WASHINGTON – The House and Senate judiciary committees said on Wednesday that the suspect in Tuesday’s attack in New York entered the United States on a so-called diversity visa from Uzbekistan in 2010.
“According to reports to my office, Saipov is a lawful permanent resident who immigrated to the United States from Uzbekistan on a diversity visa over five years ago,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley wrote in a letter to the secretary of state and the acting secretary of homeland security.
In a separate statement, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte called for the program to be terminated.
DUBAI – Bahrain’s public prosecutor charged two leaders of the country’s banned main opposition party of spying for Qatar on Wednesday, months after cutting ties with the neighboring Gulf monarchy amid a regional diplomatic row.
Sheikh Ali Salman, secretary general of al-Wefaq party, and Sheikh Hassan Sultan are accused of colluding with Qatar to carry out “hostile acts” in Bahrain and damage its national interests and prestige, according to a statement on state news agency BNA.
The men met Qatari officials as well as affiliated agents inside Lebanese Shi’ite militia Hezbollah, the statement said. It accused them of transferring confidential information and receiving financial support from Qatar.
The prosecutor ordered that both men be taken into custody.
Salman’s wife Alya Radhi wrote on Twitter that she had spoken by phone with her husband, who denied all charges. There was no immediate comment from al-Wefaq.
Salman is already serving a four-year prison sentence for inciting hatred and insulting the interior ministry, after he was arrested in 2015.
He was summoned and interrogated about the new accusations in the presence of his lawyer, the statement said.
It did not elaborate on whether Sultan was detained.
The Red Sea is warming faster than the average for the world’s oceans, a team of Saudi scientists has reported. Their finding is likely to have implications for life in the Red Sea, including Israel’s only coral reef off the resort city of Eilat.
Based on general data from 1982 to 2015, the Red Sea warmed by 0.17 degrees Celsius per decade, which may not sound like a lot, but if the trend continues, its waters could warm by as much as 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100, which would have a dire effect on marine life.
And that’s the whole of the Red Sea. As measured by satellite, the sea’s northern part, which includes Israeli waters, was found to have warmed even more — by 0.4 to 0.45 degrees Celsius per decade.
The Red Sea has already been warming for decades, in keeping with the global trend. Marine life may already be existing on the high end of their thermal tolerance, the team of authors led by Veronica Chaidez of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology wrote.
Ocean surfaces have warmed by 0.11degrees Celsius per decade over the last 50 years. Climate change scientists forecast further warming by anywhere from 0.6 to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s if the trajectory of global warming doesn’t rise even more steeply.
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The warming of the world’s waters has been definitely proven. In fact, when people speak of “global warming,” what they really mean is “ocean warming”. Only some 10 percent of the global energy imbalance caused by human activity is warming the air, land and melting the ice. Some 90 percent goes into ocean heat, scientists have calculated. And the Red Sea now turns out to be heating up faster than the world’s oceans.
In June, Israeli scientists reported that the Red Sea corals in the Gulf of Aqaba, off Eilat, are oddly resistant to global warming. They predicted that the Eilat reefs could be left to become the last reef in the world, as their cousins elsewhere bleach, crumble and die. That is, unless pollution kills them first. It bears noting that when Eilat corals were placed under heat stress in laboratory conditions, they actually fared well, but an “average increase” of 2 degrees means spikes much higher and even the Eilat corals must have their own limits.
I was less than a year in south Florida when an Israeli friend invited me to her son’s brit milah. She was a secular Israeli who’d served in the IDF and had lived, for a time, on a kibbutz.
So I was surprised when I found myself outside of an Orthodox synagogue; I was even more surprised when I found the place full of black hats and discovered that I wasn’t attending a brit milah, after all, but, rather, a gender-segregated bris.
I pulled my friend aside, expressing my confusion. She shrugged.
Two years later, I was shocked to find myself outside of the same building, picking my daughter up from the preschool attached to the synagogue.
If my husband and I had stayed in Israel-Palestine, we would have never sent our daughter to a preschool of any religious orientation. We probably would have remained in the West Bank, where his family would have helped with childcare. She would have been raised a Muslim Palestinian.
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But I likely would have brought her in to Israel with me for the holidays and the occasional Shabbat on the beach in Tel Aviv. There, she would have absorbed my brand of secular Judaism – chagim and Hebrew.
Or maybe we would have ended up getting a permit for my husband to live with me inside if Israel, a permit that he would have to renew every year, a permit that guarantees only perpetual uncertainty. Actually, that scenario is a bit of a stretch – my husband is opposed to the permit system. Why should I have to ask the Israelis, newcomers to the place my family has lived for five centuries, for permission to access my own land? he asks. But let’s pretend that my husband put aside his anti-permit thing so that we could live inside the Green Line together.
Had we done that, we would have sent her to a secular daycare, no questions asked.
The JCC I tried out seemed to be a Judaism Lite, with a dash of blind allegiance to Israel for flavour: The Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center in Miami, May 2, 2016.Lynne Sladky, AP
When we arrived, I thought that I might find my brand of secular Judaism at the local Jewish Community Center. Of course, I had no idea what a JCC was.
There was no JCC in the small, Southern town where I’d grown up (the KKK, on the other hand, was active). And when I was a kid, my family couldn’t afford synagogue dues, Jewish day schools, or summer camps. As a young adult, that was part of Israel’s appeal: I could be a Jew for free there, without joining anything or paying for anything.
