Washington’s Middle East peace envoy delayed his trip to the region as Israeli officials remained defiant yesterday over their plans to build more settlements in disputed east Jerusalem amid deepening feud between US and Israel.
Dozens of masked Palestinians also hurled rocks at police and set tires ablaze across Jeruslam’s volatile eastern sector, where thousands of officers, including reinforcements brought in from other locations, were in place for a fifth straight day. Police said seven have been arrested so far.
The diplomatic crisis erupted last week after Israel announced during a visit by US Vice President Joe Biden that it would build 1,600 apartments for Jews in east Jerusalem, the area the Palestinians claim for a future capital.
PHOTO: AFP
The announcement enraged Palestinians, who have threatened to bow out of US-brokered peace talks that were supposed to have begun in the coming days. The Obama administration, fuming over what it called the “insulting” Israeli conduct, demanded that Israel call off the contentious project.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Israel Radio that demands to halt Israeli construction there “are unreasonable as far as we are concerned.” He predicted that the diplomatic row with the US would blow over, saying neither side had an interest in escalation.
But Washington notified Israel early yesterday that envoy George Mitchell had put off his trip. The visit will be rescheduled at an undetermined time, officials on both sides said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for the timing of the project’s approval, but he has not said it would be canceled. On Monday, he defended four decades of Jewish construction in east Jerusalem and said it “in no way” hurts Palestinians.
Palestinians, who number about 250,000 in east Jerusalem, see the building of new settlements and the presence of some 180,000 Jews there as a grave challenge to their claims to the territory.
About 3,000 Israeli police officers were deployed in the east Jerusalem area yesterday, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
Early yesterday, masked Palestinians hurled rocks at Israeli police and burned tires in multiple areas. Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said police fired stun grenades to disperse dozens of protesters at one site, while village elders helped to end protests at another. No injuries were reported in those disturbances.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS