Drew Angerer/Getty Images; Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

• An ex-Twitter employee said Trump’s White House asked the company to take down a tweet.
• The expletive-filled tweet, written by Chrissy Teigen, insulted Trump.
• “They wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement,” the ex-official said.

President Donald Trump’s White House asked Twitter to take down a 2019 tweet posted by celebrity Chrissy Teigen that insulted him, a former employee at the social media company testified before a congressional committee on Wednesday.

“I do remember hearing that we had received a request from the White House to make sure that we evaluated this tweet, and that they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed towards the president,” Anika Collier Navaroli, previously a senior expert on Twitter’s US Safety Policy Team, told lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee.

In the September 9, 2019 tweet, Teigen called Trump “a pussy ass bitch” — an apparent response to a Trump tweet roughly an hour before deriding Teigen’s husband, musician John Legend, as “boring” and her as his “filthy mouthed wife.”

Navaroli confirmed on Wednesday that Teigen’s expletive-filled tweet was what the White House asked to be removed, though Twitter declined the request.

The revelation came as the committee’s Republicans led a hearing titled, “Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias,” featuring testimony from Navaroli along with three former Twitter executives.

The hearing focused on how Twitter blocked the distribution of a 2020 New York Post story about emails claimed to be retrieved from a laptop belonging to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Twitter executives had limited the story’s reach over concerns of a foreign disinformation campaign a month before the 2020 election, but later allowed the story to be shared and said the company mishandled the situation. Other news outlets, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, confirmed the New York Post’s reporting months later.

Conservatives have long claimed that social media platforms like Twitter are biased against them, censor their speech and favor liberals. At the start of Wednesday’s hearing, Chairman James Comer praised Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, saying he brought to light the platform’s alleged suppression of conservative voices. 

—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2019

—chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) September 9, 2019

Yet the GOP’s push to discuss alleged social media bias against conservatives seemingly backfired during Navaroli’s testimony about the Trump White House seeking to remove Teigen’s tweet.

“My, my, my, what happens when you hold a hearing and you can’t prove your point,” said Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who led the line of questioning toward Navaroli. 

Three of the four former Twitter officials also testified they had no evidence that Biden’s White House had ever asked the company to remove content. 

“But there’s plenty of evidence Donald J. Trump tried to do that,” Connolly said. “And if we’re gonna have a hearing about the misuse of social media and the intrusion of government in the content on social media, we’ve got an environment-rich target but it’s not Joe Biden. It’s Donald J. Trump.”

Teigen quickly reacted to the testimony on Wednesday, tweeting: “oh my god” with a laughing emoji. Trump’s office did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment. 

NurPhoto/Getty Images; Phil Rosen/Insider

• Following a brutal year for tech, the rise of ChatGPT has sparked a boom in AI stocks and chip-makers.
• Shares of both well-known and obscure companies have skyrocketed on even small updates related to AI. 
• The frenzy bears some resemblance to the meme stock craze, but AI’s foundation is stronger, experts say. 

On the heels of a brutal year for Big Tech, the meteoric rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is providing a boost to some of the hardest hit names of 2022, with small firms and tech giants alike rallying on announcements related to the seemingly endless potential of artificial intelligence. 

The boom is reminiscent of the meme-stock craze that sent shares of companies like GameStop, AMC Entertainment, and Bed Bath & Beyond to the moon in 2021 — but this time, investors won’t have to rely on the enthusiasm of retail investors on social media to keep the rally going. 

Two years ago, institutional investors had taken large short positions in a handful of struggling companies, and retail investors — largely organized on Reddit’s Wall Street Bets forum — took it upon themselves to drive share prices higher with something akin to a community-wide buying spree.

The moves sparked a short-squeeze that crushed returns at a number of hedge funds with large short bets. 

But to Chris Natividad, the chief investment officer and co-founder of Equbot, which has an ETF powered by IBM’s supercomputer Watson, the comparisons between the meme-stock movement and AI hype fall short because the fundamentals driving each trend aren’t comparable.

“Retail investor and media response sentiment is similar, but the financial strength of the underlying AI companies and broad application of AI solutions as a whole suggests there is more upside to come,” Natividad told Insider.

While much of the meme-stock bandwagon stemmed from speculation and a sense of solidarity among retail traders, the companies they were targeting didn’t have particularly strong balance sheets or fundamentals. 

Meme-stock darling Bed Bath & Beyond, for instance, has started the year on the brink of bankruptcy, and one analyst this week described its fundraising efforts as a last gasp with shares heading to $0. 