The word “community” gave me the idea that the JCC might offer something similar. Expecting to find a warm, laidback place with a bulletin board – like a kibbutz dining hall – and worried that I’d lose my Hebrew while living in America, I headed to the local JCC with a handwritten flier: Are you a native Hebrew speaker who wants to improve your English? Or an English speaker who wants to learn Hebrew? Let’s talk! Below that was my brand-new American number.
Instead of the cozy center I’d fantasized about, I found a locked facility, floors polished to a shine, an Israeli flag flying out front. I wasn’t allowed to tack up my flier; rather than a language partner, I found only sparsely attended exercise classes. It wasn’t what I was looking for but I’d put on some weight during the 2014 summer war and, I told myself, it’s like getting a personal trainer for next to nothing.
After kickboxing one day, I was chatting with an elderly man, a physician who ran a group practice. He mentioned that he had, on a number of occasions, passed up Arab and Muslim applicants for no other reason than that they were Arab or Muslim. He said this casually, as though I would naturally sympathize. I said nothing; I stopped going to exercise classes.
Then there was the brief stint working at the JCC’s daycare where, ahead of Tu B’Shevat, staff received educational materials printed off of the JNF’s website. The same JNF that, today, wants to replace the Bedouin village of Al Araqib with trees; the same JNF that planted forests over the remains of Palestinian villages that were emptied in 1948.
No, the JCC wasn’t the place for me. Even when I managed to set aside the particulars of the JCC’s politics, I wondered: Is this a community?
It seemed more like a bland corporation where some executives decided what it meant to be Jewish and then dictated that vision, top-down, to customers. It was Judaism Lite, with a dash of blind allegiance to Israel for flavor.
‘Why have we traded thousands of years of history and culture to base our identity, instead, on a piece of land?’ La Ghriba synagogue in Djerba, southern Tunisia. Oct. 28, 2015.AP
That last part seemed strange to me, as did the Israeli flag outside of the building. Weren’t we all Jews before both Zionism and the modern state of Israel existed? What does Israel – a place that most American Jews haven’t visited, let alone lived in – have to do with anything? Why have we traded thousands of years of history and culture to base our identity, instead, on a piece of land? And why, I wondered, is there more space in Israel for dissent than there is in the American Jewish community?
Needless to say, I let my membership lapse.
Then I got work adjuncting. I needed to find childcare. Fast. None of the secular preschools I visited were a fit; the JCC was certainly out of question. I remembered the place where my friend’s son had his brit milah. I dropped by. There was no Israeli flag out front but there was Hebrew inside.
What’s the harm in a little religion? I asked myself. I signed my daughter up.
While I initially felt encouraged by the place’s welcoming attitude. I told them about our unique family situation and they seemed accepting. But I became concerned about the content. However silly, I was disappointed that their sort of Hebrew wasn’t the Hebrew I’d learned in Israel. Sukkot isn’t “Sukkot” but, rather, “Sukkos.” It’s not shabbat shalom but “gut shabbos.” The kids don’t study the alef-bet. No, it’s the alef-beis.
Something else wasn’t sitting right with me. On Rosh Hashanah when I accompanied my daughter to the children’s program, I figured out what it was: . When they did a mock tashlikh, the children fished “good” and “bad” things out of a bag, tossing the “bad” into a large piece of paper, painted blue, decorated with fish, representing a body of water, and receiving candy for the “good.”
“Good” and “bad”? I didn’t want her internalizing the labels and feeling the guilt or shame common to religious people of all the Abrahamic faiths. I was uncomfortable with how black and white it all was, I was uncomfortable with the moralizing. At the end of the day, this place wasn’t so different than the JCC, I realized. It was just as dogmatic.
For me, as it turned out, any bit of religion is too religious. I wanted my version of Judaism – Jewish culture, as practiced by secular Israelis. Chagim and Hebrew.
As I considered pulling her out of the preschool, I wondered: What would my daughter learn about Judaism from me, really? Tiras kham with my terrible American accent and maybe, when my husband isn’t around, we’ll listen to some Arik Einstein and vintage Haim Moshe? Here, in the U.S., with my Hebrew and non-synagogue chagim, I’m a community of one.
It’s a contradiction I can’t quite square with myself. I consider myself an anti-Zionist. Or maybe I’m a non- or post-Zionist. Whatever I am, I oppose the current incarnation of Israel as a place that offers privilege to Jews while depriving Palestinians of their human and civil rights.
Though I’m not sure one state is going to go very well – and make no mistake, the window for a two-state solution closed a very long time ago – I oppose the two-state solution. I support the BDS movement. I oppose Israel’s attempt to co-opt Jewish identity. And yet, here I am, cringing when I hear Yiddish pronunciations and wincing at religion, and yes, nostalgic for a certain kind of Israeliness.
As for the local Arab community, my husband’s hours are too long to get involved. Passing his identity on to our daughter means that he speaks Arabic and only Arabic with her, and that we eat a lot of Arab food. And soon after our daughter was born, my husband gave up pork – a nod, however small, to his Muslim roots., but a big deal in south Florida where, thanks to the Latin influence, we’re surrounded by pig products.
