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The three agreements signed include a mutual recognition of drivers’ licenses and a maritime agreement designed to encourage direct trade links between the two countries.

By Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner

Israeli Transportation Minister Miri Regev on Monday signed a series of deals between Israel and Morocco in the latest example of deepening ties between Israel and the Arab kingdom.

“I am sure that together we will strengthen and bring the relations between the countries and in the Middle East to new heights,” Regev wrote of the visit, the first by an Israeli Transportation Minister to Morocco.

Her Moroccan counterpart Mohamed Abdeljalil is expected to reciprocate the visit in September.

The three agreements signed include a mutual recognition of drivers’ licenses and a maritime agreement designed to encourage direct trade links between the two countries. The third agreement is a memorandum of understanding to increase cooperation in road safety and sustainable mobility, with Israel and Morocco agreeing to form a joint team focused on transportation innovation, including drones and self-driving cars.

Morocco formally established normal relations with Israel in 2020 as part of the Abraham Accords framework that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries. As part of the negotiations to achieve that deal, the Trump administration agreed to recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara territory.

Regev told i24 news on Tuesday that Israel would also be taking a position on the Western Sahara issue.

“Relations with Morocco are of the utmost importance to Israel, and I am sure that the government will take a position on this issue very soon,” she said.

The post Israel signs transportation deals with Morocco as ties deepen appeared first on World Israel News.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen is in Slovakia as part of efforts to improve ties with the E.U.

By JNS

Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen met with European counterparts in Slovakia on Tuesday and called for unity in countering the Iranian threat before it is too late.

During the closed-door session in the capital Bratislava, Cohen also discussed strengthening the Abraham Accords and relations with the E.U. bloc.

He is the first Israeli foreign minister to address the Slavkov/Austerlitz format—a regional cooperation forum consisting of Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

The meeting included Ministers Alexander Schallenberg of Austria, Jan Lipavský of the Czech Republic and Miroslav Wlachovský of Slovakia.

“We discussed the joint fight against the Iranian nuclear issue and I said that we are close to the point of no return. We must act in cooperation against the reign of terror in Tehran,” Cohen posted to Twitter following the meeting.

“In addition, we discussed strengthening ties between the countries of the Abraham Accords. We continue to strengthen relations with the countries of the European Union, an important and strategic step to promote the interests of the State of Israel,” he continued.

Cohen kicked off his Central European trip on Sunday night in Croatia, on Monday meeting in Zagreb with Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and other top officials. Foreign Minister Gordan Grlić-Radman joined Israel’s top diplomat at the Zagreb Holocaust Memorial.

Cohen also met with the country’s President Zoran Milanović.

He will also visit Austria and Hungary before heading back to Israel. While in Budapest, Cohen will attempt to reach a final agreement on Hungary moving its embassy to Jerusalem. He is expected to meet with his Hungarian counterpart Péter Szijjártó and possibly with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

It is Cohen’s seventh visit to Europe since he assumed office on Dec. 29, part of an effort to improve ties with the European Union.

The post Israel: Iran ‘close to point of no return’ appeared first on World Israel News.

The former secretary of state called the accusation “total nonsense.”

By JNS

Henry Kissinger, who served as national security advisor and secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations, denied that he intentionally delayed critically needed military supplies to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, speaking during a Channel 12 interview broadcast Monday.

According to U.S. Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., former Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, in his 1976 book “On Watch: A Memoir,” Kissinger stalled the airlift and then blamed the delay on Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger.

“I do not mean to imply that he wanted Israel to lose the war, He simply did not want Israel to win decisively. He wanted Israel to bleed just enough to soften it up for the post-war diplomacy he was planning,” Zumwalt wrote.

“It’s total nonsense,” Kissinger told Channel 12‘s Amit Segal.

Kissinger, who turned 100 years old on Saturday, said the reasons for the delay had to do with technical issues, a political scandal involving the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew and the fact that the U.S. was under the initial impression that Israel was winning.

“To make the airlift of a country available to a war-making country that is in the middle of a war is not something that is normally done, has in fact never been done,” he added.

“It was also the week in which Vice President Agnew resigned, so it takes a special Israeli attitude to even ask that question, if you forgive me,” Kissinger said.

“I mean, this was a huge step we took. It saved Israel,” he said.

“If you look at the days of the war … until Tuesday morning [Oct. 9], we thought Israel was winning and was crossing the canal. It was only Tuesday afternoon that [Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Simcha] Dinitz came back to the United States. And it was not until Tuesday evening that I could reach Nixon because of the Agnew [crisis],” Kissinger said.