Alternatively, companies caught in the AI hype are riding a wave of enthusiasm around the innovative potential of tools like ChatGPT, even if that potential remains a ways away from being reached. Chip-makers like Nvidia and Ambarella have seen significant gains year-to-date, and their products could be poised to bring in revenue for years to come. 

“AI stocks and AI solutions will continue to benefit from machine learning while the majority of meme stocks will not,” Natividad noted.

Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary echoed the sentiment, telling Insider that AI as an investment sector has vast potential. He’s currently in talks to take an equity position in ChatGPT creator, OpenAI.

Bot competition looks poised to grow, with Google, Microsoft, and Chinese tech giant Baidu each making strides with their respective AI tools.

“AI’s sort of the new, hot kid on the block,” O’Leary said. “Like the internet was 20 years ago. This is the next thing.”

Improving macro conditions for tech

It isn’t just company-specific news that’s driving AI names higher. The wider macro picture for tech could be shifting after a terrible showing for the sector in 2022. 

The Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate campaign last year weighed on growth names as investors flocked to less risky corners of the market. But with signs of easing monetary policy ahead, the sector could find its legs once more, according to Fundstrat.

Technical indicators have also improved, and skepticism around tech’s recent strength has led to an uptick in short positions, which could end up fueling more gains. With 20% of tech stocks still more than 75% off their highs, Fundstrat noted that a recovery is still in the early stages.

The Nasdaq “closed above the 200-day [moving average] for the first time since April 2022,” strategists said. “The technical picture has flipped positive.”

The infrastructure of Toyota was compromised again, this time its global supplier management network was hacked by a researcher.

The security researcher Eaton Zveare has exploited a vulnerability in Toyota’s Global Supplier Preparation Information Management System (GSPIMS) to achieve system admin access to Toyota’s global supplier management network.

The GSPIMS portal allows employees and suppliers to access to ongoing projects, surveys, information on purchases.

A JSON Web Token (JWT) is a sort of session token that represents a user’s valid authenticated session on a website. A user can usually get a JWT after logging into a website using his email and password

The analysis of the GSPIMS app allowed the researcher to discover a function named “GenerataJWT” that allows to generate a JWT based on a provided valid email address without providing any password.

The researcher pointed out that Corporate Toyota emails are easy to guess because use a predictable format (firstname.lastname@toyota.com) in North America. It was easy for the expert to find Toyota employees with Google queries, he also focused on the research of employees registered in the GSPIMS system. Once discovered the employee, Zveare was able to a createJWT HTTP request that returned a valid JWT.

The expert used the JWT to access the GSPIMS portal and after gaining access to the platform he discovered an account with system administrator privileges.

“Checking the managers of the managers, etc. made it easy to find accounts that had elevated access to the system. Eventually I found a North America Regional Admin. That gave me access to the User Administration section. I then poked around more and found users with even higher access, such as Supplier Admin, Global Admin, and finally, System Admin.” reads a post published by the expert. “In the GSPIMS settings, the tabs that appear are dependent on your role. There’s Regional Settings for Regional Admins, Global Settings for Global Admins, and System Admin Settings for System Admins. System Admins can access all the tabs.”

The researcher was able to obtain access to a system admin account that gave him full access to the system. The expert gained access to information on over 14,000 user accounts, information related to all available projects, surveys, and classified documents.

“I discovered what was essentially a backdoor login mechanism in the Toyota GSPIMS website/application that allowed me to log in as any corporate Toyota user or supplier just by knowing their email. I eventually uncovered a system administrator email and was able to log in to their account. Once that was done, I had full control over the entire global system.” concludes the expert.

Zveare reported the flaw to Toyota on November 3, 2022, and the company confirmed the vulnerability was fixed on November 23, 2022.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Toyota)

The post Researcher compromised the Toyota Supplier Management Network appeared first on Security Affairs.

Tricia Rojo Bushnell was on hold with the prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri, waiting to talk to Leonard “Raheem” Taylor. Executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, Rojo Bushnell was calling to update Taylor on litigation related to his execution, which was scheduled for 6 p.m. on Tuesday. Taylor had been in a holding cell, the prison official told Rojo Bushnell, but now she couldn’t get through. Rojo Bushnell could hear someone talking in the background just before the prison official came back on the line “and said, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s done.’ And I said, ‘Done?’ And she said yes. And I clarified, ‘You mean the execution process is done?’ And she said yes.”