‘We’re both secular and not enthusiastic about enthusiastic about our toddler donning the hijab, even for play’: Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock during the first day of Eid al-Fitr. Sept. 10, 2010. AP
On Eid al-Fitr we went to a nearby mosque so that our daughter would feel the holiday spirit. I covered my hair loosely with a scarf for the occasion; months later, when my little girl happens upon any long scrap of fabric, she drapes it over her head, points at me, and shouts “Mama! Mama!” As my husband and I are both secular, neither of us feel enthusiastic about the idea of our toddler donning the hijab, even for play.
And, from what little we’ve seen of the community here, it seems that, as is the case with American Jews, participation would revolve around religion. I wonder, too, if we did manage to find some sort of secular Arab community, how we would be accepted as a mixed couple. Would I have to hide my identity?
When I picked my daughter up from school a month ago on Erev Sukkot, the director came out to wish me a happy holiday, a pleasant Sukkos. Grey clouds were gathering on the horizon. Pointing at the sukkah, I asked the director how she was going to eat and sleep outside with all this rain. “It doesn’t work here,” I continued. “Sukkot only works there.”
She nodded.
“Chag sameach,” I said, as I pulled away.
Mya Guarnieri Jaradat is a journalist, writer, and the author of The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others. She is currently working on a memoir about her time in Bethlehem. Twitter: @myaguarnieri
What did a scholar with deep knowledge of the Holy Land and its peoples make of the Balfour Declaration at the time?
George Adam Smith (1846–1942), my grandfather, was a Scottish Presbyterian biblical scholar. He made many visits to Egypt and Palestine. He is most famed for his magnum opus on The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, published in 1894 and running into 26 editions. It was put to practical use by General Edmund Allenby in his Palestine campaign against the Ottoman Turkish forces in 1917.
Smith had a lively and tragic awareness of diplomacy and also war.
In 1878 he went to the Congress of Berlin – the one on Balkan frontiers – as a correspondent for Vanity Fair, picking up tit-bits by purporting to be a member of staff at the hotel where Disraeli, Lord Salisbury and other British statesmen were staying.
In 1915 and 1917 his two elder sons (my mother’s elder brothers) were killed in the war, one serving in France, the other in East Africa.
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In early 1918, commissioned by the British Foreign Office and the American National Committee on the Moral Aims of the Allies, he addressed 127 meetings in the U.S. in support of the Allied cause in the war.
George Adam Smith in 1892Adam Roberts
I was provoked to seek out his view on the Balfour Declaration when I came across a book by Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World. It was published in 1993, the year he became the leader of Likud. In the course of a detailed exposition of Jewish historical rights to Israel, Netanyahu wrote:
“These obvious facts moved Sir George Adam Smith, author of The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, to write in 1891, “Nor is there any indigenous civilization in Palestine that could take the place of the Turkish except that of the Jews who have given to Palestine anything it ever had of value to the world.”
Some have believed the attribution to Smith of these words. They struck me as unlike Smith, but how can one prove a negative – that Smith never, in 1891 or at any other time in his long and active career, uttered these words?
There was a clue in Netanyahu’s careless footnoting: he did not quote directly from Smith, but rather from a polemical book, by Samuel Katz, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, published in New York in 1973.
Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May, right, meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Downing Street, London, Monday, Feb. 6, 2017. Peter Nicholls/AP
This in turn cited another book by Herbert Sidebotham, England and Palestine: Essays Towards the Restoration of the Jewish State, published in 1918, which did have the offending words about the lack of “any indigenous civilization in Palestine” but did not attribute them to Smith.
In fact what George Adam Smith wrote on this topic in his 1894 The Historical Geography was this grandiose concluding sentence of a chapter on “The Form of the Land”:
“Palestine, formed as it is, and surrounded as it is, is emphatically a land of tribes. The idea that it can ever belong to one nation, even though this were the Jews, is contrary both to Nature and to Scripture.”
The conclusions from all this are that Netanyahu should have checked his sources, and also that fake news is not exactly a new problem.
The question that arises is: what did Smith himself think of the Balfour Declaration?
British military in the courtyard of the Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem, 1920.Universal History Archive / UIG
Smith and Balfour, both Scots, both interested in reconciling science and religion, both Fellows of the British Academy, knew each other. However, I know of no evidence that Smith was consulted in the preparation of the Balfour Declaration. There is no mention of him in several key works on it.
Smith did comment on the Declaration in his short book, entitled Syria and the Holy Land, completed within less than two months of the Declaration and published in 1918.
Smith saw it as “the most momentous factor in the Zionist movement”, and he warmly praised the way the movement had progressed. He welcomed the settlement of Jews in increased numbers in Palestine, but he warned:
“Beyond this and the firm conditions happily laid down by the British Government, nothing is yet definite. However deserving of our sympathy, the Jewish claims have not been so thought out in face of the present facts of Palestine as to command our unqualified support.”
George Adam Smith Street sign, Jerusalem, IsraelAdam Roberts
He noted the many different viewpoints in the Zionist movement, and among Jews more generally, about what system of government might have a chance of working in Palestine.
He wrote, perhaps a little optimistically: “Were Jewish influence, social and political, to become predominant in Palestine – if only through sheer force of numbers – I do not think it would prove intolerant to other creeds.”
But he warned that the particular question of the holy places is more dangerous, and he asked pertinently whether, when Jewish writers claim the whole country, they had “realised the economic and social disturbances which the execution of this claim would involve.” He asked: “While Jewish hopes are high and legitimately high, it is right to point our what difficulties lie in the way of their equitable fulfilment.”
