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June 30th, 2016 
Awake Goy 
Al Franken attending the 68th Annual Writers Guild Awards at Edison Ballroom in New York City, Feb. 13, 2016. (Theo Wargo/Getty Images For The Writers Guild Of America)
Last week Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said that if Hillary Clinton asked him to be her running mate, he’d take the job. “If Hillary Clinton came to me and said, ‘Al, I really need you to be my vice president, to run with me,’ I would say yes, but I’m very happy in the job that I have right now.”
Although Franken, 64, has spent seven years in the Senate and proven himself to be a conscientious lawmaker – championing decidedly unfunny issues like health insurance, mental health services in schools and net neutrality – some still find it hard to take the former comedian and Saturday Night Live writer seriously as a political figure. He was, after all, the author of an article in Playboy in 2000 about his visit to a (fictional) institute offering virtual pornography, and wrote an infamous Saturday Night Live sketch in which a suave Roman played by Burt Reynolds tries to pick up women at the local vomitorium.
And yet Franken, who defeated Republican incumbent and fellow Jew Norm Coleman in a bitter, highly disputed 2008 election, is on a number of short lists for the veep spot on the Democratic presidential ticket. The Hill included Franken among “Clinton’s 9 most likely VP picks” (admittedly, he was number 9), and Newsweek ranked him fifth as a possible choice, tied with former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
Franken is himself the author, in 1999, of Why Not Me?, a satirical campaign memoir in which a character named Al Franken becomes president (and chooses as his running mate former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, correctly predicting Al Gore’s VP choice a year before it happened).
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Published time: 29 Jun, 2016 13:27
US Secretary of State John Kerry © Nicolas Asfouri / Reuters
Britain could remain in the EU for the foreseeable future, with Downing Street appearing not to know how to negotiate the divorce, US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Colorado at the Aspen Ideas Festival a day after speaking to Prime Minister David Cameron.
The UK will have to implement Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in order to leave the EU, which would kick-start a process that could last months, if not years before an exit is formalized. This would involve a series of renegotiations of treaties and other headaches for Britain.
“This is a very complicated divorce,” Kerry told the audience in Colorado, days after Cameron announced he was stepping down. The British PM feels “powerless” to negotiate the country’s exit, which he had campaigned against. According to the US secretary of state, this is a “fair conclusion – to go out and start negotiating a thing that he doesn’t believe in and he had no idea how he would do it.”
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Five other candidates put their names forward as prime ministerial candidates after David Cameron’s resignation
June 30, 2016, 3:56 pm
LONDON (AP) — The race to become Britain’s next prime minister took a dramatic and surprising turn Thursday, with former London Mayor Boris Johnson — popular with the public and widely considered a front-runner — ruling himself out of the race after the defection of a key ally.
In a morning of political machinations and mutterings of treachery that had commentators reaching for Shakespearean parallels, Justice Secretary Michael Gove abruptly withdrew his support for Johnson and announced he was running for the Conservative Party leadership himself.
Johnson, a prominent campaigner for British withdrawal from the European Union, told a news conference that the next Conservative leader would need to unite the party and ensure Britain’s standing in the world.
“Having consulted colleagues and in view of the circumstances in Parliament, I have concluded that person cannot be me,” he said, to the astonishment of journalists and supporters in the room.
Johnson dropped out after Gove, Johnson’s ally in leading the EU “leave” campaign, startled the political world by announcing that he was running to succeed Prime Minister David Cameron.
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Lebanon thwarts terror raids by Daesh on bustling areas
The Lebanese army says it has foiled two planned terrorist attacks by Takfiri Daesh militants on a tourist site and a crowded area.
According to an army statement released by Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) on Thursday, five people involved in the thwarted assaults, including the mastermind, were detained.
“Those arrested confessed to having carried out terrorist acts against the army previously. Investigations are continuing,” the statement read.
On June 27, eight bombers launched two waves of attacks on the northeastern Christian village of Qaa, located on the border with violence-wracked Syria, killing five people and injuring almost 30 others.
There has been no claim of responsibility for the deadly bombings, but security officials believe Daesh terrorists were behind the raids.
Lebanese security chiefs have warned of a heightened terrorist threat in the wake of the Qaa attacks, with Prime Minister Tammam Salam raising concerns about “a new wave of terrorist operations.”
Lebanon’s Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk said most of the Qaa bombers came from crisis-hit Syria.
