Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai has ordered all public bomb shelters opened today. The emergency announcement comes as Israeli aircraft bombard Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip following a rocket attack earlier in the day that destroyed a home in central Israel, injuring seven people. While Hamas has claimed the rocket an ‘accident’ the city is not ruling out a possible escalation as tensions rise in the region.
14 were injured during riots in Ketziot prison in the south of Israel, after two guards were stabbed by a number of rioting prisoners belonging to the Hamas terror group. The guards received initial treatment on the premises after one was stabbed in the neck and the other in the hand by a said makeshift knife. All the wounded were transferred to Soroka hospital, where two guards, and two prisoners were in a medium to critical condition, according to a statement by Inbar Gunter, a Soroka spokeswoman. Others had been released from medical care overnight. The reasons for the stabbing were as yet unclear, although there has been continuous tensions in the establishment in the last few weeks, after prison authorities cracked down on illegal communications from the outside. Read more at ...
President Trump says he would want to see Benjamin Netanyahu reelected as prime minister in the April 9 Knesset elections. Seconds after he recognized Israeli control over the Golan Heights alongside Netanyahu at the White House, a reporter asks Trump whether he would like Netanyahu to win the elections. “Yes I do, yes I do,” the president answered. Read more at Times of Israel.
New York - Attorney Michael Avenatti, who represented a woman’s battles against U.S. President Donald Trump, has been charged with extorting more than $20 million from Nike, according to a criminal complaint filed by federal authorities in New York. The U.S. Attorneys offices in New York and Los Angeles separately filed charges against Avenatti, with the California case accusing him of embezzling a client’s money to cover his own debts, as well as using phony tax returns to obtain millions of dollars in loans from a bank. Avenatti threatened to expose allegations of misconduct from Nike employees unless the apparel company paid him and an unnamed co-conspirator $22.5 million to “buy Avenatti’s silence,” the New York complaint said. Read more at Reuters
Washington - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is asking President Donald Trump for permission to share Israeli wine with White House staff. And the Israeli leader is joking that he hopes “they don’t open an investigation” as a result. Back home, Netanyahu is facing a pending indictment on corruption charges. And Trump has been the subject of numerous investigations, but is claiming vindication following the release of a summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Netanyahu made the offer after Trump signed a proclamation recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Netanyahu says he brought Trump a case “of the finest wine from the Golan.” But he says Trump, who doesn’t drink alcohol, is “not a great win...
Washington - - Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans said on Monday it was understandable for markets to be nervous when the yield curve flattened, though he was still confident about the U.S. economic growth outlook. In what many see as a bad omen for the economy, yields on benchmark U.S. 10-year treasury notes fell below three-month rates on Friday for the first time since mid-2007, an inversion that has in the past signaled the risk of recession. After an unexpected rise in the Ifo Institute’s March business climate index in Germany, spreads between U.S. three-month and 10-year Treasury yields turned positive. Evans described the inversion as “pretty narrow”. “We have to take into account that there’s been a secular decline in long-term i...
Washington - President Donald Trump has signed a proclamation recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The document reverses more than a half-century of U.S. policy as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (neh-ten-YAH’-hoo) visited the White House. Trump had previewed the move in a tweet last week that it was time for the U.S. to take the step after 52 years of Israeli control of the strategic highlands on the border with Syria. Netanyahu has pressed for such recognition for months. Trump’s action gives him a political boost just weeks before what’s expected to be a close Israeli election. Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war but its sovereignty over the territory is not recognized by the international community.
Washington - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that he was cutting short his visit to Washington after a Gaza rocket attack on Israel, which Vice President Mike Pence said is evidence that Hamas militants cannot be a partner to achieve a Mideast peace. Netanyahu vowed to strike back hard in response to the attack, which the Israeli military said was conducted by militants from Gaza’s ruling Hamas. Netanyahu called the rocket strike, which injured several people, a “criminal attack.” He said he planned to return to Israel to handle the crisis shortly after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House. “The rocket attack by Hamas proves that Hamas is not a partner for peace,” Pence said at the annual convention of the American Isr...
London - The flight on Monday seemed to go perfectly well, until passengers realized that their plane had landed in both the wrong city and the wrong country. The British Airways flight from London City Airport was supposed to head to Duesseldorf, Germany, but ended up in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. The airline said Monday the problem started when an incorrect flight plan was filed by WDL Aviation, which operated the flight on behalf of British Airways. Officials say the pilot followed the flight plan for Edinburgh, and that air traffic control officials also were following the same flight plan and saw nothing amiss. WDL aviation said it was trying to determine the cause of the “obviously unfortunate mix-up.” The flight was refueled and set off again, this time dire...
Amman - Jordan’s King Abdullah II has canceled a visit to Romania to protest its prime minister’s support for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The Royal Hashemite Court said Monday that the decision came “in solidarity with Jerusalem.” Abdullah was scheduled to visit Romania later in the day. On Sunday, Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dancila told a conference in Washington that her country was moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. However, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, a rival who’s in charge of the East European nation’s foreign policy, said the prime minister hadn’t consulted with him over the decision. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians seek east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as th...