One of the key difficulties concerned the borders – Smith pointing out that since Roman times the term “Palestine” had never had exact borders. Responding to certain extreme maximalist Zionist claims, Smith wrote”
“It is not true that ‘Palestine is the national home of the Jewish people and of no other people’…It is not correct to call its non-Jewish inhabitants ‘Arabs’, or to say that left no image or their spirit and made no history–except in the Great Mosque [the Al Aqsa compound].”
Smith was not infallible. Perhaps, even by the standards of his time, he too easily accepted British colonial thinking about Palestine’s non-Jewish inhabitants. And he was sometimes over-optimistic about the British role.
George Adam Smith’s gravesite, Currie CemeteryWkimedia/Stephencdickson
On the British liberation of Jerusalem in December 1917, using the millenarian language of Christian redemption, he expressed the hope that “this wonderful beginning” would be “the earnest of the creation, for the first time on earth, of a government devoted wholly to Peace, with no temptation to war in itself and no provocation to other States, because founded by the agreement and solid guarantees of all peoples to whom the land is dear and holy.”
That was not to be.
Still, I regret that the scholar in Britain who was most knowledgeable about the lands and peoples of Palestine was not consulted by the government in drawing up plans for the area. Most of those involved did not have direct knowledge of the area.
The lack of respect for regional expertise and languages is a problem with which we have become familiar since the Western military interventions in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011. In this matter, as in others, the Balfour Declaration was a harbinger of things to come.
Adam Roberts is Senior Research Fellow in International Relations, Oxford University. He was President of the British Academy, 2009–13. He is the author and editor of numerous articles and books. His latest book (jointly edited) is Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2016)
The Israel Defense Forces on Monday broken a subterranean conflict tunnel stretching easterly from a city of Khan Younis in a southern Gaza Strip into Israeli territory, reaching within a mile of a Kibbutz Kissufim limit community. According to troops officials, construction of a tunnel, that was ongoing, began usually after end of a seven-week fight opposite Hamas in 2014. The IDF did not exhibit who dug a colonnade though stressed that it eventually binds Hamas “accountable and responsible” for all aroused acts emanating from Gaza as a ruling authority.
Seven terrorists were killed in a operation, including dual high-ranking members of a Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Arafat Abu Murshad, a executive Gaza commander; and his emissary Hassan Abu Hassanein. Two ranking Hamas members who also perished were believed to have died from asphyxiation after they entered a hovel to save others who were inside when a Israelis collapsed a structure.
The Israeli confidence row is evaluating a series of perplexities stemming from a mission, including possibly a participation of both high-ranking Hamas and comparison Islamic Jihad loyalists indicates a new spin of team-work presumably tied to a Iranians, with whom Hamas is essay to build a relationship. Earlier this month a Hamas commission visited Tehran seeking closer ties and some-more appropriation to support a troops ambitions opposite a Jewish state. One graphic probability is holding “good-cop; bad-cop” to a subsequent spin with Hamas camouflaging a impasse in apprehension in sequence not to destroy a settlement with Fatah and a Palestinian Authority, and thereby sacrificing a place in a Palestinian one government. Islamic Jihad would be a ideal partner for such a scheme.
For Iran, all scenarios seem to be “win-win.” As it extends a strech into Gaza it is consolidating a control over a Lebanese supervision around a Hezbollah militant classification that also provides inroads into southern Syria.
Pointedly, an Iranian Foreign Ministry orator cursed “the barbarous Zionist regime” for destroying a tunnel, an act he described as precipitated by a enterprise to “guarantee [Israel’s] confidence by murdering Palestinian youths.”
According to Yaakov Lappin, an Israeli troops match and analyst, “Islamic Jihad has had a possess hovel module given 2014 and this sold one appears to have been partial of a network. Even so, it is really doubtful that Hamas did not know about it.
“The dual groups have in new years been cooperating,” he explained to The Media Line, “as good as coordinating their responses to Israel formed on a bargain that any eccentric movement could lift both groups into an neglected war.”
Lappin lifted a probability that a Islamic Republic destined a servant to intentionally puncture into Israeli domain as a provocation. “The Iranians would really most like to spin Gaza into one of a bases that is used to aim Israel, as good as to use a enclave as a indicate of entrance into a West Bank, that they have been perplexing to entrance for years.”
Speaking to The Media Line, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yosef Kuperwasser, conduct of a Regional Research Project during a Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, explained that, “The bid dates behind to a Second Intifada [a duration of heated terrorism characterized by Palestinian self-murder bombings between 2000 and 2005]. Tehran has attempted to do this by Islamic Jihad, that it combined and totally controls, and also by financing Hamas.”
Dr. Eitan Shamir, former executive of a National Security Doctrine Department in Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, agrees that Islamic Jihad—and, by extension, Tehran—is reporting itself in a Gaza Strip. “It is clearly holding a some-more active role, since Hamas has recently attempted to assume a comparatively assuage posture. While both are committed to a ‘resistance’ [read anti-Israel violence], Hamas is some-more compelled [by domestic realities].”
Nevertheless, he told The Media Line that “the [destroyed] hovel was expected famous to Hamas, so it might possibly be ignoring these actions or maybe perplexing to work underneath a cover of Islamic Jihad. Overall, Hamas can't put itself in a position to curb Islamic Jihad as they are both being financed by a same patron.”
