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To the world, he was Jeffrey Smith, an ultra-Orthodox Jew and spiritual leader teaching the Torah to hundreds of students in Jerusalem’s Hasidic community. But inside, Smith was keeping a secret. “Since I was 5 years old, I really thought I was a girl,” Smith, 63, told The Post in an interview last week from Israel, where she has been living for the past two years — as an Orthodox Jewish woman — following sex-reassignment surgery. As a boy growing up in Patchogue, LI, Smith knew early on that something was amiss. But there was no Internet to tell her...

today 26 Jan 1944-"Lieutenant Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to a prepared position in a woods while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him to his right one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. Lieutenant Murphy continued to direct artillery fire which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, Lieutenant Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer which was in danger of blowing up any...

A mother and daughter upset that their teenage relative was disciplined at a South Side elementary school are charged with allegedly beating and stabbing two Chicago Public Schools employees and a teen boy at the school.

Snow and powerful winds swept into the Northeast on Monday as a storm predicted to grow into a major blizzard prompted mass transit shutdowns, highway closures, thousands of airline flight cancellations and a ban on driving in New York City and on major roads across the region. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the closure of New York City’s subway and bus system as of 11 p.m. Monday, the first such closure since Superstorm Sandy hit the region in the fall of 2012. With the closure of all mass transit, and the citywide driving ban as of 11 p.m., Cuomo’s...

#Google hands data to US Government in #WikiLeaks espionage case https://t.co/ocBQGvL4yl pic.twitter.com/MIxGiOu9si — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 26, 2015 Google hands over WikiLeaks emails, but is the first to exploit Charlie Hebdo and Sony's "the Interview". Why? https://t.co/D2Ir2Yi3Kq — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 25, 2015 'Attack on journalism': WikiLeaks responds to Google's cooperation with US govt Google’s willingness to surrender the private emails of WikiLeaks staffers to the United States government amounts to an “attack on journalism,” a representative for the whistleblower group says. Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who joined WikiLeaks as the group’s spokesman in 2010, said he’s “appalled” that...

The Legacy Lives On! Mark’s Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation “Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.” --Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny Welcome to “The Levin Lounge”… Step in and have a virtual FRink.Taking the country by storm, one radio station at a time – and kicking the BUTTS of the competition! Welcome all, to the most FUN LIVE THREAD on FreeRepublic.com! You can call Mark’s show: 1-877-381-3811

I win and you cheated. That’s what my four year-old says whenever we race from the bedroom to the kitchen, or up and down the driveway, or whatever he decides is now a competition.  He’s learned from his TV shows* that “cheaters never win”, and therefore anyone who doesn’t  win, must be a cheater.  And even if you do cheat, if you win, you haven’t cheated, because winners never cheat. My son has summed up liberal thought perfectly. In his four year-old brain, he’s failed to make the leap that winning by cheating robs you of the win, and that...

Federal deficits may have been falling since the end of the recent recession, but thanks to spending increases in major health care programs, including Obamacare, deficits are set to explode in 2017, according to a new report by the Congressional Budget Office. Thanks to the recent recession and President Obama's trillion dollar stimulus, the federal budget deficit reached an all time $1.4 trillion high in 2009. Then, as the economy slowly improved and Obama's stimulus trickled to end, the deficit began to fall. According to the CBO, the deficit will continue to fall to $467 billion in 2016. Immediately...

UC Irvine and Australian chemists have figured out how to unboil egg whites – an innovation that could dramatically reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production and other segments of the $160 billion global biotechnology industry, according to findings published today in the journal ChemBioChem. "Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg," said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry. "In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return...

