Marissa Newman is The Times of Israel political correspondent.
The Times of Israel liveblogged Sunday’s developments as they unfolded.
Ministers approve a bill allowing Israeli companies to sue boycott activists for a maximum sum of NIS 100,000 without proof of damage.
The proposal by Likud MK Yoav Kisch — and backed by Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan — seeks to bypass a High Court of Justice ruling that disqualified portions of Israel’s anti-boycott law that sought punitive damages.
In the current revision, the companies are allowed to seek damages without citing evidence they were hurt financially by the boycott campaigns, in a move the authors of the bill likened to similar Israeli laws on copyrights. That distinction from punitive damages would satisfy the court’s demands for the law, as laid out in its ruling, the authors opined.
In a tweet, Erdan says he was “proud” the Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved the bill, giving it coalition support.
“After it is approved, the law will be an effective tool to fight boycott activists against Israel,” he says.
Six people are lightly hurt as a ceiling in a school in southern Israel collapses.
According to reports, the injured are construction workers and the building — near the town of Hura — was under renovation.
Rescue teams are searching the building to ensure no one was trapped in the rubble.
The Lebanese army denies knowledge of an assassination plot against former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who resigned on Saturday, citing fears for his life.
“Based on investigations, arrests and information there have been no plans to carry out assassination attacks in the country,” the armed forces say, according to the Hezbollah Al-Manar TV station.
The Al-Arabiya TV station reported over the weekend that an attempt to kill Hariri was thwarted by Lebanon’s security forces several days ago.
At least six people were killed Sunday in a suicide attack in the centre of Iraq’s disputed Kirkuk city, a security official says.
The attackers struck near a former police station used by Saraya al-Salam, a Shiite paramilitary force led by powerful Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the official says on condition of anonymity.
— AFP
In London to mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with British Jewish leaders.
Accompanied by his wife, Sara Netanyahu, Culture Minister Miri Regev, and Israel’s Ambassador to the UK Mark Regev, the prime minister meets with British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and the head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews Jonathan Arkush, among others.
Netanyahu praises the British prime minister’s speech on Thursday night, during which Theresa May said she would “absolutely not” apologize for the landmark 1917 document seen as a key milestone in the establishment of the State of Israel.
“I thought Theresa May gave a tremendous speech,” says Netanyahu, noting the “intertwined” histories of Israel and Britain.
Belgian state broadcaster VRT says that Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont and four other former regional ministers have turned themselves in to police in Brussels.
VRT says that all five have arrived at the Brussels prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor is due to make a statement shortly about a European arrest warrant issued for Puigdemont and the other four as Spain seeks their return for an investigation related to Catalonia’s independence bid.
They had fled to Belgium after being removed from power by Spanish authorities as part of an extraordinary crackdown to impede the region’s illegal declaration of independence.
Federal prosecutors in Belgium had said on Saturday that they were studying the warrants and that they had shared them with city counterparts in Brussels.
— AFP
Egypt has recovered 354 archaeological objects that were seized by authorities in the United Arab Emirates, the antiquities ministry in Cairo says.
Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qasimi, ruler of the emirate of Sharjah, had ordered the pieces returned to Egypt after police captured them, the ministry says Saturday.
It does not provide any details on where or how the pieces were recovered, or from whom.
Antiquities Minister Khaled El-Enany inspected the pieces at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo on Saturday, it says, adding that they would be placed on display in a “special exhibition.”
The recovered pieces include antiques from the Pharaonic era and some from Islamic times, it says.
Among them are a pottery container carrying the name of Ramses III, who ruled Egypt around 3,000 years ago, and several bronze statues depicting Egyptian gods including Isis and Osiris.
They also include tombstones from the Islamic era.
Egypt, a rich source of archaeological treasures, regularly announces the recovery of stolen artifacts.
It has long campaigned for the return of precious artifacts which it considers stolen and which are housed in European museums, such as the Nefertiti Bust in Berlin.
— AFP
Lebanese President Michel Aoun is demanding that Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri return to the country before he decides whether to accept his resignation from office, according to Reuters.
Hariri, in Saudi Arabia, announced he was quitting on Saturday, saying he feared for his life.
Bahrain on Sunday urges its citizens to avoid traveling to Lebanon and advises those already in the country to leave immediately for their safety.
“Due to the current conditions and developments in Lebanon, the foreign ministry asks citizens present in Lebanon to leave immediately and exercise extreme caution,” the foreign ministry says in a statement.