The find of a conflict tunnel—whether assembled with Hamas’ taciturn capitulation to grasp trustworthy deniability or during a pithy directive—creates additional problems when noticed opposite a backdrop of a togetherness understanding sealed with Abbas’ Fatah faction.
On a tactful front, Jerusalem has regularly vowed not to rivet in assent negotiations with a Palestinian supervision that includes Hamas and a latest hovel occurrence will expected indurate this position, even as Israel continues to concur with Abbas on several levels in a West Bank.
It is, after all, in a seductiveness of both parties to safeguard that Hamas in sold is not means to enhance a range of a apprehension operations. Additionally, U.S. President Donald Trump’s soon-to-be-unveiled assent beginning will expected yield a “loophole” to effectively sideline Hamas from any talks, thereby enabling Jerusalem to enter into a routine with Abbas while saving face.
The situation, however, is some-more formidable and potentially bomb from a confidence standpoint with Abbas set to assume sum control over Gaza by Dec 1. There is widespread doubt he can forestall Hamas and Islamic Jihad from stability to arm themselves to a teeth—with a assistance of Iran—while melancholy Israel with conflict tunnels.
Lappin reinforced a thought that Hamas will sojourn a widespread troops participation in Gaza for a foreseeable future. “Abbas will not be means to send a sizeable confidence force into a enclave, though rather a thought is that Hamas’ armed wing will oath devotion to a togetherness government. But [the Palestinian leader] is not deluded—he recognizes a limitations.”
According to Kuperwasser, “the doctrine for Israel is that it should not be tempted to trust in a apparition that a [Fatah-Hamas] agreement will lead to reduction terrorism from Gaza.” He serve stressed that Jerusalem “should reason adult a [tunnel] instance to a general village as justification of what Hamas is and will continue to be.”
Kuperwasser resolved by highlighting a perils of an elaborating energetic in Gaza: “What would have happened if a Palestinian Authority had already insincere shortcoming in a Strip and afterwards Islamic Jihad responded to a broken hovel by banishment rockets into Israel? And what if there was a serve escalation after Israel retaliated?
“Abbas would have been held in a middle. What would he do in such an unfit situation?”
A techer in Bar-Ilan University’s Middle Eastern Studies expertise educated a Muslim tyro to mislay her hijab, and diminished her from a classroom when she refused to do so final week.
According to a Ynet news on Monday, a tyro reported a occurrence immediately. The university pronounced that a highbrow has been reprimanded and a disciplinary cabinet has launched a grave investigation.
In response to his actions, a university strongly cursed a highbrow in a matter expelled on Monday: “Bar-Ilan University unquestionably condemns a descent and frightful occurrence that occurred late final week.
“We perspective this as an act opposite all of us – opposite a educational institution, a students and a faculty,” a matter continued.
“This university prides itself on a fact that it enables any and each tyro to suffer his studies in an atmosphere of equivalence and respect. This is, and will continue to be, a hallmark.”
University boss Arie Zaban wrote in a minute to a University Board of Trustees and Council of Trustees: “I am confounded by this lecturer’s degrading and frightful behavior.
This form of nauseous function is unsuitable anywhere, and positively has no place during Bar-Ilan University.”
The lecturer, from a Department of Middle Eastern Studies, has been reprimanded by a University both verbally and in writing, and will be brought before a disciplinary cabinet for serve action.
The techer has apologized to a tyro and to a whole category and, according to a statement, a tyro has supposed his apology.
In a response from a tyro (who stays unidentified), she states: ‘I was deeply repelled and annoyed by my professor’s actions, though this is not a thoughtfulness of a day-to-day atmosphere on campus. Bar-Ilan respects my sacrament and culture, and creates special concessions for me so that we can observe Muslim holidays and Ramadan.
I suffer good family with students and expertise here, and we trust that all universities can demeanour adult to Bar-Ilan as an instance of bringing different populations together underneath one roof.”
Ever upload a selfie to Facebook? Email your latest PowerPoint display to your boss? If so, chances are that a information was vast and unwieldy and that your mechanism dense this information to broadcast it opposite a World Wide Web. And, if so, it is also expected that behind your mechanism or phone’s focus complement was a Lempel-Ziv algorithm.
The Lempel-Ziv algorithm was invented by Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel in a 1970s. On Nov 9, Israeli-born Ziv, now 85, will accept a EMET Prize for his work in a fields of information compression, information speculation and statistical communication theory. The EMET Prize rite will take place during a Jerusalem Theater by invitation only.
The EMET Prize is deliberate a Israeli Nobel Prize, and, in fact, many Israeli Nobel winners initial perceived a EMET Prize.
Other EMET Prize winners this year embody Oded Kotler and Yevgeny Arye (Culture and Art), Zelig Eshhar and Alexander Levitzki (Life Sciences), Assaf Razin (Social Sciences), and David Heyd (Humanities).
Ziv is a first-ever mechanism operative awardee in a accurate sciences difficulty – mostly for his work on a Lempel-Ziv algorithm.
The Lempel-Ziv algorithm is a initial widely used concept information focus process for computers. With a algorithm, a vast English content record can typically be dense to about half of a strange size. It can also be used to restrict GIF, TIFF and PDF files.
The complement works with what Ziv calls pointers.
