the necessary procedures as quickly as possible and bringing the aron to Israel for kevurah.

Yossi Landau, operations officer for ZAKA’s Lachish region, said the organization is accompanying the family and working with local authorities to ensure the niftar is brought to kevurah with the proper kavod.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle sold for a staggering $40 million at auction in Monterey, California.

The 2026 Ferrari Luce “Tailor Made,” identified as “Chassis 0,” is the first production chassis from the Italian luxury automaker’s new electric vehicle program, according to RM Sotheby’s.

The one-of-a-kind Ferrari was sold during RM Sotheby’s Monterey auction, with all proceeds benefiting educational initiatives through the Ferrari Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity. The buyer’s premium was waived for the sale.

The Luce marks a major milestone for Ferrari as the company enters the fully electric vehicle market. Ferrari has described the model as the first fully electric car in the Prancing Horse’s history.

The $40 million example was configured through Ferrari’s Tailor Made personalization program and features several details developed specifically for the vehicle.

Its exterior is finished in Madreperla Semi-Gloss paint, which Ferrari says produces iridescent reflections that shift from green to violet depending on the angle and intensity of the light.

Inside, the Luce features Perla-colored Le Mans metallic leather made from specially selected Swiss hides, along with Grigio Corvara secondary elements instead of traditional black trim.

Ferrari also equipped the car with dedicated wheels, bespoke brake calipers and special Ferrari badging set against an optical white background. A plaque identifies the vehicle as “Chassis 0,” distinguishing it as the first production chassis in the Luce program.

The winning bidder will not take immediate possession. Following the auction, the car is expected to return to Ferrari’s headquarters in Maranello, Italy, with final delivery currently scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.

The vehicle was built to U.S. specifications. If it was purchased by a buyer outside the U.S., that buyer will be responsible for export, import and federalization requirements, according to the auction listing.

Bank Leumi earned more money in three months than any Israeli bank ever has. The lender reported net profit of NIS 2.83 billion, roughly $940 million, for the second quarter, up 8.5% from a year earlier, when it released results on Aug. 12.

The reason is simple: Leumi is lending much more money while spending very little to run itself. Its loan book grew 9% since the start of the year to about NIS 566 billion, with corporate lending up 14% — enough that the bank has already hit its full-year growth target of 8% to 10% with half the year left. At the same time, its efficiency ratio, which measures how much of every shekel of income is eaten up by salaries, branches and technology, fell to 24.7% from 29.1% in the prior quarter. In plain terms, about 25 cents of every dollar the bank takes in goes to running the business, and the other 75 cents flows toward profit. That is among the lowest figures of any major bank in the world, and the bank credits its use of artificial intelligence for much of the improvement.

The record came despite a government surtax on Israel’s five largest banks totaling NIS 3 billion this year, of which Leumi absorbed NIS 293 million in the quarter. Without it, profit would have been about NIS 3.1 billion and return on equity 17.9% rather than the reported 16.3%.

Shareholders are getting a large share of the money back. Leumi is returning NIS 1.4 billion, about $470 million, split between a cash dividend of roughly NIS 1.1 billion and share buybacks — half of quarterly net income, and an annual dividend yield of about 5.5% at current prices.

Loan quality held up as the portfolio grew. Non-performing loans stood at 0.45% of credit, meaning fewer than one shekel in 200 is in trouble, against 0.43% a year ago. The bank set aside NIS 291 million for possible credit losses in the quarter, but said the entire provision was a general reserve tied to the pace of lending growth rather than any specific borrower going bad — the tenth consecutive quarter that has been the case. On individual problem loans, the bank actually recovered more than it wrote off.

For the first half, profit reached NIS 5.18 billion and return on equity 14.9%, at the top of the 13.75% to 15.25% band the bank set in its strategic plan. Capital remains well above regulatory minimums, with a core capital ratio of 11.65%.

The backdrop is an Israeli economy the Bank of Israel expects to grow 4% this year and 5.5% next, with interest rates easing and business borrowing picking up after two difficult years. Rival Bank Hapoalim posted a NIS 2.5 billion quarter, with credit growth of 6.6%, slower than Leumi’s.

Investors have noticed. Leumi shares are up 24% over the past year, giving the bank a market value of about NIS 110 billion and making it the largest bank in Israel by that measure.

JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv

© JBizNews.com All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution without written permission is prohibited.

Passengers aboard a Blue Bird Airways flight from Ben Gurion Airport to Crete called police and banged on the cockpit door after being left inside the aircraft for up to an hour and a half amid intense heat.

Flight BZ742 was scheduled to depart for Crete at 2:00 p.m., but passengers said they remained aboard the aircraft while it sat on the ground, with the air conditioning operating at only minimal strength despite high temperatures outside.

Several passengers said the conditions became increasingly difficult, with some calling police to report the situation while others knocked on the cockpit door demanding action.

“All the children were screaming, there was sweat and a stench on the plane. Everyone turned red from the heat,” one passenger told N12.

Passengers said the flight attendants were also struggling with the conditions. Following the protests, a flight attendant reportedly opened one of the aircraft’s doors, allowing additional air into the cabin.

Blue Bird Airways said recent delays have largely been caused by unusually heavy congestion in Greek airspace and airports, where much of the airline’s summer operations take place. The company said it operated 84 flights the previous day, its highest-ever daily total.

The airline said passengers are sometimes already aboard and ready for departure but must wait for takeoff authorization, which can arrive on short notice.

“We are aware of the discomfort involved in waiting on the aircraft and apologize to the passengers,” the airline said, adding that its teams are working around the clock to minimize delays and their impact on flight schedules.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

The Tel Aviv District Court on Sunday upheld an arbitration ruling in the decades-long battle over control of Ponevezh Yeshiva, ordering the faction led by Rav Shmuel Markowitz to vacate the yeshiva’s property by the end of September.

Judge Yehudit Shevach, deputy president of the District Court, rejected a petition filed by the Mesores HaTorah organization, Rav Markowitz and Rebbetzin Tzipora Markowitz seeking to overturn the arbitration decision issued by retired judge David Cheshin. The Markowitz faction says it now intends to appeal the ruling to Israel’s Supreme Court, a move that could potentially delay the eviction if the court agrees to intervene.

The 19-page ruling requires Rav Markowitz’s talmidim to leave the Ponevezh campus by September 30, 2026, corresponding to 19 Tishrei, during Chol Hamoed Sukkos.

Cheshin had originally ordered the faction to leave by July 30. However, Shevach noted that the deadline had already passed and that the parties were now “at the threshold of the Yamim Noraim,” leading her to extend the deadline. She expressed hope that the evacuation would be “carried out without further escalation.”

Beyond requiring the faction to leave the campus, the arbitration ruling upheld by the court prohibits the Markowitz group from using the yeshiva’s trademarks, including the name “Ponevezh Yeshiva” and its logo.

Rav Markowitz is also barred from presenting himself under the title “Rosh Yeshivas Ponevezh.” His faction was further ordered to pay NIS 75,000 in legal expenses to Ponevezh Yeshiva and its president, Rav Eliezer Kahaneman.

In her ruling, Shevach issued unusually harsh criticism of the conduct surrounding the dispute over the years, rejecting the Markowitz faction’s argument that the historic “2000 ruling” granted Rav Markowitz permanent and irrevocable rights as part of the yeshiva’s spiritual leadership.

According to Shevach, whatever rights had originally been granted were forfeited after Rav Markowitz “undermined the ruling and its purpose, through a chain of actions that continued consistently over the course of years.”

She relied on Cheshin’s factual findings that what amounted to a “yeshiva within a yeshiva” had been established on the campus, dividing the talmidim into competing camps.

The judge was particularly severe in describing the violence and vandalism that have accompanied the bitter dispute.

She characterized the campus as a “battlefield characterized by the use of physical force, riots, violence, vandalism,” and described incidents there as “despicable and disgraceful acts of violence and vandalism… amounting to a chillul Hashem.”

Addressing the claim that Rav Markowitz possessed an eternal right to his position, Shevach wrote that the argument should “blush” when compared with what she described as the long history of actions undertaken by Rav Markowitz, or by others acting in his name or with his authorization.

She added, in particularly pointed language, that those actions were conducted “as is the practice, with apologies, of the last of the criminals.”

The battle over Ponevezh Yeshiva stretches back to the 1990s and intensified significantly toward the end of that decade as Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach’s health declined. The dispute ultimately developed into one of the most bitter and enduring conflicts in the yeshiva world, dividing communities and families and drawing repeated attempts at intervention by leading gedolim over the ensuing decades.

Approximately four years ago, retired judge David Cheshin was appointed as arbitrator in the dispute. His eventual decision ordered Rav Markowitz’s faction to leave the yeshiva campus and imposed financial penalties.

With the District Court now affirming Cheshin’s ruling, the lengthy legal battle has moved significantly closer to a conclusion.

Toward the end of her decision, Shevach wrote that reconciliation between the rival camps on the Ponevezh campus is not presently realistic and warned that allowing the conflict to continue could, chalilah, bring destruction upon the institution.

She said the outcome “reflects the painful reality, which requires separation through the removal of the rebellious camp.”

Rav Markowitz’s faction, however, says the legal fight is not over and intends to seek relief from the Supreme Court.

In its earlier petition to overturn the arbitration decision, the faction argued that Cheshin had dramatically exceeded his authority by effectively nullifying the historic “2000 ruling,” which it maintains established Rav Markowitz’s status as a permanent and unconditional rosh yeshiva.

Attorneys representing the petitioners argued that the arbitrator invented an implied condition to conclude that Rav Markowitz’s rights had retroactively expired in 2007.

“A determination born out of nothing,” the petition stated. “The arbitrator turned the bowl on its head; he created a new legal reality that retroactively negates 20 years of rights and communal reliance.”

The District Court rejected those arguments and upheld the arbitration ruling in full.

The remaining question is whether the Supreme Court will agree to hear the planned appeal and potentially intervene, or whether Shevach’s ruling will remain intact and Rav Markowitz’s faction will be required to leave the Ponevezh campus by the end of September.

{Matzav.com}

U.S. stocks opened mixed Monday, August 17, as a surprisingly strong New York manufacturing report pushed Treasury yields higher while another burst of enthusiasm around artificial intelligence lifted chip and memory stocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened down 69.3 points, or 0.13%, at 53,663.11. The S&P 500 gained 4.9 points, or 0.06%, to 7,790.68, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 55.5 points, or 0.21%, to 26,784.65. 

The morning’s main economic report was considerably stronger than expected. The New York Fed’s Empire State Manufacturing Index jumped to 20.6 in August from 15.6, its highest level in more than four years and well above the roughly 11-to-12 reading economists expected. New orders came in at 17.3 and shipments at 11.7, while employment continued to expand. The less comfortable part of the report was inflation: the prices-paid index climbed to 58.6, showing manufacturers are still facing substantial increases in input costs. 

That stronger factory reading helped push the 10-year Treasury yield back toward 4.70% to 4.71% in early trading. It matters because markets had spent the past several sessions reducing expectations for another Federal Reserve rate increase after weaker retail sales and softer inflation reports. Traders entered Monday pricing roughly a 30% chance of a September rate hike, down from around 50% a week earlier. 

Technology is providing the counterweight. Astera Labs jumped roughly 9% and Marvell about 5% in early trading, while Micron gained more than 3% and Sandisk more than 4%. Nvidia and Amazon were each up around 1%. Investors continue to favor companies supplying the memory, networking and computing infrastructure behind the AI buildout. 

Part of that enthusiasm followed new attention on Anthropic’s enormous growth projections. The AI company is forecasting roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue, compared with a recently publicized annualized revenue pace of about $47 billion. Those projections are helping reinforce expectations that AI companies will continue spending heavily on chips, servers, storage and data-center infrastructure. 

Memory stocks received an additional boost after a report that the Trump administration does not want Apple relying on Chinese memory suppliers. Micron, Sandisk, Seagate and Western Digital all moved higher as investors considered the possibility that U.S. technology companies could be pushed toward non-Chinese suppliers. 

There were important moves outside technology as well. L3Harris Technologies fell nearly 3% after the defense contractor removed Chairman and CEO Christopher Kubasik following an investigation into conduct that the company said violated its code. Sam Mehta was named CEO, and L3Harris reaffirmed its 2026 financial outlook. 

Alphabet was also in focus after Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it had increased its stake in Google’s parent by roughly 83% to nearly 106 million shares worth about $37.8 billion, making Alphabet Berkshire’s third-largest U.S. stock investment. The unusually large technology position is being watched as another sign of institutional confidence in the AI spending cycle. 

Oil remains the biggest outside risk to stocks. West Texas Intermediate traded around $82.75 a barrel and Brent near $89, with the market watching the expiration of the 60-day U.S.-Iran ceasefire period and any developments surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. Higher energy prices could quickly complicate the improving inflation picture and revive expectations for another Fed rate increase. 

One housing report was scheduled exactly at the cutoff for this recap. The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index for August was due at 10:00 a.m. ET, with economists looking for a reading around 33 versus 34 in July. At the 10:00 a.m. cutoff, the new figure had not yet been posted by NAHB or verified by major data services, so JBizNews is not publishing an unconfirmed number. 

For the rest of Monday, investors will watch Treasury yields, oil and any new U.S.-Iran headlines, along with short-term Treasury bill auctions later in the morning. With few major corporate earnings scheduled during regular trading, the broader question is whether strong AI buying can keep the S&P 500 near record territory even as stronger economic data and higher oil prices threaten to push borrowing costs back up.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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The quarterly New York Fed foreclosure data came out for Q2, and once again — to the surprise of many doomers — the index fell slightly, still below 2019 levels. Not only that, but this week’s existing home sales report also showed housing inventory down year over year and sales slightly higher, with prices up 2.0% year over year, something that would be impossible if we had a surge of foreclosures coming to the market. 

