As Israel mourns its fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism this week, top Palestinian Authority officials have explained that its government is “obligated” to pay salaries to 6,000 imprisoned Palestinian terrorists—and to the families of suicide-bombers and other so-called “martyrs”—because they were “soldiers” of the P.A. who had been “sent” by the P.A., and who acted out of “national interest and not for personal reasons.”
Most significantly, they “received orders” from the Palestinian Authority.
P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina revealed: “It is impossible to send a soldier to war and then not take care of his family.”

President Trump imposed a fresh set of sanctions on the Tehran regime on Wednesday, targeting Iran’s iron, steel, aluminum and cooper sectors.
The move came on the one-year anniversary of Trump’s announcement of the US withdrawal from the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran — known as the JCPOA.
“Today’s action targets Iran’s revenue from the export of industrial metals — 10 percent of its export economy — and puts other nations on notice that allowing Iranian steel and other metals into your ports will no longer be tolerated,” Trump said on Wednesday.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad was “about to launch rockets at Tel Aviv when the ceasefire [with Israel] stopped it from happening,” the terrorist group’s leader, Ziad Nakhala, told the Beirut-based Al Mayadeen TV station on Tuesday.
Nakhala, who was in Egypt when the latest round of violence between Israel and Gaza-based terrorist groups erupted last Friday, outlined in the interview how events unfolded and also issued threats against Israel.

A square in the city of Petach Tikvah will be named after President Donald Trump, the city’s mayor announced.
Rami Greenberg said Monday that he decided to name the square adjacent to City Hall for the U.S. president because of “his unqualified support for the State of Israel,” the Israeli daily newspaper Maariv reported.
The square will be dedicated officially on July 4, Greenberg said. The mayor said he will invite the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, government ministers and public figures.
Read more at Arutz Sheva.
{Matzav.com}

“The battle is not over,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of the conflict with the Gaza Strip-ruling Hamas on Wednesday.
Netanyahu was speaking at an official state ceremony for Israel’s annual Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism. The speech came after a weekend of fierce fighting between Israel and the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups in Gaza.
Hundreds of rockets were fired at Israel’s southern communities over a two-day span, killing four civilians. A ceasefire was announced on Monday.
“We are carefully weighing our next steps to ensure Israel’s security,” Netanyahu pledged, according to Hebrew news site Walla.

Ukraine’s president-elect Volodymyr Zelensky held what was called a “historic” meeting on May 6 in Kiev with the six leading representatives of the country’s Jewish community.
The meeting with the chief rabbis of Ukraine’s six most populous regions—geographically representing the entire country—included Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki of Dnipro, Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz of Kharkov, Rabbi Avraham Wolff of Odessa, Rabbi Shlomo Wilhelm of Zhitomir and Rabbi Pinchas Vishedski of Donetsk. Rabbi Moshe Asman, rabbi of the central Brodsky synagogue in Kiev, also attended.

President Donald Trump, who won the presidency in part on his image as a successful business mogul, lost $1.17 billion over 10 years on failed business deals, according to tax records obtained by the New York Times.
The losses, in the 1980s and 1990s, were greater than those reported by nearly any other American taxpayer during that period, according to Internal Revenue Service data the Times said it had reviewed. In 1990 and 1991, according to the Times report, Trump’s loses of $250 million a year were more than double those of the nearest taxpayer the IRS collected information on.

In a single withdrawal, hackers siphoned $40 million in bitcoin from one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
Binance said it would suspend all deposits and withdrawals for at least a week while it conducts a security review, though trading will continue. The company said thieves employed phishing and viruses to commandeer the 7,000 bitcoin, and that it was possible hackers might still control some user accounts.