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30 man who burst through a checkpoint at Israel’s main airport in a stolen car and then drove against traffic on Sunday morning. The Jewish Home | DECEMBER 8, 2022 After receiving medical attention, he was transferred to the police for questioning. The driver was in the country illegally. During the incident, travelers at Terminal 3 were told to lie down and take cover as a precaution. Ziv Hait, a representative of Israir Airlines who was in the terminal during the incident, told Channel 12 that at around 6 a.m. they heard instructions for everyone in the terminal to lie down “due to some kind of security incident.” “Everyone was running in panic in every direction to find cover…. I arrived with a group of American tourists…. They didn’t understand what was going on – I had to explain to them in English that it is a security incident and they are supposed to lie on the floor.

“At 6:10 we received instructions to get up and that it was possible to return to routine,” he said.

Israeli officials believe the suspect may have taken a wrong turn off the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, sabotaging his getaway as he entered one of the country’s most guarded facilities.

“It happens almost every week,” Reuters quoted a police spokesperson as saying. (JNS)

An Attack on Power Lines

Tens of thousands of people in a rural North Carolina county remained without power Monday as authorities worked to repair two power stations damaged by targeted gunfire Saturday night, an attack that Gov. Roy Cooper said raised “a new level of threat.”

Beyond reiterating that whoever carried out the attack “knew exactly what they were doing” and that the damage had been substantial, officials gave few new details about the investigation during a news conference at the Moore County sheriff’s headquarters. Cooper, a Democrat, said that the incident had drawn attention to the importance of protecting critical infrastructure.

“I know that with our power sector, water infrastructure — we know that potential vulnerabilities are there,” he said. “We will be evaluating ways to work with our utility providers and our state and federal officials to make sure that we harden our infrastructure where that’s necessary.”

The attack on the North Carolina stations left roughly 45,000 people without power in Moore County, which lies about 60 miles southwest of Raleigh. Power had been restored to about 7,000 customers by late Monday afternoon, officials said, but they added that most would likely have to wait until Thursday, even as temperatures in the region fell into the 40s. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is working with state and local law enforcement on the investigation.

On Monday, Carthage, the county seat, had the quiet and somewhat improvised feeling of a coastal town in the wake of a hurricane, with traffic lights dark at busy intersections and church groups and other volunteers lining the roads to hand out hot dogs and barbecue to their neighbors.

A county sports complex was serving as a shelter — about 20 people stayed there Sunday night, officials said — and the public library in the town of Southern Pines was offering warm drinks, phone chargers and board games “for an escape from reality.” Schools were closed, stores took only cash, restaurants gave away refrigerators full of food, and some residents stood in their front yards warming their hands over barrel fires. (© The New York Times)

Straw Leads to Arrest

robberies was arrested on Thursday after authorities linked DNA found at a robbery in May to a straw he used to sip a Red Bull energy drink at a casino five months later, prosecutors said.

Federal prosecutors said the man, Taylor Dziczek, 30, of Chicopee, presented a People’s United Bank teller in Plainville, Connecticut, on May 26 with a note with words to the effect of “I have a gun. Don’t call 911. Don’t set off any alarms.”

He then showed the teller what appeared to be a black firearm, although the gun may have been fake, according to court documents.

“Don’t be a hero,” he told the teller, according to prosecutors.

Plainville police officers collected paper money wrappers that were discarded at the scene, and they subsequently underwent a DNA analysis, according to court records.

Five months later, on Oct. 21, Dziczek was at the MGM casino in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was drinking a Red Bull energy drink out of a black straw. Multiple agents from the FBI were surveilling him, court records said, and one of them collected the discarded Red Bull can and straw as evidence. It was not clear what led the agents to surveil him in the first place.

A laboratory analysis of DNA left on the straw was connected to DNA found on discarded money wrappers at the Plainville robbery, prosecutors said. Dziczek was charged in that robbery Thursday.

If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison, prosecutors said.

Dziczek is being investigated in connection with 14 robberies and one attempted robbery of banks and credit unions in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont between September 2021 and August, court records show. They state that a total of about $137,000 was stolen.

In each of the robberies, the suspect wore similar clothing and exhibited a unique tendency to obscure his right hand, according to court records. Photos in the criminal complaint show that Dziczek has tattoos on his right arm and hand.

In 2017, Dziczek was convicted of a

2015 unarmed robbery of the Easthampton Savings Bank in Hadley, Massachusetts, according to court documents. (© The New York Times)

Warm Noses are Better

reasons for the correlation between the cold outside and the cold viruses we fight – more people are gathered indoors, and viruses survive better in low-humidity indoor air. But there has been less certainty about whether lower temperatures actually impair human immunity and, if so, how.

Now, a new study published this week in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology details a previously unknown way that the immune system attacks viral intruders inside the nose – and finds it works better when it’s warm.

