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In 2022, the share of yuan payments for Russian imports rose to 23% from 4% before the Ukraine war

Foreign Secretary James Cleverley has pledged to investigate after the Jewish Chronicle revealed that scientists at British universities have helped Iran develop technology that can be used in its drone program.

The foreign secretary @JamesCleverly has pledged to investigate after the JC revealed that scientists at British universities have helped Iran develop technology that can be used in its drone programme. pic.twitter.com/iqkudiZEP2

— The Jewish Chronicle (@JewishChron) June 13, 2023

The post WATCH: British universities helping Iran develop drone technology appeared first on World Israel News.

Training failures and hiding knowledge of the gate the terrorist used are two main factors blamed for the tragic incident.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF has admitted mistakes and drawn personal consequences for three senior officers following the June 3 attack on the southern border when a rogue Egyptian policeman killed three soldiers before being eliminated.

One of the main conclusions of the inquiry was that there was an operational failure regarding the half-meter-by-half-meter opening in the border fence that the terrorist used to gain entry. It was intentionally made to be easily opened, so as to facilitate entry for the purpose of repairs or security operations, but its existence was only revealed to senior staff, not to the troops who had a post only 150 meters away.

“The special security passage was viewed by us as a hidden passage… not updating the soldiers on this passage was a systemic failure… that lasted for several years,” said Southern Command head Maj. Gen. Eliezer Toledano. “We should have understood this, but unfortunately, we didn’t.”

It was also found to be a major error that the border companies are trained mainly to stop drug smuggling attempts, which occur on an almost-daily basis along the Egyptian border, rather than terrorist attacks, which have only been attempted a few times over the last decade.

The IDF announced that it would now “refine the order of priorities” and increase training for troops regarding direct attacks.

Other mistakes on the border included soldiers hearing gunfire and not reporting it and the policy of 12-hour shifts of duty, something the lower echelons have complained about for a long time but to no avail.

Regarding the hunt for the terrorist, the investigation found that Staff Sgt. Ohad Dahan, who was killed in the operation, as well as others, were not wearing their helmets when they approached the terrorist’s position. The assailant fatally shot Dahan and wounded another soldier from some 200 meters away.

Some changes were made even before the report was made to IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi.

The fence was sealed almost immediately, and the guard shifts were shortened to eight hours after the Bardelas Battalion on border duty reportedly refused to stand sentry unless the change was made, saying that they could not perform their duties properly otherwise.

As a result of the investigation, the army has decided to formally censure the Bardelas commander, Lt. Col. Ivan Kon, and freeze promotion for him for five years due to his “responsibility for the implementation of the operating concept in his forces.”

One slot further up the line, Paran Brigade chief Col. Ido Sa’ad has been removed from his position and will be transferred due to his “overall responsibility for the event and the manner by which operations are carried out in his area.”

Sa’ad was dismissed even though the report said he had properly led the operation that ended with the terrorist’s death.

Finally, the 80th Division commander in charge of Paran and other brigades in the south, Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, was reprimanded for his “overall responsibility for the event, including the lack of control over the implementation of the procedures.”

‘Incident could and should have been prevented’

The investigation found that while the pair of guards, Sgt. Lia Ben Nun and Staff Sgt. Ori Yitzhak Iluz, were not asleep when the Egyptian cut the zip ties holding the fence closed and approached them at around 7 a.m., they did not fire their weapons, meaning that he had completely surprised them.

In reaction to this finding, the IDF said that from now on, four guards will man every station so that each direction will be covered. Having more people at the post would seemingly also increase their alertness.

“We conducted an exhaustive and in-depth investigation,” Halevi said Tuesday. “Along with quality work, initiative and successes, we also found operational and command faults and gaps. We will study them, fix and improve them. This is a difficult incident, which could and should have been prevented, and it is our responsibility as commanders — and mine as commander of the army first and foremost — to learn lessons and be better.”

The post IDF admits mistakes after three IDF soldiers killed on southern border, officer dismissed appeared first on World Israel News.

A Pennsylvania woman was recently charged with aiding suicide after a two-year investigation into the death of her ex-boyfriend uncovered a series of “heinous” text messages she sent him. On June 13, authorities charged Mandie Reusch, 35, with criminal charges following the death of her former partner Kevin Metzger two years prior.