I know we get headlines every month or quarter with huge percentage increases in foreclosure data, but today I wanted I share a simple way for people to understand when foreclosures will become an issue. I also discussed this topic on today’s episode of the HousingWire Daily podcast.

Foreclosure data

One of the things I’ve stressed when I talk at events this year is that we have had many recessions post-WWII but only one foreclosure crisis. That foreclosure crisis started with a massive credit boom from 2002-2005, and then a credit bust. That credit bust pushed foreclosures up, according to New York Fed data, in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. Then, the Great Recession happened. As you can see, none of that is happening now — we aren’t even back to 2019 levels yet, and it’s August 2026.

Here is how the Fed tracks the data: New foreclosures. Number of individuals with foreclosures first appearing on their credit report during the past 3 months. Based on foreclosure information provided by lenders (account level foreclosure information) as well as through public records.

This is key to what I will present next, because I can explain why housing inventory was down year over year, even though for 3.5 years now headlines were showing big percentage increases in foreclosure data.

Inventory

When you don’t have a lot of distressed sellers in the mix, we just deal with the normal supply and demand equilibrium for housing; a surge of actual foreclosures in 2026 would have easily put the inventory data much higher in 2026.

Keep it simple: housing demand is up 2.4% year to date and new listings didn’t explode, so inventory growth slowed and declined only slightly year over year in the last existing home sales report this week. 

We track inventory differently than the NAR; we have no contract data in our inventory, so these are the homes available for sale. Inventory is up 0.78% fron the previous week.

• Weekly inventory change (July 31-Aug. 7): Inventory fell from 872,932 to 865,709
• Same week last year (Aug. 1-Aug. 8): Inventory fell from 865,600 to 859,050

New listings data is key

When you have a massive buildup in foreclosure data, as we saw from 2005-2008, you will get a surge of new listings data. These aren’t sellers that will be buyers; these are distressed sellers in the mix. Not to mention, after a significant high-LTV credit boom and bust, a ton of people were underwater: In 2010, over 23% of homes were underwater. The run-up in foreclosure data from 2005-2008 was going to be a problem, because the higher the percentage of underwater homes, the more likely a foreclosure will happen. In contrast, people with a lot of equity can sell and prevent that foreclosure.

In addition, our new listing data isn’t surging. From 2013-2019, the normal for our new listings has been 80,000-100,000 per week during the seasonal peak months — and we haven’t had any normal years since 2020. New listings have picked up over the last two years, but it’s mostly been the traditional seller-as-buyer. This explains why inventory growth has been low this year.

Here is last week’s new listings data for the past two years:

• 2026: 67,301
• 2025:  66,341

Some context for those who believe the new listings data resembles the housing bubble years: during that time, new listings ranged from 250,000 to 400,000 per week for several years. Let me repeat that: 250,000-400,000 per week for years. New listings data today isn’t even back to normal levels, with foreclosure data not back to 2019 levels.

Conclusion

Once the foreclosure data starts to pick up beyond a normal trend — and it will with a job-loss recession — then you need to wait for it to be reflected in the new listings data. The entire process, from start to finish, might take 9-18 months; in some cases, many years. Understanding the data means you can properly track and talk about foreclosures and the relationship of foreclosures to inventory.

This post was originally published on here.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday again rebuffed President Donald Trump’s push to throw out a jury’s $5 million finding that he sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll at a New York City department store in the mid-1990s and later defamed her.

The Republican president’s lawyers had asked the justices to reconsider their refusal to hear his appeal. The court denied Trump’s petition along with several others.

It’s unusual — although not unheard of — for the court to grant such requests. Trump paid the judgment shortly after the court declined to take up his appeal in June.

Trump and the Justice Department are also asking the high court to toss out a second Carroll verdict totaling $83 million. They argue he’s immune from being sued over comments he made about her in 2019, when he was president. The court has not yet acted on that appeal.

Carroll is a longtime advice columnist and former TV talk show host. She testified at a 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly 1990s encounter into a violent attack in the dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury retailer across the street from Trump Tower in Manhattan. The jury found Trump liable for defaming Carroll when he denied her allegation in 2022.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.

The year long construction project on the exit 127 bridge on the northbound Garden State Parkway has reopened over the weekend.

https://thelakewoodscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/wa-1786974992299-flbszy.mp4

Israel has made clear that no reconstruction of the Gaza Strip will take place until Hamas is fully disarmed, following a lengthy meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jared Kushner.

According to a report by B’Chadrei Charedim, despite significant gaps between Israel and the United States regarding the Board of Peace, the American side took a more moderate position during the talks. Kushner reportedly stressed that “there is nothing to rebuild before the Strip is demilitarized.”

Under the understandings discussed at the meeting, the first step toward demilitarization would require Hamas to hand over all of its weapons — both heavy and light — for destruction under the supervision of Gen. Jeffers, who heads the ceasefire monitoring committee.

Until that happens, only sanitation-related work would be carried out in Gaza to prevent the spread of disease, with broader reconstruction remaining on hold.

Israeli officials also presented Kushner with evidence they say shows that no genuine Hamas disarmament process has taken place in recent months. Israel additionally presented findings regarding alleged Turkish financing of the terrorist organization.

Netanyahu made clear that Israel will not give up the IDF’s freedom of action in Gaza or its policy of targeted eliminations, including operations against immediate threats and terrorists who participated in the October 7 massacre.

An Israeli official said the central disagreement remains Israel’s deep skepticism over whether Hamas is willing or capable of surrendering its weapons. The American side, by contrast, reportedly believes full disarmament remains achievable.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly investigating a U.K.-based nonprofit tied to a longtime ally of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over questions surrounding its financial activities, including whether donor money may have reached a U.S.-sanctioned Palestinian organization.

According to the New York Post, federal authorities are examining an organization known as PFF, which reportedly controls roughly $100 million dedicated to supporting anti-Israel initiatives. Investigators are reportedly looking into whether funds connected to the organization were provided to Al-Haq, a Palestinian organization sanctioned by the United States.

“A new fund set up by Arabs across the US, UK, and Australia has been built to take on Israel,” one source familiar with the operation told the Post.

The Post reported that Bassema Yousef, a New York-born Democratic donor who now resides in London, has emerged as a central figure in the organization’s fundraising operation. One source described Yousef as the “lynchpin” of PFF’s fundraising. She has also been identified as a longtime ally of Mamdani.

Yousef has repeatedly posted sharply anti-Israel messages on social media, including accusations that Israel is committing “war crimes with U.S. tax dollars.”

According to sources cited by the Post, Yousef created PFF with financial backing from two wealthy businessmen: Basil Qunibi, an investment executive based in Austin, Texas, and Yasser Shahin, a Palestinian-Australian motorsports magnate.

British corporate records confirm Shahin’s involvement in supporting PFF, according to the report. The IRS has also confirmed that the organization maintains a nonprofit entity registered in Delaware.

People described as having direct knowledge of PFF’s activities told the Post that the organization’s leadership provides funding for anti-Israel messaging and works to defend pro-Palestinian activists.

“PFF is a strategic foundation that is large, well-funded, and institutional in quality,” the foundation says on its website. “We partner with organisations that we believe have an ability to consistently deliver results that align with our strategic objectives.”

The organization has also publicly rejected suggestions that its work supports violence.

“PFF and its partners are unequivocally committed to justice, peace, inclusion and non-violence,” the nonprofit said.

DHS did not immediately provide Fox News Digital with a response regarding the report and declined to discuss the matter when contacted by the Post.

“HSI does not comment on the existence or status of specific investigations, nor on investigative methods, intelligence sources, or potential enforcement actions,” a DHS spokesperson told The Post, referring to the Homeland Security Investigations unit.

The Post emphasized that the existence of the reported federal investigation does not itself establish that PFF, Yousef, Mamdani or anyone else connected to the organization engaged in criminal wrongdoing.

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — If Mali and Liel Yahalomi had chosen to start new lives in the United States, one particularly uncomfortable moment might have been avoided: the release of video footage showing police locating the two women in Argentina.

The case has raised questions about what happens when an adult deliberately cuts contact with family and disappears without committing a crime. In the United States, adults generally have the right to leave voluntarily. When police locate an adult reported missing and establish that the person is safe, left of their own free will and is not wanted in connection with a crime, officers generally cannot simply disclose the person’s whereabouts to relatives.

Had the two women told American authorities, “We are here voluntarily, we are healthy and we do not want anyone to know where we are,” police could generally confirm to concerned relatives that they had been found safe while withholding their location. Authorities could likewise issue a public statement confirming that the missing-person case had been resolved, without revealing where the individual was staying.

That does not mean, however, that completely disappearing is easy. There is no precise official figure for how many Americans deliberately disappear each year, partly because voluntary departures are included within the much broader category of missing-person reports.

Approximately 600,000 missing-person reports are filed annually in the United States. The overwhelming majority are resolved, with people being located or returning home on their own within days or weeks.

Many cases involve teenagers who run away or adults who temporarily cut contact with relatives. Women fleeing abusive relationships also account for some voluntary disappearances. Only a small proportion of missing-person cases are formally classified as abductions or other involuntary disappearances, while several thousand people remain listed as missing for more than a year.

There was a time when someone could leave a major East Coast city, move to a small Midwestern town and begin a new life with relatively little difficulty. Modern technology has made that far more complicated.

Digital records, financial systems, smartphones, social media, online services and an enormous network of surveillance and security cameras create a trail that can be difficult to erase.

There is also an important legal distinction between voluntarily cutting ties with family and attempting to disappear in order to evade debts, criminal proceedings or law enforcement. A person wanted by authorities does not acquire a legal right to evade them simply by deciding to start over.

For people who are not breaking the law, however, an entire industry has developed around privacy and the practical and emotional challenges of voluntarily leaving one’s former life behind.

Experts disagree even about whether someone planning to disappear should tell a single trusted person. One argument in favor is that doing so could prevent relatives from reporting the person missing and triggering a major search. On the other hand, telling someone means that another person knows the disappearance was deliberate.

Another key question is whom the person is trying to avoid. Family members have far fewer resources than governments, and someone genuinely being sought by U.S. authorities is unlikely to become unreachable simply by cutting personal ties.

Jason Hanson, a former CIA officer who operates a YouTube channel focused on personal security, privacy and survival, said disappearing successfully requires extensive preparation.

“It requires a great deal of preparation. You can’t wake up one morning and decide to disappear just because you watched a movie the night before where someone vanished within a few minutes.”

Modern life generates extensive digital traces through social-media accounts, financial transactions, smartphones and online services. Anyone attempting to withdraw completely from an existing social circle would have to contend with the enormous amount of information generated by ordinary daily activities.

The psychological transition can be equally difficult. Starting over means entering an environment where familiar friends, acquaintances and routines no longer provide a person’s established social identity. It can also mean leaving behind possessions, habits, hobbies and relationships that connect someone to their previous life.

The Hollywood fantasy of disappearing into a tiny town may itself be misleading. A newcomer can attract considerably more attention in a small community than in a major city where strangers arrive every day.

Ultimately, voluntarily cutting all ties requires powerful reasons. It means closing a door without knowing whether it can ever be reopened.

Frank Ahearn, who has worked with people seeking greater privacy and authored the book How to Disappear, says the reality bears little resemblance to Hollywood portrayals.

“You’re not simply faking your death, buying some fake documents in an alley and then retiring to a life of leisure on some small island nation.”

Ahearn argues that disappearing legally, without creating an even greater problem than the one a person is trying to escape, requires careful planning. “You have to be prepared to cut contact with everyone you know, to change everything you are.”

He also warns that disappearing is not something that can be improvised.”Disappearing means being prepared and strong enough. Otherwise, you will waste a lot of time and money trying to disappear, only to fail.”

The Yahalomi case illustrates the stark contrast between the legal right of an adult to voluntarily cut contact and the practical difficulty of becoming genuinely invisible in the modern world. Even when authorities have no legal reason to disclose a person’s location, digital records and everyday technology can make a complete disappearance extraordinarily difficult.

As the 60-day ceasefire period tied to the memorandum of understanding expires, Iranian officials continued Monday to project confidence in their confrontation with the Trump administration. At the same time, President Trump renewed his threats against the Islamic Republic during a phone interview with Fox News, saying of the Iranians: “They’re good poker players, but they’re dying.”

Trump said the Iranian regime should surrender. “They should raise the white flag,” he said. “I don’t have a timetable. I’m not in a rush. If the war resumes, we will lead and Israel will support.” The president added that the midterm elections are not influencing his decisions regarding Iran.

Trump also issued a warning to Oman, which is involved in negotiations with Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz. “If they get in our way, we’ll bomb them,” he said. Trump also dismissed reports that U.S. ammunition stockpiles are running low, saying that what the United States has used until now has been relatively minor.

Gaza also came up during the interview, with Trump saying Israel should stop striking Gaza after Hamas agreed to disarm.

Regarding Israel’s elections, Trump indicated that he is in no rush to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is leaving the issue open. “The best thing for us is not to get involved in it — but I may endorse someone,” Trump said.

A senior Iranian official told Reuters on Monday that Tehran’s leadership has decided to change its military doctrine, formally shifting from a defensive posture to a “full offensive policy.” According to the official, Iran has set a firm deadline of only several weeks for the full implementation of the memorandum of understanding with the United States.

The official said the timetable will be conveyed in the coming days to the United States and regional countries through mediators. Tehran is warning that if diplomatic efforts fail, the response will be immediate and severe.

“All Iranian bodies are prepared to escalate tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and across the entire region if diplomacy fails,” the official said.

