The plans to charge New Yorkers a nickel for every paper bag they get at stores passed its first hurdle Wednesday.
City Council’s Sanitation Committee moved a bill, drafted by council members Margaret Chin and Brad Lander and backed by the De Blasio administration, to the full council for approval. The council members and environmental advocates said the fee, coupled with the state’s ban on plastic bags that goes into effect next year, will help push people to use reusable bags when they shop.
City Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who cast the committee’s lone vote against the bill, said that the proposed regulation would cause serious financial and logistical problems for some New Yorkers who can’t carry nondisposable bags all of the time.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that she would sign on to a resolution calling for an investigation into whether President Trump should be impeached, citing special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in her decision-making.
“Mueller’s report is clear in pointing to Congress’ responsibility in investigating obstruction of justice by the President,” she tweeted.
“It is our job as outlined in Article 1, Sec 2, Clause 5 of the US Constitution,” the progressive lawmaker added. “As such, I’ll be signing onto @RashidaTlaib’s impeachment resolution.”

President Trump on Thursday pushed back against questions about whether he may have obstructed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, asserting that he could have “fired everyone,” including special counsel Robert Mueller, if he had so chosen.
“I had the right to end the whole Witch Hunt if I wanted,” the president tweeted. “I could have fired everyone, including Mueller, if I wanted. I chose not to. I had the RIGHT to use Executive Privilege. I didn’t!”
A redacted version of Mueller’s full report was released Thursday morning. In it, the special counsel detailed 10 areas where investigators looked at whether Trump may have obstructed justice.

Health officials on Thursday were sounding the alarm on the sprawling outbreak of measles that has seen thousands of cases nationwide in the past year, after a flight attendant and a 10-year-old boy were believed to have suffered irreversible brain damage from the highly contagious disease, and as some 45,000 Israeli children reportedly remained unvaccinated.
The condition of the El Al worker who was hospitalized earlier this month with the measles has deteriorated, Hebrew media reported on Thursday. She is suffering from meningoencephalitis — a complication of the measles virus – and is in a coma, having been moved to an isolated intensive care unit, and has suffered suspected brain damage.

Officials in the Prime Minister’s Office on Thursday denied reports that Russia had found the body of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen in Syria, a day after Moscow strongly rejected the claim of its involvement.
Cohen’s body has not been returned from Syria, despite decades of appeals by his family. News of the whereabouts of Cohen’s remains are closely followed in Israel, where recovering the bodies of fallen soldiers carries special resonance.
Over the years, Cohen’s widow Nadia had unsuccessfully made several appeals to the Syrian government to release her late husband’s remains. In 2008, a former bureau chief of late Syrian leader Hafez Assad claimed that no one knew where Cohen was buried.

Security forces arrive with bulldozers at home of terrorist who murdered Ori Ansbacher after the Supreme Court approved the demolition.
The terrorist, Arafat Irfaya, murdered 19-year-old Ansbacher in February. Irafya attacked Ansbacher and stabbed her to death in the Ein Yael forest near Jerusalem.
The decision to demolish the terrorists’ apartments was made by a majority of two judges against one. The terrorist lived with his parents in one apartment, while the second one only served him.
Read more at Arutz Sheva.
{Matzav.com}

Facebook revealed Thursday that millions of Instagram user passwords had been stored in unprotected text accessible by the company’s employees.
The company disclosed the information as an update to a March blog post in which it admitted that hundreds of millions of users’ Facebook passwords had been left unprotected within the company’s servers.
While the original post said tens of thousands of Instagram user passwords had been exposed, Facebook said it has since discovered many more Instagram passwords exposed in the same way.
“Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” Facebook wrote in the update. “We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users.”

The rate of people filing for divorce within two weeks of Pesach is three times as high as during the rest of the year, according to Ronit Sharon, manager of the Talia Center for Children and Parents and a lecturer at the Hebrew University.
She said that this statistic is true for the Bais Din rabbinical court and the secular divorce system, and is only equivalent around the Rosh Hashanah holiday.
“Beware that the holiday period invites many hours that couples are together, which can lead to conflicts arising,” Sharon said. “Don’t make impulsive decisions on ending a connection during the holidays. Persevere until afterwards and then look at the situation with a new perspective.”

A detailed report from special counsel Robert Mueller said investigators struggled with both the legal implications of investigating President Donald Trump for possible obstruction of justice, and the motives behind a range of his most alarming actions, from seeking the ouster of officials to ordering a memo that would clear his name.

Attorney General William Barr’s office made nearly 1,000 redactions to the publicly released version of special counsel Robert Mueller report, according to an analysis by Reuters.
Reuters found 953 total redactions, broken down by the four categories Barr had previously stated would be redacted.
The news service determined that the most common redaction concerned “harm to ongoing matter,” which occurred in 427 cases, according to the analysis.
Read more at The Hill.
{Matzav.com}