Global

Two Irish bands scheduled to play highly-publicized concerts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Nahalal in June have cancelled, citing an overwhelming international uproar over...

Following his victory Sunday, the 57-year-old François Hollande shouted himself hoarse, as he had done so often during the campaign, thanking his supporters for electing him president and promising to unite the whole country. But Richard Prasquier, President of the Jewish-French organizations, says one of the changes the Hollande presidency brings is a boost to the anti-Israel left.

Press TV, Iran's television network, broadcasting in English round-the-clock, on Sunday published an interview with Mark Glenn, of The Crescent and Cross Solidarity movement, who said that Israel is the only regime that “has threatened to take the entire world down in a nuclear Armageddon in the instance that her precious experiments in Jewish self-rule in the Middle East ceases to materialize.”

At the end of a week in which the United Church of Canada, that country's largest Protestant denomination called for a boycott of goods produced in “illegal” Israeli settlements, including East Jerusalem, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird declared that "Israel has no greater friend in the world today than Canada." Baird was addressing the American Jewish Committee World Leaders Plenary in D.C.

Despite a drop of 0.7% in antisemitic incidents in 2011 over the previous year, the gravity of the problem in Canada is better understood by observing long-term trends: antisemitic incidents have grown twenty-fold since B'nai Brith started monitoring antisemitism thirty years ago, while a five-year view shows a 24.6% rise.

Belgian Jews are at loggerheads as a result of an EU vote to dispatch the UN to Israel on a mission to scrutinize Jewish towns and communities in Judea and Samaria.

The Supermarket chain Co-Operative Group, Britain's fifth-largest food retailer, is the first major European retailer to stop buying from companies that export produce from Israeli settlements east of the Green Line. The largest Israeli agricultural export companies affected by this move are Agrexco, Arava Export Growers, Adafresh and Mehadrin.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has announced that Israel had severed all working relations with the UN Human Rights Council as of Monday this week, and will block a U.N. fact finding team from entering Israel or Judea and Samaria to investigate Jewish settlements. Spokesman Yigal Palmor said this "means that we're not going to work with them. We're not going to let them carry out any kind of mission, including this probe."

President Shimon Peres: "Our mutual unwavering commitment to each other is crucial. The young generation's commitment to our state is essential as our shared tomorrow will be defined by innovation. As partners of our nation, your ability to secure a future defined by scientific development and discoveries is vital to our shared mission."

Israel marked twenty years of diplomatic relations with Azerbaijan on Sunday, with a visit to the 95% Muslim country by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who also visited the capital city’s Chabad house, according to a report by Lubavitch.com.

An online petition headlined "Tell the International Olympic Committee: 40 Years is Enough!" has garnered thousands of signatures. It is urging the Committee to honor at the Olympic Games this summer, the memory of 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered at the 1972 Olympics in Munich by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.

Israeli Ambassador to UN uses the opportunity to address myths that have become a "permanent hindrance" to the progress in the Middle East; myths that "in the barren deserts of the Middle East...find fertile ground to grow wild...and can surprisingly find their way" into the halls of the UN.

A campaign by the widows of two Israeli victims of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre have had their petition for a memorial at the 2012 Olympic games rejected by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Three young Hindu women who were kidnapped, forcibly converted to Islam and married off to Muslim men, chose this week to live with their husbands instead of their families. It has been rumored that the three women had been threatened by Pakistan People's Party parliamentarian Mian Mithu with "dire consequences" if they decided to return to their parents.

Among its results, the study found that 72% of Polish citizens agree or strongly agree that "Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era," and that 68% of Hungarians share this sentiment. Nearly 70% percent of Hungarians also think that "Jews have too much influence" in their country.

The City of Vienna will rename a section of the fashionable Ring Avenue named after Dr. Karl Lueger, Vienna's mayor from 1897 to 1910. Lueger was a renowned anti-Semite. One resident of Vienna, a failed postcard artist named Adolf Hitler, said he was inspired by Lueger's public Jew hatred.

