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.”

Resolution sponsor Dianne Feinstein says Trump administration policy 'emboldens extremist groups like Hamas and pushes peace further out of reach'

A spoken word by Moshe Friedman:

Palestinian media reports IDF destroys Hebron home of Arafat Irfaiya, charged in the rape and murder of 19-year-old Ori Ansbacher in February

Yahrtzeits – 14 Nissan
-Rav Asher Yeshaya of Ropshitz (1845), the main rebbi of Rav Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam, the Shinover Rav.
-Rav Avraham Yaffen, Rosh Yeshivas Novardok (1897-1970). Educated as a youth in the Pinsk Talmud Torah, he then learned under Rav Isser Zalman Melter in Slutzk. In 1913, he was apppinted rosh yeshiva of the main Novardok yeshiva by Rav Yosef Yoizel Horowitz and became his son-in-law. From then on, he assisted his father-in-law with all aspects of Novardok’s yeshivas. By 1939, there were over 80 Novardok yeshivas throughout Poland, serving over 4000 students. He moved to Eretz Yisrael in 1964.

Middlebury, VT – A Middlebury College chemistry professor whose written exam question asked students to calculate the lethal dose of a poisonous gas used in Nazi gas chambers during the Holocaust has taken a leave of absence, the school said. The Vermont liberal arts college said that it’s investigating under the terms of its faculty [...]

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.”

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.