“We told the Israelis they could pick up any equipment with El Al. On that day we promised Israel that we would replace all its losses, and therefore said expend all equipment that you need, because we’re here. On the fourth day [of the war, Oct. 9,] we started trying to get an airlift going,” Kissinger said.

On Oct. 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. Neither U.S. nor Israeli intelligence foresaw the attack. After Israel suffered severe setbacks, it began to turn the tables. However, Israel faced a shortage of essential military material. The U.S. promised to resupply Israel but there was a delay of eight days, never adequately explained until the revelations in Zumwalt’s book.

Zumwalt’s explanation became widely accepted, particularly as Kissinger pressured Israel for territorial compromises after the war, Channel 12 noted.

Intense pressure from Kissinger has been blamed for first forcing Israel to lift its siege in Sinai of the Egyptian Third Army, which it had encircled and cut off from supplies, and then turning Israeli military victory into political defeat through a series of so-called “disengagement agreements” that saw Israel retreat to the Mitla and Gidi passes (January 1974) and then, in a second agreement (September 1975), surrender those passes, as well as its position on the Gulf of Suez coast and the Abu Rodeis oilfields in southwestern Sinai to Egypt.

On the Syrian front, U.S. pressure led Israel to withdraw from a position threatening Damascus and from a slice of the Golan Heights.

The post Kissinger denies holding back resupply during Yom Kippur War appeared first on World Israel News.

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Even with a cast led by the hilarious Julia Louis-Dreyfus, You Hurt My Feelings struggles to find a single laugh in this comedy of manners about affluent New Yorkers learning the value of “little white lies.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars in You Hurt My Feelings. (Jeong Park / A24)

There’s a feeling of blank surprise in watching writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s new film You Hurt My Feelings. Not only because it’s such a weak, limp, plodding comedy — even with Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing the lead. The real surprise is watching this type of film, one that seems to have become so totally obsolete in the 2020s, you can’t even believe you’re seeing a new version of it.

You Hurt My Feelings is the one about the small cluster of affluent white people in an upper-class enclave of New York City who live incredibly well doing those kinds of jobs virtually nobody gets to do anymore. There’s Beth (Louise-Dreyfus), a pop memoirist/fiction writer, who also teaches writing at the New School. There’s her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), an “incredibly overpaid” therapist. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), is a successful interior decorator, and her husband, Mark (Arian Moayad), is a stage and film actor.

But they’re so whiny and discontented about their professions they’re all vaguely planning to quit and do “something else”?

Something else? Like what? You don’t want to be a writer living in luxury anymore, after getting a bit of criticism on your latest manuscript, so you become . . . a princess? An astronaut? A movie star? I don’t know — what do people who have everything do about their hangnail problems when they’re convinced hangnails are an outrage and they’re entitled to far better, hangnail-free lives?

After a whole kerfuffle over Beth’s wounded feelings when she overhears her husband Don telling pal Mark that he doesn’t really like Beth’s new book, she’s gradually persuaded that everybody tells white lies to get along with the people in their lives, a grade school–level observation that never develops further. The main characters all learn small lessons about human frailty and the value of love and acceptance, and then carry on with their cushy jobs and fine dining and theatergoing and occasional charity work. Just when Beth and Don have finally accepted that their son Elliott (Owen Teague) works a mere ordinary-person job at a lowly pot dispensary, he finishes the first draft of his screenplay and presents it to them. Saved from professional mediocrity!

Amber Tamblyn and David Cross play a couple regularly consulting Don the therapist — the worst therapist ever, judging by what we see. After the couple demands $33,000 worth of reimbursement for two years’ worth of unsuccessful marriage counseling, he finally gets up the gumption to tell them they clearly hate each other and ought to divorce. He can’t seem to figure out that incessant, sneering combat is the basis for their entire relationship and that they like it that way. He really ought to get out more, or at least watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

This was all once Woody Allen’s dish — affluent white people living in material luxury in Manhattan, making themselves neurotically miserable over their personal relationships and minor downturns in the upturns of their fabulous careers. But there’s one key difference separating Annie Hall (1977), say, from something like You Hurt My Feelings. Pariah though he is now, it must be acknowledged that Woody Allen was once funny as hell, and that required a certain amount of real insight. Allen didn’t respect his own comic ability, as he himself admitted, and he ruined his filmography making increasingly solemn, high-minded, would-be-philosophical crap. But once upon a time, he was a formidable wit.

It makes sense that Holofcener’s filmmaking is descended from Allen’s, because she practically grew up on Allen’s film sets. Her stepfather, Charles H. Joffe, was the producer of almost all of Allen’s film work, giving Joffe the peak experience of accepting the Best Picture Oscar on Annie Hall.