Rojo Bushnell was sitting in a Huddle House diner down the street from the prison. She’d been there all day with Megan Crane, co-director of the MacArthur Justice Center’s Missouri office, working on Taylor’s case. Rojo Bushnell realized that as she was waiting on hold, the execution was already underway. At 6:16 p.m. Taylor was pronounced dead.

Taylor was executed for the 2004 murder of his girlfriend, Angela Rowe, and her three young children in Jennings, a suburb of St. Louis. Taylor had always maintained his innocence. He was nearly 2,000 miles away when the bodies were found inside the home he shared with Rowe, shot in the head. Police seized on Taylor as their sole suspect, pursuing witnesses to confirm their theory of the crime while ignoring evidence to the contrary. At Taylor’s trial, the prosecution relied on a dubious statement provided by Taylor’s brother, Perry — a statement Perry had vociferously recanted — and on testimony from a medical examiner who dramatically changed his estimated time of death in order to implicate Taylor.

Despite lingering questions over Taylor’s guilt, his innocence claim was never fully investigated nor considered by any court. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell declined to avail himself of a Missouri law that allows prosecutors to reopen possible wrongful convictions, saying there were no facts “to support a credible claim of innocence” in Taylor’s case. The office maintained its stance even as Taylor’s daughter, Deja, flew to St. Louis days before the execution to share crucial information supporting her father’s alibi, which could have confirmed that the victims were still alive several days after Taylor had left the state.

“They know that people have other avenues to vindicate their rights, but it doesn’t matter to them.”

As Taylor’s execution loomed, attorneys sought to stop it, asking Gov. Mike Parson to convene a Board of Inquiry: an independent panel tasked with vetting Taylor’s innocence claim. The governor declined to do so. As it became clear the execution would likely proceed, attorneys learned that the state was denying Taylor’s request to have a spiritual adviser and two witnesses, Rojo Bushnell and Crane, present during the execution.

After the Missouri Supreme Court and the federal district court in St. Louis declined to intervene, Rojo Bushnell and Crane were sitting in the diner working on an appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court. Rojo Bushnell was calling to tell Taylor about the appeal when she was informed that it was too late.

It is not the first time that Missouri has executed a person in the face of a compelling claim of innocence, nor is it the first time the state has executed someone while litigation was still pending. “I think that’s something we were all thinking about,” Rojo Bushnell said. “They know that people are continuing to litigate; they know that people have other avenues to vindicate their rights, but it doesn’t matter to them.”

During her last visit with Taylor on Tuesday morning, Rojo Bushnell talked to him about his love of music. His favorite song, he told her, was The O’Jays’ “Family Reunion.” Rojo Bushnell and Crane listened to the song as they drove from Bonne Terre back to St. Louis after the execution. Taylor, a devout Muslim, “accepted his fate, that whatever was Allah’s will was Allah’s will,” Rojo Bushnell said. “He was positive up to the last time I talked to him.”

Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty held rallies in support of Taylor across the state on Tuesday, from Kansas City to Bonne Terre. “One day the truth will be uncovered, and Raheem Taylor will be vindicated and posthumously exonerated,” the organization’s co-director Michelle Smith said.

“This is an undeniable and irreversible injustice,” Crane said. “But in the words of Raheem, he will ‘live eternally in the hearts of family and friends.’”

The post “An Irreversible Injustice”: Missouri Executes Leonard “Raheem” Taylor Despite Doubts Over His Guilt appeared first on The Intercept.

President Joe Biden gave a State of the Union address last night that at times was often gleeful, and at times almost gleefully combative. He sounded like a winner celebrating a victory over a defeated and unpopular opponent – and that’s because he was.

If your approval rating is around 40%, it means you’ve got a lot of people in the middle who don’t like you, and you’ve got to find a way to win them over. You’ve got work to do, and you have to be humble about it. Perceived arrogance will only make them dislike you even more. But the 202 midterm results suggested Biden’s approval has actually been in the fifties the whole time. He now knows he’s popular and on track for reelection in 2024, and he can act like it. So he did.

Biden is obviously far more popular than the Republican House, and he used that to his advantage. But last night was about more than that. House Republicans have no leadership, no cohesion, no sense of strategy, and no political savvy. They had already decided that they were going to heckle President Biden during his speech, and Biden knew it going in, so he used their predictability against them. If they had any smarts, they’d have known they were walking into a trap. If they had any leader, they’d have been hushed on the spot. Instead they simply got played.

Even though most of the media coverage of President Biden’s speech has been positive, most of it has treated the speech as some kind of shocking display of political savvy on Biden’s part. Of course this is the same mainstream media that’s spent the past two years pretending Biden’s strong economy is weak, pretending Biden’s strong approval rating is in the thirties, and pretending Biden is too old to be able to do the job. But in the real world, Biden has been absolutely nailing it for the past two years.