The official added that Iran does not intend to continue tolerating the military and economic pressure being placed on it. “Iran will not wait for the United States to continue the naval blockade indefinitely,” he said.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Friday his government has triggered an economic reciprocity law mechanism against U.S.-imposed tariffs, saying the move was intended to show his nation must be respected.

In July, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of Brazilian exports, with duties reaching up to 37.5% in some products. The Trump administration has accused Brazil of unfair trade practices, but Lula has denied the accusations, insisting they are politically motivated ahead of the October election.

Lula is seeking reelection against Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who met with U.S. officials, including Trump, in Washington weeks before the administration proposed higher tariffs on Brazilian goods.

“Yesterday, we invoked the reciprocity law to show that we are not to be taken lightly,” Lula said in an interview with Brazilian podcasters. “We respect ourselves. I am very calm knowing what could happen, and I am prepared to debate the defense of Brazil anywhere in the world.”

Brazil’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement late Thursday it is requesting diplomatic consultations with its U.S. counterparts on the issue, as a sign of Lula’s aim “to privilege dialogue and negotiation in its international relations.”

The beginning of the proceedings does not necessarily mean Brazil will retaliate against U.S. tariffs.

“I don’t want any fight with the United States,” Lula said Friday. “Unfortunately, they are spreading falsehoods.”

Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department revoked the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to Washington in retaliation for Brazil’s denial of visas last month for two American diplomats who sought to visit ahead of the October election.

The U.S. government also has accused Brazil of stalling approval of Trump’s nominee for ambassador in Brasilia, while Brazilian officials say the U.S. should have first sought the government’s approval before submitting the nomination to Congress, as diplomatic protocol requires.

Since U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked the Brazilian ambassador’s visa in response to Lula’s actions but did not order her expelled, U.S. officials have said the Trump administration does not want the dispute to escalate.

These officials, who have spoken on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations, have said on multiple occasions that Rubio’s limited response was intentionally designed to give Lula time and space to back down.

At the same time, they have said that the U.S. will respond quickly should Lula’s government choose to escalate the matter and that declaring the Brazilian ambassador “persona non grata” and expelling her from the U.S. would be a logical next step.

Lula said once again Trump has treated him well, but warned any foreign governments “who come here to meddle in the election, will lose.”

___

Associated Press writer Matthew Lee contributed from Washington.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Iran’s parliament approved a bill on Sunday that would criminalize interviews and other communications with media deemed hostile to the Islamic Republic, including US or Israeli media and outlets financed by either country, Iran’s Shargh newspaper reported.

Under the bill, which must still be reviewed by the Guardian Council before it can become law, interviews or participation in discussions with such media would be banned and violations punishable by six months to two years in prison.

Interviews with other foreign media would require notification to the intelligence ministry, while contact with foreign embassies, offices of foreign organizations or other non-Iranian institutions without notification and written permission from the foreign ministry would be punishable by a fine and deprivation of certain social rights.

The bill would also harden penalties for alleged economic crimes committed under the direction or supervision of foreigners, ban providing information to foreigners without intelligence ministry approval, and restrict scientific cooperation with foreign institutions outside an approved list.

Iran’s heavy punishments for cooperation with foreign entities

It would punish policy or legislative proposals made under the direction of foreign intelligence services if they harm Iran’s security or independence, with prison terms of up to 30 years. Cases would be heard by Revolutionary Courts.

The move does not mark the first time Iran has criminalized cooperation with foreign entities. A law passed in 2025 after a 12-day war with Israel imposed tougher penalties for alleged cooperation with hostile states.

Iranian photojournalist Yalda Moaiery was sentenced this month to 15 years under that law over allegations that included giving interviews to media deemed hostile and providing photographs to US and Israel-linked organizations.

This post was originally published on here.

Transportation Minister Miri Regev accused the El Al workers’ committee on Monday of trying to damage her standing in the Likud primaries, claiming the effort is retaliation for her push to bring Wizz Air into Israel.

Speaking outside a polling station during the Likud primaries, Regev warned supporters not to assume her position on the party slate is secure.

“Anyone who tells you, ‘Miri Regev is strong,’ wants to weaken me,” Regev said. “You know that the El Al workers’ committee decided to knock me down the list. All because I decided to bring in Wizz Air.”

Regev made clear that she does not intend to back away from the move despite the opposition.

“I said that I would bring down airfares, and that is what will happen,” she declared.

“No workers’ committee will intimidate me or blackmail me,” Regev added. “The citizens of the State of Israel are more important.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

NEW YORK (VINnews) — A prominent candidate from Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is drawing growing attention ahead of a state election in Saxony-Anhalt, amid concerns that the party could achieve a historic breakthrough and gain control of one of Germany’s federal states.

In an unusual cover story this week, the German news magazine Der Spiegel branded the candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, “the most dangerous man in Germany,” citing his hard-line positions on immigration and minorities and warning about the growing strength of the far right.

Siegmund rejected the criticism and instead described the cover as “excellent publicity.” He has even incorporated the Der Spiegel coverage into his election campaign, portraying the attention as evidence that his political movement is challenging Germany’s established political order.

The AfD has expanded its support in recent years, particularly in eastern Germany, building its political appeal around opposition to immigration, criticism of European Union policies and attacks on Germany’s political establishment in Berlin.

The party’s Saxony-Anhalt branch has been classified by German security authorities as a right-wing extremist organization and is subject to surveillance.

Siegmund is the AfD’s leading candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, where the party has emerged as a major political force. If he were to become state premier, it would represent a major political milestone for the AfD and a historic breakthrough for a party that was founded in 2013.

It would also mark the first time that the AfD had succeeded in leading the government of one of Germany’s 16 federal states, making the election particularly significant for the country’s postwar political landscape.

German political parties are already preparing for the possibility of an AfD victory. Traditional parties are exploring alternative governing coalitions designed to prevent the far-right party from taking control, while refusing to cooperate with the AfD remains a central principle for many mainstream political forces.

The prospect of an AfD-led government is particularly sensitive in Germany because of the country’s history and the political safeguards established after World War II to prevent the resurgence of extremist movements.

As the election approaches, however, Siegmund and the AfD continue to gain momentum in the polls, intensifying pressure on Germany’s established parties and turning Saxony-Anhalt into a closely watched test of the country’s political direction.

A strong AfD performance would have implications far beyond the state itself, potentially strengthening the party’s argument that it is moving from the political margins toward becoming a governing force in Germany.

California’s push for a new billionaire wealth tax is intensifying concerns about the state’s ongoing loss of taxpayers and income, with new IRS figures showing thousands of residents taking billions of dollars elsewhere and billionaire investor Mark Cuban warning that the proposed levy could accelerate the exodus.

Cuban entered the debate Saturday with a warning that the measure could have consequences extending far beyond where wealthy individuals choose to live. He argued that investors could steer their money elsewhere and pressure startup companies to leave California as well.

His comments came during a contentious public exchange with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who has defended the proposed tax. Cuban pushed back strongly against Khanna and said he could direct future investments away from California if voters approve the measure.

The political fight is unfolding as the latest IRS data compiled from federal tax returns indicates that California is already experiencing substantial losses of taxpayers to other states.

Los Angeles County posted the largest net taxpayer loss in the country, with 17,496 more tax filers moving to other states than arriving from them. Those departing taxpayers represented nearly $1.9 billion in income leaving the county.

Several other major California counties recorded significant losses as well. Orange County had a net decline of 11,618 tax filers, while San Diego County lost 9,401. Riverside County recorded a net loss of 8,968 filers, and San Bernardino County lost 8,462.

Such migration can have broader financial consequences for state and local governments because departing residents take taxable income with them, potentially affecting revenues used to support schools, law enforcement, infrastructure and other government services.

The taxpayer migration has become a central backdrop to the growing battle over California’s proposed billionaire tax and whether imposing additional taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents could encourage even more capital to move elsewhere.

The ballot measure, which is supported by the Service Employees International Union, would establish a one-time 5% wealth tax on California residents whose net worth exceeds $1 billion.

California voters are set to decide the proposal in November. Under the initiative, the tax would apply retroactively to people who were California residents as of Jan. 1, 2026.

Backers of the measure contend that it could raise billions of dollars that could be directed toward healthcare and education. Opponents argue that the proposal risks encouraging billionaires, businesses and investment capital to abandon California for states with lower tax burdens.

Cuban has argued that the potential ramifications extend beyond whether individual billionaires relocate. He said the tax could affect his own decisions about where to invest and where the companies receiving those investments should operate.

“If this passes, and it doesn’t directly impact me at all, I won’t be a Cali resident, but you can bet if I’m investing in a multi billion dollar startup, I’m asking them to move from California first,” Cuban wrote.

Cuban then delivered an even more pointed warning to entrepreneurs considering whether to remain in the state.

“IMO, if this passes, only idiot startup founders stay in Cali.”

{Matzav.com}

WASHINGTON (AP) — Florida voters will select nominees Tuesday to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and to complete the remainder of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s unexpired U.S. Senate term. The state also will hold its first congressional primaries since adopting a redrawn district map designed to boost Republican candidates in November.

The primary for governor could set the direction for both parties in the state. A longstanding rivalry between DeSantis and President Donald Trump broadly shapes the Republican contest, while moderate and progressive candidates compete to guide beleaguered state Democrats out of their electoral doldrums.

Eleven candidates are competing for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, including Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, former investment firm CEO James Fishback and former state House Speaker Paul Renner.

Donalds has Trump’s endorsement and enjoys an overwhelming financial advantage over the rest of the field. He backed Trump over DeSantis in the 2024 presidential primaries and was considered as a possible Trump running mate that year.

Collins is a close DeSantis ally who says he is running to “protect the DeSantis legacy.” He was tapped by DeSantis to serve as lieutenant governor in August 2025. In his announcement, DeSantis said Collins, an Army Special Forces veteran who lost a leg to combat injuries, was “the Chuck Norris of Florida politics.” Nonetheless, DeSantis has not endorsed a candidate in the primary.

Six Democrats are running to succeed DeSantis, including former Republican U.S. Rep. David Jolly, state Rep. Dotie Joseph and former high school math teacher Dayna Marie Foster, who is backed by the state’s Democratic Progressive Caucus.

Jolly took an unlikely path to running for governor as a Democrat, joining the party in 2025 after leaving the GOP in 2018. He has a commanding fundraising lead over the rest of the field in spite of his past political affiliation. He has tapped former Democratic U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham as his running mate, and her name will appear alongside his on the ballot. Graham is the daughter of the late Bob Graham, the longtime Democratic U.S. Senator and governor.

Florida Democrats have faced a drought in statewide elections, particularly for governor. A Democrat last won the governorship more than 30 years ago. DeSantis was reelected in 2022 with a 19-point margin over former Gov. Charlie Crist, another former Republican-turned independent-turned Democrat.

In the U.S. Senate race, Republican U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody faces minimal opposition for the party’s nomination. Moody was state attorney general in January 2025 when DeSantis appointed her to fill Rubio’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. She is now running to complete the final two years of Rubio’s term.

Her Democratic opponent in November will be either state Rep. Angie Nixon or retired Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman. Vindman, a former National Security Council staff member, was a key witness in Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. His brother, Eugene, was elected to Congress from Virginia’s 7th District in 2024.

Nixon, along with Joseph in the race for governor, was among a group of Black state lawmakers who led unsuccessful Democratic efforts to block Republican redistricting plans in 2022 and 2026.

The new congressional boundaries Republicans enacted in May essentially eliminate four congressional districts currently or most recently represented by Democrats. Democratic U.S. Reps. Kathy Castor in the 14th District around Tampa and Darren Soto in the 9th District near Orlando are both running for reelection in their new Republican-friendly districts and will face the winners of crowded GOP primaries.

In South Florida along the Gold Coast, Republicans redrew the area with the hope of reducing the number of Democratic districts from five to three. Like Castor and Soto, U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz is running for reelection in a new Republican-friendly district, but he must first clear a primary challenge from union organizer and democratic socialist Oliver Larkin.

In another South Florida district, former U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick is mounting a comeback bid after resigning from the 20th District in April. She’ll face U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the Democratic primary in the new 20th, which is no longer a majority-Black district.

Republican U.S. Reps. Randy Fine and Cory Mills face competitive primary challenges in the 6th and 7th Districts, respectively, while a crowded Republican primary to replace Donalds in the 19th District has attracted a lot of out-of-state interest. Former U.S. Reps. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and Chris Collins of New York, as well as a former Illinois state senator, all seek the Republican nomination.

Here are some of the key facts about the election and data points the AP Decision Team will monitor as the votes are tallied:

When do polls close?
Polls close at 7 p.m. local time, which is 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. ET. Most of the state is in Eastern time, and polls there close at 7 p.m. ET. A few counties are in Central time, and polls there close at 8 p.m. ET.

What’s on the ballot?
The Associated Press will provide vote results and declare winners in contested primaries for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, governor, chief financial officer, agriculture commissioner, state Senate and state House.

Who gets to vote?
Only voters registered with a political party may participate in that party’s primary. Democrats may not vote in the Republican primary or vice versa. Independent or unaffiliated voters may not participate in either primary.

How many voters are there?
As of July 20, there were about 13.5 million registered voters in Florida. Of those, about 5.6 million, or about 42% were Republicans; about 4.1 million, or 30%, were Democrats and about 3.3 million, or about 25%, were not registered with any party. The rest were registered with other parties.

How many people actually vote?
About 1.5 million Republican primary voters and about 1.1 million Democratic primary voters participated in the 2024 U.S. Senate primaries.

How much of the vote is cast early or by absentee ballot?
About 63% of the Republican primary vote and about 77% of the Democratic primary vote in the 2024 U.S. Senate primaries was cast early in-person or by mail.

