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Benny Gantz’s Blue and White centrist party has opened a two-seat lead over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, according to updated voting results Thursday morning from the Central Election Committee.
With some 96.5 percent of all votes in Tuesday’s elections having been counted, Blue and White had 33 seats to Likud’s 31. Third was the Joint List alliance of Arab-majority parties at 13, followed by the Shas with nine and UTJ with eight.
Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu also had eight seats, after briefly moving up to nine. Rounding out the list were Yamina with seven seats, Labor-Gesher with six and the Democratic Camp with five.
 

The State Department said Thursday that it was withdrawing $100 million in aid to Afghanistan and withholding another $60 million because of government corruption, a week before an election in which President Ashraf Ghani hopes to win a second term in office.
Asked about the statement announcing the cuts and what message it was sending to Ghani, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said only that “we want free and fair elections.”
“We’re going to do everything we can to support them, and we need every actor in the region – every leader, every citizen in Afghanistan – to work toward that end,” he said.

Senior Trump administration officials are considering a plan to again divert billions of dollars in military funding to pay for border barrier construction next year, a way to circumvent congressional opposition to putting more taxpayer money toward the president’s signature project, according to three administration officials.
The president has pledged to complete nearly 500 miles of new barrier by the 2020 election – stirring chants of “Build the Wall!” at his campaign rallies. But that construction goal will require a total of $18.4 billion in funding through 2020, far more than the administration has publicly disclosed, the administration’s latest internal projections show.

A whistleblower complaint about President Donald Trump made by an intelligence official centers on Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter, which has set off a struggle between Congress and the executive branch.
The complaint involved communications with a foreign leader and a “promise” that Trump made, which was so alarming that a U.S. intelligence official who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community, two former U.S. officials said
Two and a half weeks before the complaint was filed, Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer who was elected in a landslide in May.

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Passengers aboard a Delta flight from Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale experienced a horrifying seven minutes when the plane dropped almost 30,000 feet in about seven minutes.
Flight 2353 was halfway through its journey Wednesday when the pilots made a “controlled descent” from the cruising altitude of 39,000 feet to 10,000 feet, Delta rep Drake Castaneda told The Post on Thursday.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Thursday that U.S. President Donald Trump was “played” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on numerous occasions.
“[The Israelis] did that with the president on a couple of occasions, to persuade him that ‘We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys,” said Tillerson in a 90-minute discussion at Harvard University, likely referring to the Palestinians.
Tillerson, who served as the nation’s top diplomat from January 2017 to March 2018 after leading ExxonMobil, labeled Netanyahu, who is currently fighting for his political life after Tuesday’s elections, “an extraordinarily skilled” politician and statesman who is “a bit Machiavellian,” but cultivates “useful” relationships with world leaders.

President Donald Trump filed a federal lawsuit against the Manhattan district attorney Thursday, his attorney said, seeking to stop him subpoenaing Trump’s tax returns in a probe of hush-money payments during the 2016 election.
In the suit, Trump argues that District Attorney Cyrus Vance is conducting a criminal investigation of him, which he contends is not allowed under the Constitution.
That’s because the Constitution prohibits any prosecutor from investigating any sitting president for any criminal wrongdoing, he says.

President Trump met Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in the White House on Thursday, in an apparent effort to address lawmakers’ concerns over everything from the company’s plans to launch a cryptocurrency, to data privacy and allegations of political bias.
The meeting — one of several held by the social media network’s founder in his first visit to Capitol Hill since he faced Congress in tense hearings about the Cambridge Analytica scandal last year — was “constructive”, according to a Facebook spokesperson.