“It’s like a TV guide,” Ziv says. “Every time a module repeats during a week, a full outline of that module is not reprinted. The beam usually notes, ‘See page this or that.’ This is a pointer and it saves space. It’s utterly simple, though no one else suspicion of it.”
While there are many statistical focus codes that were invented before and after Lempel-Ziv, they are all formed on a arrogance that a information being transmitted is statistical and that a transmitters (computer or man) know what a statistics are.
“I was worried by this a priori arrogance for a prolonged time,” Ziv tells The Jerusalem Post.
Ziv initial became meddlesome in information speculation as a immature male operative for a systematic dialect of a Defense Ministry (today Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd).
“We had usually come off a War of Independence, and it was transparent we indispensable to rise some-more modernized systems, though no one knew how,” recalls Ziv. “On one hand, we arrange of taught ourselves. Like in a yeshiva, we would lay around together and investigate how from books.”
At a same time, a method motionless to send a organisation of a tip employees to get PhDs in a applicable theme of their choice. Ziv was comparison and unsentimental to get a doctorate in information record from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At MIT, Ziv complicated underneath Claude Shannon, deliberate a father of information speculation and a owner of one of a exemplary communication theories. Ziv finished his grade in dual years and returned to work during a Defense Ministry, that by this time had turn Israel’s RD Military.
Soon he and a organisation of method researchers left their posts to learn and do investigate during a Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, assisting it benefit a station as one of a tip general record schools in a universe and, Ziv believes, environment a theatre for transforming Israeli students into a Start-up Nation.
The grounds for a Lempel-Ziv algorithm was laid on a expostulate to haven duty.
“Professor Lempel and we were both during a Technion and we got called for miluim [reserve duty],” recalls Ziv. “We common a automobile and during a float we discussed a challenge. Even after we got behind and any went on sabbatical, we continued to investigate and exam together.”
When a organisation figured out a algorithm, they published dual open systematic papers on their speculation and stopped there. At a time, they did not consider too many about a focus of their work.
When a Lempel-Ziv algorithm was developed, a unsentimental impact was not felt during first. In fact, Ziv says people were not that interested, since there was tiny genuine need for information focus for communication. In a 1970s, it was mostly used for captivating decoding or shortening a delivery rate for loud (error-filled) channels.
“All we had during a time were tiny PCs,” says Ziv.
Then a Internet strike a marketplace and there was a outrageous need for it.
“The Internet is a reason since this algorithm is now integrated into all exemplary communication algorithms that have been used for transmitting information blunder free, as good as in JPEG and other algorithms,” Ziv explains.
Today, personal computers and even phones have outrageous memory capacity. But usually a integrate of decades ago, memory was expensive, so we had to restrict if we wanted to store a lot of data. When trade peaked on a Internet, there was no other choice though to restrict it, too. Today, there is so many information being generated that information focus is always indispensable and will always be needed.
Lempel-Ziv is still a many common information focus algorithm that people are regulating for error-free information compression. It can also be used for predictive analytics and appurtenance learning.
The initial association to obvious program formed on a Lempel-Ziv algorithm was a Sperry Rand Corporation. Ultimately, Microsoft and IBM also grabbed reason of a value.
“The good thing about a algorithm is that it is so elementary that it is unequivocally easy for somebody to get his possess version,” says Ziv.
Researchers in other fields are frequently anticipating new ways to request a algorithm. Geneticists are examining if Lempel-Ziv can be leveraged to broadcast a tellurian genetic formula faster and cheaper to investigate genetic disorders and provide patients better.
The Lempel-Ziv algorithm is built into a initial Sony-Philips DVDs. It can be used to systematise music, such as if we listen to a available block of song and wish to find out either it is Mozart or Beethoven.
A organisation of students during a Technion are now deliberation either Lempel-Ziv could be used to brand people by a approach they form on their personal keyboard, like a fingerprint. If so, this could be a breakthrough in communications security.
Ziv, who won 1993’s Israel Prize for accurate sciences, says he is unapproachable of receiving a EMET Prize and thinks it provides support for Technion students to work harder and aim higher. However, he is medium about his accomplishments.
He tells a Post that investigate is partial smarts and partial luck.
“Research is not like elucidate a mathematical problem, such as anticipating a block base of something,” says Ziv. “With investigate we are traffic with a unknown. Sometimes we don’t know what it is we are looking for. Or, sometimes, we find something that was not even what we were looking for, though it is unequivocally interesting.”
He says that immature scientists should not put people like himself on pedestals. Before his successes, there were a lot of failures – that is usually partial of research.
“You have to try many times and destroy and destroy and fail,” says Ziv.
He says he thinks a reason a Technion is so eminent and Israel is a Start-up Nation is not since Jews are inherently smarter, though since of a significance a republic and a Jewish republic historically put on training over all else.
“You get an corner when we know a significance of training for a consequence of learning, regardless of either there is application,” he says.
This essay was created in team-work with a EMET Prize.
The Likud private a dozen members dependent with a “New Likudniks” from a party’s rolls this week, observant that they are not in line with Likud’s ideology.
According to a Likud’s administration, a 12 members booted from a celebration got their membership by “fraud and deception,” and their dismissal came after a Likud’s authorised confidant Avi Halevi pronounced it was authorised to do so though a preference from a party’s court.
