Protesters and panel attendees turned out in large numbers at the Brooklyn College BDS panel. Roughly 300 attendees came to listen to the discussion of the movement to impose boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel. Outside, 150 counter protesters chanted in the cold on the public college’s campus, according to one report. The event, co-sponsored…
Polish lawmakers blocked a transsexual colleague from becoming deputy speaker of parliament on Friday after her nomination caused discomfort among some sections of Poland’s devoutly Catholic society. Liberal supporters of 58-year-old Anna Grodzka said parliament had missed an opportunity to show that Poland was changing from a heartland of traditional values into an open-minded society….
Fissures are appearing in Calgary’s Jewish community following the conviction of one of its members, a prominent forensic psychiatrist, for sexually assaulting patients. Dr. Aubrey Levin was sentenced on January 31 to five years in prison for abusing people involved with the province of Alberta’s criminal justice system who were sent to him for assessment…
For the second time in a month, vandals desecrated Jewish graves in Tunisia. On Feb. 4, unidentified individuals smashed and overturned ten gravestones in Kef in Western Tunisia, according to the Tunisia News Network. An earlier incident in the coastal Tunisian town of Sousse left more than 68 Jewish graves ransacked and looted on Jan….
Twenty-eight percent of Israeli households said they required welfare services in 2011, according to official data. A report published on Feb. 6 by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics said that 520,000 out of 1.83 million registered households approached welfare services for assistance in 2011. Out of those, 15 percent were single-parent households and 47 percent…
Iran played no part in the bombing of a bus last year that killed Israeli tourists, its ambassador to Bulgaria said on Friday, rejecting Israeli charges that it was involved in the attack. Bulgaria has accused the Iranian-backed Hezbollah of carrying out the July attack, a charge the Lebanese Shi’ite Islamist militia dismissed as part…
A war crimes investigator cast fresh doubts on the autobiographical account of a purported Holocaust survivor living in Australia who says he was a child mascot for Nazis. Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, wrote to officials last week at the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany,…
A U.N. agency employee based in Jerusalem who tweeted an incendiary anti-Israel photo nearly a year ago was removed from her position. Khulood Badawi, the information and media coordinator for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Jerusalem, was dismissed on Wednesday. The OCHA explained Badawi’s removal as a contract non-renewal, according…
Republican U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions on Thursday warned that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary could face a tough time winning confirmation if the White House did not clear up a dispute over the Medicare health program. Jack Lew, Obama’s former chief of staff and budget director, is due to testify on Wednesday before…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met on Thursday with Yair Lapid, the surprise runner-up in an election last month, to try to draw him into a broad government that could bridge Israel’s religious divide. In the Jan. 22 ballot, centrist candidate Lapid’s rallying cry, “equal sharing of the burden”, touched a nerve among voters angered by…
Former baseball MVP Ryan Braun is reportedly the latest in a series of players linked to a Miami-area clinic that allegedly distributed performance-enhancement drugs to a number of stars. According to the Yahoo! Sports report, the Milwaukee Brewers star’s name appears on three records from the Biogenesis clinic, but there are no drugs listed next…
