Presidential candidates Nicolas Maduro and Henrique Capriles have begun Venezuela’s election race with scathing personal attacks even as mourners still file past the late Hugo Chavez’s corpse. Maduro, who was sworn in as acting president after Chavez succumbed to cancer last week, is seen as the favorite to win the April 14 election, bolstered by…
The lawyer for a Pakistani man accused of plotting jihadist violence is reportedly planning to try to bar Jews from the jury in his trial in Brooklyn federal court. Defense lawyer Frederick Cohn says the views of Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, who’s accused of lying about trying to join jihadists in Pakistan, are too repellent for…
Swarms of locusts have continued to cross into Israel from Egypt and the Agriculture Ministry is preparing to carry out additional spraying of the insects, which pose a threat to agriculture. Sunday afternoon the ministry reported another large swarm moving toward Ashalim in the northwestern Negev. The ministry staff plans to monitor their movements and…
A town in northern Spain is preparing to hold its first Passover seder since the areas Jews were forced to flee during the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. The festive dinner will take place in the old center of the town of Ribadavia on March 25 and is being organized by the municipality’s tourism department in…
Non-Jewish residents of the heavily haredi Orthodox-populated London neighborhood of Hackney have launched a campaign to prevent Orthodox Jews from changing city planning regulations. A group named Hackney Planning Watch recently produced a flyer warning: “Your neighborhood is in danger! Want your neighbor to extend their home to cover the whole of their back garden?…
Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles said on Sunday he will challenge the late Hugo Chavez’s preferred successor for the presidency next month, setting the stage for a bitter campaign. Capriles, a 40-year-old state governor, will face election favorite and acting President Nicolas Maduro. The pair have until Monday to register their candidacies for the April…
The famed Vienna Philharmonic has acknowledged that many of its musicians were Nazi party members during Hitler’s rule and that its director may have delivered a prestigious orchestra award to a Nazi war criminal two decades after the end of World War Two. The orchestra, which has come under fire for covering up its history,…
A Polish governmental institute closed an investigation into the 1941 murder of 20 Jewish women in northeastern Poland, unable to name the victims or perpetrators. Prosecutors for the Institute of National Remembrance in Bialystok could not determine the names of the victims, nor did they discover the identities of six of the seven perpetrators who…
Israeli leaders marked the first year since an attack on a Jewish school in France that killed a rabbi and three children. Natan Sharansky, the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, met Sunday in Jerusalem with the parents of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, who was killed in the attack on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school…
New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn officially launched her candidacy on Sunday for the job that would make her the city’s first female and first openly gay mayor, in a race that has no Jewish major candidate for the first time in years. The Democratic Quinn, 46, made her announcement on Twitter, saying: “It’s…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will likely encounter harsh opposition within his Likud party if high-ranking ministers and Knesset members soon find themselves without a job. Party officials on Sunday threatened an “intifada”, or uprising, over what they call “Netanyahu’s failure to give out positions” to members of Likud and other formerly close coalition partners. The…