A search of Metzger’s property revealed a letter from Reusch. Further investigation revealed that the defendant sent her ex a “trail of torment and solicitation” in June 2020. According to State Police Trooper Steve Limani, the content of the texts included various explicit images, videos, and themes, which he described as “the next level or most extreme amount of bullying.”

One example of Reusch’s manipulative behavior was a video she sent Metzger of her having sex with another man for money he had previously given her. Westmoreland County District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli argued that Metzger might still be alive if Reusch had kept the “harsh words” to herself.

Defense attorney Phil DiLucente maintained that if Reusch were to be convicted in this case, it would set a dangerous precedent for prosecuting people over “emotional words” instead of verbal communication. In addition to aiding suicide, Reusch is facing charges of harassment and is due to appear in court on June 27 for her preliminary hearing.

If the morality of a cause could be judged simply from the proportion of intelligent and creative people who support it, then the Eugenics movement of the early twentieth century most assuredly would have been among the most righteous crusades in modern history. Among its supporters were presidents, prime ministers, economists, professors of law and medicine, Nobel laureates, and many of the greatest names in contemporary finance, philanthropy, literature, and art. When Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in his majority opinion on the notorious Buck vs. Bell case, wrote that “Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough”, he spoke not only for himself and the seven other majority justices who decided as he did in the case, but for perhaps for the greater part of educated American citizens as well.

Twelve years earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, Virginia Woolf recorded in her personal journal a description of a recent encounter that had been particularly distasteful to her: out for a Sunday walk with her husband Leonard, she had passed “a long line of imbeciles”, whose existence, she forthrightly states, struck her as an offense: “One realized that everyone in that long line was a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature with no forehead, or no chin, and an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible.” Before moving on to less remarkable observations, Woolf concludes the passage unforgettably: “They should certainly all be killed.”

Woolf’s Bloomsbury cohort John Maynard Keynes, probably the most influential Anglophone economist of his generation, was no less a true believer in the rightness of the crusade. While serving as the treasurer of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society, Keynes cast an alarmed eye toward the future and found it rather too thickly populated. An ameliorative plan of action he announced in a 1914 speech to the organization: “In most places the material condition of mankind is inferior to what it might be if their populousness were to be diminished…In many, if not in most, parts of the world there actually exists at the present time a denser population than is compatible with a high level of economic wellbeing.” Wendell Holmes, Woolf, Keynes, and other equally refined intellects of the hour were agreed on this article of faith: that the world must be unpeopled. So much was obvious to all but the backward and the superstitious.

As a further source of strength, the attractions of Eugenics were impressively ecumenical. It is of course conveniently argued today by partisans of the right and of the left that the ideology was fundamentally socialist in its origins, or fundamentally reactionary, depending on whose convenience is best served. But, in truth, Eugenicists wore all manner of party labels and sectarian colors. In their ranks were both Republican and Democrat, nationalist and radical, Liberal and Tory. The movement’s latitude of appeal may be appreciated by considering two anecdotes: in 1917, William Ralph Inge, the patrician and Protestant Dean of St. Paul’s, published a determined essay on the necessity of defending the ascendency of the white man against the rise of the darker races. In that same year, the Anarchist leader Eugene Debs contributed to the Birth Control Review an encomium dedicated to “Comrade Sanger” and her noble labor in the vineyard of scientific birth control. For all of its narrowly elitist aims, there was a perverse catholicity in the appeal of the gospel of sterilization.

The study of the movement and its supporters may leave the interested student curious as to the nature of the opposition. Whether we feel that the controlled and methodical “improvement” of the species was right or wrong, it ought to be obvious that to stand against it was to oppose not only a scientific doctrine, but that much more powerful thing: a social fashion whose followers included nearly all the tenured experts and bright sophisticates of the world’s wealthier nations. As often happens at the appearance of some new and stylish evil, articulate dissent was slow to reply. This fact might exasperate, but need not surprise us. Probably had our generation then been living we would have done no better. Unglamorous plain truth usually counts on fewer allies than noisy modishness, and it would be valuable, if depressing, to know how many people over the centuries have made a permanent wreck of their honor in the name of a temporary vogue.

