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The Trump administration announced on Friday that it is looking into whether the federal government could assume oversight of the 9/11 memorial and museum in New York City.

Located in lower Manhattan at the site where the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, the memorial consists of two large reflecting pools bordered by waterfalls and etched names of victims, along with a museum beneath the plaza.

Since it opened to visitors in 2014, the memorial and museum have been managed by a nonprofit foundation chaired by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a longtime critic of Trump.

The White House acknowledged that “preliminary exploratory discussions” had taken place about the possibility, but offered no further details. Officials noted that during his presidential campaign, Trump had promised to designate the site as a national monument, ensuring federal protection and support.

Leadership at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum countered that federal law does not currently allow Washington to simply take over the property, which belongs to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Beth Hillman, the organization’s CEO, argued that the move would run contrary to Trump’s agenda of shrinking government, saying that having the federal government assume responsibility for the memorial “makes no sense.”

“We’re proud that our exhibitions tell stories of bravery and patriotism and are confident that our current operating model has served the public honorably and effectively,” Hillman said, pointing out that the institution has raised $750 million privately and has welcomed about 90 million people since opening.

According to its latest filings, the museum brought in more than $93 million in revenue last year, while operating costs were approximately $84 million. After accounting for depreciation, the institution reported close to a $9 million surplus.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul also expressed unease with the prospect of federal involvement, pointing to what she described as recent attempts by Trump’s administration to shape narratives of U.S. history at national museums and monuments, including those under the Smithsonian’s umbrella.

The consideration of a takeover comes not long after the administration temporarily cut, then reinstated, staff in a federal program that provides medical assistance to individuals suffering from conditions connected to toxic debris from the World Trade Center.

“The 9/11 Memorial belongs to New Yorkers — the families, survivors, and first responders who have carried this legacy for more than two decades and ensured we never forget,” Hochul said. “Before he meddles with this sacred site, the President should start by honoring survivors and supporting the families of victims.”

Anthoula Katsimatides, a member of the museum’s board who lost her brother, John, in the attack, said she saw no reason for a shift in control.

“They do an incredible job telling the story of that day without sugarcoating it,” she said. “It’s being run so well, I don’t see why there has to be a change. I don’t see what benefit there would be.”

Still, some members of the broader 9/11 families’ community have voiced dissatisfaction over time, taking issue with ticket costs or suggesting that elements of the museum’s exhibits should be revised.

Representatives for Trump chose not to comment on the matter.

Nearly 3,000 lives were lost on September 11, 2001, when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. More than 2,700 of those deaths occurred in New York during the catastrophic collapse of the twin towers.

{Matzav.com}

Jewish teachers are demanding action after a full-sized Palestinian flag has hung for months in the hallway of a Brooklyn high school — with repeated complaints to city education officials going unanswered, the NY Post reported. The banner has been on display at Leaders High School in Gravesend, part of the Lafayette Educational Complex, since at least April, according to Moshe Spern, president of the 250-member United Jewish Teachers group. “It’s a blatant political statement, and it has no place in a public school,” Spern told The Post. “For five months, this flag has been a constant, political presence in this school’s hallways, and it’s impossible to ignore the message it’s sending to the school’s staff and children.” Spern said he first gave the benefit of the doubt, assuming the display might be tied to a cultural observance. But after the flag remained long after the school year ended, he formally contacted Principal Thomas Mullen, citing Department of Education rules prohibiting political displays on school property. In emails shared with The Post, Spern wrote that Jewish staff, parents, and students were “very concerned” about the display and urged school leaders to restore neutrality. “The flag is clearly a political statement, and you’re making Jewish stakeholders really uncomfortable,” Spern wrote in a follow-up message after receiving no response. To date, neither Mullen nor the Department of Education has responded to the complaints. Mullen declined to comment when reached. “This is a matter of trust,” Spern said. “When we alerted school and district leadership to a clear violation of political neutrality regulations, they chose to ignore us. That’s simply unacceptable. They had every chance to correct this before students even walked through the door for the new school year, but they left it up. How can we trust that similar violations in other schools are not going unchecked?” Spern called on both the DOE and the United Federation of Teachers to step in. “Every stakeholder has the right to attend a school without feeling intimidated or scared,” he said. The DOE has yet to issue a statement on the controversy. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