The annual Jewish Lag B’Omer pilgrimage to the oldest synagogue in Africa should be maintained as a symbol of Tunisian openness, according to Tunisia’s tourism minister on Tuesday, yet the increase in fundamentalist Salafi Islamic political rule threatens to drive out the remaining Jews of Djerba.

Eighty-three reserves officers and soldiers yesterday sent the Defense Minister and the IDF Chief of Staff a letter supporting the Eisner, who had been suspended from his post. Additional support came from Hagit Rein, mother of Major B'naya Rein who was killed in the Second Lebanon War and whose body Eisner retrieved.

Back in 1998, Lord Nazir Ahmed, 53, became the first Muslim life peer. Now he is reported to have said: "'If the US can announce a reward of $10 million for the (capture) of Hafiz Saeed, I can announce a bounty of £10 million (for the capture of) President Obama and his predecessor, George Bush."

Saeed Jalili, Secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, says Tehran does not intend to stop producing uranium enriched to a purity level of 20 percent, insisting that enrichment of uranium is his country's right. The UN Security Council has demanded the suspension of enrichment. Iran has enough enriched uranium for around four bombs if the material is refined further to about 90-percent purity.

Tehran and the group of 6 (US, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany) met in Istanbul on Saturday, ending a 15-month hiatus in talks. "There is a positive atmosphere… contrasting with the last time," EU spokesman Michael Mann stated. An afternoon session on Saturday involved a number of bilateral meetings, but the Iranian delegation rejected the US representatives’ request for a bilateral meeting.

JP Morgan acquired a $100 million stake in Conduit from investor Yozma fund at a $1.4 billion valuation. Conduit’s cash cow is its toolbar, which the company says has been used by more than 200,000 sites, including MLB.com and Miniclip, to reach 250 million users.

French National Front leader Marine Le Pen has been slipping in the polls ahead of the April 22 first-round vote, placing fourth President Nicolas Sarkozy and two other candidates. And so, to boost her ratings, she's been doing whatever she can, including pick the very Jewish sounding Goldman Sachs, as her target.

Günter Grass, Germany's most celebrated living author, became the center of a news hurricane on Wednesday, after he published a poem titled "What must be said," in which he blames Israel for destabilizing world peace with its plots against Iran. The Israeli Embassy in Berlin said it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews of ritual murder before the Passover festival.

NETANYA – “The expression ‘time heals all wounds’ is simply not true, even a decade after the Pesach terror attack at the Park Hotel,” Batya Weinberg, a caseworker for the OneFamily organization said on the eve of last week’s 10th anniversary memorial gathering of victims and families who were directly affected by the atrocity.

In a key defeat for NGO "Lawfare", the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Tuesday decided that it does not have jurisdiction to begin an investigation over cases related to the 2008-09 Gaza War because "Palestine" is not a state. But this victory over Israel's Palestinian foes may not be long lasting.

The drill, called "Noble Dina", will continue through April 5, and will also include the U.S. Sixth Fleet. It is aimed at simulating submarine combat, airborne dogfights, as well as coordinating the defense of offshore natural gas platforms.

It's important to separate the failure of elite French police units to apprehend murderer Muhammad Merah a week ago, from our estimate of the ability of French security forces to monitor radical Islamists within their borders. It turns out that France, which has been hit by terrorist attacks since the Algerian war of the 1950s, could teach the US a thing or two about controlling Arab terrorism.

Turning to Internet users for help in reporting rape and sexual assault in Syria, to inform the international community and to provide the base for potential prosecutions, a new Women's Media Center initiative, spearheaded by Gloria Steinem, declares: "Our goal is to make these atrocities visible, and to gather evidence so that one day justice may be served."

Adlene Hicheur, a French nuclear physicist of Algerian descent who once worked at Switzerland's renowned CERN laboratory, is being tried in Paris on charges of collaborating with Al Qaeda in North Africa. His attorneys claim he only sent angry emails. They are afraid their clients would be unfairly linked with the Toulouse murderer.