Left-wing victor of Greece's election, Syriza's Alexis Tsipras, says: "Today the Greek people wrote history" http://t.co/OKEjqZ2FKe — BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) January 25, 2015 Who is Alexis Tsipras – Greece's 'Harry Potter' or the man steering the EU towards an iceberg? http://t.co/vD4I4oVntV pic.twitter.com/ne4pj32aER — The Independent (@Independent) January 26, 2015 First act as PM, #Tsipras visits Kaisariani rifle range where Nazis executed 200 Greeks on 1 May 1944 v/@dgatopoulospic.twitter.com/a4CeNgsw66 — Damian Mac Con Uladh (@damomac) January 26, 2015 Syriza’s Tsipras sworn in after Greek government formed with rightwingers New PM takes oath after radical leftists agree to share power with...

Vatican City, January 26 - Pope Francis on Saturday received in a private audience a Spanish transsexual and his girlfriend after the man wrote to him saying he had been cast out of the church in his native city, Spanish daily Hoy reported Monday. The transgender male, Diego Neria Lejarraga, a 48-year-old former woman, wrote to the pope some time ago saying he had been "marginalised" by Church officials in the city of Plasencia, in the southwestern region of Estremadura, Hoy said. Neria, a believer and a practising Catholic, said he had been rebuffed by elements of the local clergy...

Pope Francis met privately with a Spanish transgender man this weekend, according to new report featured in the Washington Blade. Diego Neria Lejárraga told the Spanish newspaper Hoy that he and his fiancée met with the pontiff at his official Vatican residence on Saturday, in what would mark the first meeting of a pope with a transgender person.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has established a research and essay competition in honor of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz hosted by the National Defense University. The king, who died Jan. 23 at age 90, oversaw the modernization of his country’s military during the time he spent as commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, a position he held from 1963 until he became king in 2005. Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said the essay competition is a fitting tribute to the life and leadership of the Saudi Arabian monarch. The king was a lifetime supporter...

McManus is a mechanical engineer and his wife Mairee is a surgical physician's assistant, as well as the primary earner. He breaks out his budget by week. In 2014, they brought home an average after-tax household income of $14,735 a month. In the chart below, check out their average monthly spending for 2013, 2014, and predicted for 2015. Note that these are averages, so a single month isn't depicted.

A woman who vowed that if she didn’t find love by the time she turned 40 married herself earlier this month in a lavish ceremony here in Houston, according to reports. Yasmin Eleby married herself at the Houston Museum of African American Culture on January 3 in a lavish ceremony with10 bridesmaids in attendance, plus family and other guests on hand to celebrate the event. For this ceremony, Eleby’s minister sister performed the spiritual service, as it’s not legal to marry yourself. The pictures from the ceremony look normal, except that Eleby is by herself in the photos and not...

On Wednesday, January 21st, Bill and Melinda Gates made a very big, very public bet: "The lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history," they wrote in their annual letter. "And their lives will improve more than anyone else's." Beneath that bet were some very big sub-bets: that the world will cut the number of children who die before the age of five in half; that we’ll wipe four major diseases — including polio and Guinea worm — off the face of the earth; that African farmers...

The last two times NBC aired the Super Bowl — 2009 and 2012 – Matt Lauer conducted what’s become the annual pre-Super Bowl interview with Pres. Obama. This year, his “Today” colleague Savannah Guthrie does the honors. The interview usually runs 10-12 minutes airing around 5:30pmET on Super Bowl Sunday.

SAN ANTONIO — While the Northeast battles winter storm "Juno," the San Antonio area will see much warmer temperatures than normal for January this week and could set a record high, according to NWS Meteorologist Larry Hopper. Highs and low temperatures through Wednesday in San Antonio will be steady with highs in the mid-to-upper 70s and lows in the 40s and 50s. Record-high temperatures may be seen throughout the city on Wednesday, according to Hopper.

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Award-winning veteran actor and storyteller Sir Ben Kingsley was among the dignitaries at the first day of the Let My People Live Forum in Prague, and used the opportunity to explain why in his view Europe has failed to fully come to terms with the crimes of the holocaust. […] One of the greatest tragedies, he insisted, was the fact that in his view, “Europe did not grieve in 1945. It moved on. It found another enemy; it found other issues. The first step in healing is for us to collectively grieve—we have missed that crucial step.” As a result,...