The Palestinian Authority (PA) will receive a transfer of 1.5 billion shekels ($430 million) from Israel, officials from the two governments said Friday.
Israel will continue to deduct money from the transfers to account for the PA’s payments to prisoners, a decision that sparked the row, but the two sides have agreed to further talks to resolve that issue, the PA’s “civil affairs minister” Hussein al-Sheikh said, according to AFP.
Shai Babad, director general of Israel’s finance ministry, told AFP the transfer would be made on Sunday to the PA government, which is facing a crippling financial crisis caused by the dispute.
Read more at Arutz Sheva.
{Matzav.com}

In the United States, it’s not often that airlines compensate passengers for flight delays. Federal law mandates compensation when a passenger is involuntarily bumped from a flight or unable to retrieve their luggage, but says nothing about delays, leaving policies and procedures up to the airlines. In practice, this often means they can get away with offering inconvenienced passengers bottled water, a bag of chips and a free checked bag for their trouble. Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a check in the mail from Air Transat a week after I experienced a 24-hour delay on a flight from Venice to Toronto.

Lebanese authorities arrested a Syrian national accused of having made phone calls to neighboring Israel, the army said Friday.
Officially, Lebanon remains at war with Israel since the latter’s establishment in 1948.
The suspect, who was not identified, was charged over “contacting Israeli phone numbers and communicating with Israelis present in the occupied Palestinian territories.”
Read more at i24NEWS.
{Matzav.com}

The U.S. economy added a modest 136,000 jobs in September, sending the unemployment rate to a nearly 50-year low, a mixed bag that some economists said was more evidence that the country could be headed for a slowdown.
President Donald Trump, who is trying to focus part of his 2020 reelection campaign on the strength of the economy, immediately cheered the low unemployment rate.
“Breaking News: Unemployment Rate, at 3.5%, drops to a 50 YEAR LOW,” he wrote on Twitter. Then he appeared to add sarcastically, “Wow America, lets impeach your President (even though he did nothing wrong!).”
(c) 2019, The Washington Post · Eli Rosenberg  
{Matzav.com}

The Treasury Department’s acting inspector general has opened an investigation into whether the Trump administration acted improperly during its ongoing fight with House Democrats over releasing President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has refused to comply with a request from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., for six years of the president’s business and financial returns. Democrats have said a 1924 law explicitly gives them the authority to request the documents, but Mnuchin has denied the request and now the matter is pending in federal court.
A focus of the fight is the mandatory audit program that the Internal Revenue Service conducts on the president’s and vice president’s tax returns.

A member of the “Texas Seven” received the stay after the judge was accused of using racist and anti-Semitic language about the defendants.
For more than 15 years on death row, Randy Halprin filed challenge after challenge to his sentence. Finally, Halprin’s lawyers had found several people who said that the judge who oversaw their client’s murder conviction had regularly used racist language and referred to Halprin, who is Jewish, using anti-Semitic slurs.
The lawyers had been spurred to investigate the judge, Vickers Cunningham, by an explosive report in The Dallas Morning News last year saying that he had promised to reward his children if they married a white, Christian person of the opposite sex. The report sank the judge’s campaign for Dallas County commissioner.

An effort believed to be tied to the Iranian government attempted to identify, attack and breach email accounts belonging to a U.S. presidential campaign, government officials and journalists, according to new data unveiled by Microsoft, highlighting the continued global security threats that loom over the fast-approaching 2020 election.
The intrusion observed by Microsoft, spearheaded by an outfit it calls Phosphorus, made more than 2,700 attempts to identify personal email addresses that belonged to the company’s customers over a 30-day period between August and September, 241 of which were then attacked. Four were compromised, but they do not belong to the presidential campaign or government officials, according to the tech giant.

The suspect in a deadly knife attack at Paris police headquarters worked for more than 15 years in the complex as he began following a “radical vision” of Islam, a top prosecutor said Saturday amid tense political fallout from the incident.
French prosecutors are now investigating Thursday’s attack that killed four people – two police officers and two headquarters staff – as an act of terror.
But opposition leaders have accused the French government of incompetence for delays in identifying the apparent motives of the suspect, a 45-year-old man identified as Mickaël Harpon who was killed at the scene by a police intern.

President Trump has accused Democrats of “interfering” with the 2020 election and the 2016 election as he faces an impeachment probe based on an allegation that he solicited foreign help to interfere in the 2020 contest.
“Not only are the Do Nothing Democrats interfering in the 2020 Election, but they are continuing to interfere in the 2016 Election. They must be stopped!” he tweeted.
“The so-called Whistleblower’s account of my perfect phone call is ‘way off,’ not even close,” he tweeted. “Schiff and Pelosi never thought I would release the transcript of the call. Got them by surprise, they got caught,” Trump wrote. “This is a fraud against the American people!”
Schiff’s committee is one of three leading the impeachment probe.

North Korea’s top negotiator said late on Saturday that working-level nuclear talks in Sweden between officials from Pyongyang and Washington had been broken off, dashing prospects for an end to months of stalemate.
The North’s chief nuclear negotiator, Kim Myong Gil, who spent much of the day in talks with an American delegation, cast the blame on what he portrayed as U.S. inflexibility, saying the other side’s negotiators would not “give up their old viewpoint and attitude”.
“The negotiations have not fulfilled our expectation and finally broke off,” Kim told reporters outside the North Korean Embassy, speaking through an interpreter.