As of Friday, about 663,000 Republican ballots and about 610,000 Democratic ballots had already been cast in Tuesday’s election.

When are early and absentee votes released?
Florida counties release all or almost all of their results from early in-person and mail voting in their first vote updates of the night, usually before releasing any results from in-person Election Day voting. Less than a third of counties release any in-person Election Day results in their first vote update.

How long does vote-counting usually take?
In the 2024 state primary, the AP first reported results at 8 p.m. ET, just as the final polls closed in the state. The last vote update of the night was at 11:47 p.m. ET with about 99.9% of total votes counted.

When will the AP declare a winner?
The AP does not make projections and will declare a winner only when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow a trailing candidate to close the gap. If a race has not been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, such as candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear that it has not yet declared a winner and explain why.

How do recounts work?
Florida requires a machine recount in races where the vote margin is 0.5% or less of the total votes cast. A manual recount of overvotes and undervotes is then required if the machine recount results in a vote margin of 0.25% or less of the total votes cast. The AP may declare a winner in a race that is subject to a recount if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.

Are we there yet?
As of Tuesday, there will be 77 days until the 2026 midterm elections.

LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Andy Burnham exchanged messages with an impostor posing as U.S. President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, according to reports published Monday.

A spokesperson for Burnham declined to comment, saying it was policy not to discuss “national security matters.”

Politico cited four unnamed officials in first reporting that Burnham thought he was messaging with Susie Wiles before he became suspicious and cut off communications.

Last year, the U.S. government investigated a series of messages that elected officials, business executives and other prominent figures in the U.S. received messages from someone posing as Wiles.

Soon after those incidents, the State Department warned U.S. diplomats of attempts to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and possibly other officials using artificial intelligence. The warning followed the discovery that an impostor posing as Rubio had attempted to reach out to at least three foreign ministers, a U.S. senator and a governor.

The FBI had warned of “malicious actors” misusing AI to impersonate senior U.S. government officials.

Burnham, who became prime minister less than a month ago, has tried to forge good ties with the White House. Trump initially warmed to Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, before souring on him.

Prediction markets may be attracting billions of dollars in trading, investors and valuations, but Polymarket has learned that regulatory approval does not guarantee something every financial company still needs: a bank willing to hold its money.

JPMorgan Chase ended its banking relationship with Polymarket in October 2025, citing regulatory concerns surrounding the fast-growing prediction-market business.

The decision did not completely sever ties between the two companies. Polymarket continues to interact with parts of JPMorgan, and the bank has maintained relationships with other companies in the sector.

But losing an ordinary banking relationship exposes a vulnerability that applies across fintech and crypto:

A company can raise enormous amounts of capital, attract millions of users and operate sophisticated technology — and still face serious problems if major banks decide the regulatory risk is too high.

Polymarket allows users to trade contracts tied to whether future events will occur, covering areas ranging from elections and economic policy to sports and other real-world outcomes.

The industry has exploded in popularity, but regulators are still debating where prediction markets belong.

Supporters argue the contracts are federally regulated financial products that can provide valuable information about expectations for future events.

Critics argue that many of the contracts function much like gambling and should be subject to state gaming laws and consumer protections.

That unresolved legal landscape creates a separate problem for banks.

Financial institutions do not merely ask whether a customer’s business is technically legal. They also consider whether serving that customer could expose the bank to future enforcement actions, compliance costs, money-laundering concerns or reputational damage.

That can make banking access its own form of business risk.

Polymarket previously ran into federal regulators in 2022, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission accused it of operating an unregistered derivatives platform. The company paid a penalty and restricted access for U.S. users.

It has since returned to the American market through a regulated structure, but scrutiny has not disappeared.

Prediction-market companies are facing legal challenges from states that argue certain contracts amount to unauthorized gambling. New York City officials have separately begun examining marketing practices in the industry, including whether platforms are targeting young users with misleading or aggressive promotions.

That uncertainty helps explain JPMorgan’s caution.

Yet the relationship is unusually complicated.

JPMorgan has reportedly continued working with Polymarket in other capacities even after withdrawing traditional banking services. Earlier this year, the bank offered some wealth-management clients access to a Polymarket fundraising round that valued the company at roughly $14.5 billion.

Polymarket is now reportedly seeking additional capital at an even higher valuation.

That creates a remarkable contradiction.

A major bank can apparently consider Polymarket attractive enough to introduce to wealthy investors while simultaneously deciding that maintaining its basic banking relationship creates too much regulatory risk.

For business owners, that distinction is important.

Banks increasingly act as an additional layer of regulation for emerging industries. Crypto companies, cannabis businesses, gambling operators, payment companies and other businesses operating in legally complicated sectors can discover that being permitted to operate and being permitted to bank are two different things.

Without reliable banking relationships, companies can struggle with payroll, vendor payments, customer funds, financing and everyday cash management.

For prediction markets, that could become increasingly important as the industry grows.

Platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi are attempting to move from relatively niche trading products into mainstream financial and consumer businesses. Doing that requires not only customers and regulatory licenses, but dependable access to banking, payment and settlement infrastructure.

Polymarket found another banking provider after JPMorgan ended the relationship.

But the episode illustrates the industry’s larger challenge.

Prediction markets are trying to convince investors that they belong beside exchanges, brokerages and other mainstream financial institutions.

Some of the world’s largest banks are apparently not yet convinced that serving them is worth the risk.

JBizNews Desk | New York

© JBizNews.com All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution without written permission is prohibited.

NEW YORK (VINnews) — A team of construction workers has discovered a gold hoard worth an estimated $10 million during renovation work at the site of a former Belgian brewery that is being converted into a shelter for homeless people.

The treasure was discovered last week in the city of Dendermonde, when a drill became lodged in a gold bar, according to local police. The gold had reportedly been hidden in a bag beneath the stone basement floor of a 19th-century villa built in the 1890s for the brewery’s former owner, Theophilus Van Assche, local police officer Katrien Braem said.

The eight-member construction crew included an 18-year-old student working a summer job who was the first to notice the gold. The workers contacted their employer and police to report the discovery, which included gold coins and gold bars dating from the Victorian era.

Police said their teams collected and catalogued the treasure before immediately placing it in a highly secured federal vault.

Photographs released by police showed 49 gold bars arranged on a table at the construction site, along with hundreds of gold coins collected in a builders’ bucket.

The historic site, which has been almost completely demolished, is being renovated by the social welfare organization CAW Oost-Vlaanderen. Workers discovered the gold while installing sewage pipes for new shelters that are planned for the property.

The ultimate fate of the treasure remains unclear. Legal proceedings may be required to determine whether ownership belongs to descendants of the Van Assche family, the organization carrying out the renovation, or the workers who discovered the gold.

Dendermonde police, in the Flemish region of Belgium about 29 kilometers northwest of Brussels, have warned would-be treasure hunters to stay away from the site.

Police said all of the discovered gold has been removed, while the construction area contains several dangerous pits.

“It appears that various treasure hunters are eager to visit the site,” police wrote in a statement. “Perfect advice: it really is pointless.”

The discovery comes at a particularly lucrative time for the precious metal. Gold is currently trading above $4,400 per ounce, after more than doubling in value over the past several years.

Of the thousands of lawsuits Meta faces over child safety on its platforms, none may be more consequential than one going to trial this week in California.

States are seeking extensive financial damages that could, in theory, total as much as $1.4 trillion, plus changes to how the company operates Facebook and Instagram.

The lawsuit accuses the social media giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features that get children addicted to its platforms. It also claims that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of federal law.

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains,” the lawsuit says.

Dozens of states filed the lawsuit three years ago. The trial set to begin Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, features four of the states as plaintiffs — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. The other 25 states are expected to have trials later.

Meta said it disputes the allegations, and the trial evidence will show its commitment to supporting young people. “We’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most,” the company said in a statement.

States seek to land a major blow against Meta

For Meta, which already lost two pivotal cases over harms to children and teens this year, the stakes are high. The company reported a rare profit decline last month, in part due to $2.4 billion in legal expenses.

The $1.4 trillion figure, which Meta disclosed in a legal filing, is almost as high as the Menlo Park, California, company’s entire market capitalization — that is, the value of all its outstanding shares on the stock market. Paying it would inevitably put Meta Platforms in bankruptcy and perhaps put the company under state ownership.

“The state attorneys general are going for the gusto,” said Eric Goldman, a professor and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law. “They are trying to set the definitive precedent in this case and they have asked for extraordinary damages and they are going to seek extraordinary structural remedies if they succeed.”

Meta calls the possible penalty “untethered to any claimed violation” by the states.

“A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” Meta said in a July 6 filing with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

If Meta loses the trial, the court would have wide discretion over the size of any financial penalty, and legal experts say anything close to $1.4 trillion would be unlikely.

“It’s not plausible in the sense that Meta doesn’t have that much money and could not get it,” said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech. “An award that large would put Meta into bankruptcy, wipe out its owners, and effectively result in the states owning Meta.”

As a practical matter, Grimmelmann added, “that seems extremely unlikely to happen.”

In other cases that have involved high potential damages for multiple individual offenses, he said courts have stopped short of imposing the maximum penalties. One example is the Anthropic artificial intelligence training case, where plaintiffs were claiming damages of $150,000 per book that Anthropic copied, but the penalty ended up being $3,000 per book, totaling about $1.5 billion.

Trial seeks to hold Meta accountable on state and federal statutes

The federal trial this week is more complex than one earlier this year, in Los Angeles, where a state court awarded $6 million in damages from Meta and Google’s YouTube to a single plaintiff, a young woman who testified she became addicted to social media as a child.

That case was a bellwether, or test case, picked from thousands of similar civil tort lawsuits to give both plaintiffs and the defendants an idea of how their arguments fare in court. The jury determined that Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design or operation of their respective platforms, and that the negligence was a substantial factor in causing harm to the plaintiff. They also determined each company knew their platforms could be dangerous when used by a minor and that they failed to adequately warn of that danger.

The Oakland case, meanwhile, has state attorneys general as the plaintiffs and centers on state and federal statutes they allege Meta violated, which lay out potential penalty amounts for each violation.

“And there’s a lot of them because it’s four different states and at least three different kinds of statutes. There’s a child privacy statute, there’s a false advertising statute and there’s unfair competition statutes,” said Rebecca Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School.

Meta has added safety tools — but states want more

An outcome that leads to changes in how Facebook and Instagram operate could be as consequential as any financial penalty.

Meta has introduced a slew of new features in recent years designed to protect minors. In 2024 it launched teen accounts on Instagram, which are private by default and come with messaging and content restrictions, and parental controls. The company also uses artificial intelligence to determine if kids under 13 are using Instagram or if teenagers are lying about their age to access adult accounts.

Safety advocates have called on the company to do more. A New Mexico judge earlier this month ordered new safety measures on the platforms including time limits for minors, AI chatbot restrictions, and mandatory warnings on the platforms, but his order applied only to users in the state.

“These AGs have a real chance at fixing the product,” Laura Marquez-Garrett of the Social Media Victims Law Center said Friday in a virtual discussion with advocates hosted by the Tech Oversight Project. “For these companies, this is a real point of reckoning. As these cases go forward, this is a leap forward, folks, not a step.”

During jury selection last week, prospective jurors were asked whether and how much they believe Meta has contributed to the youth mental health crisis. While many agreed that it did, they also put responsibility on parents, and said things like climate change and the state of the world are also causing children’s and teenagers’ mental health issues.

___

AP Technology Writer Kaitlyn Huamani contributed to this report.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Every summer, we hear story after heartbreaking story of children drowning in private pools.

A toddler wandered into a backyard pool. A child slipped under the water while adults were nearby. Family and friends are left devastated, asking how something so unthinkable could happen so quickly.

As difficult as it is to say, we need to face an uncomfortable truth: swimming is not a necessity. It is a privilege and a recreational activity. If we choose to take our children swimming, we are also choosing to accept the enormous responsibility that comes with it.

Drowning is one of the few tragedies that is almost always preventable.

Many people imagine drowning as loud splashing and desperate cries for help. In reality, drowning is usually silent. It can happen in seconds. A child can disappear beneath the surface while adults are talking, looking at their phones, grilling dinner, or assuming someone else is watching.

“Someone else is watching” has cost far too many children their lives.

If you’re going to swim with children at a private pool, there should either be a lifeguard, or one adult whose only job is to watch the water—every second.

Not chatting. Not eating. Not scrolling. Not running inside for a towel. Watching the pool with the same level of focus a professional lifeguard would.

It isn’t fair to expect one person to supervise the grill, greet guests, take care of a baby, carry on conversations, and also keep children safe in the water. Drowning doesn’t wait until it’s convenient.

Yes, hiring a lifeguard costs money. Yes, designating a “water watcher” means someone must give up part of their time relaxing, socializing, or enjoying the afternoon to keep constant watch over the pool.

But compared to the unimaginable cost of losing a child, those sacrifices are insignificant.

None of this is written to judge families who have experienced this nightmare. They have already suffered more than anyone should ever have to endure. It is written because every one of these tragedies should make the rest of us stop and ask, “What can I do differently so it never happens to my child—or anyone else’s?”

If sharing this message prevents even one drowning, it will have been worth saying.

Our children deserve nothing less than our complete attention around the water. Every second. Every time.

Anonymous

TLS welcomes your letters by submitting them to us via  Whatsapp  or via email  [email protected]

NYPD officers shot and killed a 54-year-old man on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on Sunday after police said he advanced toward officers with a large butcher knife despite repeated commands to drop the weapon.

The confrontation unfolded shortly after 4 p.m. inside an apartment building at 126 Ludlow Street, where police had been dispatched following several 911 calls reporting that an assault was underway.

