Adam Dickter's blog

I had a chance to catch up with Bob Turner just hours before his national-news-making victory in the NY9 congressional race Tuesday, outside a public school in Marine Park, Brooklyn.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg will visit Israel on Oct. 23 to dedicate a Magen David Adom facility in Jerusalem named after his father, City Hall and the American Friends of Magen David Adom announced Tuesday.

it wll be his eighth trip to Israel since entering politics and his sixth as mayor.

Who would have figured that Ari Gold, the high-strung, foul-mouthed, Hollywood agent protrayed by Jeremy Piven on HBO's "The Entourage," would wind up offering us a lesson in priorities and family values? But that's what happened (SPOILER ALERT) in the series finale last night.

Every New Yorker has a 9/11 story, and mine is rather unremarkable.

I was driving my kids to school and turned on the usual pop radio station, but there was no music. A plane had struck the World Trade Center. By the time I dropped off my son Zack at school, the second plane had struck. By the time I dropped off my youngest, Jacob, then barely a year old, at my in-laws, the first tower fell. By the time I reached Yeshiva Of Flatbush to drop my daughter off, the world was in full-blown terror-attack panic.

* City Council Speaker Christine Quinn will present a proclamation to Gilad Shalit's father, Noam Shalit, tomorrow at City Hall calling on the Israeli soldier's captors to let him go and declaring Sept. 7 "Gilad Shalit Day in New York."

The last time I was in Israel, two years ago this week, the streets of Jerusalem were being ripped up to embed track for the city's new light-rail transportation system. Light-rail, essentially what used to be called trolley cars, is a relatively cheap form of transportation, far easier to implementthan digging subway tunnels. Wiith traffic barred from those streets where they operate, the streamlined above-ground cars are far more efficient than buses that get caught in and cause traffic jams.

The Sunrise Highway separated my neighborhood from the area of Nassau County that was under an evacuation order last weekend (largely ignored, from what I have heard). But my wife and I briefly considered a voluntary, pre-emptive evacuation of our own as Hurricane (or tropical storm) Irene barreled toward the East Coast and weathermen predicted an event just short of the apocolypse.

Last month, the Iranian Speaker of the Parliament, Ali Larijani, called the assassination an Darioush Rezaie, an Iranian nuclear scientist  an "American-Zionist act of terror." Rezaie was gunned down outside his Tehran home by a motorcyle-borne gunman. He was the fourth nuclear scientist in Iran to meet an untimely demise.

We'll take a closer look at the campaign of Democrat Assemblyman David Weprin for Congress in this week's paper, but I'd be remiss in not blogging today about what I am hearing is a groundswell of anti-Weprin sentiment among the Orthodox in the district because of his vote in support of same-sex marriage in June. I am told that prominent haredi rabbis are urging a strong vote for Republican Bob Turner as a de facto protest vote against the marriage equality bill.

Since support of Israel is a major issue in the race to succeed Anthony Weiner in Congress, I thought it might be interesting to post today's statements on the Eilat terror attacks from Republican Bob Turner and Democrat david Weprin. (Turner first by alphabetical order.)