Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation Gunilla Carlsson announced today that Stockholm plans to cut assistance that it provides to the Palestinian Authority (PA), after Swedish officials became dissatisfied with the pace of Palestinian negotiations with Israel. Sweden currently provides $107 million annually to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank....

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

Today, an estimated fifty million Iranians are going to elect the seventh president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. There are six candidates left in the race. One of them is Hassan Rohani, who, nearly ten years ago, was the Secretary General of the Supreme National Security Council (SGSNS) and...

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

South Korean pop star Psy is reportedly heading to Israel this summer. The singer is scheduled to perform two concerts, one in Tel Aviv and one in the resort city of Eilat. The K-pop icon’s “Gangnam Style” music video has been viewed on YouTube more than one billion times since...

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon warned Wednesday that spillover from Syria’s civil war is threatening the increasingly fragile four-decade ceasefire between Syria and Israel. Observers are specifically raising alarms about the potential collapse of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) – the U.N. peacekeeping mission which has monitored the...

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

United Nations official Richard Falk – who has among other things blamed America and Israel for the Boston Marathon terror attack, posted anti-Semitic cartoons on his blog, and suggested that America was complicit in Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 – is responding to a round of recent...

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

Google is set to buy Waze, the wildly popular Israeli maps mobile application, Israel’s Globes business paper reported over the weekend. The $1.3 billion deal would be the largest ever for a smartphone app. The latest reports indicate that a deal is imminent. The deal is expected to be announced...

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

The Boulder, Colorado city council voted overwhelmingly Monday to reject a sister city application from Nablus, citing Palestinian Authority abuses in the West Bank city and its long history as a terrorist center. Opponents of the proposal noted the Palestinian Authority’s dismal human rights record and lack of press freedom....

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

Speaking Sunday at a youth summer camp in the Gaza Strip, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh proclaimed to the crowd that Israel would be destroyed to make way for a Palestinian state. Arab media sources summed up his speech with the headline ‘Haniyeh: No future for Israel on the land of Palestine.’...

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) held its thrice-yearly session Monday. As always, the body deliberated over its infamous Item 7 – the council’s permanent agenda item on Israel and the only one devoted to a specific country. As always, a convoy of some of the world’s worst human-rights abusers...

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle

Israel is making concessions and goodwill gestures toward the Palestinians in an effort to boost the prospects of Secretary of State John Kerry’s renewed peace push. Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman disclosed some of them to Israeli radio on Monday in the context of discussing a building freeze in parts...

Continue Reading >>
  • Kindle