Gaza – The Israeli military says two soldiers have been wounded by gunshots from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The army said Friday the soldiers were moderately and lightly wounded, respectively. Israeli aircraft hit a Hamas militant site in response. The shootings come as thousands of Palestinians demonstrate along the territory’s perimeter fence with Israel. Meanwhile, [...]

The White House on Friday hit back at Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for accusing Attorney General William Barr of committing a crime by lying to lawmakers in sworn testimony.
“The fact that the Speaker would take it upon herself to call him a liar is really, really inappropriate and beneath her office,” deputy press secretary Steven Groves said on MSNBC.
Pelosi said Thursday that she “lost sleep” Wednesday night watching replays of Barr’s testimony. “He lied to Congress; he lied to Congress. And if anybody else did that, it would be considered a crime,” Pelosi said.
Read more at The Hill.
{Matzav.com}

Vice President Mike Pence said Friday that the possibility he might have been spied on by U.S. intelligence officials in 2016 is “offensive.”
“And as the attorney general said when he testified before Congress, there was spying,” Pence said in an interview with Fox News’ Sandra Smith. “We need to understand why there was [and] whether there was a sufficient predicate,” he continued.
“We really need to get to the bottom of how this all began and if there was a violation of the rules, if the law was broken, the people that were responsible need to be held accountable,” he continued.
“But I have to tell you, it’s very offensive to me,” he added.

Washington – President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin for more than an hour Friday about extending an existing nuclear arms agreement and potentially starting a new one to include China. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the two leaders also discussed “very, very briefly” the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller [...]

The U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in April, notching a record 103 straight months of job gains and signaling the current economic expansion shows little sign of stalling.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, the Labor Department said Friday, the lowest since 1969. The official unemployment rate has been at or below 4% for more than a year.

Berlin – European and American investigators have broken up one of the world’s largest online criminal trafficking operations in a series of raids in the United States and Germany, authorities said Friday. Three German men, ages 31, 22 and 29, were arrested after the raids in three southern states on allegations they operated the so-called [...]

New York – The U.S. State Department allowed seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, in what some experts say could be a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause. The 90-story Manhattan [...]

It is an argument that often happens when the Rav is not there for Maariv.  Often people are unaware of his particular ruling for Sefiras HaOmer when Ma’ariv ends well before sunset.
Read more on Yeshiva World News

Mir, Belarus – For the first time in decades, a Holocaust commemoration event was held in this town, which used to be one of Europe’s main hubs of Jewish learning. Attending the event in Mir, a town of some 2,000 residents southwest of Minsk, was Nobuki Sugihara, the son of Japan’s only Holocaust-era savior of [...]