It warns its citizens to avoid traveling to Lebanon “for their own safety and to avoid any dangers they might encounter.”
It gives no further details on the nature of any threat.
Its warning came a day after Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation. Speaking from the Saudi capital Riyadh, Hariri cited Iran’s “grip” on the country and threats to his life. His surprise withdrawal from a government that also includes Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah risked plunging the already fragile country deeper into turmoil.
Manama has declared Hezbollah a terrorist group and repeatedly accused it of involvement in violent attacks in the tiny Gulf kingdom.
— AFP
Iran’s state TV is reporting that the country’s supreme leader has appointed a new Navy chief.
The Sunday report by the TV’s website says that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appointed Admiral General Hossein Khanzadi as Iran’s new Navy commander. His predecessor, Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, has served in the post for 10 years.
Brigadier Khanzadi was a deputy commander in the Iranian Navy Forces before the appointment.
Brigadier Sayyari, 62, has been appointed as Deputy Army Coordinator by Khamenei.
— AP
A French court will rule Tuesday who really owns a painting of women picking peas by Impressionist master Camille Pissarro, more than 70 years after it was seized from a Jewish art collector.
The dispute began earlier this year when the painting, “La Cueillette des Pois,” went on display in Paris during a retrospective of Pissarro’s work, alerting family members of the original owner, Simon Bauer.
Bauer, a wealthy businessman with a sizable art collection in 1943, was dispossessed by the anti-Semitic wartime French government which collaborated with the Nazis.
After narrowly escaping death when a train drivers’ strike stopped him from being sent to an extermination camp, Bauer recovered some of his collection after the war and received compensation — but never La Cueillette.
In early 2017, his descendants spotted an opportunity when the painting was lent to the Marmottan museum in Paris by Americans Bruce and Robbi Toll, who had bought it in 1995 for $800,000 (690,000 euros at current exchange rates).
They launched legal action and in May a court granted their request to have it impounded pending a ruling on its on ownership.
— AFP
Slovakia’s neo-Nazi politician Marian Kotleba lost his job of regional governor while the ruling left-wing Smer party also took a thrashing in the Slovak regional election this weekend, final results show on Sunday.
Right-wing and centrist parties emerged as the winners in Saturday’s vote, the Slovak statistics office said, and they will now govern in five out of seven Slovak regions.
Smer, led by Prime Minister Robert Fico, will have regional governors in the remaining two regions, having lost four governor’s seats in the vote, in which turnout was just 30 percent.
Kotleba, head of the LSNS party, lost in his native central region of Banska Bystrica to independent candidate Jan Lunter, who was backed by coalition and opposition parties which joined forces against the far-right governor.
Only two of 336 LSNS candidates have been elected into regional assemblies in Slovakia, a eurozone member with 5.4 million inhabitants.
“The fascist party was defeated and it is also important that the political map of Slovakia has changed,” Grigorij Meseznikov, head of the Bratislava-based Institute for Public Affairs, a think tank, tells AFP.
Hostile to both the Roma minority and the established elite, Kotleba has spoken warmly about former Slovak president Jozef Tiso, who agreed to deport tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi Germany during World War II.
— AFP
The number of activists detained by Russian police at anti-Putin protests across the country on Sunday has increased to 380, a monitoring group says.
“We know of 380 detained. Thirteen were detained in Saint Petersburg and 346 in Moscow, who were taken to 19 police stations,” says OVD-Info, a rights group that monitors detentions at political protests. Moscow police said previously they had detained 260 people.
— AFP
The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces raised $53.8 million at a Beverly Hills gala.
Some 1,200 people were in attendance at the annual event on Thursday night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, which raised what organizers said was a “record” amount for Israeli soldiers for such needed services as academic scholarships for combat veterans; financial assistance for soldiers in need; support for Lone Soldiers throughout their service and upon release; aid for wounded veterans and the families of fallen soldiers; weeks of rest and recuperation for entire IDF units, as well as educational, cultural, and recreational facilities.
The event was chaired by FIDF National Board member and major supporter Haim Saban and his wife, Cheryl.
The largest single gift in FIDF’s history was announced at the event as $16.6 million from Oracle co-founder, executive chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison. His donation will support the construction of well-being facilities on a new training campus for the IDF’s coed infantry units.
— JTA
Three Palestinians were arrested last week for attempting to plant a bomb at a security fence near Jerusalem, Border Police say.