After entering the building, responding officers discovered blood on the floor and followed a trail leading up a staircase, NYPD Assistant Chief Melissa Eger said during a news conference Sunday evening.

As the officers made their way upstairs, they encountered 54-year-old Wei Chan descending the staircase while carrying what authorities described as a large butcher knife.

“Officers repeated multiple commands for the male to show his hands in an effort for him to drop the weapon,” Eger said. “As officers issued repeated commands, the male continued to advance towards the officers armed with the large butcher knife.”

Police said the officers then discharged their weapons, striking Chan. Emergency personnel transported him to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Authorities said Chan had no known record of criminal activity with the NYPD, although police had previously documented mental health-related interactions involving him.

“He has no known criminal history with our department. However, he does have a documented mental health history with the department,” Eger said.

Police also discovered Chan’s 75-year-old father, Cheung Chan, inside the building with a laceration to his head. Investigators believe Wei Chan attacked and injured his father before officers arrived at the scene.

Cheung Chan was transported to a hospital for treatment and is expected to survive his injuries.

The NYPD officers who responded to the incident were also brought to a hospital for evaluation following the deadly confrontation.

“Their actions are a reminder of how officers run towards danger and not away from it,” Eger said.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Sunday that officials had briefed him on the shooting and confirmed that the NYPD would conduct an internal investigation into the officers’ use of deadly force.

“As with every incident in which NYPD officers discharge their weapons, there will be an internal investigation, and body-worn camera footage of the incident will be released,” Mamdani wrote on X.

Police said the investigation into the shooting and the events that preceded the officers’ arrival remains ongoing.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea on Monday expressed hopes for resumption of diplomacy between the U.S. and North Korea to ease animosities on the Korean Peninsula, as U.S. President Donald Trump’s order to cut military exercises with South Korea caused concerns it might hurt the allies’ readiness against North Korean threats.

Trump cited his good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the decision, a likely bid to reengage with Kim, who views U.S.-South Korean military exercises as invasion rehearsals. But experts say the North Korean leader, now emboldened by his advancing nuclear arsenal and expanding military cooperation with Russia, won’t likely return to talks unless he is assured of serious U.S. concessions.

The 11-day, summertime Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises began Monday morning as scheduled and it wasn’t known which parts of the training were being downsized. Trump’s announcement baffled many in South Korea, a key U.S. ally in Asia where national security is a top priority due to threats from nuclear-armed North Korea.

Trump orders military to ‘substantially reduce’ drills
Trump said in a social media post that the exercises are not only costly but “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which he said “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his time in the White House.

Trump instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” the exercises. He added that he recently asked President Lee Jae Myung if South Korea would join the U.S. in the “denuclearization” of Iran, “and they said, ‘No thanks!’”

Trump’s move is the latest example of the American president appearing to turn against an ally in favor of a leader cast by previous administrations as an adversary. Trump and others in his administration also have railed against NATO allies over a perceived lack of support for his war against Iran, even as they seek to confront an increasingly aggressive Russia in the Baltic region.

The trust many South Koreans have in the U.S. has eroded following a tariff war instigated by Trump’s administration and his transactional approach to security.

South Korea hopes for talks between US and North Korea
The office of South Korea’s president said later Monday that the government hopes “friendly relationship” between Trump and Kim would lead to “meaningful dialogue” between the U.S. and North Korea and start discussions on promoting peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. It said that South Korea will make necessary diplomatic efforts for that.

South Korea and the U.S. are closely discussing practical and military contributions that can be made to restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, according to South Korea’s presidential office.

Lee is a liberal who espouses improved ties with North Korea. Since taking office last year, his government has taken proactive steps to improve ties with North Korea, including turning off front line loudspeakers that blared K-pop music and world news. On Saturday, Lee offered to hold talks to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

The conservative People Power Party, the main opposition party, lambasted Lee for allegedly “turning a blind eye on the public’s security concerns” caused by Trump’s announcement and prioritizing hopes for U.S.-North Korea diplomacy.

North Korea has shunned any talks with South Korea and the U.S. and accelerated weapons testing activities since Kim’s high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with Trump broke down in 2019. Kim also has bolstered his diplomatic credentials by aligning with Russia over its war against Ukraine and taking steps to deepen cooperation with China.

In September 2025, Kim suggested he could resume talks with the American president if the U.S. drops “its delusional obsession with denuclearization” of North Korea. Experts say Kim likely aims to use his enlarged nuclear arsenal to win major concessions like extensive sanctions relief.

“Trump’s recent social media posts about Kim Jong Un suggest a willingness to reengage, but North Korea is busy profiting from Russia’s war against Ukraine while modernizing its own military,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.

Downsizing the U.S. and South Korean drills “can damage alliance coordination, slow the process of South Korea taking on greater responsibility for its own defense, and weaken deterrence against possible conflicts in Asia,” Easley said.

Duyeon Kim, a senior analyst at Washington’s Center for a New American Security, said “reducing joint drills weakens military readiness over time against another potential North Korean attack.”

Military drills test tactics and anger North Korea
South Korea’s military earlier said the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises this year would be similar to previous years in scale, with about 18,000 South Korean soldiers taking part.

The U.S. military said the drills would incorporate lessens from recent conflicts such as North Korea’s battlefield experiences in the Russia-Ukraine front, while including a live-fire exercise to test joint precision targeting and maneuver, a wet gap crossing and distribution of prepositioned military equipment.

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry on Friday accused the U.S. and South Korea of plotting more provocative drills this year and vowed to respond with “a new level of a deterrent.” Earlier this month, North Korea fired two ballistic missiles into the sea in a likely protest of the drills.

Duyeon Kim, the analyst, said North Korea uses U.S.-South Korean drills “for domestic propaganda purposes to create a false narrative of a hostile America and justify its nuclear weapons program.”

This is not the first time Trump has sought to suspend the drills. After his first summit with Kim in 2018, Trump unilaterally announced the suspension of the U.S.-South Korean summertime exercises, calling them “very provocative” and “tremendously expensive.”

Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said North Korea feels less urgency to return to talks with the U.S. and South Korea now than when it entered talks with its rivals in 2018, but is unlikely to completely ignore Trump’s overture.

He predicted North Korea will likely say it has noted Trump’s post but will wait for further action showing the U.S. intends to drop hostilities against North Korea.

NEW YORK (VINnews) — Despite the signing of a memorandum of understanding between U.S. President Donald Trump and Iran at the Palace of Versailles in mid-June, a new report in the Wall Street Journal suggests based on interviews with Iranian and Arab officials that Tehran may have used the lull in hostilities to prepare for a broader regional confrontation rather than pursue a lasting diplomatic settlement.

The agreement reportedly offered Iran significant economic incentives, including sanctions relief, the ability to resume oil exports, access to billions of dollars in previously frozen assets, and the prospect of a $300 billion reconstruction fund. In return, the United States hoped Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and help bring regional fighting to an end.

However, according to sources in Iran and several Arab countries, Iran’s leadership viewed the agreement as a tactic by the United States and Israel to buy time. They claim Tehran responded with a dual-track strategy: while its diplomats, led by more pragmatic figures such as President Masoud Pezeshkian, who reportedly supported an agreement to avert economic collapse, continued negotiations, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei allegedly began preparing the country’s security apparatus for renewed conflict.

According to the report, Arab intelligence agencies intercepted communications indicating close coordination between Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Tehran-backed militias throughout the region.

The alleged strategy quickly manifested itself, with attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz resuming and hostilities expanding into the Red Sea. Yemen’s Houthi movement, reportedly supported by the IRGC with intelligence, weapons, and operational guidance, declared the Bab el-Mandeb Strait closed to Saudi Arabia and began attacking Saudi-linked forces.

At the same time, Iraqi militias allegedly targeted Saudi oil facilities, while Iran reportedly launched advanced ballistic missiles toward Jordan, demonstrating what analysts described as improved precision capabilities.

Tehran-based security analyst Mohammad Hassan Sangtarash characterized the campaign as a “salami tactic”, a gradual escalation designed to wear down opponents before a much larger confrontation.

Behind the scenes, the report says Mojtaba Khamenei has carried out sweeping changes within Iran’s security establishment.

Veteran IRGC commander Mohsen Rezaei was reportedly appointed secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, while Hossein Taeb returned to lead the Basij militia, where he is expected to oversee an expanded domestic intelligence network aimed at suppressing potential unrest fueled by Iran’s economic crisis.

The report further claims that the IRGC, estimated to number around 200,000 personnel, has been granted expanded authority over Iran’s conventional military under the command of Ali Abdollahi. Newly appointed IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi was reportedly instructed to prepare for “powerful offensive operations.”

According to the report, contingency plans now include possible sabotage of undersea internet cables in the Persian Gulf and efforts to stir unrest in countries with significant Shiite populations. Kuwait, for example, is said to be increasingly concerned after recently intercepting six IRGC operatives who allegedly entered its waters aboard a fishing boat.

The reported developments have heightened concerns among Gulf states, which fear Iran’s increasingly belligerent posture and what they view as the West’s inability to restrain Tehran.

President Trump, angered by the renewed attacks and reportedly describing Iran’s leadership as “sick,” is said to have suspended negotiations while waiting for economic sanctions to exert greater pressure.

According to the report, diplomatic efforts have stalled after the IRGC blocked attempts by Iranian negotiators to reach an agreement through Omani mediation on the gradual reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, Iranian officials are reportedly preparing the country for what they describe as a “survival economy.” Sources close to Iran’s negotiating team claim the current calm is merely “the quiet before the storm.”

A senior Iranian strategic adviser was quoted as suggesting that a deeper motivation behind Tehran’s continued confrontation is a “multi-generational blood revenge project” following the assassination of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the beginning of the war, an indication, according to the report, that Iran’s leadership is preparing for a prolonged conflict.

Israel’s largest shipping company is being sold to a German carrier whose shareholders include the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and a new poll finds that about two out of every three Israeli Jews want the government to stop it.

The survey, conducted this month by Midgam Consulting and Research and commissioned by the Zim workers’ committee, found that 67.1% of Israel’s Jewish public opposes approving the sale to a buyer with Qatari shareholders. Roughly 57% object specifically because of the Qatari stake, while another 10% oppose the deal under any circumstances. About 30% would approve it only after security reviews, and just 2.4% — fewer than one in 40 — would sign off on it regardless.

What stands out is how little the answer changed from group to group. Opposition ran at 77.2% among religious respondents, 70.2% among secular respondents, 66% among haredi respondents and 60.2% among traditional respondents. Men and women, higher earners and lower earners all landed within a few points of one another. On a subject that usually splits Israeli opinion down predictable lines, this one does not.

The deal behind the numbers was signed in February. Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd agreed to acquire Zim Integrated Shipping Services for about $4.2 billion in cash. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund holds 12.3% of the German carrier and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund holds 10.2%. Zim was founded in 1945, is headquartered in Haifa, and was fully government-owned until it was privatized in the early 2000s.

The structure splits the company in two. Hapag-Lloyd takes Zim’s international business — the Asia-to-America routes and the bulk of its chartered fleet. What stays in Israel is a smaller carrier, backed by Israeli private equity firm FIMI, holding 16 vessels, the Haifa headquarters and the shipping lines running to and from Israel.

That smaller company is meant to satisfy a condition the state has held for years. The government’s golden share lets it call up the fleet in an emergency to bring in essential goods such as wheat and fuel, requires a minimum of 11 ships, and blocks any foreign entity from taking sole control.

That is the heart of the objection. Israel imports nearly everything it eats, burns and builds with by sea. In a war, a blockade or a closed shipping lane, the question is not who owns the vessels on paper but who picks up the phone when Jerusalem calls. Zim kept sailing to Israel during periods when foreign carriers rerouted around the region, and that record is why the company is treated as infrastructure rather than as a stock.

Senior officials have already said the current terms do not clear that bar. Defense Minister Israel Katz sided with Defense Ministry officials who reviewed the acquisition and concluded it does not protect Israel’s national security interests, particularly in emergencies. Deputy Minister Almog Cohen separately warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against handing over the country’s maritime gateway to a buyer with Qatari and Saudi shareholders.

There is a second worry that gets less attention: whether the Israeli remnant is strong enough to matter. The Israeli Administration of Shipping and Ports has cautioned that without state support, the slimmed-down carrier could be too weak to survive an industry downturn — which would leave Israel with no independent fleet at all.

Zim workers’ committee chairman Oren Caspi said the poll shows the public grasps what is at stake, calling it a struggle over a national interest rather than a labor dispute, and urging the government to block the sale.

The decision now sits with the state. The transaction is expected to close by late 2026 and remains subject to approval by Zim shareholders and regulators, including the State of Israel itself. Jerusalem can approve it, kill it, or approve it only with hard security conditions attached — a bigger guaranteed fleet, firmer emergency call-up rights, and state backing to keep the Israeli carrier solvent. The poll says the public wants the third option at minimum. The government has until the end of the year to answer.

JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv

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A federal appeals court has reinstated key portions of a Texas election law requiring identification information on mail-in ballot applications and ballots, overturning a lower court decision that had blocked the provisions in March.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals restored several requirements contained in Senate Bill 1, the Election Protection and Integrity Act of 2021, which made sweeping changes to the state’s election procedures.

Among other provisions, the law revised certain voting registration requirements, imposed identification requirements for voting by mail, required individuals assisting voters to sign an oath affirming that they did not coerce the voter, and established new election fraud offenses.

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican from Mineola who authored the legislation, has maintained that the changes are intended to make voting more accessible while strengthening safeguards against fraud.

“These are common sense reforms, and we’re going to stand by them,” Hughes said to Nexstar following the federal appeals court opinion.