Saudi Arabia has quietly given the United Arab Emirates a green light to pull back from its normalization deal with Israel if Jerusalem moves ahead with annexation in the West Bank, according to a report by Israel’s Kan news outlet. The development, cited by a source close to the Saudi royal family, comes after a closed-door meeting last week in Riyadh between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed. The official Saudi Press Agency acknowledged the meeting, saying the leaders discussed “the latest developments in Palestine,” though it made no mention of annexation. Kan quoted the source as saying both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi agreed that rolling back participation in the Abraham Accords would be a “realistic” response to Israeli annexation moves. The source added that such a step would also bring ongoing Saudi-Israeli normalization talks to a standstill. The warning underscores the fragility of the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 when the UAE normalized ties with Israel in return for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shelving annexation plans. That breakthrough was widely believed to have Saudi Arabia’s tacit blessing. In recent weeks, Abu Dhabi has issued a series of increasingly sharp warnings to Israel against renewed annexation efforts. These included an on-the-record interview with The Times of Israel, an official UAE government statement, and private messages relayed through backchannels. The Washington Post reported that the warnings were serious enough to push Netanyahu’s government to remove annexation from the agenda of a scheduled cabinet meeting Thursday night. The Saudi intervention comes as Riyadh has ramped up its criticism of Israel over the war in Gaza. Earlier, the kingdom accused Israel of “genocide” against Palestinians in a strongly worded statement. While that communiqué did not reference annexation, Kan’s reporting suggests the issue is very much at the center of high-level Saudi-Emirati coordination. Any Emirati withdrawal from the Abraham Accords would mark the first unraveling of the landmark U.S.-brokered agreements and could trigger a wider diplomatic crisis across the region. For Netanyahu, already under intense domestic and international pressure, the warning from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi presents yet another red line he is now forced to navigate. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

“The United States has never asked Israel not to apply sovereignty” in Judea and Samaria, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told broadcaster Channel 14 on Friday.

Huckabee’s statement came on the backdrop of Hebrew-language reports claiming that Washington asked Jerusalem not to advance policies that could cause harm the stability of the Palestinian Authority.

“I have repeatedly said that the United States respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do. That’s also what Secretary of State Rubio said just last week,” Channel 14 quoted the American envoy as saying in response to these reports.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “abruptly” canceled a Cabinet discussion on a plan to annex part of Judea and Samaria, Channel 14 reported.

The report provided several reasons for the cancelation, including American pressure not to press forward with this agenda.

An unnamed Israeli official reportedly said that the meeting was only postposed due to schedule congestion.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that an “unusual message” delivered by the United Arab Emirates had prompted Netanyahu and several senior ministers to remove the annexation plan from the Cabinet’s agenda.

“Annexation would be a red line for my government, and that means there can be no lasting peace. It would foreclose the idea of regional integration and be the death knell of the two-state solution,” Special Envoy of the Emirati Foreign Ministry Lana Nusseibeh told Hebrew and international media on Tuesday.

It was reportedly the first time an Emirati official has publicly put under question the Abraham Accords, which the UAE and Bahrain were the first Arab countries to sign onto on Sept. 15, 2020.

The public message followed several warnings in diplomatic back-channels, which were met with silence by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, according to the Post.

Asked by reporters on Thursday in Ecuador to comment on this development, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “What you’re seeing with [Judea and Samaria] and the annexation, that’s not a final thing—that’s something being discussed among some elements of Israeli politics. I’m not going to opine on that today.”

He went on to say that Washington had harsh words for world leaders, who have said that they plan to recognize an independent Palestinian state.

“We told all these countries, ‘If you guys do this recognition stuff—it’s all fake, it’s not even real,” Rubio told reporters during the diplomatic visit to Quito, Ecuador. “If you do it, you’re going to create really big problems.”

Rubio is expected to visit Israel on Sept. 14. JNS

{Matzav.com}

Kan 11 News reported Friday that in May 2024, the IDF and then-Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi tried to convince Israel’s political leadership to adopt an agreement that would secure the release of all hostages. The proposal, they argued, would remove operational restrictions and allow the military to deliver a decisive blow to Hamas in Gaza.

The report stated that in the months before the entry into Rafah, Halevi pushed for a single-stage plan that aimed to both bring home the hostages and conclude the war.

A team from the Operations and Strategic Divisions reportedly prepared multiple scenarios to demonstrate how Hamas could be defeated following such a deal. The thinking was that once every hostage was safely back, the army would have far greater freedom to destroy Hamas. However, the political leaders rejected the idea outright.

The report added that during a small cabinet discussion where Halevi presented the plan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed it, allegedly describing it as a “defeat.” According to those with knowledge of the meeting, the initiative was blocked so quickly that it was never even passed on to the negotiation team for review.