The New Likudniks is a organisation that recruits members to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party aiming to be a moderating force in a primaries. It focuses on a free-market socioeconomic bulletin and education, though has been met with accusations of being a revolutionary infiltration of a Likud. Coalition management David Bitan and Likud activists began actively fighting a materialisation after New Likudniks owner Lior Meiri was speckled during a weekly anti-Netanyahu protests in Petah Tikva.
There was a Likud justice preference tentative about a 12 members in question, though a Likud romantic who petitioned opposite them withdrew a censure in light of Halevi’s authorised opinion. The now-former Likud members will be means to interest a preference in a party’s court.
Halevi wrote that “based on plain evidence, a New Likudniks, including a respondents to a petitions…do not brand with a goals of a Likud and do not devise to opinion for a Likud in a choosing to a Knesset. Their declarations on Likud membership forms that they brand with a goals of a Likud are fake declarations. They achieved a payoff of being Likud members by dishonesty and fraud.”
The profession also argued that, given their membership in a Likud is “a fraud and formed on fake declarations,” it violates a rapist code, and therefore, a celebration can cancel their membership.
The New Likudniks’ orator pronounced that “Avi Halevi is not a Likud, a Likud is a members and a voters,” and that a groups leaders have faced “political harm by hurtful army in a party.”
“The authorised confidant does not have any management to mislay anyone from a party, positively not though a conference or before message,” a New Likudniks added. “This is illegal, opposite a Likud structure and a Parties Law. It looks like he wants to equivocate assembly us in court.”
The organisation skeleton to go to justice to quarrel a decision.
ANKARA – Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Iran on Wednesday to accommodate with tip leaders as tragedy between Tehran and Washington mounts over a 2015 chief understanding between Iran and 6 vital powers.
State TV reported that Putin would plead issues with Iranian officials including informal crises such as a Syrian conflict, a chief understanding and mercantile and shared ties.
Putin will also take partial in a three-way limit between Russia, Iran and adjacent Azerbaijan.
A new Turkish domestic celebration founded by a former apportion and outspoken censor of Tayyip Erdogan could cost a boss essential support and potentially replace a categorical opposition, a check suggested on Wednesday.
The consult by distinguished polling organisation Gezici showed that a Iyi Parti (“Good Party”), founded this month by a breakaway jingoist lawmaker Meral Aksener, could symbol a thespian change in Turkish politics, eclipsing a physical CHP that dominated Turkish politics for most of a republic’s history.
While usually 5 members of a 550-seat council have assimilated Aksener’s party, a consult suggested it could win over electorate from several parties, including Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AK Party as good as physical or jingoist groups.
Although Turkey’s subsequent elections are not due until 2019, pollster Gezici asked 4,638 respondents how they would opinion in a eventuality of a snap election.
VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis on Wednesday cursed new lethal attacks in Somalia, Afghanistan and New York, observant militants were abusing a name of God to clear their violence.
“I am profoundly saddened by a militant attacks in these new days in Somalia, Afghanistan and yesterday in New York,” a pope pronounced in an residence to symbol All Saints Day, adding that he was praying for a victims and their families.
“We ask God to modify a hearts of terrorists and giveaway a universe of loathing and of insane murder that abuses a name of God to disseminate death.”
On a face of it, any alleviation in tactful family between countries that are accessible to Israel and a Iranian regime would be deliberate bad news for Jerusalem. In this context, we might have approaching to hear grumblings about a scheduled revisit Wednesday by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Tehran. Putin will be in Iran to attend a trilateral limit along with Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev. But, intriguingly, Israeli officials have remained silent.
Putin and Aliyev have most in common. Both are post-Soviet strict leaders of nations abounding in oil and gas, though bad in democracy and giveaway speech. And underneath both of them, their dual countries have built increasingly tighten mercantile and confidence ties with Israel. Neither are approaching allies, though geopolitical dynamics have pushed both Russia and Azerbaijan closer to Israel.
or over a decade now, a Jewish state has enjoyed increasingly comfortable family with secular, Shi’a Azerbaijan. Israel imports a infancy of a oil from that nation and, according to Aliyev himself, has sole in new years some $5-billion-worth of arms to his army, including – unfamiliar sources contend – drones, radar systems and missiles.
Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev during a UN General Assembly, in September. His attempts to woo a West have foundered in a final dual years.
For most of this period, Azerbaijan has had moving family with a Iranian neighbor, though Israeli comprehension officials have still called a nation “a behind doorway for Israel to Iran.”
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However, as Aliyev’s attempts in a final dual years to benefit larger acceptance by a West have foundered – mostly due to reports of vital tellurian rights infringements and a termination of any giveaway democracy or media in his nation – he has grown closer both to a Kremlin and a Iranian regime. Their initial trilateral limit took place in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, in Aug 2016.
The warmer family do not, however, seem to have come during Israel’s expense, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu creation his possess revisit in Dec to Baku, where he sealed a array of mercantile team-work agreements.
For his part, Putin has worked given entrance to appetite in 2000 on improving Russia’s historically bad attribute with Israel. In a final dual years, given Russia deployed a troops army to Syria, in support of a unwell Assad regime, these ties have acquired a new urgency, with Putin holding a keys to Syria’s postwar fate.
Putin is meddlesome in gripping both a interests of Israel and Iran in check. Netanyahu has demanded that Tehran not be authorised to settle a permanent troops participation in Syria, and that any army constant to Iran, such as those of a proxies Hezbollah, not be authorised to work nearby a Golan border.
