The East Ramapo Central School District (ERCSD) announced a surprising $30 million budget surplus during Monday night’s Board of Education meeting, sparking calls for accountability and reforms in financial oversight, Monsey Scoop reported. This discovery, confirmed by an independent audit conducted by EFPR Group, contrasts sharply with earlier warnings of a $30 to $40 million deficit projected for the summer of 2024. The audit, which reviewed the district’s finances for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, found that financial statements complied with generally accepted accounting principles. The unexpected surplus comes on the heels of concerns raised by a state-appointed monitor last year, who predicted a severe fiscal shortfall.

The U.K. government hit Iran with new sanctions Monday for sending ballistic missiles and other weapons to Russia to support the war against Ukraine. The Foreign Office said it will freeze assets for Iran’s national airline and its state-owned shipping company that helped transfer weapons. It will also sanction the Russian cargo ship Port Olya-3 that delivered the missiles from Iran. “Iran’s attempts to undermine global security are dangerous and unacceptable,” Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in a statement in advance of announcing the sanctions at the U.N. Security Council.

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — A Wall Street Journal report claims that the IDF has found significant stockpiles of Russian-made weapons in Hezbollah

Twenty years since Bill Clinton opened his presidential library and museum before a rain-soaked crowd, the area around the glass and steel facility has been transformed. The museum fueled development around Little Rock’s once-sleepy downtown, with a former industrial area to its east blossoming into an entertainment district. Next to the building, cyclists and runners regularly cross what was once a railroad bridge spanning the Arkansas River. But little has changed inside the museum, which features many of the same exhibits unveiled two decades ago: touchscreen displays where visitors can pull up Clinton’s daily schedules, replicas of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, electronic tickers scrolling with the 42nd president’s accomplishments.

A platform widely used by gamers for livestreaming announced updates to its hate speech policy on Friday, explicitly banning the word “Zionist” when used as a veiled insult targeting individuals or groups.
Twitch, an Amazon-owned company with over 240 million active users, implemented the change following growing criticism, including from a prominent lawmaker who recently accused the platform of fostering antisemitism in a letter addressed to its leadership.
In a statement shared on its official blog, Twitch clarified, “We prohibit the use of terms that may not be harmful or abusive in isolation, but can be used as a slur or to denigrate others in certain contexts.”

After one of the most chaotic and least productive sessions in modern history, voters made a surprising choice in elections for the U.S. House — they overwhelmingly stuck with the status quo. House Republicans will hold onto a thin majority, and while the chamber’s exact partisan divide is still to be determined as votes are tallied in a handful of states, the results of 435 House races nationwide have produced hardly any change to the makeup of the chamber. In fact, it’s more like a stalemate: Republicans and Democrats have each flipped seven seats, while just eight incumbents nationwide have lost their races. The results show just how entrenched the political dynamics have become in a legislative chamber that is meant to closely reflect the will of the people.

Israeli soldiers in Lebanon have found large troves of Russian weapons in Hezbollah areas, surprising security officials who were unaware of the large cache of modern Russian arms Hezbollah had acquired in recent years, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. The report quoted an IDF major who said that 60% to 70% of the weapons that troops found in southern Lebanon in the first days of the ground war were Russian-made. More recently, reservists told the WSJ that they continue to locate large amounts of Russian weapons inside Lebanon. Although the IDF was aware that Hezbollah had some older Russian-made weapons, their withdrawal from the country in 2006 meant that they lacked information from the ground in the almost two decades since then.

The Associated Press said Monday that it would begin offering buyouts and lay off selected employees, part of a plan to reduce the news outlet’s staff by about 8% and accelerate a transition to a digital-first organization. The move is part of what is expected to be a dispiriting end-of-year period in the news industry, which is beset by business woes that go back years. The end of a busy presidential-election cycle was also expected to accelerate reorganization plans. The AP said those eligible for buyouts were to learn of the offer, which would include severance pay and partial health coverage for 18 months, by the end of Monday. Those whose positions are due to be eliminated would learn about their fates over the next few weeks.