In a dramatic step, New York state’s education department is abandoning its efforts to impose punishing regulations on yeshivas and private schools, citing what they called an “unprecedented” number of comments against the proposal.
The Board of Regents, at their monthly meeting Monday, summarized the 140,000 comments submitted by citizens from across the state over the summer, with most of them asserting that the proposed regulations would infringe on their rights as parents to choose their children’s education.

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The Pentagon is proposing a $15.4 billion fiscal 2021 budget for the Space Force, the newly minted sixth branch of the military.
The money, largely transferred from existing Air Force programs, would include $2.5 billion for operations and maintenance, $10.3 billion for research and development, $2.4 billion for procurement and $77 million from a war fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account.

An Israeli court sentenced radical Islamic cleric Raed Salah to 28 months in jail for “inciting to terror” in speeches he made after a 2017 attack at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in which two Israeli policemen were killed, according to an AP report.
Salah, the head of the banned northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, was convicted in November of inciting others to follow the example of the Arab-Israeli gunmen that perpetrated that attack.
Salah denied the charges and said after the sentence was announced that the proceedings in the case were “far from the truth,” according to the report. Salah served a nine-month jail sentence in Israel in 2017 for “incitement to violence” and “incitement to racism.”

Rav Dovid of Kolomai, a talmid of the Baal Shem Tov (1732)
Rav Yona Navon, Rav of Yerushalayim (1713-1760). Appointed Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Gedulat Mordechai in Yerushalayim at the age of 19 years, he later moved to Italy due to the harsh poverty. Supported by relatives, he published Nechpah Bakessef, his sefer of responsa. He also authored Get Mekushar on the sefer Get Pashut of Rav Moshe ibn Chaviv, as well as Pri Mipri to refute the questions on Pri Chadash raised by the Pri Toar and the Simlah Chadasha. Among his many talmidim was Rav Chaim Yosef Dovid Azoulai, the Chida.
Rav Asher Tzvi of Ostraha, author of Maayan HaChachmah (1817)
Rav Yaakov of Zabeltov (1881)

A major Arab media personality caused a storm of controversy over the weekend when he tweeted that Zionism is the “most successful project of the past century.”
The tweet was issued by Faisal al-Kasim, a pugnacious but widely admired host on the Qatari network Al Jazeera. A Druze born in Syria, al-Kasim runs the popular but also controversial talk show The Opposite Direction, and is often extremely critical of Arab and Islamic regimes in the Middle East.
He touched off the latest firestorm when he tweeted, “The majority of Arabs, if they want to insult you, describe you as ‘Zionist,’ knowing that the most successful project of the past century and the present is the Zionist project, while all projects of the Arabs, especially Arab nationalism, have failed.”

Iran will “raze Tel Aviv to the ground” if attacked by the United States, said Iran’s Expediency Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaee on Saturday. Tehran has been looking for a pretext to attack Tel Aviv because Israel had played a role in the “martyrdom” of Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, added the former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander-in-chief.
Rezaee’s remarks were made during an interview aired by Lebanon’s Mayadeen TV. The former IRGC commander said that Tehran has precise information on American activity in the region, including on all U.S. bases and aircraft carriers. Iran, he added, even monitors U.S. soldiers when they go to hotels in Kuwait or Bahrain, and knows such things as the food sources of U.S. troops in the region.

The White House on Monday proposed a $4.8 trillion election-year budget that would slash major domestic and safety net programs, setting up a stark contrast with President Donald Trump’s rivals as voting gets underway in the Democratic presidential primary.
The budget would pursue hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and seek reductions in the Children’s Health Insurance Program while wringing some savings from Medicare despite Trump’s repeated promises to safeguard the program for older Americans.

The story of a traveling British businessman who appears to have passed the coronavirus to Britons in at least three countries has prompted concerns over “super spreaders,” who could play an outsize role in transmitting the infection.
A British national, who has not been named, may have unwittingly spread the virus to at least 11 people in the course of his travels from Singapore to France to Switzerland to England, according to public health authorities and accounts in the British media. Infected Britons in England, France and Spain likely caught the virus from him.