Israeli natural gas deal revived thanks to softening of contested clause
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) After a series of hurdles, a breakthrough has been achieved in the negotiations over a deal that would regulate the exploration, harvesting, and development of Israel’s Tamar and Leviathan offshore natural gas fields.
The framework agreement has been contested by multiple legal petitions seeking to repeal it. Most recently, Israel’s High Court of Justice overturned the deal, giving the Knesset a year to amend the plan or risk cancellation of the deal altogether. The court cited a clause in the deal that would prevent Israel from making significant regulatory changes for the next 10 years as the main reason for scuttling it, arguing that the clause, dubbed the “stability clause,” restricts the Knesset’s powers.
The initial “stability clause” stipulated that the Israeli government could not impose regulatory changes, such as breaking up suspected monopolies, on the consortium for a full 10 years from when the deal was signed. On Wednesday, the companies invested in harvesting the gas and Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz reached an agreement on a new framework that in effect softened the contested clause.
According to Steinitz’s office, the representatives of the energy companies agreed to rework the clause to allow future governments to amend the deal, should changes become necessary—something that the previous clause restricted.
“The new formulation [of the clause] gives future governments more room to exercise their judgment and implement policy changes regarding the natural gas industry…The proposal will be brought to a cabinet vote in the coming days,” Steinitz’s office said.
Steinitz further remarked on Wednesday that “after a concerted effort, we managed to formulate a suitable substitute to the stability clause, under the guidelines mandated by the High Court of Justice. Its purpose is to generate a regulatory environment that encourages investment. I am hopeful that the development of the Leviathan gas field, which began last January, will now continue according to the original timetable.”
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Israel faces ‘moderate’ risk for Zika virus outbreak, WHO warns
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a report on Wednesday warning that the Zika virus was expected to spread to parts of Europe and its surrounding region this coming summer, dividing countries into ones that have “moderate” and “low” risks of an outbreak. Israel was labeled as facing a moderate risk.
Israel received a “moderate” ranking because it is home to one of the strains of mosquitoes that can transmit Zika. Other reasons for such a warning include population density, urban environments, and robust global travel.
The majority of the people infected with Zika generally experience no symptoms, or light symptoms like rashes, fevers, and headaches. But scientists contend that contracting the virus during pregnancy can have extremely harmful implications, causing severe fetal abnormalities such as microcephaly. In rare cases, the Zika virus has also been linked to a disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can cause temporary paralysis.
Israeli health experts, in collaboration with the country’s Health and Environmental Protection ministries as well as the local authorities, have devised a plan designed to monitor and exterminate mosquitoes that may carry Zika. If implemented, the plan would give various enforcement bodies the authority to execute certain measures to prevent an Israeli outbreak of the virus. The proposal will be put to a vote among the Israeli ministerial cabinet.
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Avigdor Lieberman agrees to join Netanyahu’s coalition as defense minister
(JNS.org) Avigdor Lieberman and his right-leaning political party Yisrael Beiteinu will reportedly join Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, with Lieberman becoming defense minister.
Lieberman, Israel’s former foreign minister, accepted the position after Netanyahu offered it Wednesday as part of the revamping of the Likud party-led coalition. He will replace current Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.
Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog, leader of the center-left Zionist Union party, said after the news broke on Lieberman that “Israeli citizens will now have to deal with a government whose policies are borderline crazy.” Before Lieberman’s appointment, the Zionist Union itself had been under consideration to form a unity government with the Likud-led coalition.
On Tuesday, Lieberman had said that his party has “no intention of whitewashing the Labor party’s entry into the government. We’re the true national camp. We have clear positions, primarily in the fields of security, immigration and absorption. If those issues are indeed on the table, and they’re willing to talk to us—not just over the defense portfolio but also defense policy, death sentence, pension reforms—I don’t see why not have these talks directly, instead of in the dead of night and through mediators and leaks to the press.”
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Melania Trump: anti-Semitic attacks on reporter go ‘too far,’ but were ‘provoked’
(JNS.org) The wife of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Melania Trump, said that while anti-Semitic abuse leveled at Jewish reporter Julia Ioffe for a critical profile of the potential first lady went too far, the reaction to the article was also “provoked.”
“I don’t control my fans,” Melania Trump told lifestyle magazine DuJour. “I don’t agree with what they’re doing.”
After Ioffe wrote the article for GQ magazine, in which she also revealed that Melania Trump has a half brother born out of wedlock in Slovenia, Melania Trump had called the profile “inaccurate” and an invasion of her privacy.
Ioffe later received a barrage of anti-Semitic emails, calls, and social media messages—and even death threats—for the article. Ioffe eventually filed a police complaint due to the threats. Melania Trump told DuJour that while “there are people out there who maybe went too far,” Ioffe’s article “provoked them.”
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Israeli economist appointed as head of Brazil’s central bank
(JNS.org) Israeli economist Ilan Goldfein has been appointed the president of the Central Bank of Brazil in the wake of the suspension of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff due to corruption charges.