The legislation prompted multiple lawsuits from voting rights organizations, which argued, among other claims, that provisions of the law violated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Texans who vote by mail are predominantly people age 65 and older or those who qualify because of a disability.

After SB 1 took effect, a Brennan Center for Justice study found that approximately one in seven Texans who sought mail-in ballots had their applications rejected. Many of those rejections occurred because voters either omitted an identification number or provided one that did not correspond with the identification information contained in the state’s voter registration records.

For instance, a voter who initially registered using a Social Security number but subsequently placed a Texas identification number on a mail ballot application could encounter a mismatch under the new system.

The 5th Circuit rejected concerns that the initial level of rejected applications and ballots demonstrated an ongoing problem, pointing to evidence that rejection rates fell sharply as election officials and voters became accustomed to the requirements.

“The number of mail-in application or mail-in ballot rejections caused by missing or mismatched identification numbers dropped from 11 or 12 percent to 2.7 percent in just eight months. And officials testified that the numbers will ‘continue to decline’ because Texas’s identification database will ‘continue to get more robust,’ and voters will ‘get more used to’ the new procedures,” the federal appeals opinion reads.

Hughes similarly argued that the rejection rate has continued declining as Texans have become more familiar with how the identification system operates.

“We believe that rate continues to come down as people learn about the process and become more familiar with it,” Hughes said.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office advises mail-in voters to provide both their Texas identification number and the last four digits of their Social Security number on their application and ballot. As long as one of those numbers matches the information contained in the state’s records, the ballot can be accepted.

Looking ahead to the Texas Legislature’s 2027 session, Hughes said he does not anticipate pursuing “major wholesale” changes to the state’s election system. He said, however, that lawmakers are likely to continue examining possible measures aimed at strengthening election security.

India is ordering its oil industry to dramatically increase the amount of cooking gas it can produce at home, a major energy-security shift after disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz exposed how vulnerable the country remains to imported fuel.

Under an Aug. 13 government order, state-run and private refiners have been assigned the capacity to produce as much as 63,810 metric tons of liquefied petroleum gas a day when supplies are constrained.

That is significant because India currently consumes roughly 91,000 tons of LPG each day. The new production ceiling could therefore cover about 70% of daily demand domestically during an emergency.

India produced only about 35,900 tons a day domestically during the fiscal year ended March 2026, meaning the new targets would require refiners to be capable of pushing output far above normal levels when needed.

The government is also requiring companies to strengthen storage and transportation infrastructure so the additional LPG can actually reach consumers during a disruption.

The largest assignment goes to Reliance Industries, whose Jamnagar refining operation could be required to produce as much as 18,000 tons a day.

For India, LPG is not a niche petroleum product.

It is the cooking fuel used by hundreds of millions of households, restaurants and businesses. India consumed about 33.2 million metric tons during the 2025-26 fiscal year, while domestic production totaled only about 13.1 million tons.

Imports filled most of the gap.

And before the latest Middle East disruptions, roughly 90% of India’s imported LPG came from the Middle East, leaving the country heavily exposed to shipping through and around the Strait of Hormuz.

That vulnerability became impossible to ignore earlier this year when conflict involving Iran disrupted Gulf shipping and produced India’s worst LPG shortage in years.

The government was forced to take emergency measures, including redirecting fuel supplies and asking refiners to maximize domestic LPG production.

India has since moved aggressively to diversify.

State refiners are planning to obtain as much as 25% of the country’s LPG imports from the United States in 2027, while crude buyers have also sought supplies from Africa, Latin America and other routes that avoid Hormuz.

The latest order goes one step further.

Instead of relying only on finding alternative foreign suppliers after a crisis begins, India is trying to build enough domestic production capacity to absorb a much larger portion of demand itself.

That could have consequences across global energy markets.

If Indian refiners divert more refinery output toward LPG, it can affect the amount of other petroleum products they produce. Higher domestic LPG output could also reduce India’s need for some Middle Eastern cargoes while increasing competition for alternative supplies from the United States and elsewhere.

India is separately considering an even larger strategic-fuel programme that would create dedicated national reserves for LPG and liquefied natural gas for the first time.

The proposed plan could eventually cost about $42 billion and include enough LPG storage to cover roughly six weeks of demand.

Taken together, the policies show how the Strait of Hormuz crisis is beginning to permanently reshape energy planning far beyond the Middle East.

Countries that once optimized their supply chains around the cheapest available fuel are increasingly asking a different question:

What does it cost if that fuel suddenly cannot arrive at all?

For India, the answer is now leading to more domestic production, larger reserves and a more geographically diverse supply chain.

The new LPG targets are therefore not simply an emergency response.

They are an acknowledgment that energy security now requires paying for spare capacity before the next crisis arrives.

JBizNews Desk | New Delhi

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JERUSALEM (VINnews) – An ultra-Orthodox Torah student from Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood has been held at Israel’s Military Prison No. 10 for about a week after being arrested at a military recruitment office, according to a report by Kikar Hashabbat.

The man, identified as Yitzchak David Lamet, is described by acquaintances as a devoted and quiet Torah scholar. He reportedly went to the recruitment office on the advice of a community activist to resolve his status as a yeshiva student, but was arrested and transferred to military custody.

Friends say Lamet lacks the backing of a major Hasidic court or powerful network of communal activists, leaving his case without the public campaign that often accompanies arrests of other members of the ultra-Orthodox community.

“He simply fell through the cracks,” acquaintances said.

The arrest comes only weeks after Lamet and his wife welcomed a son. The family has already celebrated the baby’s brit milah, while his wife is now preparing for the upcoming pidyon haben ceremony without her husband.

Friends expressed frustration that the case has received relatively little public attention.

“If he were a follower of a prominent rebbe, the whole world would be shaking,” one acquaintance said, questioning whether an avreich without influential connections receives less support.

His acquaintances are calling on community activists and other relevant officials to intervene and seek assistance for Lamet and his family.

A serious antisemitic incident occurred in recent days in Spain when seven Jewish tourists from France came under attack at the Barcelona port area by a mob of hundreds of people who harassed and threatened them, Ynet reported.

One of the Jews, Jimmy Zagrone, told a French television network that for 40 minutes, he and six other Jews were subject to slurs, spitting, and humiliation, and even feared for their lives.

Zagrone added that he and several others were wearing yarmulkes when the incident occurred, and one member of the group was a Chabad chassid who was wearing a long black coat and a black yarmulke.

He explained that the incident began when a woman wearing pro-Palestinian symbols noticed them and began clapping and shouting at them. She was soon joined by hundreds of others who gathered around the Jews, shouting and spitting at them. The chants began with “Free Palestine” but quickly became more antisemitic and threatening, including “baby killers,” “Jews are not welcome here,” and “Zionists are not welcome here.” They later shouted “Death to Israel” and chanted against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Zagron said that in a desperate attempt to calm the situation, he tried to explain to the attackers that he was a French citizen with no connection to Israel, but his words had no effect and the shouting and spitting continued.

As the mood of the crowd became increasingly threatening, the group understood that their lives were in danger and decided to split up to avoid being surrounded. Baruch Hashem, all seven escaped the crowd and managed to return safely to their hotel.

It should be noted that a similar antisemitic incident occurred to a group of French Jewish tourists in Barcelona just last month.  The disturbing incident occurred on Friday night as the group left a shul. Two members of the group were wearing yarmulkes, and they were quickly surrounded, insulted, and spat upon by a large mob utilizing bicycles, scooters, and motorbikes.

The assailants chanted phrases such as “Jews are not welcome in Barcelona” and “baby killers” as they chased the Jews through the streets of Barcelona while continuing to spit at them.  The tourists escaped physical harm only after reaching a local hotel where security personnel blocked the crowd from entering.

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)

Sen. Bill Cassidy on Sunday accused Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of failing to honor assurances made during his confirmation process that the childhood vaccination schedule would not be altered, pointing to President Donald Trump’s new executive order reducing the number of recommended vaccines.

Appearing on ABC News’s “This Week,” the Louisiana Republican discussed commitments he said Kennedy and the White House made to secure his support for Kennedy’s confirmation as HHS secretary last year. Cassidy, a physician, indicated that maintaining the existing childhood vaccination schedule was one of those commitments.

“As I’ve mentioned multiple times in the past, there are guarantees that were given to me and guarantees that were supposedly going to be enforced by the White House,” Cassidy told host Martha Raddatz, adding that keeping the childhood vaccine schedule was “among those” pledges.

Cassidy suggested that Kennedy could argue that the latest changes were ordered by Trump rather than by the HHS secretary himself, but said that distinction did not change his broader concern.

“So, people can draw their own conclusions, but it’s pretty evident that … was the White House and the RFK pledge,” added the Louisiana Republican, who is also a physician. “RFK may say, technically, this is the president, not him, and technically, he’s right. But the point is, the American people have been poorly served.”

Trump signed an executive order on Monday seeking to reduce the number of vaccines recommended for children to 11.

The new guidance also calls for separating the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three individual shots. Under the previous recommendations, children received two doses of the combined MMR vaccine, with the first administered between 12 and 15 months and the second between ages 4 and 6.

Trump’s action came months after a federal judge blocked an earlier attempt to scale back the childhood immunization schedule. Those changes had been advanced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, known as ACIP.

Kennedy had moved aggressively to reshape the influential vaccine advisory panel after taking control of HHS, replacing all 17 of its sitting members with a new group of appointees.

The reconstituted committee subsequently voted to change several longstanding childhood vaccination recommendations. Among the changes was a decision to delay the recommended age for children to receive the MMR vaccine together with the chickenpox vaccine.

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, later invalidated the votes taken by ACIP after Kennedy replaced the committee’s membership, effectively blocking those recommendations from taking effect.

Despite the sweeping changes Kennedy has pursued at HHS and Trump’s latest executive order, Cassidy said Sunday that he does not regret casting the pivotal vote that helped confirm Kennedy as health secretary.

Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said that when Kennedy’s nomination was being considered, he also heard from Americans who strongly supported Kennedy, including because of his promise to target ultra-processed foods.

“The point is that when you’re making the decision process, you’re taking in everything at once, and you just make the best decision that presents at … the time,” Cassidy told Raddatz.

{Matzav.com}

JERUSALEM (VINnews) U.S. negotiator Jared Kushner held a rare meeting with Hamas political leaders on Sunday in a new diplomatic effort to make progress in the stalled Gaza ceasefire. Kushner will meet with Israel’s prime minister on Monday.

The talks aim to salvage the new 15-point, U.S.-backed road map for Hamas to disarm in Gaza and Israel to withdraw from the region after three years of almost constant warfare.

A meeting between Kushner, fellow envoy Steve Witkoff and Hamas leaders in Egypt last year helped clinch the ceasefire, whose progress until now had been stalled over the key issue of Hamas’ disarmament.

The rare meeting in Egypt with Hamas’ Khalil al-Hayya was confirmed by a regional official and a Hamas official, both speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters. Kushner was one of a trio of envoys meeting with al-Hayya, with officials from mediating countries Egypt, Qatar and Turkey also present there.

Kushner was sharply criticized for the meeting with Hamas by Israeli political analyst  Zvi Yechezkeli.

According to Yehezkeli, the i24NEWS’ Arab affairs analyst, the very fact that the meeting took place represents a significant achievement for the terrorist organization.

“The meeting itself is a victory for Hamas. It grants the organization legitimacy and recognition for the day after the war,” he said.

Yehezkeli argued that the meeting contradicts the objectives Israel set at the outset of the war. “Nearly three years after the war began, whose declared goal was to eliminate Hamas both militarily and politically, such a meeting is truly a slap in Israel’s face,” he stated.

He urged Israel not to allow the meeting to influence its policy toward Hamas. “Israel must act as though this meeting never happened and continue fighting Hamas, both as a military force and as a political entity,” he said.

At the conclusion of the discussion, program host Miri Michaeli also addressed the meeting, saying: “I wonder whether Kushner would have been willing to meet with Hitler.”

The artificial-intelligence investment boom is beginning to reshape more than technology stocks. It is increasingly competing with governments and businesses for the same pool of long-term capital — and helping drive inflation-adjusted borrowing costs to levels not seen in nearly two decades.

The real yield on 30-year U.S. Treasury debt is hovering around 3%, near its highest level in roughly 18 years.

Real yields measure what investors earn after accounting for expected inflation. For companies, they are one of the clearest measures of how expensive long-term money actually is.

The pressure is coming partly from an extraordinary wave of borrowing.

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and other large technology companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI data centers, purchasing chips, securing electricity and expanding cloud infrastructure. Increasingly, some of that expansion is being financed through the bond market.

Major AI-focused technology companies have already raised roughly $220 billion through bonds in 2026, substantially more than during the same period last year.

At the same time, governments are borrowing heavily.

The U.S. Treasury must finance large federal deficits while corporations are simultaneously asking investors to fund one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in technology history.

That creates competition for capital.

When more borrowers want money, bond investors can demand higher yields before agreeing to lend it.

The result is beginning to spread well beyond Silicon Valley.

Higher long-term Treasury yields influence the cost of corporate bonds, commercial real estate financing, mortgages, infrastructure projects and other loans extending decades into the future.

That helps explain one of the strange signals coming from markets this week.

Short-term Treasury yields have fallen as cooler inflation reduces expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise rates in September.

But long-term borrowing costs remain stubbornly high.

Thursday’s $25 billion auction of 30-year Treasury bonds required a yield of about 5.22% — the highest at a 30-year auction in roughly 25 years.

In other words, investors are becoming somewhat more comfortable with what the Fed may do over the next several months while demanding considerably more compensation to lend money for decades.

AI is not solely responsible.