In fact, to be fair, Holofcener’s life is very much like her film characters’. They’re “special” people who have money and are wired into the art and entertainment industries and who really can decide to give up successful sculpting for songwriting, or successful songwriting for acting. Her father was sculptor-songwriter-actor Lawrence Holofcener, and after divorcing him and marrying Joffe, her mother Carol Joffe became a set decorator, earning Academy Award nominations for two Woody Allen films, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days (1987).

With a background like this, Holofcener can honestly be seen as making “slice-of-life” films, however rarified. Critics love them because they’ve been trained to adore this kind of film, with its complacent New Yorker sensibility. It’s funnier than the movie is — the automatic critical praise of the film’s supposedly incisive, mordant humor, and the way it’s seen as taking on burning issues like middle-aged malaise. Even when Holofcener’s just wallowing around among familiar figures, generating lukewarm chuckles while treating them all fondly, she gets credit for being a bold satirist: “No American director’s more committed to exposing the smugness and self-aggrandizement of bourgeois urbanites.”

I’d had hope, when I first read a summary of You Hurt My Feelings, that Holofcener really meant to delve into the complicated necessity of lying, a kind of following up on Jane Austen’s line in Pride and Prejudice, “Honesty is a greatly overrated virtue.” But her idea of taking on the role lying plays in relationships goes no further than things like “exposing” how Beth and Don consistently lie about liking the presents each gives the other, or how Sarah lies to Mark about some of the performances he gives, though in her actual opinion, they’re not always so hot.

Such marshmallow instances of lying are hardly worth any kind of moral extrapolation. And such sluggish, laugh-free films as this can hardly even be called a “comedy.”

The debt ceiling deal is a cruel agreement that imposes new work requirements on SNAP recipients and bureaucratic hurdles for those who still qualify. It will kick people off the rolls and inflict pain, seemingly randomly, with no regard for the human toll.

The new SNAP work requirements will inflict pain on poor people and accomplish nothing else. (John Moore / Getty Images)

A debt limit deal has been reached. The deal includes new rules for the food stamp program:

The bill imposes new work requirements for food stamps on adults ages 50 to 54 who don’t have children living in their home. Under current law, those work requirements only apply to people age 18 to 49. The age limit will be phased in over three years, beginning in fiscal year 2023.

The bill would also exempt veterans, the homeless and people who were children in foster care from food-stamp work requirements — a move White House officials say will offset the program’s new requirements, and leave roughly the same number of Americans eligible for nutrition assistance moving forward.

The rules being extended to ages fifty to fifty-four require individuals to complete, record, and report eighty hours of work in a month, either in the form of actual paid employment or by participating in an uncompensated “work program” organized by the government. The maximum monthly SNAP benefit for an individual is $281, which makes the eighty-hour work program route effectively the same as a job that pays $3.51 per hour. This is less than half the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Indiscriminate Culling of the Rolls

Most of the discourse about this change has been centered on the philosophical debate about the justness of conditioning benefit receipt on labor market activation and on the empirical debate about what effect these kinds of requirements actually have on employment.

These are interesting debates, but they miss the more mundane administrative reality of these kinds of rule changes. More than anything else, what happens when you tighten the requirements like this is that existing benefit recipients fail to realize that the rules have changed and that they need to submit new forms in order to keep their benefits going. This results in them being disqualified from benefits even if they are actually meeting the new requirements.

So while, in theory, this sort of reform aims to distinguish the active SNAP beneficiaries from the inactive SNAP beneficiaries and threaten benefit cuts to the latter in order to get them to take up work or a work program, in reality, this reform just uses information-dissemination frictions and paperwork burdens to indiscriminately cull the SNAP rolls of both active and inactive beneficiaries.

This happened in 2018 when Arkansas tightened work rules for Medicaid receipt. After that change, only 20 percent of people affected by the new rules even filled out the relevant forms and only 6 percent reported enough work to meet the requirements.

It happened again this year when the COVID-era Medicaid eligibility rules were rolled back. This change was meant to not only kick people off the program who would be ineligible for Medicaid but for the COVID-era expansion of the program. In practice, the vast majority of those who have lost coverage during the rollback have done so for procedural reasons related to failure to fill out new forms.

Early data shows that many people lost coverage for procedural reasons, such as when Medicaid recipients did not return paperwork to verify their eligibility or could not be located. The large number of terminations on procedural grounds suggests that many people may be losing their coverage even though they are still qualified for it. Many of those who have been dropped have been children. . . .