Moscow - Russia is reacting with an “I told you so” on Monday in state media after the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Moscow’s involvement in the U.S. presidential election didn’t find evidence of collusion. Wrapping up the 22-month investigation, Mueller’s report found no evidence that U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with Russian officials to influence the 2016 election. Mueller said in a passage from the report quoted by U.S. Attorney General William Barr that there was no evidence that Trump “was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.” But the released summary didn’t clear the president of improper behavior regarding Russia. Until Monday,...
Addis Ababa - Ethiopian Airlines’ CEO says the pilots who flew the plane that crashed on March 10 had trained on “all appropriate simulators,” rejecting reports that they had not been adequately prepared to handle the new aircraft. Tewolde Gebremariam said in a statement Monday that the airline owns simulators to help pilots train on the Boeing 737 Max, which has software installed that requires new training. The software can pitch the plane’s nose down in some cases to keep it from stalling. There is speculation that the software could have contributed to the crash, which killed 157 people, as well as to the crash of another Boeing 737 Max, a Lion Air flight, in October. Regulators say both planes had similar erratic flight paths shortly after take-off, an impor...
Washington - U.S. President Donald Trump’s call for recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights was manna from heaven for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu two weeks before an election. For many Arabs, it crushed any hope that there will one day be a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians and increased doubts that Washington is an impartial arbiter. But allies and enemies can agree on one thing: Trump’s statement last Thursday was a turning point in U.S. policy over territory Israel captured from Syria in a 1967 war and annexed in 1981, in a move the U.N. Security Council declared unlawful. “I am confident that the Lord is at work here,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was in Israel when Trump made his announcement on...
The Israeli humanitarian-aid organization IsraAID announced on Wednesday that it is planning to send a response team to Mozambique this week after the African country was hit by Cyclone Idai on March 14 after days of incessant rains. The aid group is expected to provide relief supplies and medical care, restore access to potable water and offer psychological support to those affected. Cyclone Idai has been regarded as one of the worst tropical cyclones on record to affect Africa and the Southern Hemisphere as a whole. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), preliminary projections indicate that at least 1.7 million people were affected in the direct path of the cyclone in Mozambique, with a further 920,000 in Malawi. A spokesperson for WFP said on Sunday that teams had been active...
President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani on Sunday called for the public release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report on the Russia investigation, after a summary of the report was released by Congress. “Sure,” he said when asked about releasing the full report on CNN. “We would all like it to happen because if it doesn’t happen, somebody is going to say there is something in there.” He added, “let me say for the 400th time, the president did not do anything wrong.” Giuliani called Attorney General William Barr’s summary of Mueller’s findings a “complete exoneration” of the president. Read more at The Hill.
The release of the special counsel’s “principal conclusions” Sunday prompted swift reaction from presidential candidates, former national security officials, lawmakers and media pundits who seized on the finding that there was no coordination during the 2016 presidential campaign between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. Attorney General William Barr sent congressional leaders his summary of the confidential report he received Friday from special counsel Robert Mueller, whose team spent the past 22 months investigating Russian interference in the 2016 White House race. “While the report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” the four-page summary said. Inside the White House and the Republican Party,...
Special Report host Bret Baier reacts to William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report.
Canberra - An Australian teen known around the world as “Egg Boy” conceded on Monday that egging a far-right senator was not the right thing to do, but said the gesture united a world reeling from a white supremacist’s alleged massacre of 50 Muslims in New Zealand. Will Connolly, 17, gave his first television interview since becoming an online hero among many for cracking an egg on Sen. Fraser Anning’s head as the maverick legislator spoke at a news conference after a gunman killed or wounded 100 worshippers at two Christchurch mosques on March 15. Anning has been widely criticized for blaming Muslim immigration for the racist attacks. Connolly said he was embarrassed that the international attention he had attracted with the egging, which was caught on video, ha...
If you’re confused about Brexit, you certainly aren’t alone. Britain’s path toward leaving the European Union is complicated and confounding – full of forks, U-turns and more than a few dead ends. Even seasoned Brexit watchers have at times struggled to figure out what’s going on. British Prime Minister Theresa May is trying one more time to get parliamentary support for the withdrawal deal she negotiated with EU representatives. For it to pass, she would need to convince at least 75 lawmakers who voted against it – twice – to change their minds. If she can’t get the math to work, Britain risks the economic earthquake of a no-deal withdrawal. But to understand how the Brits got here and what’s at stake, we need to back up a bit. Q: W...
Jerusalem - On Monday morning, a rocket from Gaza struck a private home in central Israel, wounding at least seven people. Why did Israel’s Iron Dome not intercept the rocket? Investigators at the scene told the Hebrew daily Maariv that it is estimated that the rocket fired was a missile that can reach a range of more than 100 kilometers, carrying a 125-km warhead. The rocket is named J-80 after the head of the military wing of Hamas, Ahmed Jabri, and according to Hamas – since it travels on a nonlinear path – it can not be intercepted by Iron Dome. Hamas is reporting that the missile was launched inadvertently, as the terrorist organization claimed earlier this month when two rockets were fired toward Tel Aviv. The Hamas sources said they believe the rocket system mi...
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