Large government deficits, reduced central-bank bond buying and continued uncertainty over inflation are also pushing long-term yields higher.

But the AI infrastructure boom is adding another enormous borrower to an already crowded market.

For businesses outside technology, that creates an unexpected consequence.

The trillions being invested to build artificial intelligence may eventually increase productivity and lower costs across the economy.

In the meantime, the race to finance that infrastructure may be helping make long-term money more expensive for almost everyone else.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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Iran’s parliament speaker declared Sunday that Tehran has defeated the United States and Israel both militarily and politically, escalating a war of words after President Donald Trump announced plans for the United States to take control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and Tehran’s chief diplomatic representative, argued that the US and Israel had entered the conflict with a series of clearly defined goals but had failed to accomplish any of them.

“I say with complete conviction that we won this war, both militarily and politically,” Ghalibaf stated. “The United States and Israel attacked us with nine specific objectives, but they failed to achieve any of them.”

Ghalibaf said his declaration of victory was not intended to suggest that Iran had physically destroyed the US military. Rather, he maintained that victory should be measured by whether Washington and Israel succeeded in accomplishing the objectives they had set for the conflict.

“The United States and Israel failed to achieve any of their nine stated objectives, and that was their greatest defeat,” Ghalibaf claimed.

Ghalibaf, who has served as Iran’s leading representative in diplomatic contacts with Washington, also portrayed a memorandum of understanding reached between Iran and the United States as a significant diplomatic achievement for Tehran, calling it “a document of pride and of our victory on the diplomatic front.”

The Iranian official conceded that the country’s population has yet to fully appreciate what he described as the scale of Tehran’s success, saying Iranians should take pride in what he called a “glorious victory.”

Ghalibaf’s comments came after Trump delivered a dramatically different assessment of the conflict during a rally on Long Island on Friday, where he said Iran was being badly defeated and announced that he intends to place the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz under American control.

“After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon, I will be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States,” Trump told the crowd.

Trump also described Iran’s leadership structure as having been devastated during the conflict, saying the destruction has made it increasingly difficult for Washington to find anyone with whom it can negotiate.

Iran has “no leadership. Their leadership is gone. Their second tier is gone. The third tier is half gone. That’s one of my problems, that there is nobody to negotiate with. It’s a problem. It’s the only country in the world where nobody wants to be president.”

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi responded to Trump’s declaration by insisting that Tehran alone determines passage through the Strait of Hormuz. He said Iran would continue its naval blockade until the United States recognizes what he called its “strategic defeat”.

Gharibabadi directly challenged Trump in a social media post, declaring that the strategic waterway belongs to Iran and will remain under Iranian control.

“Once and for all, accept the reality: up to this point, you have suffered strategic and heavy defeats; the Strait of Hormuz has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian.”

He went on to insist that only Tehran has the authority to determine whether the strait remains open or closed and said the blockade would continue as long as Washington refuses to acknowledge defeat.

“This strait will only be closed and opened under Iran’s command, and as long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and cease your fanciful delusions, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade.”

Another senior Iranian official took aim at Trump on Shabbos, invoking a recent security measure in which the president was transported between aircraft inside a catering vehicle amid security concerns.

Ebrahim Azizi, chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security Commission, mocked Trump while warning him to focus on his own safety rather than threatening to take control of the Strait of Hormuz.

“The US President ought to worry about his own security rather than his endless bluffing regarding the Strait of Hormuz; before he ends up hiding in a food truck,” Azizi wrote on social media.

The European Union intends to significantly expand sanctions against Russia in the coming months, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told a German newspaper.

“EU sanctions have already cost Russia dearly, depriving Russia’s war machine of over €1 trillion, and for autumn I am putting forward the most far-reaching sanctions listings since the start of the war,” she told the German daily newspaper, Die Welt.

“Once adopted, they would immediately raise the total number of sanctioned Russian entities by a third. The pressure must keep growing until Moscow ends its war.”

Kallas did not elaborate further on timing or details of the new sanctions package.

EU imposes sanctions on Russian banking, cryptocurrency

The EU in July approved its most recent sanctions package against Russia over its war in Ukraine, imposing curbs on the country’s banking sector and cryptocurrency networks.

This post was originally published on here.

Businesses across Europe are discovering an expensive gap in their insurance coverage: extreme heat can devastate revenue without damaging a single piece of property.

Last summer’s European heatwaves caused an estimated €43 billion, or roughly $50 billion, in lost economic output, according to Moody’s. Yet insured payouts totaled only about €500 million — meaning barely more than 1% of the estimated economic losses were covered.

The reason lies in how traditional business-interruption insurance works.

Most policies are built around physical damage. A fire destroys a restaurant kitchen, a storm damages a roof or flooding forces a factory to close. The property damage triggers the business-interruption coverage that can reimburse lost income while the company recovers.

Extreme heat can hurt a business very differently.

Customers stay home. Outdoor tables sit empty. Construction crews work fewer hours. Factory workers become less productive. Cooling expenses rise. Trains slow down. Agricultural output falls.

The business may lose substantial money while its building remains completely intact.

And that can leave the owner with no traditional insurance claim at all.

The problem is becoming particularly visible in Italy.

In Padua, a northern Italian city known for its early-evening aperitivo culture, extreme temperatures have pushed customers indoors or caused them to arrive much later.

A survey of roughly 600 restaurants, bars and other hospitality businesses in Padua and the surrounding province found that more than 80% experienced sales declines of about 20% during the recent heatwave.

For a restaurant operating on thin margins, losing one-fifth of revenue can turn a profitable month into a losing one even though nothing inside the restaurant was physically damaged.

That distinction is becoming a much larger issue for insurers and businesses.

Only 28% of small and midsize European companies surveyed for the region’s insurance regulator had business-interruption protection attached to their property coverage. Just 17% carried non-damage business-interruption coverage, which can respond to disruptions even when property remains intact.

And even specialized policies may not automatically cover extreme temperatures.

Insurers traditionally find heat difficult to underwrite because there is no single obvious event comparable with a hurricane making landfall or a building catching fire. Heat can instead trigger several problems simultaneously — drought, wildfire, water shortages, lower worker productivity and reduced consumer activity.

Companies are already reporting the consequences.

Manufacturers can face higher cooling costs and slower production. Restaurants lose outdoor customers. Construction companies may need to shorten working hours. Farmers can lose crop yields. Transportation companies can encounter infrastructure restrictions.

The potential solution receiving more attention is parametric insurance.

Unlike a conventional policy that reimburses a company after investigators establish physical damage, parametric insurance can be structured around a predetermined trigger.

For example, a business could purchase coverage that automatically pays if temperatures remain above an agreed level for a specified number of days.

The thermometer effectively becomes the claims adjuster.

That could be particularly useful for hotels, restaurants, construction companies, farms and other businesses where revenue or productivity is closely tied to weather but physical property may remain undamaged.

The lesson for business owners extends well beyond Europe.

A company that carries business-interruption insurance should not automatically assume it is protected whenever weather interrupts business.

Owners need to understand what actually triggers the policy.

If coverage requires physical property damage, a week of extreme temperatures that empties a restaurant, slows a warehouse or forces employees to stop working could produce a major financial loss without producing an insurance payment.

That makes a previously obscure insurance question increasingly important:

What happens when the weather damages the business — but not the building?

For a growing number of companies, the answer today may be that the owner absorbs the loss.

JBizNews Desk | London

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Anthropic investors have been kicking the tires on what could be the most valuable initial public offering in history. A handful of the frontier lab’s backers confirmed to the Financial Times this week that they expect privately held Anthropic to go public in October with a targeted valuation of $2 trillion or higher, which easily eclipses SpaceX’s record-breaking $1.77 trillion IPO in June.

That valuation would more than double the $965 billion the company was worth when it reported a Series H funding round in May. Bloomberg, meanwhile, has reported that Anthropic is also in talks to buy the startup Decart AI for $6 billion. Anthropic filed for an IPO confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but has not publicly set a timeline. Rival frontier lab OpenAI followed suit shortly after Anthropic, but is not expected to IPO until 2027.

The awkward part of all this, though, is that Anthropic isn’t making money yet. Across the Nasdaq 100 universe, the index of large-cap tech companies Anthropic would join post-IPO, the average company trades at roughly 34 times trailing earnings and 25 times forward earnings. At those multiples, a $2 trillion Anthropic would need to post annual profits in the neighborhood of $59 billion to $79 billion to keep pace. 

It could be getting closer, but the Claude chatbot purveyor led by Dario Amodei still has a long way to go. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic’s second-quarter 2026 revenue would more than double to $10.9 billion, while the company would for the first time post an operating profit. But operating profit is not the same as net income. Operating profit tells investors whether the business is covering costs like salaries, compute, and research, but it doesn’t account for interest on debt or taxes. Net income is what’s leftover after all of that is subtracted out. And for a company like Anthropic, with all the needs that go along with sustaining a bleeding-edge frontier lab, the distance between operating profit and actual bottom-line profit could be substantial. 

Avery Marquez, director of investment strategies at Renaissance Capital, said approaching that threshold of a profitable bottom line will be key to make Anthropic’s valuation palatable to public investors.

“Just seeing the [$2 trillion] number, it’s definitely jolting,” she said. “Reaching near operating profitability will at least be something that in my mind makes this very large valuation maybe not seem so crazy.”

At $2 trillion, Anthropic would be keeping company with six other businesses in the world with valuations that size or more plus Broadcom, which has been floating near the $2 trillion mark since first crossing it earlier this year. But just look at the profits of those six firms.

Nvidia’s valuation is more than $5 trillion, and it earned $120.1 billion in net income last fiscal year on $215.9 billion in revenue. Alphabet, at $4.55 trillion, made $132 billion on $403 billion in revenue. Apple, at $4.49 trillion, earned $112 billion on $416 billion in revenue. Microsoft, at $3.7 trillion, posted $133.7 billion of net income in the year ended June 30. Chipmaker TSMC, one of the most valuable companies outside the U.S., rounds out the group at $2 trillion.

Anthropic would be closest to Amazon, which booked $77.7 billion in net income in its most recent fiscal year, although a portion of its own profits are a function of Anthropic’s valuation. (Amazon’s most recent second-quarter earnings show $62.6 billion of net income, and $53.4 billion of that was nonoperating pretax income “primarily from our investments in Anthropic,” its earnings release states.) 

What’s going right

Anthropic’s run-rate revenue went from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion by mid-May. Outside data shared by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff estimated Anthropic’s run rate had reached $74.1 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s $41.3 billion. (Salesforce is an early investor and customer of Anthropic; neither company has confirmed the figures, and Benioff shared data from TickerTrends.) 

“What most impresses me about Anthropic (besides unprecedented revenue growth) is their enterprise hat trick,” posted Benioff. “The best model (Claude), the best coding agents (Claude Code), & the best productivity tool (Cowork).”

What most impresses me about Anthropic (besides unprecedented revenue growth) is their enterprise hat trick: the best model (Claude), the best coding agents (Claude Code), & the best productivity tool (Cowork). Salesforce is proud to be an early investor, customer, and partner. pic.twitter.com/PE1DIGTOnN

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) July 23, 2026

The two rival frontier model developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, are comparable to each other, noted Marquez, which means whichever company files first sets the benchmarks that every company that follows has to measure up against.

Anthropic can tout its enterprise customer base, which is stickier and compounds more predictably than individual consumer subscriptions, which is where OpenAI’s ChatGPT has the name-brand recognition advantage. 

Then there’s compute. Evan Schlossman of Neostellar Capital Corp., whose fund holds a position in OpenAI, said the supply side of the business is the second thing he’ll turn to once he has an S-1 prospectus filing for Anthropic, right after he looks at its definitions for revenue and how it defines key financial metrics. 

“The question is, what is Anthropic’s source over the next 18 months, 24 months, of how much compute they will be able to access at any given time?” said Schlossman. “Do they own that? Are they leasing it? Is it short-term leases? Is it long-term leases?”

The answers will be revealing. A company that owns its servers or has locked-in, long-term leases has predictable costs and can squeeze performance out of its fleet of chips, making each dollar of revenue less expensive to deliver. Short-term leases can lead to spiking costs and scarce supply, and could leave Anthropic at the mercy of another company’s pricing. 

“If you’re able to get slightly better margins out of the hardware you own, what is that showing in terms of overall margin?” asked Schlossman. 

For its part, Anthropic has been locking in capacity. It has deals with Amazon, Google, and Broadcom, and GPU access through SpaceX. If the Decart deal closes, it would also bring in software that helps chips run more efficiently, and an inference optimization team that could plug and play in Anthropic’s organization. Marquez said lining up an acquisition before a road show is pretty common in the tech-IPO world. Companies do it so the pro forma financials already reflect the acquisition, even if the numbers describe a combined business that hasn’t actually operated together yet. 

What this does to OpenAI

Schlossman said the $2 trillion valuation for Anthropic is “exciting” news as an OpenAI investor. 

“If you see strong, credible demand for investments in Anthropic and escalating premiums on that revenue, it would speak to a reasonable analogy that you’re seeing similar market trends for OpenAI,” he said. “It’s the same sort of bull or bear case.”

He’s also not worried about one lab slide-tackling the other. 

“If everyone in the world wanted to switch over to OpenAI tomorrow, or Anthropic tomorrow, or Gemini tomorrow, I don’t believe those companies even have the compute to satiate that,” he said. “It seems less likely that you’re going to have one model intelligence company dominate the global demand for intelligence.”

Marquez sees Anthropic’s valuation turning up the heat for OpenAI. Whether it goes public first or second barely matters for Anthropic, but it matters a lot for OpenAI, which will be priced against a live competitor if Anthropic goes first as planned. Anthropic’s enterprise revenues are flattering, but hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT. OpenAI will likely have to answer the strategic question as to whether it will continue pushing more deeply into enterprise where Anthropic is strong, or if it will lean into scaling more individual customers and monetizing advertising or paid conversions, she said. 

