Former President Donald Trump’s team has launched a new social media platform, billing it as an alternative to Big Tech sites.
Named GETTR, the app advertises its mission statement as “fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas,” Politico reported Thursday.
Trump’s former spokesman, Jason Miller, is leading the platform, described as similar to Twitter, Politico reported.
Miller, a spokesman for Trump’s 2020 campaign, hinted in March that Trump would re-enter the social media space with a new platform of his own that would “completely redefine the game.”

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a pair of Republican-backed Arizona voting restrictions do not run afoul of federal law, rejecting a Democratic challenge and dealing a blow to voting rights advocates.
The 6-3 decision, which fell along familiar ideological lines, comes as a raft of GOP-crafted voting limits are introduced and passed across the country, with Democrats and civil rights groups turning to courts to argue the new measures threaten to suppress the vote of racial minorities.
One Arizona policy at issue in Thursday’s case requires provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct to be discarded. The second measure makes it illegal for most third parties to deliver ballots for others, a practice critics refer to as “ballot harvesting.”

The city’s bumbling Board of Elections said Wednesday that Eric Adams maintained his lead in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary — one day after officials threw the race into chaos with a botched count.
Preliminary results posted on the embattled election agency’s website showed Adams narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia, 358,521 votes (51.1 percent} to 343,766 (48.9 percent).
In an ironic twist, the percentages are identical to the ones reported Tuesday, when Garcia overtook Maya Wiley to vault into second place pending the counting of absentee ballots.
But the vote spread between Adams and Garcia shrank to 14,755 from 15,908.
Read more at NY Post.

The family of the Florida grandparents missing in the aftermath of the Surfside building collapse told The Post Tuesday they are still getting mysterious phone calls from the couple’s landline — at least 20 since the catastrophe.
Dianne Ohayon said the family’s latest sliver of hope came early Monday, when her younger sister received a call from their parents, Myriam and Arnie Notkin.
“They’re coming in every day,” Ohayon, 56, said of the eerie calls.
“The last one I have knowledge about was Monday morning, a call came in at about 5:30 a.m. It was static. It’s the same thing every time.”
Read more at NY Post.
{Matzav.com}

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid seems pleased about his meeting on Sunday in Rome with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Like his American counterpart, he belongs to the self-described “center” of a political camp pressured by a far-left minority.
What this means is that while neither is openly hostile to either country, both cling to failed premises about the nature and purpose of international relations. More specifically, Blinken believes that the best way to prevent the powers-that-be in Tehran from building the bomb is through a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or some version of it.

Last week’s deadly Florida condo collapse may have started at the base of the building, engineers have said, according to reports.
“It does appear to start either at or very near the bottom of the structure,” consulting engineer Donald O. Dusenberry told the New York Times, after watching video footage of the 12-story Champlain Towers South Condo collapsing in Surfside early Thursday. “It’s not like there’s a failure high and it pancaked down.”

The death toll has risen to nine people after a 12-story condominium building collapsed in Florida, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a press conference Sunday morning.
“We’ve identified four of the victims and notified the next of kin…We are making every effort to identify those others who have been recovered and additionally contacting their family members as soon as we are able,” Levine Cava said.
Search and rescue teams created a 125-feet-long trench at the rescue site, which allowed authorities to recover additional bodies and human remains, Levine Cava said.
Read more at CNBC.
{Matzav.com}

NEWS FROM AGUDATH ISRAEL OF AMERICA
For Further Information
Please Contact Leah Zagelbaum
Lzagelbaum@agudah.org

For Immediate Release: June 22, 2021

Positive News for Yeshivos as the New Jersey Budget Process Gets Underway

Charges have been dismissed against a trucker who drove into a crowd of protesters in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd last year.
In an online court session on Friday, Bogdan Vechirko entered into a “continuance without prosecution” agreement with prosecutors, according to the Star Tribune.
Under the agreement, he has to remain law-abiding for the next year and pay restitution.
The incident occurred during a protest that took place about a week after Floyd’s death.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested that undercover FBI agents helped orchestrate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.