Security forces observed a suspicious car approaching the fence near Tira (and the settlement of Beit Horon) on Monday. Three Palestinians then assembled the makeshift explosives, which included a gas tank, targeting Israeli troops, according to the police account on Sunday.
Israeli security forces arrested two of the suspects at the scene. A third suspect, who managed to flee, was arrested on Tuesday.
Sappers were then summoned to dismantle the bomb.
The suspects were Palestinians from the village of Bayt Duqu, aged 17-19, according to police. They were indicted on Thursday in the Ofer Military Court.
The IDF has recovered the bodies of five Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists who were killed in the army’s demolition of a Gaza attack tunnel last week, the army says.
The terrorists, who were working in the tunnel at the time of the strike, were buried in the rubble under a cleared military zone between the Gaza Strip and Israeli territory.
In the days after the attack, the Hamas terrorist group asked the Red Cross to request that Israel allow it to search for the bodies, but this was denied.
— Judah Ari Gross
US President Donald Trump would “certainly be open” to meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, he says in an interview broadcast Sunday as he begins an extended Asian tour.
Asked by journalist Sharyl Attkisson, host of the “Full Measure” TV show, whether he would “ever consider sitting down with the dictator,” Trump says he is holding meetings with numerous Asian leaders.
“I would sit down with anybody,” he says. “I don’t think it’s strength or weakness, I think sitting down with people is not a bad thing. So I would certainly be open to doing that but we’ll see where it goes, I think we’re far too early.”
Trump’s conciliatory-sounding comment came after months of fiery rhetorical exchanges between the two leaders, prompted by a series of internationally condemned nuclear and missile tests by the North.
The North has denounced Trump as a “mentally deranged US dotard,” or senile old man, and the country’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun referred to him Sunday as “instable.”
Trump, for his part, has mocked Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and has vowed to rain “fire and fury” down on the North if it threatens the US or its allies.
— AFP
Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah movement, said on Sunday that the previous day’s resignation of the country’s premier Saad Hariri had been “imposed” by Saudi Arabia.
“It is clear that the resignation was a Saudi decision that was imposed on prime minister Hariri. It was not his intention, not his wish and not his decision” to quit, Nasrallah says in a televised address.
— AFP
Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials vow to continue to fight Israel and say they have additional attack tunnels, after the IDF reveals it is holding the bodies of five of the Islamic Jihad fighters.
“Our battle is open and shall not end. The freedom tunnel is not the only tunnel owned by the Islamic Jihad. It has many tunnels and many options,” Palestinian Islamic Jihad senior official Ahmad al-Mudalal tells the Hamas-linked website al-Shehab.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum tells al-Shehab that the Israeli decision would not stop “the resistance from developing its capabilities.”
An unnamed member of the Sayara Al Quds, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s military wing, says the terror organization will “recover the bodies of the martyrs of the freedom tunnel, and will trample with its feet on the necks of the enemies.”
The terror group member tells the Palestine Today news agency, affiliated with PIJ, that “the occupation will not be able to bargain over our fighters.”
— Dov Lieber
A ground invasion of North Korea is the only way to locate and destroy, with complete certainty, all components of leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons program, according to a Pentagon official.
“It is the most bleak assessment,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says Sunday.
Two House Democrats, in a letter to the Pentagon, had asked about casualty assessments in a possible conflict with North Korea, and Rear Adm. Michael J. Dumont of the Joint Staff responded on behalf of the Defense Department.
Dumont noted that the United States is evaluating North Korea’s ability to target heavily populated areas of South Korea with long-range artillery, rockets and ballistic missiles. He pointed out that Seoul, the South’s capital with a population of 25 million, is just 35 miles from the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas.
The amount of casualties would differ depending on the advance warning and the ability of US and South Korea forces to counter these attacks, he tells Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz.
“A classified briefing would be the best place to discuss in detail the capability of the US and its allies to discuss capabilities to counter North Korea’s ability to respond with a nuclear weapon and eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons located in deeply buried, underground facilities,” Dumont says. He also mentioned the possibility that chemical and biological weapons might be used by the North in case of a conflict.
In a joint statement Saturday, 15 Democratic lawmakers and one Republican— all military veterans — call the assessment that a ground invasion would be required to destroy the North’s nuclear arsenal “deeply disturbing” and that such an action “could result in hundreds of thousands, or even millions of deaths in just the first few days of fighting.”