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Turkish president meets with Hamas chief in Istanbul
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has met with visiting leader of the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, amid reports suggesting that Ankara and Tel Aviv are close to agreeing a deal on normalizing tense ties.
Erdogan received Khaled Meshaal in Istanbul on Friday, Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency reported, quoting presidential sources.
The two sides discussed how to ease the humanitarian problems that the Palestinians are grappling with and how to bridge the differences between Hamas and the Palestinian Fatah movement.
Fatah and Hamas have been at odds after a joint national consensus government was dissolved in June 2015, just a year after it was initially established.
The two key rival factions have had particularly tense relations since Hamas scored a major victory in Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and emerged the ruling party in the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip, also triggering Israeli ire and alarm.
Friday’s meeting between Erdogan and Meshaal came at a time that according to Turkish press reports, Ankara and Tel Aviv could hold final talks on concluding a reconciliation agreement on Sunday.
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Ratings agency’s decision follows similar moves by Moody’s and S&P
- Tuesday 28 June 2016
Mr Farage, on the same day he was mocked by members of the European parliament, defended the Republican
- Wednesday 29 June 2016
- Mr Farage said his problems are ‘far bigger’ than Mr Trump’s AP
On May 31, 2010, Shayetet 13 commandos took control of a Turkish boat that left from Istanbul at the initiative of the IHH, which is recognized by Israel and European countries as a terrorist organization. The incident exacerbated the diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Israel.
Israel claimed that Erdogan gave the flotilla a green light to leave the Istanbul port and that members of the then Turkish PM’s party encouraged the IHH to use violence against IDF soldiers, if the former took control of the boat.
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In the tourist area located next to Taksim Square there were still some people opposed to the political developments which led to an end to the end of the prolonged break with Israel. Not far away, on the Bosporus Straits sits the Mavi Marmara as a symbol of the six year conflict which has finally come to an end.
Meanwhile, The Hurriyet Daily News – one of Turkey’s largest papers – spoke about the reconciliation deal with Israel and with Russia in the same breath.
The immediate impact of the two political agreements is mainly economic, with the return of millions of Russian tourists, and perhaps even Israeli tourists as well.
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Two photos of the winner of the Miss Hitler 2016 contest run by the British white supremacist group National Action. (National Action)
(JTA) — A Scottish woman who said she turned to neo-Nazism after “the Jewish propaganda became too obvious to ignore” was named Miss Hitler 2016.
National Action, a British white supremacist group, announced the winners of its contest on Twitter and on its blog earlier this week because Facebook removed the group’s page in May, shortly after the contest was announced.
Female supporters were invited to “submit a short interview for the site under a pseudonym, accompanied by photos in the T-shirts we sent them.”
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BERLIN (JTA) — Prosecutors in Stuttgart are shelving their war crimes investigation of a 94-year-old man who already was convicted of Nazi war crimes in Italy.
Former SS soldier Wilhelm Kusterer of Engelsbrand — who was found guilty of involvement in the massacre of 770 civilians in Marzabotto, Italy, in 1944 and sentenced to life in prison in absentia in 2008 — was too ill to stand trial, the prosecutors said. A spokesman for the prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to get a conviction in Germany, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.
The German investigation was launched in 2013.
In March 2015, Kusterer, who had served for years in the Engelsbrand parliament as a member of the Social Democratic Party, received an honorary medal for social services from his town. But he returned the medal last March following protests mounted from Italy against honoring a convicted war criminal.
In 2014, nearly 30,000 people died from opioid overdose in US, a 14 % jump from previous year; rise also seen among American Jews
June 29, 2016, 3:59 am
NEW YORK (JTA) — Eve Goldberg’s son, Isaac, was in a panic. He had to get out of college.
Isaac Goldberg Volkmar had been at the University of Rhode Island for less than a semester in 2009 when he called his mother desperate to escape. He had joined a fraternity, where his brothers got him to take the pain medications Percocet and OxyContin. After a few months the New York teen knew he was addicted and needed help.
From there, Isaac was in and out of rehab in Pennsylvania and New York. He overdosed the summer after freshman year. At one point, a family friend burst into Eve’s apartment, where she found Isaac turning blue and had him rushed to the hospital.
Isaac grew up in what his mother calls a normal Jewish home in the downtown Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca. The family had no history of addiction, so by 2013, when Isaac was recovered and working as a basketball coach at the United Nations International School in Manhattan, Goldberg hoped the worst was behind him. He was even set to move into his own apartment.
But Isaac began acting anxious that Thanksgiving. He woke up his mother in the middle of the night looking for aspirin. In December, Goldberg walked into his room and found him unresponsive, overdosed on opioids. He died after six weeks in a coma; he was 23 years old.
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In new submission to Parliament, former Labour mayor of London supports two-state solution though last month he called creation of Israel ‘fundamentally wrong’
June 28, 2016, 6:46 pm
LONDON — Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London suspended by Labour in an anti-Semitism row, and notorious for insisting that Hitler supported Zionism for a while, issued a long written submission Tuesday defending his positions to Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry on the rise of anti-Semitism.
Livingstone appeared before the panel on June 14, but on Tuesday sent a further lengthy submission in which he complains that he was questioned as though he were under investigation, claims to deplore anti-Semitism, and accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”
He acknowledges in the submission that he told the BBC that “Hitler was supporting Zionism” in the 1930s, and still insists on the veracity of the claim, but says he does “regret raising the historical points about Nazi policy in the 1930s.”
Livingstone writes that he does not believe “Zionism or the policies of Israeli governments are at all analogous to Nazism. Israeli governments have never had the aim of the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews,” he acknowledges.
Still, he goes on to launch a bitter assault on modern Israel, stating: “Israel’s policies have included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed at clearing them out of what became a large part of the Israeli state. Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denies the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. I am deeply critical of these policies, but I do not consider them as analogous to Nazism.”
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Hostility to Jews among Arab immigrants and deep-seated anti-Semitism mean there will be ‘massive’ exodus to Israel among France’s 500,000 Jews, says Jewish Agency chief on visit to Paris
June 28, 2016, 4:50 pm
PARIS — Arab immigration to France and deep-seated anti-Semitism in that country mean French Jews have no future there, the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel said.
Natan Sharansky made this declaration on Monday in the French capital, where he was attending a Jewish Agency Board of Governors meeting, held in the city for the first time as a sign of solidarity with French Jews.
“We came here because there are historical processes here,” Sharansky said of France, which for the past two years has been Israel’s largest source of immigrants thanks to a record-setting 15,000 Jews who settled in Israel in that time.
“There is no future for the Jews in France because of the Arabs, and because of a very anti-Israel position in society, where new anti-Semitism and ancient anti-Semitism converge,” Sharansky told JTA.
Since 2012, Islamists have killed eight Jews in two shooting attacks that came amid hundreds of nonlethal violent assaults. A French citizen with alleged ties to Islamist groups is standing trial in France for a third shooting in 2014 at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, in which four people died.
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Donniel Hartman, the head of an educational powerhouse, argues heretically that the great monotheistic religions are fatally flawed — by an obsessive focus on God that overwhelms what should be our prime imperative, to live decent, moral lives. Here, he explains how we need to fight back
June 28, 2016, 11:31 am
‘Putting God Second.” The very title of Donniel Hartman’s new book sounds sacrilegious, heretical, an assault on the Divine and on faith in the Divine.
But of course, it can’t possibly be that, can it? It’s written, after all, by an Orthodox rabbi. By the president of Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute, an educational powerhouse dedicated to invigorating Judaism.
The Hartman Institute, situated on a large, airy campus around the corner from the Jerusalem Theater, employs 300-plus people whose shared purpose, says Hartman, is to “elevate the ideas and educational programs in Jewish life, so as to create a meaningful and powerful Judaism for the modern world.” It runs programs in 130 secular Israeli high schools, and a gap year for Israelis and North Americans; it has trained over 1,000 rabbis in North America; it co-runs a new Israeli rabbinic school for men and women of all denominations; it has provided curricula for Hillel educators at dozens of US college campuses; 1,000 senior Israeli army officers a year have studied at the institute, which also hosts two Orthodox high schools — one for girls, one for boys — with 700 students. Thousands of lay leaders across North America study in its seminars. It runs extensive programs for Christian and Muslim leaders in North America and for Arab educators in Israel. On the day I visited, a group of key Israeli security officials were in a nearby classroom, for a program on the significance of Jerusalem.
Hartman High School students take their matriculation exams in mathematics (photo credit: Yossi Zamir/Flash90)
And the head of this Jewish research and educational juggernaut is telling us we need to put God second? Well, yes he is.
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