G.K. Chesterton was never fashionable while living. This may be one reason why we still read him now that he is dead. It happened that he was approaching the high crest of his literary ability when the Eugenicists were nearing the peak of their social influence. Once Chesterton recognized the moral consequences of that influence, his antagonism to it was unyielding and unequivocal. The fullest statement of his opposition to the great herd-thinning experiment appears in his 1922 book Eugenics and Other Evils. Of his several works dedicated to social issues, this remains one of the liveliest and most combative. It is evident on every page that Chesterton was conscious that to stand for one side or the other was to stand not for a relative convenience or inconvenience, but for good or evil in forms as absolute as can be found. In attacking, Chesterton is cheerfully unsparing and generously fanatical. He is at war with an evil idea rather than with its particular supporters. In his enemy he sees a new form of slavery as well as a false scientism, and a slavery all the more insidious for the halo of humanitarian rhetoric that surrounds it.

To Chesterton, it was obvious that this theory supplies the well-to-do with another instrument for the manipulation of the poor; the thing in question may even be more pernicious than certain older oppressions, such as sweated labor and penal transportation, for in Eugenics lies an evil that is allegedly exercised for the benefit of its victims and advocates. To defend it is to cover naked cruelty with a mendacious veneer of public-spirited virtue. To excuse its sins against the innocent and the weak is to sign a careless benediction over what Chesterton refers to as the “anarchy from above”, the irresponsible experimentation of privileged sophistry on powerless Everyman and Everywoman. Eugenics and Other Evils is not a long book; therefore it is all the more impressive how much of his enemies’ wooly reasoning Chesterton unravels, and how many fallacies he is able to expose. The book is a small masterpiece of the polemicist’s art.

No book ever ends a battle, even if certain have begun them. Chesterton died when Eugenics had still to enjoy its hour of darkness in Belsen and Buchenwald. After these and other monstrosities of National Socialism were brought to light and judged, the cause was compelled to change its language and its colors. Yet it is nonetheless alive. Whether any controversialist of Chesterton’s strength remains to fight it is a more doubtful question.       

The post Chesterton and Eugenics: A Man against A Fashion appeared first on Providence.

“Our stance is clear: No agreement with Iran will oblige Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Israel will continue to do everything to defend itself.”

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

A “mini-deal” between the U.S. and Iran aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for some sanctions relief will come to fruition in the near future, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told senior government officials.

“What’s on the agenda at the moment between Washington and Tehran is not a nuclear deal, it’s a mini-deal,” Netanyahu by Walla News as saying, speaking in a closed-door meeting to the Knesset Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday. “We will be able to handle it.”

Netanyahu reportedly stressed that the potential deal is a “mini-agreement, not an agreement,” following widespread reports that Tehran and Washington were engaged in talks, via an Omani negotiator.

Officials who were present at the meeting said Netanyahu framed the deal as something Israel “can live with,” and that “this isn’t the deal we knew,” referring to the 2015 nuclear agreement which Israel had vehemently opposed at the time.

The premier also emphasized that Israel would not view the deal as restricting Israel’s freedom of action for fighting Iranian-funded terror and proxies in the region.

“Our stance is clear: No agreement with Iran will oblige Israel,” he said. “Israel will continue to do everything to defend itself.”

According to the Walla report, Iran will not enrich uranium above 60 percent purity – notably, reports earlier this year indicated that the Islamic Republic has already surpassed this limit – and the U.S. will unfreeze large amounts of seized Iranian funds and assets abroad.

The two countries will also engage in a prisoner exchange.

On Tuesday, U.S. State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller said that reports of an upcoming interim deal with Iran were “completely false.”

Miller stressed that “the vast majority of those reports have been wrong or completely misleading,” but did not deny that Oman was acting as a negotiator between the U.S. and Israel.

Washington “has always had the ability to deliver messages to Iran when it’s in the interest of the U.S. to do so,” Miller said.

The post US ‘mini-deal’ with Iran is inevitable, but Israel can ‘live with it’: Netanyahu appeared first on World Israel News.

On Sunday morning in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Ashley Thielen, the mother of two young children, let her one-year-old and three-year-old go to play at Bliss Park without expecting what would happen next.