After the media saw the midterm results, it was always going to have to revise its take on Biden’s presidency. After all, the American people clearly think Biden is doing far better than the media has been claiming. The question was when and how the media would begin to revise its approach. More than anything, last night’s speech feels like the inflection point at which the mainstream media may finally be ready to admit that Biden is indeed kicking ass. Now if only they hadn’t first wasted two years of our time.

The post How President Biden beat House Republicans at their own game appeared first on Palmer Report.

I’m not going to lie — when I saw the preview for the Netflix film You People, starring Jonah Hill and Lauren London, about a white Jewish man and Black Muslim woman who fall in love, I was both curious and maybe a little hopeful that You People would be a modern Black/Jewish retelling of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

The acclaimed 1967 film, starring Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, illuminated the struggles even nice white liberal couples like Tracy and Hepburn had when their daughter brought home her accomplished Black physician fiancé (Poitier). I hoped that You People would depict a Black/Muslim/Jewish storyline full of the contemporary conversations and cultural expressions unique to what happens when Black and Jewish people fall in love.

As I settled in to watch You People, I was particularly looking forward to seeing depictions of Jews of color. I anticipated a modern movie set among the racially diverse Jewish communities in Los Angeles, with a story that expressed the diversity and authenticity of both Jewish Americans and African Americans.

All of my optimism was dashed in the opening scene, set at Yom Kippur service at the Skirball Cultural Center in Bel Air. As soon as the camera pulled back to reveal that the congregants were all white, I knew that You People was not going to genuinely depict what American Judaism looks like in 2023.

There has been significant criticism of You People due to its antisemitic portrayal of Jewish Americans and racist portrayal of Black Americans. Yet there hasn’t been enough focus on one of the biggest misses of all: that an entire film about the relationship between Black and Jewish communities, a film informed by a paid “Jewish consultant” no less, omits the very Black Jewish people the film had a responsibility to explore and include.

The film is 117 minutes of stereotypes and caricatures about both Black Americans and Jewish Americans. The Jewish characters are anxious, nosy, boundary-crossing, racist and underinformed (or misinformed) about Black Americans and Black History. And the Black characters are underdeveloped and limited in their dimensions.

Chances are that any Black American so close to the Black Power movement that they would be gifted a kufi from Minister Louis Farrakhan, as Eddie Murphy’s character Akbar was, would have incredible stories and experiences to share. But not in You People. Akbar, the father of London’s main character Amira, was reduced to a non-religious “Black Muslim,” whose most memorable trait is a proximity to Farrakhan. The film does nothing to engage with the complexity of the Black American Muslim experience, and instead plays solely into Jewish discomfort with the well-known antisemite. Akbar’s interactions with his potential white Jewish son-in-law Ezra are a flattened and antagonistic projection of someone who could have had a character line rooted in our collective and complex history and vision for the future.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character Shelley, the mother of Ezra, reacts to the idea that the future offspring created by Amira and Ezra would be Black. She muses, “Our family is growing in such a cool and hip and funky way!” a comment that is at best awkwardly tone-deaf, and at worse tokenizing. She continues, as if to make fun of the 20% of U.S. Jewish families that are multiracial, by overenthusiastically exclaiming, “We’re a family of color.” Shelley’s comments are the closest that You People gets to acknowledging that Jews of color exist, yet because it is mentioned in a flippant and frankly appropriative manner, Black and brown Jews become the unwitting punchline of the joke. To fleetingly and somewhat racistly note the possibility of creating baby Jews of color, absent any actual portrayal of Jews of color, is inaccurate and regressive.

I believe it took actual effort to consciously exclude Jews of color from You People. According to Brandeis University’s 2021 study of Jewish LA, 15% of Los Angeles Jews self-identify as people of color, 9% of which are children — a number that is increasing over time. This means that in every You People scene where there were Jews or people of color, we know from the data that many of those characters should have been non-white Jews. And if no non-white Jewish character was in the imagination of the writers and producers of You People, why not at least a reference to Jews of color?

The lack of effort to accurately depict Jewish Los Angeles feels both lazy and deliberate. I wonder if someone in a position of power made the decision to reflect a binary of Blacks and Jews to keep us as multiracial community regressed and trapped back in time. There aren’t many movies that take on relationships between Blacks and Jews, and You People seems to work extra hard at a depressing historical depiction more akin to the struggles the interracial couple of 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner faced rather than a forward-looking reflection of reality.