“It is our intent to have a full public accounting of the potential cost of war, so the American people understand the commitment we would be making as a nation if we were to pursue military action,” the lawmakers say.
— AP
Likud MK Oren Hazan announces he will be joining a hunger strike launched earlier on Sunday by a group of settler leaders and representatives of bereaved families. The activists are demanding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately transfer funds he pledged for West Bank security and infrastructure development.
Hazan says that he is currently not in good health, having undergone two operations in the last month.
However, after seeing “bereaved families sitting here in the cold, hunger-striking in order to obtain security for the residents of Judea and Samaria, something that is really my responsibility and your responsibility, Mr. Prime Minister,” Hazan announces that he will join the protest.
— Jacob Magid
A key Netanyahu aide detained for questioning on Sunday in the submarines corruption scandal will not be permitted to return to work at the Prime Minister’s Office, Channel 2 reports.
The aide — who was held for questioning along with the prime minister’s attorney David Shimron — has not been named. The pair were grilled by police for over 10 hours on Sunday, with the questioning ongoing.
However, according to Channel 2, police will not seek to extend their remand and the two were expected to be released once the interrogation ends.
In what is known as “Case 3000,” authorities are investigating alleged corruption and bribery involved in multi-billion-shekel naval deals with the German shipbuilding company ThyssenKrupp. Netanyahu is not a suspect in the case. However, police are planning to summon him to testify on what he knows about the issue.
A new poll, released a year after Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory, shows the US president suffering historically dismal approval ratings as the Russia investigation casts a continuing shadow.
The Washington Post, which conducted the survey with ABC News, says Trump’s approval rating was “demonstrably lower than any previous chief executive at this point in his presidency over seven decades of polling.”
Just 37 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the job.
The president’s disapproval rating was 59%, with half of those saying they strongly disapproved, both the worst marks of his presidency.
The next highest disapproval rating among presidents stretching back to Dwight Eisenhower was 41%, for Bill Clinton, in 1993.
The poll comes as Trump faces a daunting array of political and legal challenges, led by the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
— AFP
Nasrallah on Sunday plays down the risks of conflict between rival camps in Lebanon or with his movement’s arch-foe Israel.
“Do not listen to alarmist speeches … do not worry, there is nothing to worry about,” he says.
“We will react responsibly and calmly… we are concerned about the security” of Lebanon, Nasrallah adds.
On Israel, he says the Jewish state “will not embark on a war against Lebanon unless it is guaranteed a quick, decisive and inexpensive war.”
— AFP
Newly leaked documents show that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the Trump administration’s point man on trade and manufacturing policy, has a stake in a company that does business with a gas producer partly owned by the son-in-law of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to records obtained by the International Consortium of Journalists, Ross is an investor in Navigator Holdings, a shipping giant that counts Russian gas and petrochemical producer Sibur among its major customers. Putin’s son-in-law Kirill Shamalov once owned more than 20 percent of the company, but now holds a much smaller stake.
Commerce Department spokesman James Rockas says Ross “never met” Shamalov and has generally supported the Trump administration’s sanctions against Russia, according to the ICIJ report. Rockas adds that Ross has withdrawn from matters related to transoceanic shipping vessels and has met the “highest ethical standards.”
The details are likely to add to the questions about ties between Russia and the Trump administration, connections that for months have shadowed the White House and are a focus of an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. Yet it wasn’t immediately clear how many partners Ross might have or what the profit-sharing agreement might be.
ICIJ disclosed the Ross holding as part of reporting on 13.4 million records of offshore entities in tax havens leaked to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The newspaper then shared the records with ICIJ and a network of more than 380 journalists in 67 countries. The New York Times is its US partner in this inquiry.
The Times earlier reported on the Ross holding.
— AP
Local news outlets report that several people have been shot at a Baptist Church in South Texas.
Television stations KSAT and KENS report that there are multiple victims and that there is a large police presence at the church in Sutherland Springs, which is 30 miles (48 kilometers) southeast of San Antonio.
KSAT reports that two Airlife helicopters are also at the scene.
A sheriff’s department dispatcher says everyone is at the scene and unavailable to comment.
KSAT has video of several fire and police vehicles at the church and a photo of a helicopter that the station says was arriving to take victims to hospitals.
— AP
A Texas sheriff says there were multiple deaths in the church shooting and the shooter has been taken down, AP reports.
A local news report says a 2-year-old was among those shot by the gunman.