Horrifyingly, she soon heard her toddler screaming, their skin marked with acid burns. After an investigation, authorities determined that an intruder had broken into the chemical storage room of the park’s pool and stolen muriatic acid: a corrosive substance commonly used for cleaning and maintaining a pool’s pH balance.

The children suffered second-degree burns to the palms of their hands and the bottoms of their feet. Thankfully, Thielen’s two children escaped with mostly superficial damage.

The acid had been poured on three slides, including the one that had caused the burns to the Thielen’s children. The horrifying incident reminds us of the importance of staying vigilant around our children and reporting suspicious activity to the authorities.

The acid pool was cleaned from the playground, but the slides remain closed until further notice. Longmeadow Police have asked anyone with burns to their hands, arms, clothing, or any information relating to the acid spill to come forward to the authorities.

Prosecutors said that Awawdeh walked up to the victim and called him a “dirty Jew” and said “F–k Israel, Hamas is going to kill all of you.”

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

A pro-Palestinian activist who brutally beat a Jewish man on a New York street and bragged afterwards that he’d “do it again” was sentenced to 18 months in jail on Tuesday.

In May 2021, Waseem Awawdeh, 25, and four other men targeted Joey Borgen, who was identifiably Jewish due to his kippah (yarmulke) as he walked to a pro-Israel rally in Manhattan.

Awawdeh and his accomplices pepper-sprayed, kicked, punched, and beat Borgen with crutches in the unprovoked attack, leaving the victim hospitalized with a concussion.

He was reportedly originally offered a lenient plea deal to serve six months in jail by liberal Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, but that agreement was rescinded after widespread outrage from Jewish advocacy groups.

Awawdeh pleaded guilty to charges in April to attempted assault in the second degree as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree, as part of a new plea deal that will see him serve up to 18 months in jail.

During a 2021 arraignment hearing shortly after the attack, prosecutors said that Awawdeh walked up to the victim and called him a “dirty Jew” and said “F–k Israel, Hamas is going to kill all of you.”

Prosecutors added that Awawdeh had bragged about his crime, telling a jailer, “If I could do it again, I would do it again. I have no problem doing it again.”

“I’ve heard of waves of hate increasing through the city, and maybe I was a little naive to think it would never happen to me,” Borgen told the New York Post following the assault.

“I’ve been in New York for my entire life and I would never in a million years have thought that it would get to this point where I would have to second guess wearing a yarmulke in public.”

Another participant in the attack, Faisal Elezzi, was sentenced to three years of probation and mandatory “anti-bias training” in April 2023.

Three other men are currently awaiting trial for their roles in the assault on Borgen.

The post Pro-Palestinian attacker of NY Jewish man sentenced to 18 months in jail appeared first on World Israel News.

The close-knit community in France, is mourning the tragic shooting death of 11-year-old Solaine Thornton and praying for the recovery of her parents. The devastating attack on the family during an outdoor barbecue has left the small town in anguish, and investigators have revealed details about the suspect and his motives.

Dirk Raats, 70, was a neighbor of the Thorntons and had been in a years-long dispute with them over their inherited garden. The situation boiled over Saturday night, when investigators believe Raats opened fire on the family from less than 30 feet away, shooting Solaine on a swing set and then her parents.

The animosity between the Raats and Thorntons began with the latter cutting down a large oak tree whose branches crossed their neighbor’s property. Though Raats and his wife tried to sue for damages, they ultimately lost the case. The couple then attempted unsuccessfully to resolve the conflict at a 2019 town hall.

Further complicating the tragedy is that Raats was allegedly under the influence of drugs at the time of the shooting. Police discovered several illegal firearms, including a 22-caliber rifle and a large amount of cannabis, at the suspects’ house.

However, Solaine’s 8-year-old sister Celeste had the presence of mind to run from the scene, seeking help from family friends Pierre and Frederique Leroy. The couple saw Rachel holding her bleeding daughter, screaming, and Adrian shouting from the pain of his injuries.

The senseless shooting of Solaine Thornton and the severe injuries of her parents is an unfathomable tragedy for the small community. People are working to come to terms with the senseless act, honoring young Solaine’s memory and praying for a speedy recovery for her parents.

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