Two men have pleaded guilty to acting as illegal agents of the government of Iran on charges stemming from monitoring a Jewish center in Chicago and American members of an exiled Iranian opposition group, the U.S. Justice Department and FBI announced Tuesday.
Majid Ghorbani, 60, an Iranian citizen and permanent U.S. resident of Costa Mesa, California, pleaded guilty Monday to one count of violating U.S. sanctions, according to court records. Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar, 39, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen, pleaded guilty Oct. 8 to one count of conspiracy and one count of acting as an undeclared agent of the Iranian government, court filings show.

The publisher of a soon-to-be-released book by an anonymous senior Trump administration official has told the Department of Justice it would not comply with its request for proof the author did not sign any nondisclosure agreements.
Assistant Attorney General Joseph Hunt made the request Monday in a letter to the publishers of a book by the official behind a 2018 New York Times op-ed that declared there was a “resistance” within the administration is writing a book available next month.

Donald Trump Jr. named CIA officer Eric Ciaramella as the whistleblower who filed a complaint about President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The president’s eldest son, 41, sent out a link via Twitter to a Breitbart News story that named Ciaramella as the “alleged” whistleblower.
Ciaramella, a 33-year-old CIA officer, was named in a RealClearInvestigations report last week.

The family of Moshe Holtzberg, who survived the Mumbai masscare, is requesting families who named children after Rabbi Gabi (Gavriel) and Rivky Holtzberg to help them with a unique project, COL LIVE reported.
Moshe will celebrate his thirteenth birthday next month, and the family is working to collect stories of children named after his parents. The stories will be printed and bound, to be given to him as a bar mitzvah gift.
Parents who have named a child after either Gabi or Rivky can send in the child’s name, age, photo, and location, as well as a description of the child and the inspiration behind the name, to Snspielman@yahoo.com.

Anti-Israel activity on college campuses in the United States increased during the 2018-19 academic year, according to an Israel on Campus Coalition report that shows there was a record number of anti-Israel disruptions at pro-Israel campus events.
During the academic year, campuses on the East Coast experienced more anti-Israel events than any other region, including an increase in anti-Israel activity at Ivy League schools such as Columbia University, Brown University and Cornell University.
Harvard University experienced a rise in anti-Israel events over the past two academic years.

The New Right’s Naftali Bennett says he believes there’s “a very, very high probability” Israel will go to a third election within a year due to the ongoing political gridlock and inability to form a government.
That eventuality is currently more likely than a coalition taking shape, he says on a newly launched podcast, unless Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman changes course and agrees to join a narrow right-wing religious government.
He warns that the right will likely suffer “a great blow” in such an election. “I’m very pessimistic,” he says.
Read more at Times of Israel.
{Matzav.com}

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey has captured Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s sister and wife in Syria, a week after the Islamic State leader was killed in a US operation.
Erdogan said that Baghdadi’s brother-law had also been apprehended.
It comes just a day after Turkish officials claimed that Turkish forces had captured Rasmiya Awad, 65, one of Baghdadi’s sisters along with her husband and daughter-in-law in the town of Azaz, just over the border from Turkey.
Read more at Independent.
{Matzav.com}

The mother of a young Israeli-American woman imprisoned in Russia has asked her lawyers to withdraw a petition to cancel the extradition of a Russian hacker whose case may have motivated Moscow’s decision to imprison her daughter.
Naama Issachar was arrested in April as she was transferring to a connecting flight in Russia while carrying a small amount of marijuana as she returned home to Israel from a trip to India. She was convicted of drug smuggling, a charge she denies, and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison.

Tel Aviv-based online payments fraud prevention startup Riskified has completed a $165 million funding round, the company announced Tuesday. The round was led by New York-based General Atlantic according to a company valuation of more than $1 billion, the company said. Minneapolis-based Winslow Capital participated in the round, as did existing investors Qumra Capital, Entrée Capital, and Pitango Venture Capital.
Founded in 2013, Riskified’s products for online retailers utilize machine learning algorithms and user behavioral analytics to prevent account takeover, monitor payments, and detect fraudulent transactions. The company has raised $229 million to date.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government on Monday issued a harsh condemnation of death threats recently sent to two German politicians by a neo-Nazi group, the AFP reported.
Two leading Green Party politicians, Cem Ozdemir and Claudia Roth, received threatening emails on Oct. 27, according to the report.
“We are currently planning how and when to execute you. At the next rally? Or will we get you outside your home?” read the email sent to Ozdemir, according to the Funke media group.
According to Roth, the message she received said she was second on the group’s hit list.