West Bank – Israel and the United States are putting the financial squeeze on the Palestinian Authority, where opposition to a long-awaited U.S. peace plan and anger over Israeli sanctions remain strong. Analysts see steep cuts in U.S. aid to the Palestinians over the past year as an attempt to draw them toward a blueprint [...]

Jerusalem – Some 8,000 Israeli worshipers on Tuesday night visited the tombs of Yehoshua Ben Nun and Kalev Ben Yefuna, located in the Arab village of Kafel Harath, near the city of Ariel. The entry, which was coordinated with the IDF, occurs several times a year, but this was the largest group to visit this [...]

London – A British judge sentenced WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday to 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail seven years ago and holing up in the Ecuadorian embassy. Judge Deborah Taylor said it was hard to imagine a more serious version of the offense as she gave the 47-year-old hacker a sentence close [...]

Washington – Some people told they have Alzheimer’s may instead have a newly identified mimic of the disease — and scientists say even though neither is yet curable, it’s critical to get better at telling different kinds of dementia apart. Too often, the word dementia is used interchangeably with Alzheimer’s when there are multiple types [...]

Washington – Special counsel Robert Mueller expressed frustration to Attorney General William Barr last month about how the findings of his Russia investigation were being portrayed, saying he worried that a letter summarizing the main conclusions of the probe lacked the necessary context, a Justice Department official said Tuesday night. Mueller communicated his agitation in [...]

Washington – It’s not an unfamiliar frame for describing the rise of the new nationalism: There’s a bad wind blowing through the West, and nothing less than democracy is at stake. What makes it especially unsettling for Beate and Serge Klarsfeld is that they have lived through it before — and spent a subsequent lifetime [...]

Los Angeles – A federal judge in Los Angeles has ruled that a Spanish museum that acquired a priceless, Nazi-looted painting in 1992 is the work’s rightful owner, not the survivors of the Jewish woman who surrendered it to escape the Holocaust. U.S. District Judge John F. Walter ruled Tuesday that under Spanish law, Madrid’s [...]

Washington – Playing the role of happy warrior, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said Tuesday that he expects to stay on in his current role through the 2020 election. And he said he isn’t expecting many major staff changes in the months ahead, despite the administration’s history of record turnover. In an [...]

Poway, CA – The gunmen accused of attacking U.S. synagogues and New Zealand mosques over the past six months brewed their ideas on online hate sites, pulling U.S. cyber-defense firm Cloudflare Inc into a debate on the balance between online speech and security. The attacks have prompted some investors to ask fresh questions about the [...]

Washington – U.S. government searches of travelers’ cellphones and laptops at airports and border crossings nearly quadrupled since 2015 and are being conducted for reasons beyond customs and immigration enforcement, according to papers filed Tuesday in a federal lawsuit that claims going through electronic devices without a warrant is unconstitutional. The government has vigorously defended [...]