Other states have also removed a large number of Medicaid recipients for procedural reasons. In Indiana, nearly 90 percent of the roughly 53,000 people who lost Medicaid in the first month of the state’s unwinding were booted on those grounds. In Florida, where nearly 250,000 people lost Medicaid coverage, procedural reasons were to blame for a vast majority.

If we actually had some administrative ability to apply these new SNAP rules to only zero out the incomes of inactive recipients, then the philosophical and empirical debates would be much more compelling. But the actual policy we are talking about is randomly kicking out a bunch of fifty- to fifty-four-year-old SNAP recipients regardless of whether they are actually active.

The Veteran Exemption Is Telling

To have a policy discourse, you need policy intellectuals of various political leanings to generate justifications for various policy choices. But justifications only work as justifications insofar as they connect to certain consensus values about what makes a policy good or bad.

This creates a strange situation for conservative policy intellectuals, because the welfare policy opinions of conservative voters and politicians are largely driven by resentments and punitive impulses that are not regarded as relevant to good policymaking. The role of conservative policy intellectuals thus becomes coming up with arguments that, though they don’t actually motivate conservative policymaking, nevertheless operate as justifications in a way that is legible to policy debates.

In the case of work requirements for SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, and similar programs, the real-life appeal is largely rooted in the desire to harm the kind of people who are imagined to fail the requirements: druggies, layabouts, and so on. Many think these kinds of people are scum and don’t want to see them receiving income.

But “fuck those people” doesn’t count as a justification within the norms of policy debate, and so conservative intellectuals are left trying to argue that these kinds of work requirements are actually good for the people who are subject to them. It nudges them out into work, which gives them meaning and community, and puts them in a position to advance in the labor market, which gives them more money.

This kind of stuff is entertaining to some extent, but the policymakers clearly do not think like this because, if they did, these rules wouldn’t always come with a laundry list of exemptions for sympathetic populations.

In this case, the SNAP work requirements are not going to be applied to veterans. This is obviously because veterans are a venerated group in our society. But if work requirements are good for the people who are subject to them, as conservative policy intellectuals claim, then they should especially be applied to venerated groups, like veterans, who we want good things for, right?

How Are These People Supposed to Live?

Unlike most developed countries, the United States does not have what is often called a “social assistance” benefit — i.e., a last-ditch benefit that catches people who are otherwise unable to piece together a bare-minimum income from the market or the welfare state. The closest we have to that is SNAP, but SNAP has so many eligibility restrictions, which are now getting worse, that it does not function as a social assistance benefit. SNAP’s $281 per month in food vouchers is also nowhere near a bare-minimum income.

Elsewhere, social assistance at least nominally answers the question of how certain kinds of people who fall through all the cracks of the ordinary income system are supposed to live. These are usually very stingy benefits with very strict means tests, but they at least exist and serve this important function as a last-ditch protection.

But what is our answer to how these kinds of people are supposed to live in the United States? It’s weird that we don’t even seem to ask the question, let alone make any real effort to answer it.

What do we want a fifty-two-year-old who does not have a job and gets cut off of food stamps to do exactly? Beg on the streets? Die? Do crime? Seriously, what’s the idea? Does anyone know? Does anyone care?

This past weekend, Amanda Hicks, a 26-year-old teacher in Florida, was tragically found dead alongside an adult male in a suspected murder-suicide.

On Saturday, at around 11:45 a.m., the police in Florida found the bodies of the couple after they were summoned to the Peacock Run apartments on Northwest East Torino Parkway, located in the 5500 blocks. A relative of the unnamed adult male requested a welfare check on the couple and encountered the tragic scene.

When officers arrived on the scene, they could hear an infant crying from inside the locked apartment. Thankfully, the baby was unharmed, found safe in its crib, and is now being cared for by a family member.

While officials have not yet released the adult male’s identity, it is suspected that he killed Hicks before taking his own life. Police have stated that no one else was involved and are not seeking any additional suspects.

As news of Amanda Hicks’s heartbreaking death quickly spread, those who knew her paid tribute to her radiant spirit and impact on her students’ lives.

As the Colleyville school district offers support and counseling for the students and staff, people must remember that domestic violence is a prevalent issue and that all those in an abusive relationship should ask for assistance.

While Amanda Hicks’ life ended too soon, her bright spirit, warm smile, and motherly love are worth remembering and honoring.

Twelve years have passed since the Arab Spring, and both Egypt and Tunisia are facing a stark economic crisis. Both are currently under the mercy of extremely unfavorable structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund, relying heavily on food imports, mired in debt, and facing historic inflation rates with unprecedented hikes in food […]

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The world will soon cross 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming beyond preindustrial levels, meaning serious destabilization of the earth’s ecosystem. But we can still mitigate climate change’s worst effects with drastic government action.