Instead, the plan that was approved in May 2024 followed a phased model. It stipulated that both the return of all hostages and the conclusion of the war would only occur once the full process was carried out. While this was the framework accepted, Netanyahu’s choice to halt the second phase meant the stage that was supposed to guarantee the release of all remaining hostages never went forward.

Netanyahu has since reiterated that the government’s approach is to seek only a complete agreement with Hamas, rejecting any partial deals.

“We will agree to a deal in which all hostages are released in one go and in accordance with our terms for ending the war,” the Prime Minister’s office said last month.

The outlined requirements include: the dismantling of Hamas’ weapons stockpiles, full demilitarization of Gaza, Israel retaining security control of the border area, and the creation of a new governing body in Gaza that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority and that will maintain peaceful relations with Israel.

This week, as the IDF prepared to launch a campaign to capture Gaza City, Hamas announced it was ready to consider a broad agreement involving both the release of all hostages and the end of fighting. Yet the group repeated its earlier preconditions, which Israel has made clear it cannot accept.

Defense Minister Israel Katz rejected Hamas’ claim. “Hamas continues to close its eyes and utter empty words, but it will soon realize that it must choose between two options: accept Israel’s conditions for ending the war, primarily the release of all hostages and disarmament, or Gaza will become equivalent to Rafah and Beit Hanoun.”

“The IDF is preparing at full strength,” Katz added.

The Prime Minister’s Office also responded: “Unfortunately, this is more spin by Hamas that has nothing new.

The war could end immediately on the conditions set by the Security Cabinet:

1. All hostages are released.

2. Hamas is disarmed.

3. The Strip is demilitarized.

4. Israel has security control in the Strip.

5. An alternative civil administration is established that does not educate for terrorism, dispatch terrorists or threaten Israel.

Only these conditions will prevent Hamas from rearming and returning to the massacre of October 7 again and again as it has promised.”

{Matzav.com Israel}

Hamas’ internal security division has issued new directives to its fighters, warning them to be cautious about how Israel is able to pinpoint their whereabouts.

In its statement, the terror group admitted that Israeli intelligence has been effective in identifying and tracking operatives in Gaza, in part by observing seemingly ordinary details such as clothing drying on laundry lines.

The advisory also explained that Israel gathers intelligence by watching patterns of light and electricity use, examining leftover food and the volume of garbage discarded, and keeping tabs on who visits a location and the type of relationship they have with the resident.

In a separate announcement, Hamas’ security wing cautioned journalists not to reveal information about Israeli strikes on senior members of the group, stressing that only Hamas itself and its official military media channels are permitted to release such details.

{Matzav.com}

A Saudi royal family insider revealed to Kan News that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the President of the United Arab Emirates recently agreed on a joint course of action should Israel move forward with annexing Judea and Samaria.

The source explained that if Israel extends sovereignty over the territories, the UAE would weigh pulling out of the Abraham Accords entirely.

The same source cautioned that Saudi Arabia has made it clear such a move by Israel would likely shut the door permanently on any chance of future normalization between the kingdom and Israel.

The Abraham Accords, first signed in 2020, brought Israel into formal diplomatic relations with the UAE and Bahrain, with Morocco and Sudan later joining the pact.

Although the Biden administration has publicly supported the agreement, it has so far failed in its attempts to expand the circle of countries, including its ongoing but unsuccessful push to bring Saudi Arabia into the accords.

{Matzav.com}

Mahmoud Afana, the Hamas terrorist who openly bragged about slaughtering 10 Israelis during the October 7 massacre, was reportedly eliminated in an Israeli airstrike on Thursday in Deir al-Balah.

The disturbing conversation in which Afana repeatedly boasted about his killings became public two and a half weeks after the massacre, when it was presented during a United Nations Security Council session.

At the time, Foreign Minister Eli Cohen released an audio recording of Afana speaking to his parents. “I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband; with my own hands, I killed 10,” Afana told his father. He had made the call using one of his victims’ phones, whose body was later discovered in the Gaza envelope.

In the same recording, Afana continued: “Dad, 10 with my own hands. I’m inside Mefalsim, Dad, I killed 10. Their blood is on my hands. Give me Mom.” His mother answered: “Oh my son, may God protect you.” Afana insisted: “I swear, 10 with my own hands, I killed 10 with my own hands.” His mother responded: “May God bring you back safely.” Afana added: “Dad, get back on WhatsApp, I want to do a live broadcast for you from Mefalsim.”