Sources tighten a Kremlin have pronounced in new months that Putin is not formulation to direct that Iran mislay a troops advisers or a Shi’a militias it controls from Syria, as they are among a categorical factors in ensuring a presence of a Assad regime in Damascus. However, a boss is meddlesome in preventing a vital Israeli involvement in Syria and is prepared to pledge that Syria will not turn a bottom for attacks on Israel.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu gestures, while walking with Israeli reflection Avigdor Lieberman, during a Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, in October.
Russian officials have emphasized a fact that a Kremlin has not blocked or cursed Israeli atmosphere strikes in Syria, and that coordination between a Israel Air Force and Russia’s troops member in Syria have been well-spoken and efficient.
The destiny of Syria was a categorical emanate on a bulletin dual weeks ago when Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu visited Israel for talks with Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Despite a pretended alliance between Netanyahu and a Trump administration, a primary minister’s entreaties that a United States do some-more to quell Iran’s change in Syria, have elicited little, if any action. The conclusion, that can be seen in a augmenting magnitude of meetings and phone conversations with Putin, has been that Israel has small choice though to rest now on a crony in a Kremlin.
So what summary can Putin and maybe also Aliyev be approaching to send from Israel in their meetings on Thursday with a Iranian leadership?
While Iran has grand skeleton to build a possess airbase and seaport in Syria, and has extracted promises from Syrian President Bashar Assad for land on that to build them, Israeli comprehension analysts trust that a final preference has nonetheless to be done in Tehran. Building a bases will cost a Iranian economy – usually commencement to redeem from prolonged years of sanctions – changed billions.
Beneath a aspect in Tehran, meanwhile, there is a appetite onslaught over either this investment is worthwhile. President Hassan Rouhani is most reduction fervent than his rivals, a leaders of a Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to spend this income on lost bases instead of on renewing Iran’s decayed domestic infrastructure. Israel’s process is to boost a vigour opposite base-building in Syria. After all, because spend all that money, when Israel might explosve them anyway.
The trilateral limit in Tehran will especially be about mercantile issues. Iran, Russia and Azerbaijan share a seashore (together with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) of a healthy gas-rich Caspian Sea. Iran in sold is concerned to serve feat these appetite cache and get entrance to Russia and to Azerbaijan’s modernized tube networks. Thus, on a sidelines of a summit, Putin or Aliyev might good pass on a summary that for a consequence of Iran’s mercantile future, it might be best for it to give adult on some of a Syrian ambitions.
Dead Sea Industries, a fully-owned auxiliary of Israel Chemicals, sealed an agreement to lift out a initial theatre of dredging a salt from one of a evaporation pools along a Dead Sea.
The 1-billion-shekel deal, sealed with Holland Shallow Seas Dredging, is dictated to mislay salt buildup from a company’s fifth potash prolongation pool, and so say a H2O turn so that it does not crawl and inundate a foundations of adjacent hotels.
As partial of a project, a executive will build a specialized 24-by-120-meter dredger for a pool. The dredger will be operated invariably by dozens of workers hired by a contractor, and is dictated to collect some 5.5 million cubic meters from a bottom of a pool each year.
The plan is required since a potash prolongation routine during a site necessitates lifting a H2O turn in a pool by 20 centimeters a year. During a potash prolongation process, a H2O evaporates in a sun, vouchsafing 20 million tons of salt penetrate to a bottom of a pool each year.
ICL betrothed Israel’s supervision that starting in 2017, a pool would not arise above a certain level. Under that agreement, ICL will account 80 percent of a project.
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The Hamas troops wing published on Wednesday new footage of Israeli infantryman Gilad Shalit, who was hold serf in Gaza from Jun 2006 to Oct 2011.
The footage shows Shalit in a association of 4 masked Hamas men, in a same garments he was wearing on release. Another video shows him being handed a potion of H2O from one of his captors.
Hamas releases new footage of Gilad Shalit in captivity
In Jan final year, Hamas released a video that includes clips of Shalit smiling during a grill and seen eating, examination TV and reading letters from his family.
Shalit was abducted by Hamas in Jun 2006 and hold for over 5 years before being exchanged in Oct 2011 in lapse for a recover of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners hold by Israel.
Two Israeli adults are still being held in a Gaza Strip: 28-year-old Abera Mengistu from Ashkelon, who crossed over to a Strip in Sep 2014, and Hisham Abu-Sayid, from a city of Hura in a Negev desert, who walked into Gaza in Apr 2015.
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The bodies of dual Israel Defense Forces soldiers, Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin, who were killed in 2014 during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, have also remained in Gaza.
A day of commemorative events on Tuesday will mark the centennial of the Battle of Beersheba, where Australian and New Zealand forces conquered the city in what has been called one of the last great cavalry battles in history.
That victory, on the first day of the Palestine campaign during World War I, paved the way for the defeat of the Ottomans and an end to their 400-year rule in the country.
The events in the southern Israeli city will be attended by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and New Zealand Governor General Dame Patricia Reddy.
Tuesday’s commemorations will begin at the British World War I cemetery in Beersheba, where Turnbull will participate in a solidarity ceremony and prayer. Other events include the dedication of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps memorial museum in the city, a cavalry parade and a memorial ceremony for New Zealand soldiers.
