Mohammed al-Issa, former Saudi Arabian justice minister and Secretary-General of the Muslim World League, and a delegation of Muslim religious leaders from over 24 countries visited Auschwitz-Birkenau on Thursday to mark the 75th year since the liberation of the Nazi death camp. The Muslim delegation was accompanied by a delegation of American Jewish Committee (AJC) officials. It is “the most senior delegation of Muslim religious leaders to visit Auschwitz ever,” said AJC CEO David Harris.

It was the kind of event designed to play up the Midwestern sensibilities that Amy Klobuchar so often talks about on the campaign trail. In a small rural Iowa community, voters gathered in a neighbor’s home. They ate tater tot hot dish — Klobuchar’s award-winning recipe — and listened to the case for the Minnesota senator to be Democrats’ nominee for president. The only thing missing was the candidate, who was stuck in the Senate chamber some 1,100 miles away for the start of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. Instead, her potential supporters at Tuesday night’s house party got a pitch from the senator’s 24-year-old daughter. “She actually has a record of winning in places Trump has won,” said Abigail Bessler, delivering Klobuchar’s well-worn lines.

Emergency Fund Launched to Rebuild Desperately-Needed Building It was a structure that represented dreams and aspirations. The dreams of its founders and the aspirations of its young students. Bnos Devorah Raizel Elementary School had long grown out of its temporary facilities on Reb Chiya Way on the campus of Yeshiva Gedolah Zichron Moshe of Fallsburg when golden shovels pierced the parched ground of an overgrown lot in Fallsburg, NY, at the groundbreaking of its brand new school building two years ago. Located on Laurel Park Road, across the street from the school’s current trailers and bungalows, the building was going to house the almost 200 students of Bnos Devorah Raizel comfortably, with room for further growth.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Israel for the first time since he was elected as president on Thursday morning at 4 a.m. and was greeted by Minister Ze’ev Elkin. Shortly later, he announced that he and his delegation are giving up their seats at the World Holocaust Forum to Holocaust survivors on Thursday. “We learned that many of the Holocaust survivors have not been able to visit the World Holocaust Forum,” Zelesnky wrote on Twitter. “Our delegation gave them our seats, as many Israeli ministers did. These people deserve these honors most of all.

Over the past eight months, the United States has poured more than 20,000 additional troops into the Middle East to counter the escalating threat from Iran that peaked with the recent missile attack on American forces in Iraq. Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to bring troops home, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East on Thursday said the most recent forces to enter the region could be there for “quite a while.” “You’re here because I requested that you come,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie told sailors and Marines aboard the USS Bataan amphibious assault ship, his voice booming over the ship’s loudspeaker. “I’m not sure how long you’re going to stay in the theater. We’ll work that out as we go ahead.

Following French President Emmanuel Macron’s outburst at Israeli Shin Bet security officers outside the Church of St. Anne on Wednesday, several Israeli news outlets said his anger about Israeli security officials entering the church was due to the pro-BDS and anti-Semitic organization that is housed in the church. No one really knows whether that prompted Macron’s anger or he just has a bad temper but is there is a genuine reason he is so territorial about the church? The Church of St. Anne is a Roman Catholic church in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem which was given to France by the Ottoman Empire in 1856. There definitely is a reason and it’s not pretty. What is indeed known about the Church of St.

A viral illness in China that has sickened hundreds of people and prompted Chinese authorities to effectively shut down at least three cities is not yet a global health emergency, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The U.N. health agency issued its evaluation after Chinese authorities moved to lock down three cities indefinitely earlier in the day and canceled major public celebrations and gatherings in Beijing during the Lunar New Year holiday period to try to contain the evolving outbreak. During a news conference in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that while the epidemic was clearly a crisis in China, “it has not yet become a global health emergency.

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s congressional career got off to a rocky start just a year ago, with her blatantly anti-Semitic remarks on Israel and Jews stirring anger across the country and raising speculation that some other Minnesota Democrat might step forward to challenge her in 2020. That was then. Omar was kicking off her reelection campaign Thursday night with a massive bank account and no challengers who pose a serious threat from either party. Her campaign slogan – “Send her back to Congress!” – gleefully evokes President Donald Trump’s personal attacks on her. In an overwhelmingly Democratic district that where Omar took 78% of the vote in 2018, University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs gives her opponents no chance.

Three American firefighting airplane crew members were killed Thursday when the C-130 Hercules aerial water tanker they were in crashed while battling wildfires in southeastern Australia, officials said. New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian confirmed the deaths in the state’s Snowy Monaro region, which came as Australia grapples with an unprecedented fire season that has left a large swath of destruction. Canada-based Coulson Aviation said in a statement that one of its Lockheed large air tankers was lost after it left Richmond in New South Wales with retardant for a firebombing mission. It said the accident was “extensive” but had few other details.

The Trump administration lifted federal protections Thursday for some of the nation’s millions of miles of streams, arroyos and wetlands, completing one of its most far-reaching environmental rollbacks. The changes will scale back which waterways qualify for protection against pollution and development under the half-century-old Clean Water Act. President Donald Trump has made a priority of the rollback of clean-water protections from his first weeks in office. Trump says he is targeting federal rules and regulations that impose unnecessary burdens on businesses. Chiefs of the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed the new rule before appearing at a builders’ convention in Las Vegas.