His mother expressed her pride and urged him on: “I wish I were with you.” Afana told her: “Mom, your son is a hero.” His brother then entered the discussion, asking: “You killed 10?” Afana affirmed: “Yes, I killed 10, I swear.”

When his brother asked if he was in Zikim, Afana clarified: “I’m in Mefalsim, not in Zikim. I’m the first to enter, under the protection and with help of Allah. Raise up your head, Dad.”

His brother pressed him to come back to Gaza, but Afana refused. “Return? There’s no return. It’s either death or victory. How can I return? Open WhatsApp, see how many are dead. How I killed them with my own hands.”

{Matzav.com Israel}

The wealthy heiress who recently handed over $250,000 to a super PAC boosting socialist Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign is also behind a nationwide drive to push “woke math” into classrooms — a movement critics warn is designed to mold students into socialist radicals, The NY Post was told.

Liz Simons, the daughter of late hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons, runs a foundation worth nearly a billion dollars that denounces traditional, race-neutral math and replaces it with race-centered, progressive instruction that infuses social justice into standard lessons.

This model, which has been promoted in California but blocked in Florida, alters basic subjects by injecting racial discussions into otherwise straightforward math exercises.

For example, a class on interpreting graphs could morph into a broader conversation about economic inequality between white Americans and minority groups.

Mamdani’s education agenda includes stopping the expansion of charter schools, broadening access to universal pre-K, and removing competitive admissions criteria for middle schools in order to integrate classrooms more fully.

While “woke math” hasn’t yet been a centerpiece of the mayoral contest, critics worry Simons’ backing of Mamdani points to him supporting such ideas.

Yiatin Chu, who leads Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum & Education as well as the Asian Wave Alliance, said she was alarmed at the possibility and found Simons’ influence “troubling.”

“Woke math lowers the bar without helping black students. While test results show gains among black and Hispanic students, the gap with Asian and white students hasn’t closed. We hope Mamdani doesn’t undo progress.”

“This megadonor may impact his chancellor choice or NYC’s math curriculum,” she added.

Jean Hahn, a Queens public-school mother, argued that woke math lessons focus more on political training than academic skills.

“I’m already concerned as a parent that Mamdani has stated he will resume” many of former far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “diversity initiatives, which were racially toxic,” Hahn said.

Simons inherited an immense fortune after her father — a mathematician turned hedge fund titan — died in May 2024 with a net worth exceeding $31 billion, and she has been spending his fortune aggressively.

She and her husband, philanthropist Mark Heising, co-founded the Heising-Simons Foundation, which has invested heavily in woke math programs. That includes $1.7 million since 2023 for the Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project (RJEM) at Chicago’s Erikson Institute.

In Chicago, where fewer than 20 percent of public school students are proficient in math, the foundation funneled $800,000 this March into RJEM to develop seminars, teaching guides, and resources for educators incorporating “racial justice” into math lessons. Two years earlier, it distributed $900,000 for $7,000 teacher mini-grants promoting the same cause.

Between 2022 and 2023, Heising-Simons also poured at least $4 million into other woke math organizations, tax filings show. That included $630,825 to San Francisco’s Tandem Partners in Early Learning and $665,000 to Arizona-based Illustrative Mathematics.

The foundation further funded a math program in Alexandria, Virginia, that instructed young children to count storybook characters by skin color and create racial breakdown charts — even noting books with very few white characters.

The impact of this effort remains unclear.

Still, Virginia placed dead last in the nation — 51st out of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. — for math recovery between 2019 and 2024, while Alexandria students fell more than a grade level behind in reading compared to pre-pandemic, according to federal testing released in January.

Simons’ foundation also joined with the Gates Foundation to give $553,750 to TODOS Mathematics for All, an Arizona-based nonprofit pushing DEI and “anti-racist activism” in math teaching, according to RealClearInvestigations.

That same investigation reported “no credible research” proving that woke math raises achievement.

Despite Mamdani’s prior claim that billionaires “shouldn’t exist,” Simons stunned political observers when she dropped $250,000 last month into New Yorkers for Lower Costs, a PAC created to back his mayoral run.

{Matzav.com}

President Trump issued a fierce warning to criminals in Chicago on Saturday, vowing to send in the recently rebranded Department of War. The declaration came in a fiery post on Truth Social.

“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the president declared, referencing the executive order he signed on Friday restoring the Pentagon’s original name.