The notion that all Jews in the United States are white is a myth which can easily be dismantled by data dating back to the 1700s. Today, 20% of American Jews are part of multiracial families, and 15%-20% of American Jews are people of color. Those numbers increase every day.

I understand producers have the creative license to depict as little or as much of the depth and truth as they wish. But the reality is that Hill’s character — a young Angeleno Jew who hangs out with Black people, and with a Black lesbian best friend (Sam Jay) — would definitely know Black and brown Jews. Wouldn’t it have been far more interesting to watch conversations between the characters with Jews of color in the mix? Wouldn’t the opening scene of Yom Kippur service at the Skirball Center also be more interesting and more realistic if it included Jews of color among the congregants?

With all of the stereotypes, inaccuracies and historical regressions present in the film, perhaps the saddest and most ironic part of You People is that London knows something of being a Jew of color, as she has a white Jewish father (her mother is Black and not Jewish). While London was raised by her mother and identifies as a non-Jewish Black woman, her existence as the progeny of a relationship between a Black American and Jewish American defies the normative mass of white Jewish identity portrayed on screen. Jews of color are not mysterious and unknown, and yet their erasure from You People, when an actual Black woman with Jewish heritage is in a leading role, is painfully paradoxical.

In 2023, when there are ample data sets available to inform movie producers about U.S. Jewish racial diversity, and dozens of efforts, programs and organizations supporting and celebrating the racial diversity of the American Jews, You People reinforces harmful stereotypes. It simplifies the depiction of both Jewish and Black Americans, and tells an inaccurate tale of who we are as Jews by omitting racially diverse Jews from the storyline.

Netflix had the opportunity with You People to tell a Black Jewish story of 2023. Instead, old stereotypes and reductive characters were rehashed, forcing us into the way-back machine of 1967.

To contact the author, email opinion@forward.com

The post Netflix film ‘You People’ takes us back to a time that never was appeared first on The Forward.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Benny Chukrun, speaking in Hebrew on a wind-whipped day outside the Israeli embassy in the U.S. capital, had a message for his fellow protesters.

“We have a special role in Washington. We have access to the Jewish opinion leaders in the United States,” he said at a rally on Sunday opposing far-reaching changes planned by the new government in Israel, including a proposal to limit the power of the country’s judiciary. “We have to leave our comfort zone and act.”

Israeli expatriates have been coming together in cities worldwide in solidarity with the tens of thousands who have gathered every Saturday night in Tel Aviv and elsewhere to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. Rallies have taken place in New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles, Miami, Vancouver, Sydney, Berlin, Paris and London, drawing crowds ranging in size from 50 to 200. This weekend, the protests in North America took place on Sunday to accommodate demonstrators who observe Shabbat. 

It’s new and at times intimidating territory for Israeli expatriates. Israelis in America  were once known to keep a low profile in Jewish communities due to a stigma associated with leaving Israel. That sense of shame has faded as growing numbers of Israelis have relocated to the United States for work in the tech sector or other fields. Overseas travel and communication have also grown far easier. More recently, Israeli political activists in the United States have become best known for supporting their country publicly via organizations such as the Israeli-American Council.

The group organizing many of the rallies, UnXeptable, formed in 2020 to demonstrate in solidarity with Israeli protests against Netanyahu. Now, the mandate has broadened to oppose the actions of the Israeli government. That change has sparked familiar anxieties among Israelis in the United States: Are they harming Israel’s public image? Do they have a right to criticize their home country now that they have moved outside of its borders?

These questions populated multiple WhatsApp groups ahead of this weekend’s protests, said Kathy Goldberg, 57, an Israeli American who helped organize the solidarity protest in Evanston, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.

“There were fears of it looking, ‘anti-Israel,’ fears of antisemitism, that it will look like we’re piling on Israel and giving them more ammunition, when in fact these are people who love Israel and believe that right now this is the most pro-Israeli thing we can do, to help protect Israel as a democracy,’” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

What helped Goldberg and other Israelis overcome those fears was the role that they feel Israelis living abroad can play in explaining to Jewish communities why it’s OK, this time, to come out and protest. At the rally outside of the Israeli embassy, Chukrun pointed out that Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli just traveled to the United States to defend the government’s proposals. 

“Chikli was here a while ago, trying to persuade the conservative Jewish funders of Kohelet that the revolution underway is not antidemocratic,” Chukrun told the 50 or so Israelis who met outside the embassy, referring to the Kohelet Forum, an influential Israeli right-wing think tank that is leading the charge in advocating abroad for the new government.