But OpenAI doesn’t necessarily need to beat Anthropic at its own game, noted Marquez, it just has to arrive looking comparable with similar growth and a credible path to profitability on an Ebitda basis. The hurdle Anthropic will need to overcome is establishing what financial metrics make sense for the company.

“The big hang-up for the valuation is, what metrics make sense for this company?” said Marquez. OpenAI will not have that problem, but it will have a very clear peer for investors to use for comparison.

“I don’t think that’s going to deter OpenAI at all,” said Marquez. “But I don’t think it helps OpenAI for Anthropic to go first.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Iran said Monday it has reached an agreement with Oman over a plan for ships to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which runs between the two countries, and the sides are now working to finalize details for a joint statement.

Iranian Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told reporters in Tehran that “an understanding has been reached regarding the map of the transit route.”

His comments came as a 60-day deadline for finding an agreement to end the war expired, with no signs of a deal between the U.S. and Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Iran used the past two months to prepare for an escalation of the war against the US and Israel.

Baghaei did not elaborate on the deal, but details that have previously emerged suggest the deal would reopen the strait with ships entering through a route close to Iran and exiting through a route close to Oman. Ships would transit without paying fees or tolls during the interim period.

The U.S. has sought an acceptable deal on opening the strait before ending its blockade of Iranian ports, and it was not clear whether this would meet Washington’s expectations.

Iran effectively closed the strait — through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s traded oil supplies passed before the war — after Israel and the U.S. attacked the country on Feb. 28.

Baghaei conceded the talks with Oman have gone slowly, “but we had planned, and still plan, to finalize the understanding in the form of a package: the map plus a joint statement.”

(AP)

While recent economic data suggests South Florida has lost its cost advantage over New York, top real estate developers argue the numbers fail to tell the full story.

Key executives behind major residential skyscrapers in Manhattan and Miami argue South Florida is playing long-overdue catch-up after decades of underpriced real estate, while still offering buyers significantly more long-term value.

“Miami has earned a seat as one of the greatest cities in the world,” Naftali Group EVP of marketing, sales and design Danielle Naftali told Fox News Digital. “As people have migrated down here, [and] made it a location that people are living permanently, obviously, things have become a bit more expensive… world-class restaurants opening here, the most amazing cultural institutions, entertainment, hospitality groups — everything that people really experience in major cities around the world. And, you know, those truly go hand in hand.”

“Globally, Miami was playing catch-up to New York for long periods of time, and you can do this by price per square foot, you can do it by total dollars, what they sell for, but Miami used to trade at — as a local myself — I almost thought it was weird how inexpensive the real estate was here comparatively to cities like New York or London or LA,” PMG managing director Ryan Shear also told Fox Digital.

“A lot of people have moved down here, not just people, but companies and a lot of high-profile people, and you’re seeing big headlines about big trades and big sales and that’s true and that is great for the city. I don’t think it tells the whole story. I think Miami is still a value city,” he added. “I still think it’s a bargain play down here.”

A recent Bloomberg analysis of U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data found that the overall cost of living in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metropolitan area has surpassed that of greater New York. The analysis separately found that housing costs in South Florida are roughly 5% higher than in New York and its suburbs. Additionally, consumer prices in South Florida have risen 36% since 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, representing the second-highest inflation surge among major American markets, trailing only Tampa.

South Florida home prices have jumped 79% since the pandemic, according to S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller data, while Florida’s average annual homeowners insurance premium stands at $8,292, roughly four times the average in New York state, according to Insurify.

“There’s definitely a price gap that has changed. But what we see ultimately is that buyers are less sensitive to the price per square foot as the buyers have become more sophisticated,” Naftali countered. “We see our buyers thinking about everything from lifestyle, services and amenities, finished pallets, and really the best quality. So this is something that people are really willing to pay that premium.”

“Anyone that’s buying in our development today will be able to see their appreciation over the next five to ten years,” she said.

Beyond homebuyer costs, developers also face nationwide borrowing and insurance pressures. However, Shear emphasized that constructing a high-rise in Florida remains vastly more accessible than doing so in New York.

“It is still less expensive to build in Florida than New York. And not by a little, by like a decent, significant amount,” Shear said. “Debt in Florida is the same as debt in Texas… Banks lend nationally and globally. So it’s still affordable to build in Florida.”

“Everything’s relative. You know, we’re relative to the world we live in. So, relative is South Florida trading at faster paces, absorption greater than what we see in a lot of markets… It’s not a Miami thing. I think Florida in general is having a very good moment. And it’s been going on for a while, and I don’t think it’s stopping,” Shear said.

Florida remains one of nine U.S. states with no individual income tax, whereas top earners in New York City face combined state and local income tax rates of nearly 14.8%. ATTOM data show Miami-area property taxes have jumped 62% since 2019. Florida voters, meanwhile, will consider a constitutional amendment in November that would exempt the first $250,000 of a homestead’s value from property taxes other than school district levies.

“There is definitely still tax incentive to Florida. That’s very obvious. What we see, though, especially in the luxury sector, is that global luxury buyers, it’s not that they’re either going to New York or either going to Florida. Most of those buyers have a home in both locations. So there’s definitely a tax benefit to being in Florida, without a doubt,” Naftali said.

“It’s just math. The effective tax rate, I believe, in New York, if you’re in the top tax bracket, is somewhere between 50 and 55%, depending on what borough and so forth. There’s no state income tax and there’s no city tax here. So the top tax bracket is set by the federal government, that’s it. That’s the math. If anybody would tell you different, it’s not an opinion, that just factually is the truth,” Shear argued.

“I’ve read countless articles saying how real estate taxes are going through the roof. Well, it’s not the real estate tax going through the roof. There’s just more expensive real estate. It’s not that the tax rate is changing,” he continued. “But if you want to go to city that’s checking all these boxes that somebody’s looking for — massive growth, massive job[s], large population, high rises and so forth — I think it’s impossible to find one. So again, to the point of relativity, it’s all relative to the next option. I think as an option, it does not get better than South Florida.”

U.S. Census Bureau figures show the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro area’s median household income was $80,625 in 2024, about $1,000 below the national median of $81,604. The developers also pointed to infrastructure, permitting and school expansion as efforts to accommodate future population growth across South Florida.

While local median incomes may lag national benchmarks, Shear noted the region’s economic engine is fundamentally changing as major employers relocate their corporate headquarters, rather than just opening small satellite branches.

“It’s not just the people that are moving down here. People are moving their companies down here,” Shear explained, noting that PMG shifted its primary headquarters from New York to Miami. “We’ve reached a tipping point where you’re seeing companies… that are planting their flag in Miami and building companies or taking their existing company and moving them to Miami.”

“I think specifically in Miami, people will continue to move down here. As we said, this is no longer a seasonal location, right? You have everything here,” Naftali said. “It’s a continuous progression. So when you talk about the next five years, it’s only going to continue to get better. So if you’re able to get in now and invest in a new development down here, I think it’s a great investment opportunity.”

“Ask people, where do you want to spend the rest of your life?” Shear said. “Not everything’s about price per square foot, and I still think it’s a value play down here, but I think it is about a lot more down in Florida… Work hours, quality of life, weather, state income tax, restaurants, who’s down here. I mean, Miami’s culture now is incredible… how lucky are we to experience the world’s cultures in one city? Fundamentally, people are moving down here and still are continuing to, not just because you save on taxes or there’s good sun. I think people have finally figured out that living in Florida may just be a better life that they want, and that’s invaluable.”

A Chabad House that opened about a month ago in southern Sri Lanka to serve Israeli tourists in the area has become the target of attacks and threats in recent days from some local residents, Ynet reported.

A protest led by Buddhist monks and residents was held against the Chabad House on Friday night, during which the protesters demanded that the legality of its operations be investigated.

The Chabad House, located in the village of Hiriketiya, southern Sri Lanka, operates a kosher restaurant, holds Shabbos meals and serves as a ‘home away from home’ for Israeli travelers. However, residents justify their protest against the site by claiming that “unwanted religious and commercial activity” is taking place there.

This past Shabbos, during the Friday night meal, Buddhist monks and residents held a noisy protest near the Chabad House and harassed those at the site, playing loud music, throwing firecrackers into the courtyard, and hurling stones at the building.

In addition, Israelis on the way to the site to join the Shabbos meal were stopped by protesters and ordered to turn back. The protesters even set off firecrackers near some of the guests in an effort to frighten them and prevent them from reaching the site.

The protest escalated after Shabbos ended, when several Israelis leaving the Chabad House were threatened with sticks.

A spokesperson from the Chabad House told Ynet that they are concerned that the incidents will escalate without immediate intervention. “The Chabad House was opened to serve Israeli tourists in Hiriketiya, allow them to eat kosher food and provide them with a warm and safe place far from home,” an official there said. “Now we need urgent help so we can continue operating safely.”

Chabad House officials called on the Foreign Ministry, the Israeli Embassy and the authorities in Sri Lanka to immediately intervene, provide a permanent security presence around the site, and carry out an investigation on the violence and threats. “We must not wait until a disaster occurs. Immediate action is needed to protect the Israelis and the Chabad House and ensure that every traveler can reach the site safely,” officials at the Chabad House in southern Sri Lanka said.

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)

President Donald Trump’s effort to bring U.S. prescription-drug prices closer to those paid overseas is already changing pharmaceutical companies’ behavior far beyond America.

Drugmakers are increasingly holding back applications for insurance reimbursement in Switzerland because lower Swiss prices could eventually be used as benchmarks under the administration’s most-favored-nation drug-pricing policy.

A survey released Thursday by Swiss pharmaceutical industry group Interpharma found that seven of 22 newly introduced innovative medicines between January 2025 and June 2026 were never submitted for inclusion on Switzerland’s mandatory health-insurance reimbursement list. Three additional medicines were not submitted for Swiss market approval at all. 

The reimbursement list matters because it determines whether Swiss compulsory health insurance will cover a drug and also helps establish the price paid in the country.

That is now becoming a strategic concern for manufacturers.

Trump’s most-favored-nation approach seeks to prevent Americans from paying substantially more for medicines than patients in other wealthy nations. Switzerland is among the markets that can be used as an international pricing reference. 

For drugmakers, that creates a new calculation.

Launching a medicine at a relatively low reimbursed price in Switzerland could potentially put pressure on the much larger and more profitable U.S. market. Companies therefore have an incentive to delay reimbursement, hold back a launch or seek a higher overseas price rather than risk creating a cheaper benchmark that could follow them back to America.

Interpharma said just 15 new medicines were submitted for Swiss reimbursement during the 18-month period, compared with an average of 24 during comparable periods between 2019 and 2025. 

The business consequence is one of the most important unintended effects emerging from international reference pricing.

A policy designed to lower American drug costs does not necessarily change only what Americans pay. It can also influence where pharmaceutical companies launch medicines, how quickly they seek reimbursement and what prices they demand from foreign governments.

That could leave countries accustomed to negotiating lower drug prices with less leverage.

The trend is not limited to Switzerland. Drugmakers have also delayed some European launches amid concern that lower prices there could undermine U.S. pricing under the administration’s international benchmarking push. 

For American consumers, the administration’s objective remains straightforward: use the enormous size of the U.S. pharmaceutical market to push domestic prices closer to the lowest prices paid by other developed countries.

But the early response from manufacturers suggests the policy may change the global pricing system itself.

Instead of simply lowering American prices to European levels, pharmaceutical companies may increasingly try to prevent European prices from falling far below American ones.

That means the next phase of the drug-price battle may not be fought only inside U.S. pharmacies and insurance companies.

It may be fought over which countries get new medicines first — and how much they will have to pay to get them.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

© JBizNews.com All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution without written permission is prohibited.

Stripe Inc. has finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter Inc., a startup that helps companies switch between artificial intelligence models, for more than $7 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The deal, just months after OpenRouter raised money at a reported $1.3 billion valuation, underscores the demand from businesses to find the most cost-friendly AI solutions. It could also give Stripe, a payments processing firm, a stronger footing in the fast-growing artificial intelligence sector.

The final price for the acquisition could change. The discussions were described by people who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. 

A spokesperson for Stripe said the firm doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation. OpenRouter declined to comment. 

Founded in 2023, OpenRouter provides access to hundreds of AI models, with the goal of matching developers with the most efficient and affordable options for the job at hand. The New York-based company has attracted some of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, including CapitalG — one of Alphabet Inc.’s venture arms — as well as Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures. OpenRouter has raised more than $150 million in capital to date.

The startup’s rise coincides with greater scrutiny on AI costs. While firms like Anthropic PBC and OpenAI are still widely viewed as offering the most capable AI models, a long list of Chinese firms provide cheaper alternatives that are often viewed as good enough for many tasks. 

In May, OpenRouter said it serves 8 million developers who rely on it to access more than 400 different AI models. The startup’s main growth is coming from developers who experiment with different models when building agentic capabilities into their software, a process that requires a mix of infrastructure that can work across different providers and data sources.

OpenRouter also offers services that help companies access backups in case the model they use fails and understand which options are most popular across the broader tech ecosystem.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported Stripe was in talks to buy OpenRouter for about $10 billion.

OpenRouter Chief Executive Officer Alex Atallah previously co-founded OpenSea, a nonfungible token marketplace, which raised more than $400 million in capital but saw usage crater. Atallah stepped down from OpenSea in July 2022, and less than a year later started OpenRouter.

Earlier this year, Atallah described OpenRouter as the AI equivalent of Stripe. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com