The post was paired with an AI-generated image showing Trump against the backdrop of the Chicago skyline, helicopters in the air, and flames surrounding him, dressed as Robert Duvall’s character from Apocalypse Now.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” the caption on the photo read, along with the phrase “Chipocalypse Now.”

This was not the first time Trump raised the prospect of deploying National Guard forces to Chicago. He has long argued that the city’s crime and illegal immigration problems require such action, even as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker pushed back against the idea.

“We’re going in,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

“I didn’t say when.”

The White House has avoided specifying a timeline, though reports suggest troops could arrive within days.

Pritzker hit back at Trump’s latest post, blasting him as a “scared man.”

“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city,” he wrote on X.

“This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also condemned Trump’s threats. “The President’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution.”

“We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump,” Johnson added on X.

Initially, Trump said he would prefer Pritzker to formally request troops, but during his remarks in the Oval Office he made it clear that his patience had worn thin.

“If the governor of Illinois would call up, call me up, I would love to do it,” Trump said.

“Now, we’re going to do it anyway. We have the right to do it.”

The president also went after Pritzker online, branding him “weak and pathetic” after the governor accused him of “attempting to manufacture a crisis.”

“Six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago last weekend, and JB Pritzker, the weak and pathetic Governor of Illinois, just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

Over the Labor Day holiday, the city endured even worse violence, with seven killed and 54 shot. Pritzker nevertheless continued to resist Trump’s plans.

The governor argued that the president’s real motivation was political.

“He has other aims, other than fighting crime,” Pritzker said Sunday during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation.

“The other aims are that he’d like to stop the elections 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections,” he claimed.

“He’ll just claim that there’s some problem with an election, and then he’s got troops on the ground that can take control.”

In response, Mayor Johnson directed Chicago’s police force not to cooperate with federal troops or National Guard members should they be deployed.

He also urged citizens to resist Trump’s plans. “Stand up against this tyranny,” Johnson said on Saturday.

Gov. Pritzker added his own warning: “We have received credible reports that we have days, not weeks, before our city sees some type of militarized activity by the federal government. It is unclear at this time what that will look like exactly.”

Trump has also mentioned targeting other cities with Guard units and federal law enforcement, citing New York and New Orleans, though Chicago has been his primary focus. He has labeled it the “murder capital of the world.”

The city recorded 573 homicides in 2024, far more than New York City’s 377 or Los Angeles’s 268. Chicago’s murder rate stood at 21.7 per 100,000 residents, compared to New York’s 4.7.

Trump already dispatched National Guard troops to Washington, DC, in August to address crime there.

In that deployment, the Guard did not make arrests but provided support for security operations, while the FBI and local police arrested nearly 2,000 people since the August 7 order.

Sending troops into Chicago would pose additional legal hurdles. In Washington, DC, the Guard answers directly to the president. In contrast, state Guards fall under the authority of their governors.

Earlier this year, Trump deployed 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles during protests against ICE, ignoring objections from California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom sued, claiming the action was unlawful.

This past Tuesday, a federal judge agreed with Newsom, ruling that the administration had broken the 19th-century Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the use of military forces in domestic law enforcement.

{Matzav.com}

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President Trump on the Department of War: “We won World War I, World War II, everything in between, and everything in front of it. It was called Department of War — and then we went WOKE.”

POTUS: “When you look at Chicago, we have a governor that says that things are ok with crime… These people are sick. There’s something wrong with them… I watched Portland, Oregon last night burning… These are professional paid agitators… and we’re going to stop them.”

President Trump hosts Members of Congress at the newly-renovated Rose Garden: “You’re the first ones on this great place — we call it the Rose Garden Club.”

Stephen Miller on Making D.C. Safe Again: “You’re only seeing the very beginnings of this. During the first few weeks, of course, we’ve seen these radical reductions in violent crime. We’re just getting started.”

ICE released footage of its raid on the Hyundai–LG battery plant construction site in Georgia, showing restrained workers being escorted out as 457 people were detained.

The Los Angeles Police Department ended its protection detail for former Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday, following internal criticism that officers were being pulled away from crime-fighting duties, according to sources cited by the LA Times.

Satellite imagery revealed the stunning eye of Hurricane Kiko, a powerful Category 4 storm churning across the Pacific as Hawaii watches its path closely.

The DOT wants to withdraw a rule proposed under the Biden administration that would require airlines to provide compensation, rebooking and transportation-related expenses for passengers facing significant delays or cancellations caused by airlines.

The US is not talking about regime change in Venezuela, President Trump said, as the US ordered an additional 10 stealth fighter jets to be deployed in the Caribbean.