These discoveries could pave the way for an eventual treatment against the common cold and other viruses, Mansoor Amiji, a pharmaceutical sciences professor at Northeastern University, who co-led the research, noted.

The starting point was previous research by Amiji and colleagues in 2018, which found that nasal cells released “extracellular vesicles” (EVs) – a spray of tiny sacs that swarmed and destroyed bacteria upon inhalation.

“The best analogy that we have is a hornet’s nest,” said Amiji. Like hornets defending a nest from attack, EVs swarm, bind to, and kill invaders. They are also present when viruses are residing in the nose.

Researchers were interested in how EVs respond to changes in temperatures.

They divided the nasal cell samples into two groups and cultured them in a lab, subjecting one set of samples to 37 degrees Celsius, and the other to 32°C.

These temperatures were chosen based on a separate test that found the temperature inside the nose falls by about 5°C when outside air drops from 23°C to 4°C.

Under regular body heat conditions, the EVs were successfully able to fight off viruses, by presenting them with “decoy” targets that they latch on to instead of the receptors they would otherwise target on cells.

But under the reduced temperatures, fewer EVs were produced, and those that were made packed less punch against the invaders tested: two rhinoviruses and a non-Covid coronavirus, which are typically found in the winter cold season.

In other words, make sure your nose is warm – and hopefully, it can help you fight off infection.

Rare Ring Can Help Ukraine

For years, Mitzi Perdue looked down at her hand and saw history.

The emerald on her ring finger told a story stretching back nearly four centuries, to the sinking of a Spanish galleon near the Florida Keys in 1622 and a decades-long effort of a colorful undersea treasure hunter named Mel Fisher to retrieve its payload of gold and silver coins, gold nuggets and jewelry.

It reminded her, too, of her late husband, chicken magnate Frank Perdue, who received a share of the bounty in return for his investment in Fisher’s search. He donated most of it but kept

Now, 400 years after the Nuestra Señora de Atocha sank in a hurricane, Perdue, 81, is putting the emerald up for auction Wednesday at Sotheby’s in New York City. All proceeds from the sale of the ring, which has an estimated value of $50,000 to $70,000, will be donated to support humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, prompted by Perdue’s visit there after the Russian invasion.

“What must it be like for the people who have been there enduring, continuously, with no respite, for at least half a year?” she said. “After five days, I wanted to do more. And then I started thinking, ‘What can I do to be most helpful?’ And then I thought, ‘I own something that’s of historic significance.’”

The Nuestra Señora de Atocha left Havana for Spain on Sept. 4, 1622, with 180,000 coins, 24 tons of ingots struck from Bolivian silver, 125 gold bullion bars, and 70 pounds of rough-cut emeralds mined in present-day Colombia. It had been sailing for only a day when a hurricane sank it.

Fisher, who died in 1998, had moved his family to Florida in 1962, lured by the promise of finding offshore treasure. By 1969, he had embarked on a search for the Atocha. In 1985, Fisher and his team located the wreckage of the Atocha and recovered about $400 million worth of treasure. (© The New York Times)

Alex Jones Files for Bankruptcy

Infowars founder Alex Jones filed for Chapter 11 personal bankruptcy on Friday in the Southern District of Texas in Houston, citing nearly $1.5 billion in damages juries awarded this year to the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims, who won a series of defamation cases against Jones after he lied for years about the school shooting on his radio and online show.

The filing comes atop the bankruptcy filing by Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, in late July. The new filing could further delay payment of the damages to the families, who would need to seek payment through the bankruptcy courts alongside other creditors. But it could also force a greater degree of scrutiny on the finances of Jones’ empire.

For more than four years, Jones has stonewalled the courts on providing business records, financial information and other records in the Sandy Hook cases. In a separate lawsuit, the victims’ families have accused Jones of improperly siphoning assets from his business and channeling them to himself and his family. He will now ostensibly be required to reveal more about those assets.

“The bankruptcy system does not protect anyone who engages in intentional and egregious attacks on others, as Mr. Jones did,” said Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families in the damages case in Connecticut. In that case, in October, Jones was ordered to pay $1.4 billion. Two other cases were litigated in Texas.

Hours after the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting of 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, Jones began spreading lies that the massacre was planned by the government as a pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms and that the families were complicit in the plot.

In mid-2018, the families of 10 Sandy Hook victims filed four separate defamation lawsuits, later combined into three, against Jones.

In the first trial this summer in Austin, Texas, where Infowars is based, a jury awarded nearly $50 million in damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of Jesse Lewis. Shortly before that verdict, Jones put Free Speech Systems into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In October, the families of eight Sandy Hook victims won more than $1.4 billion in damages from Jones. A third and final trial in the lawsuit brought by Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah Pozner was the youngest Sandy Hook victim, is scheduled to begin March 27. (© The New York Times)