Israel has issued its first 50-year bonds in a deal worth 500 million euros ($568 million) with a single institutional investor in Europe, the Finance Ministry said on Thursday.
The bonds have a fixed 2 percent interest rate, which reflects a lower cost than previous offerings that were for periods of up to 30 years, the ministry said.
The investor in the issue was one of the largest pension funds in Europe, which has never invested in Israeli bonds in the past, it said.
The underwriters were Barclays and Deutsche Bank.
Israel has been seeing increased demand from institutional investors for its bonds, and in January carried out a record public offering of 2.5 billion euro.

Top international publisher Penguin Random House this week finally bowed to pressure to cease publication of a book branded antisemitic by several critics.
The company did not accede to demands to withdraw Pedro Baños’s How They Rule the World: The 22 Secret Strategies of Global Power from sale, but will print no further copies of the book after an external review found that the Spanish-language edition contains “echoes of Jewish conspiracy theories.”
The book by Baños, a colonel in the Spanish army, was criticized in May by author Jeremy Duns, who noted that the cover features a drawing of octopus tentacles — an image long associated with antisemitic propaganda.

Krakow – Security guards prevented worshipers from entering one of Krakow’s synagogues amid a property use dispute between its Chabad-affiliated rabbi and others from the city’s tiny Orthodox Jewish community. On Monday, guards from a private security firm wearing balaclavas blocked the entrance to the so-called Izaak Synagogue, Gazeta Wyborca reported. The regular worshipers called [...]

Over 100 ambulances sent ahead of expected touchdown of Boeing 737 flight from Germany carrying 152 passengers

Illinois is reportedly set to expunge nearly 800,000 marijuana convictions from criminal records.
The move will come in response to a landmark measure Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker (D) signed last week that will make recreational marijuana legal starting in 2020.
The Marijuana Policy Project said that the expansive legislation will allow 770,000 state residents to be eligible for expunging marijuana related offenses. The measure also creates a “social equity program” designed to help people with marijuana convictions get business licenses. The Marijuana Policy Project added that the bill also will provide $12 million to startup businesses focused on cannabis distribution.

The largest presidential field in modern Democratic politics could quickly shrink as more than half of the contenders are in real danger of failing to meet tougher requirements to participate in the fall round of debates.
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It isn’t news that Sheldon and Miriam Adelson are big fans of President Donald Trump but Miriam Adelson took it one step further on Thursday when she compared the president to the nevi’im in an article discussing why the President has not enjoyed higher support among American Jews.
“That this has not been the case (so far, the 2020 election still beckons) is an oddity that will long be pondered by historians,” Adelson wrote in an an article for Israel Hayom, of which she is the publisher. “Scholars of the Bible will no doubt note the heroes, sages, and prophets of antiquity who were similarly spurned by the very people they came to raise up.”
She went on to say she wished there would be a biblical sefer named after Trump in the future.

It was called the “The Sewing Circle,” an unlikely name for a secret subsect of Navy SEALs. Its purpose was even more improbable: A chat forum to discuss alleged war crimes they said their chief, a decorated sniper and medic, committed on a recent tour of duty in Iraq.
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US envoys taking part in an opening for an archaeological site under East Jerusalem is hailed/slammed; and people are roiled by planes, police and an 'anti-Semitic' campaign