“We can give the opposing voice, we must give the opposing voice,” he told the crowd, which responded with murmurs of agreement. “Whoever has friends in Jewish organizations, reach out. We must explain to them what is going on. There is a lot of ignorance, misunderstanding.”

The Israelis who are protesting, both in Israel and abroad, are reeling from a barrage of potential changes. The issue with the highest profile has been a proposed reform that would significantly weaken Israel’s judicial review and change the way judges are appointed. Groups of protesters also oppose government pledges to annex West Bank territory to Israel, restrict the rights of LGBTQ Israelis and expand police powers — particularly in relation to Israeli Arabs.

“A lot of [Jewish] Americans say,’What’s the problem? Here [in the United States], politicians pick judges,’” said Chukrun, 62, who works in educational tech. “They don’t understand that [in the United States], it is just one part of an overall structure of checks and balances, and you can’t just take one aspect of the state of Israel that is already a democracy standing on chicken legs.”

Expatriate Israeli protesters outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., Feb. 5, 2023. (Ron Kampeas) Image by

Etai Beck, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, told the crowd at the San Francisco protest that the Jewish Diaspora had a moral stake in speaking out now. He framed his speech as a true/false test. Like Chukrun, he criticized the Kohelet Forum as well as Israel Hayom, a free right-wing tabloid in Israel that is funded by Miriam Adelson, wife of the late casino magnate and Republican donor Sheldon Adelson.

“The Jewish people outside Israel are not allowed to express their opinions and join the protest: False,” he said in his remarks in English, which were shared on WhatsApp with other protesters. “One, Israel was established as the worldwide Jewish center. Two, the Jewish people worldwide lobbies and supports Israel — in Congress, in the media, in day to day life.”

To the degree that Israeli Americans have had a public profile until now, that profile has leaned right. The Israeli-American Council, funded to a large degree by the Adelsons, has served as a forum for Republicans in recent years; it was one of just two Jewish groups that Donald Trump agreed to speak to as president, and he used the occasion to mock American Jews for not supporting Israel enough. The protests IAC organizes typically defend Israel’s sitting government.

Shay Bar, 38, who attended the Los Angeles protest with his family, said the concerns of Israelis abroad in this instance stretched beyond partisanship.

“Our solidarity from abroad is for the future of Israel and our future here in the Diaspora,” he said. “If Israel’s democracy erodes, that will directly affect Jewish and Israeli life and in the Diaspora.”

At the Washington rally, protesters held up massive Israeli flags. An older man, speaking Hebrew, asked a group of teenagers holding up letters spelling “DEMOCRACY” in English whether they were aligned properly, and they collectively rolled their eyes and said, in English, that yes, they were. The protest ended with a rendition of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem.

Protesters in San Francisco made light of an old Israeli warning not to “wash one’s dirty laundry” abroad. “We learned from Bibi [Netanyahu] to wash our dirty laundry overseas,” said a poster in San Francisco, a reference to Netanyahu’s wife Sara’s habit of loading her flights with dirty clothes because she preferred laundry service overseas.

“Some of us here are here temporarily, some not so much,” said Yoni Charash, 47, a lawyer wearing a T-shirt bearing UnXeptable’s logo. “We all go visit, we have a connection, those of us who leave Israel are not cut off from Israel.”

Nor were they cut off from the larger Jewish communities they live in, said Chukrun. Times had changed since Israelis arriving in the United States kept to themselves because they were alienated by the synagogue-centric life of American Jews.

“Jews in the United States feel the Judaism of faith and Israelis feel the Judaism of national identity, the Israeliness,” he told JTA. “There is a cultural difference, but in recent years it’s begun to change.”

Bar in Los Angeles said Israelis are likelier now to assimilate into American Jewish communities than not. “We’re Israeli Americans who live within the community, we send our kids to school with a Jewish education, go to synagogues on holidays and are an integral part of the American Jewish community,” he said.

Chukrun, speaking to JTA, said it was critical to leverage the relationships Israelis had with American Jews.

“We have to explain that it’s not the land of the patriarchs and matriarchs, not the land of the Bible,” he said. “It’s a real country with real people — with ugly things.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post ‘We have to leave our comfort zone’: Cautious but determined, Israeli expats protest Netanyahu’s government appeared first on The Forward.

Two children died and six others were injured after a bus rammed into a daycare center in the Montreal-area suburb of Laval on Wednesday morning, police said.

