As Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations got underway on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of the danger still posed by antisemitism across the globe.
“The radical right, the radical left and radical Islam agree only on one thing — hatred of Jews,” Netanyahu said in his speech at an official state ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
The prime minister made an apparent reference to the recent controversy surrounding a cartoon published in the international edition of The New York Times that was widely condemned as antisemitic.
“The publication of caricatures of hate toward Israel undermines the legitimacy of the Jewish state,” he said.
Netanyahu also called for more international pressure on the regime in Tehran,

Amazon.com Inc dismissed the idea of running a fully automated warehouse in the near future, citing the superior cognitive ability of humans and limitations of current technology.
The technology for a robot to pick a single product from a bin without damaging other products or picking multiple products at the same time in a way that could benefit the e-commerce retailer is years away.
Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, said technology is at least 10 years away from fully automating the processing of a single order picked by a worker inside a warehouse. There is a misperception that Amazon will run fully automated warehouses soon, Anderson said during a tour of Amazon’s Baltimore warehouse for reporters on Tuesday.

Attorney General William Barr will not show up to a House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday, according to a committee aide.
The hearing, which was set to examine Barr’s handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, would have included an extra hour to allow committee lawyers to question the attorney general. The Justice Department has argued it would be inappropriate for staffers to participate in the questioning.
The move heightens the clash between the Trump administration and House Democrats, who threatened this week to subpoena Barr.
Read more at POLITICO.
{Matzav.com}

Allowances for Holocaust survivors living in Israel increased by about 10 percent in 2018, according to Ministry of Finance figures released Wednesday, on the eve of the Israeli Holocaust remembrance day.
Some 152,000 Israelis are recognized by the state as Holocaust survivors, for being held in concentration, or death camps, or fleeing the Nazi invasion of Europe during the Second World War.
According to the annual report of the Authority for the Rights of Holocaust Survivors, an agency of the Ministry of Finance that oversees state benefits for survivors, Israel paid some NIS 56 billion (US $ 139 million) in 2018 to some 210,000 Israelis recognized as having suffered during the war.

The New York Times editorial board blamed President Donald Trump for the paper’s decision to publish an anti-Semitic cartoon.
After acknowledging the paper published a “bigoted” and “appalling” anti-Semitic cartoon in the headline and opening sentences of the editorial, the board quickly shifts to lecturing readers about the “insidious” nature of anti-Semitism and the particular danger of anti-Semitic imagery in this political moment.

Attorney General William Barr confirmed Wednesday during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Trump campaign was briefed in 2016 that the Russians would try to infiltrate it, contrary to previous remarks made by the president.
“I have been told during the break that a lesser kind of briefing, a security briefing that generally discusses general threats, apparently was given to the campaign in August [2016],” Barr told lawmakers after returning from a brief recess.

Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who was wounded in the Shabbos shooting at Chabad of Poway  in California, accepted the White House’s invitation to Washington, D.C., for the National Day of Prayer.
Oscar Stewart, the combat veteran who confronted the shooter and forced him to flee, and Jonathan Morales, the off-duty border patrol agent who engaged the shooter as he fled from Stewart, will accompany Yisroel to D.C., where the three will take part in a ceremony.
Stewart could not provide any details about the ceremony, but said that it was an important opportunity to exhort people of faith to stand strong and unified in the face of evil, whether it manifests as anti-Semitism, or as attacks on churches, mosques, or any other places of worship.

Venezuela uprising turns violent, opposition leader calls for liberation.
WATCH:

Iran criticized a US plan to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in Doha on Wednesday.
“The US is not in position to (..) start naming others as terror organizations and we reject by any attempt by the US in this regard,” he told reporters on a sideline of a conference. “The US is supporting the biggest terrorist in the region, that is Israel.”
President Donald Trump is working to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, the White House said on Tuesday, which would lead to sanctions against Egypt’s oldest Islamist movement.
Reuters and Algemeiner Staff
 
{Matzav.com}

Former FBI director James Comey lambasted Trump in a op-ed today for The New York Times that he billed as an attempt to explain Attorney General William Barr’s capitulation to the Oval Office. “How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like ‘no collusion’ and F.B.I. ‘spying’?” Comey began in the op-ed, which was published while Barr testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “And how could Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, after the release of Mr. Mueller’s report that detailed Mr. Trump’s determined efforts to obstruct justice, give a speech quoting the president on the importance of the rule of law?”