Daily Briefing Dec. 12: Justice for victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing at last?

Editor David Horovitz on today’s Knesset agenda and Thursday’s live-streamed event, ‘Israel’s Judiciary: Reform or Ruin?’; health reporter Nathan Jeffay on the winter ‘tripledemic’

Welcome to The Times of Israel’s Daily Briefing, your 15-minute audio update on what’s happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, from Sunday through Thursday.

Editor David Horovitz and health reporter Nathan Jeffay join host Amanda Borschel-Dan in today’s podcast.

This Thursday, we will host our first Times of Israel live-streamed event, “Israel’s Judiciary: Reform or Ruin?” We hear what’s on the program.

Preliminary voting is expected to begin Monday on three bills that are key to the makeup of the next government. Likud MK Yariv Levin is also expected to become the new speaker of the Knesset at 4 p.m. What are these bills and what are their consequences?

Yesterday it was announced that a Libyan man suspected in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am jet that killed all 259 people aboard the plane was taken into US custody. How does the arrest of the suspect, Abu Agila Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, affect the thinking on how the bombing was accomplished?

COVID is on the rise again here in Israel, but so are two other viruses, respiratory syncytial virus or RSV, and common influenza. What did Sheba Medical Center pediatrician Prof. Moshe Ashkenazi have to say?

And finally, we hear about a world first in which Israeli scientists have derived male and female stem cells from the same person. What is significant about harvesting these cells, which are identical aside from their sex?