The bus driver, a 51-year-old employee of the Laval municipality’s public transit system, was arrested for homicide and reckless driving, a police spokesperson said.

Police declined to provide more details while they investigate and question the driver, who they said has worked for the transit system for 10 years and does not have a criminal record.

The incident happened at about 8:30 a.m. (1330 GMT), when kids are usually dropped off by their parents at daycare centers.

“Everyone is terribly saddened by what has occurred,” Quebec’s Families Minister Suzanne Roy said. “When you leave your children at the daycare for the day, you know that they’re in good hands … when an event like that can happen, it shakes us and shatters us.”

The circumstances around the crash or a possible motive was not immediately clear. The six children who were taken to hospital did not have life-threatening injuries, police said.

Authorities did not confirm the children’s ages, but according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, about 80 kids under the age of 5 attend that daycare facility.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as well as Quebec Premier Francois Legault, expressed condolences to families after the incident.

“No words can take away the pain and fear that parents, children, and workers are feeling – but we are here for you,” Trudeau said.

Laval is about 30 km (20 miles) northwest of Montreal in Quebec, Canada’s second most-populous province.

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Though he reportedly spent weeks rehearsing, President Joe Biden made a number of clumsy, strange, or outright ridiculous claims during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. Here are the top nine:

1. Cashiers at Burger Joints Need To Sign Non-Competes

Biden took credit for banning burger joints like McDonald’s from forcing employees to sign non-compete agreements. “So a cashier at a burger place can’t cross the street to take the same job at another burger place to make a couple bucks more,” he said. Republicans balked.

“They just changed it because we exposed it,” Biden retorted. “That was part of the deal guys, look it up.”

The president is apparently referring to his July 2021 Executive Order, which encouraged the Federal Trade Commission “to ban or limit non-compete agreements.”

Most fast-food chains have never made any such requirement of their workers, though some did prevent them from working at nearby franchise locations. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden made frequent use of this talking point, even earning the rebuke of left-leaning fact checkers.

“Get your facts straight, Jack!”

2. Paul Pelosi Was Attacked Because of Election Deniers

Biden tied the brutal assault of 82-year-old Bay Area resident Paul Pelosi to the rhetoric of election deniers. “Just a few months ago, unhinged by the Big Lie, an assailant unleashed political violence in the home of the then-speaker of this House of Representatives, using the very same language that insurrectionists who stalked these halls chanted on January 6th,” he said.

David DePape, a deranged 42-year-old who reportedly lived inside a school bus, attacked Pelosi with a hammer inside his San Francisco home just days before the 2022 midterms. He has presented conflicting reasons for the attack since his arrest, including government corruption and the reduction of individual liberties. While legacy media tried to paint DePape as a right-wing extremist, his son told the Daily Mail that his father was a “progressive” and “hardly a right-wing conservative.”

3. COVID Shut Down Businesses and Closed Schools

 Biden in his prepared remarks blamed an airborne virus for having “shut down our businesses” and “closed our schools,” when referring to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In reality, politicians chose to initiate lockdowns and stay-at-home orders to “slow the spread” of the coronavirus beginning in March 2020. While some Republican governors like Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) reversed course within months, Democratic governors and lawmakers kept lockdown orders and mask mandates in place for years, damaging many small businesses and harming children’s educations.

Biden has still not lifted the federal emergency declaration for COVID-19, which is set to expire on May 11.

4. Republicans Want To Get Rid of Social Security

“Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share,” Biden said, “some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset.”

The president was referring to an ongoing debt ceiling fight with Republican lawmakers, in which the Republican Party has floated various spending cuts to avoid a default. But House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) has said that cuts to both Medicare and Social Security are “off the table.” Many Republicans also stood and applauded when Biden pledged to not cut either program.

5. Jill Biden, Ed.D., Came Up With an Obama-Era Education Slogan

Biden credited his wife, “Dr.” Jill Biden, with having coined the expression: “Any nation that out-educates us will out-compete us.”

She did not come up with it. The expression has been used before by Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama. During his first year in office, the former president remarked, “In a world where countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow, the future belongs to the nation that best educates its people.”

Cameras caught Biden’s wife cheating with more than her words at the beginning of the speech last night, when the first lady stole a kiss from second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

6. Biden Takes Credit for Changing the Conversation on China

“Before I came to office,” Biden noted in his address, “the story was about how the People’s Republic of China was increasing its power and America was failing in the world. Not anymore.”

Former president Donald Trump has often been credited with changing U.S. policy toward China. Under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his administration cracked down on Chinese espionage campaigns and moved to ban TikTok.