Goldfein—who will succeed Alexandre Tombini as the central bank’s leader—has served as the chief economist at Brazil’s largest private bank, Itau, as well as an advisor to the World Bank and an advisor to the International Monetary Fund. He is a doctoral graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Goldfein—whose appointment was announced just after Rousseff was suspended for hiding Brazil’s deficit to make the country’s economy look better—said that Brazil’s economy “is huge” but “too closed off: we only export 15 percent of our gross domestic product, which isn’t very much,” reported Yedioth Ahronoth.
“We are currently carrying out a very important investigation that deals with corruption. Its trail of money flows from the private sector to public companies, from Petrobras (a state-owned oil company also involved in the scandal) to politicians. For the first time we have billionaires sitting in jail. We have politicians in jail. People might ask, ‘Why is everything happening all at once?’ With an intensive investigation the kind of which we have never seen, the worst recession in our history and the recent suspension. Is it all just a bad coincidence? Obviously, it is not. What happened was that the middle class, which had thought it was going to get rich and whose aspirations were going to come true, must now face the decimation of its dreams,” Goldfein said.
“The government has gone bankrupt, which is why everyone is angry and supports the investigation,” he added. “The next person who might consider messing with the government will tell himself, ‘Well, I can either choose to make money legally or go to jail for 30 years,’ and they will draw their own conclusions. There are already preliminary signs of recovery, so I think things will turn around, even if it won’t last forever.”
Critics of Rousseff’s corruption charges have said that her suspension is in fact a political coup.
“What’s happening in Brazil today is a coup d’etat. A coup sponsored by both internal and external force,” wrote Manuel Barcia, a professor of Latin American History at the University of Leeds, in The Independent.
“White, privileged, wealthy, male Brazilians have led the impeachment charges,” he wrote, adding, “Unlike President Rousseff, many of those who have attempted to impeach her or replace her in this new corporate and corrupt government are being investigated for charges including conspiracy, money-laundering, forging documents, and misappropriating public funds.”
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Syria again uses deadly sarin nerve gas, Israeli official says
(JNS.org) Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has used deadly sarin nerve gas for the first time since 2013, when Syria agreed to stop using chemical weapons, a senior Israeli official told the British newspaper The Telegraph.
Assad’s regime used sarin and VX gas to kill 1,400 civilians in rebel territories of Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Assad subsequently agreed to surrender Syria’s chemical arsenal in an agreement brokered by the United States and Russia.
The Israeli official quoted by The Telegraph, however, believes that Syria has hidden a portion of its sarin—an odorless and invisible gas—despite U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s declaration that America and Russia “got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out” of Syria.
“They deceived and they still have it (sarin gas),” the anonymous Israeli official said. “Recently, they have decided to use it again. Once a taboo is broken, it becomes a standard weapon that you use. There are no red lines and [sarin] becomes a standard kind of weapon.”
In early May, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz had reported that Syria’s air force dropped sarin-filled bombs in a late-April strike against the Islamic State terror group. The Israeli official interviewed by The Telegraph confirmed that Syria used sarin gas in that operation about three weeks ago.
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Intel to close plant in Jerusalem
(JNS.org) The American technology giant Intel Corporation will close its Jerusalem-based production plant by the end of this year, transferring the plant’s 170 employees to Intel’s Kiryat Gat facility in southern Israel, Globes reported.
The closure follows the announcement of 12,000 layoffs by Intel around the world. A small number of Intel’s Jerusalem employees will be laid off, but it is not yet clear how many of the chip maker’s 10,000 R&D employees across Israel will be affected the company’s streamlining plan.
Amid a decline in sales for Intel computer chips, the California-headquartered company is reportedly shifting its focus to wearable technology, cloud computing, and data servers.
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Fatah Facebook page honors Japanese terrorists who killed 26 at Israeli airport
(JNS.org) The Fatah faction—which is led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas—on its Facebook page honored members of the Japanese Red Army who murdered 26 people at Israel’s Lod Airport (now Ben Gurion International Airport) in 1972, Palestinian Media Watch reported.
On Tuesday, about two weeks ahead of the anniversary of the Lod Airport attack, Fatah posted a photo from the attack that shows pools of blood on the floor with scattered luggage as well as a photo of one of the terrorists, Kozo Okamoto.
“Forty-four years since the airport operation…A thousand greetings to the Japanese fighter and friend Kozo Okamoto, the hero of the Lod airport operation, May 30, 1972,” the Fatah post read.
In addition to the 26 people who were killed, 80 others were wounded in the Lod Airport attack. The members of the Japanese Red Army who carried out the attack were recruited by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group.
Two of the terrorists—Takeshi Okudaira and Yasuyuki Yasuda—were killed during their attack, while Okamoto survived and received three life sentences in prison. But he was released through the Jibril Agreement in May 1985 after serving only 13 years of his sentences.
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