In this aerial picture, a general view shows the flooded area caused by heavy rains across Italy’s northern Emilia Romagna region during a reconnaissance of the territory on May 26, 2023. (Antonio Masiello / Getty Images)

The hot, pissed off, oil-caked cat is now out of the bag.

We will likely cross 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming beyond preindustrial levels in the next two to four years. This is the temperature at which scientists have warned, for quite some time, serious destabilization may occur. While global temperatures are usually measured as the longer-term trend line rather than a single year’s temperature, 1.5 degrees Celsius is a frightening threshold to cross.

Rather than feeling powerless, frustrated, and terrified at this moment, it’s vitally important we take a beat to remember one very important thing:

it’s not supposed to be like this.

Collectively, we’ve gotten very used to governments, media, and industry across the world rarely, if ever, solving problems. It seems in 2023 they exist primarily to make sure the financial markets remain robust and working people stay on mute.

And much how growing up with a gambling-addict dad makes a family normalize last-second missed free throws meaning no lights or food for a month, we have gotten comfortable with ridiculous levels of corruption and incompetence from our elite institutions.

Word salads, incremental gestures, outright BS, and most of all, pretending there is no problem, flood our day-in-day-out public discourse.

So just a reminder that no, you’re not crazy, there are really obvious things we should and could be doing.

Here are six actual steps that any semifunctioning government would be working on if it were not overrun by billions of dollars in dark and soft money:

1. Declare A Climate Emergency.

Duh.

We’re in a climate emergency, so declare it. And unleash executive powers, in the United States, that allow a government to start problem solving rather than whatever it’s doing right now.

Joe Biden’s failure to declare an emergency and give a landmark climate speech makes Neville Chamberlain look more decisive than the Rock in San Andreas. Shame on him, and shame on a press corps that rarely if ever asks him about it.

2. Climate-Proof Our Infrastructure.

We should cover every structure possible in solar, wind power, battery storage, and reflective paint to protect power grids, reduce carbon emissions, and mitigate extreme heat.

How would we pay for this?

Hmm. If only there was a nearly $800 billion annual budget out there for wars that aren’t happening.

Oh yeah! The Pentagon budget!

Use a chunk of it. Now. We’ve changed plowshares to swords, but now it’s time to change swords into solar arrays and wind farms. Our military has been without a clear mission for years. And the climate emergency is the mission of all missions.

3. Nationalize and Transform Fossil Fuel Companies Into Renewable Energy Companies.

We did it during the 2007 housing market collapse with banks that behaved horribly and collapsed. What the oil companies are doing not only endangers the world economy, it will totally destroy it.

If this sounds drastic, remember that during World War II, there were no factories making Panzer tanks for the Nazis in the United States or the UK, even though I’m sure it would have been good “for the markets.”

4. Invest in Carbon Removal Technology.

We should create a dozen multibillion-dollar research labs to scale up and perfect carbon removal.

We are already at half the carbon load of the Permian extinction, and we’ve done it in a small fraction of the time.

There’s no question we’re going to need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And there are promising new technologies being developed that are only lacking funding and scale.

Is this the answer?

No. But it may help, and we have to try.

5. Ruggedize the Hell Out Of Everything.

Fires, floods, mega-droughts, tornadoes, food shortages, power outages, and dangerous heat events are shifting into a new gear across the globe.

Let’s get ready with cooling centers, new weather alert systems, sea walls, expanded firefighting capabilities, evacuation plans, etc.

This preparation will save countless lives.

6. Transform How We Cultivate Food and Meat to Reduce Methane Emissions.

The second biggest producer of greenhouse gases behind the burning of oil and gas?

Methane from the hundreds of millions of animals we cultivate for food on an industrial scale.

There are alternatives. Very tasty alternatives.

Transition farmers away from methane-producing animals and toward carbon-free proteins with huge subsidies and support from the government agencies offering engineering and infrastructure emergency support.

“But I like a good steak!”

So do I. But I like not having my house burn down just a hair more.

This is just my list and just a start. If you think it’s terrible, please, please make a better one.

If lots of people start talking about “the plan,” maybe Washington DC will stop looking at poll numbers and collecting checks at cocktail parties and work on one too.

Many will say, “You have to be realistic. Work with the system as it is.”

I would remind them we’ve been doing that for forty years. And the results couldn’t be any worse.

It’s time to challenge the system to do something really radical: actually start solving problems.