Biden made no mention that a Chinese spy balloon traversed the United States just days before his State of the Union.

7. Biden Talks Up Smoking Trees

In apparently off-the-cuff remarks about climate change, Biden said that “more timber has been burned [due to wildfires] that I have observed from helicopters than in the entire state of Missouri.” He also blamed global warming for “floods and droughts.”

Biden: “More timber has been burned that I have observed from helicopters and the entire state of Missouroh.” pic.twitter.com/rtrmUEKIvE

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 8, 2023

Leaving aside for the moment whether the president has indeed observed wildfires from a helicopter, Biden may just have been mixing up his words, as he’s been prone to do. His administration last July greenlit more than 200 helicopters to respond to wildfire incidents, according to the White House.

The claims follow a long tradition of liberals using debatable scientific results to push their agenda. Biden’s prepared remarks, for instance, touted his administration’s green energy initiatives as a response to the wildfires.

“We’re building 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations installed across the country,” he said. “And helping families save more than $1,000 a year with tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances.”

8. America Needs Oil for ‘At Least Another Decade’

As part of a reelection campaign preview, Biden floated the idea that America might “need oil for at least another decade.”

Biden: “When I talked to a couple of [oil companies], they say, ‘we are afraid you are going to shut down all the oil refineries anyway, so why should we invest in them?’ I said, we are going to need oil for at least another decade.”

All the Republicans start laughing pic.twitter.com/AYLBI5g7pw

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 8, 2023

The apparent olive branch to the oil and gas industry is far from reassuring, given the vast economic and social repercussions of abandoning fossil fuels in just 10 years’ time. The shift would threaten jobs, food supply chains, and the entire global economy. Most progressives are pushing for the United States to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the earliest.

Early in the pandemic, lefties loved to suggest that a government-forced reduction in travel by fossil fuels could transition to a permanent change. If they stay in power, that idea could go up like a Chinese spy balloon over the continental United States.

9. Nobody Wants to Be Xi

In another unscripted remark, Biden said, “Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger. Name me a world leader who changed places with Xi Jinping. NAME ME ONE! NAME ME ONE!”

Biden: “Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger. Name me a world leader who changed places with Xi Jinping. NAME ME ONE! NAME ME ONE!” pic.twitter.com/MxYUpWGZVY

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 8, 2023

The attempt to ape his predecessor’s tough talk on malign foreign powers left more than a few pundits scratching their heads. The reference apparently reaffirmed Biden’s commitment to protecting the fate of democracy amid the rise of authoritarian powers—namely, China, which last week flew unimpeded over the nation to gather intelligence on U.S. military bases.

In fact, tyrants from Kim Jong-un to Vladimir Putin and Kamala Harris would probably kill to have Xi’s absolute power and cult of personality.

At least one person seemed to get what Biden was saying: Lincoln Project alum Tom Nichols, who said Biden’s geopolitical ad lib “was great” for “wonks” like himself.

“I guess I just got it on an intuitive level: ‘Who’d want to be riding that tiger.’ We spend so much time embiggening China when in fact their leaders have to sweat out every damn day and pray for enough growth to keep them in power.”

Whatever that means.

The post 9 Most Ridiculous Claims Biden Made During State of the Union Address appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Twitter “made a mistake” by censoring the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election, the company’s former safety chief testified to Congress on Wednesday.

Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety division, said the Post’s reporting on Biden’s laptop records on Oct. 14, 2020, “at first glance, bore a lot of similarities to the 2016 Russian hack-and-leak operation targeting the DNC.”

“In that moment, with limited information, Twitter made a mistake,” Roth testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Wednesday. “Under the distribution of hacked material policy the company decided to prevent links to the New York Post stories about the laptop from being shared across the service.”

The comments were the strongest acknowledgment yet by top Twitter officials that the social media site’s decision to block sharing of the bombshell news story was unwarranted under the company’s policies.

While many former U.S. intelligence officials initially claimed the story had hallmarks of “Russian disinformation,” the validity of the laptop was later corroborated by news outlets.

Roth previously said he argued against blocking the New York Post story, telling colleagues there was not enough evidence that the records were hacked and that the decision seemed arbitrary. He told Congress he was overruled by his boss, Twitter vice president of trust and safety Del Harvey.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating Twitter’s treatment of the laptop story and heard testimony from several senior Twitter employees, including Roth, attorney Vijaya Gadde, and former deputy general counsel Jim Baker.

The post Twitter ‘Made a Mistake’ Censoring Hunter Biden Story, Ex-Safety Chief Tells Congress appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.