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A coalition of Israeli political parties announced Wednesday night they had agreed ​to a deal to form a new government, paving the way for the exit of Israel's longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party, notified Israeli President Reuven Rivlin that he had managed to cobble together a coalition less than an hour before the midnight deadline.

In a statement, Lapid said the "government will work to serve all the citizens of Israel including those who aren't members of it, will respect those who oppose it, and do everything in its power to unite all parts of Israeli society."

Democrats pulled off a dramatic, last-ditch walkout in the Texas House of Representatives on Sunday night to block one of the most restrictive voting laws in the United States from passing before a midnight deadline.

The sudden revolt torpedoed the sweeping measure known as Senate Bill 7, which would have reduced polling hours, empowered poll watchers and scaled back ways to vote in Texas, which already has some of the nation's strictest voting laws.

For Democrats, the victory may be fleeting: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who had declared new voting laws in Texas a priority, quickly announced that he would order lawmakers back to the state Capitol for a special session. He did not, however, say when that would happen.

Earlier this week, Biden administration officials passed around with bemusement some words of praise from an unexpected source: Jared Kushner.

In an opinion essay for The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Kushner, former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser on Middle East issues, said that President Biden “did the right thing” and had “called Iran’s bluff” by refusing to make new concessions to lure Tehran into talks about restoring a nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration.

“I would take this in the Biden White House as a giant, blinking red light that maybe what I’m doing is not right because Jared Kushner is finding ways to praise it,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama who worked closely on the 2015 nuclear agreement

Record numbers of Americans have voted early in the 2020 election, and more mail ballots are being cast even as voting rules in some states are facing legal uncertainty because of court decisions. Here’s what you need to know about mail ballots and what election officials advise to ensure that your ballot counts.

Most states give voters the option of using mail ballots to be sent by post or hand-delivered to drop-off locations, and many have made voting by mail easier in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Roughly 20 states allow extra days for receiving and accepting mail-in ballots so long as they are postmarked by Election Day, or earlier depending on the state. The length of those extensions vary. In Massachusetts and Virginia, for example, it is three extra days, while in California, it is 17.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Friday certified President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the state, formalizing the razor-thin presidential results after a statewide audit confirmed that Biden got more votes than President Donald Trump.

"As Secretary of State, I believe that the numbers that we are presented today are correct."

Certifying election results is typically a formality, but the arcane process has become the latest battleground in Trump's longshot attempt to cling to power.

The Supreme Court has reaffirmed a lower court's block on Wisconsin's plan that would have allowed ballots in the state to arrive up to six days after Election Day.

Democrats and progressive groups asked the justices to intervene after a federals appeals court blocked the ballot-receipt plan.

Republicans argue that the deadline extension threatens the integrity of the election by changing the rules too close to the election, an argument they have made in similar cases. Democrats say extra days are needed because postal delays could disenfranchise many voters

Four and a half years after the landmark Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union at 11 p.m. London time on New Year's Eve. With the clock running down, the two sides are still trying to negotiate a new free trade agreement to avert major disruptions at borders and more economic damage as the coronavirus surges again in the cold winter months.

The U.K. is leaving the EU while trying to maintain tariff-free and quota-free access to the massive European market of nearly 450 million consumers. Given that, the two sides are still divided over key issues.

For instance, how much access will European fleets continue to have to British fishing grounds?

Joe Biden doesn’t “own” the mayhem on the ground right now. What we’re seeing is the culmination of 20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders. If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame.

Never mind the fact that the Taliban had been gaining ground since it resumed its military campaign in 2004 and, according to U.S. estimates even four years ago, controlled or contested about a third of Afghanistan

Never mind that the previous administration’s deal with the Taliban included the release of 5,000 fighters from prison and favored an even earlier departure date than the one that Biden embraced

The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence—in which computers somehow take on a life of their own and come to rule mankind—has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their direction and behavior. The firms may not be intent on evil; they aren't intent on anything except short-term profits: they're insensible.

Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all.

If Goldman Sachs is going to change, it will be only if change is imposed upon it from the outside—either by the market's decision that it is no longer viable in its current form or by the government's decision that we can no longer afford it.

Bill Kristol and other Never-Trump Republicans have done extensive polling and talked to potential candidates and financial backers about how to stop Donald Trump, according to sources familiar with those efforts.

They have searched feverishly in recent weeks for a candidate of stature to make an independent conservative White House bid. But like Kinzinger, no potential candidate has yet bitten.

Kinzinger, previously a prominent surrogate for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, would have undertaken a third party run "literally to save the union," according to a source familiar with his thinking, because both Clinton and Trump scare him.

Hispanic Republicans and conservatives are increasingly anguished over whether they can remain involved in this year’s presidential election as Donald Trump continues to launch attacks on prominent Latinos and makes little effort to win their support.

Many Hispanics active in national GOP politics have been hoping for months that Trump would tone down his broadsides against immigrants

there is little evidence that such a change is coming — leading some to abandon the presidential race or the 2016 elections altogether.

Fight Erupts in Trump Administration Over Transgender Students’ Rights

One filing deadline is coming up this Thursday in the case before the Supreme Court involving the Virginia transgender boy, Gavin Grimm. He sued the Gloucester County School Board two years ago after the board refused to allow him to use the boys’ bathroom and told him he could use a separate bathroom in a converted janitors closet. The Obama administration had rejected that type of accommodation as unacceptable and discriminatory.

somebody has to state two basic facts:

Nobody, male or female, married or single, young or old, tall or short, educated or not, pretty or plain, wealthy or poor, with kids or without, can have it all -

Recognizing this makes people happier!

Mayhem gripped the center of the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday evening as riot police officers tried to drive two armored personnel carriers through stone-reinforced barriers in Independence Square, the focal point of more than two months of protests against President Viktor F. Yanukovych.

In the course of wild day of parries and thrusts by the protesters and the police, the authorities in Kiev reported nine people killed, including two police officers. It was the bloodiest day of violence since President Yanukovych spurned a trade deal with Europe in November and set of protests that began peacefully but have since involved occasional spasms of deadly violence.

A phalanx of riot police officers, backed by a water cannon, pushed through protesters’ barricades near the Ukraina Hotel and fired tear gas as they advanced toward the center of the square. People covered in blood staggered to a medical center set up in the protest encampment.

The president’s goal, said Ms. Rice, who discussed the review for the first time in an interview last week, is to avoid having events in the Middle East swallow his foreign policy agenda, as it had those of presidents before him. “We can’t just be consumed 24/7 by one region, important as it is,”

“He thought it was a good time to step back and reassess, in a very critical and kind of no-holds-barred way, how we conceive the region.”

Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.

Every German resident must belong to a sickness fund, and in turn the funds must insure all comers. They’re also mandated to cover a standard set of benefits, which includes most procedures and medications. Workers pay half the cost of their sickness fund insurance, and employers pay the rest. The German government foots the bill for the unemployed and for children. There are also limits on out-of-pocket expenses, so it’s rare for a German to go into debt because of medical bills.

this is very similar to the health-insurance regime that Americans are now living under, now that the Affordable Care Act is four years old and a few days past its first enrollment deadline.

There are, of course, a few key differences. Co-pays in the German system are minuscule, about 10 euros per visit. Even those for hospital stays are laughably small by American standards: Sam payed 40 euro for a three-day stay for a minor operation a few years ago

It is a measure of how low American-Russian relations have sunk that a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Secretary of State John Kerry that achieves nothing is perceived as good news. But good news it was when they met for four hours in the southern Russian city of Sochi on Tuesday, following talks between Mr. Kerry and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

That is not to say that the Cold War redux is over, despite the optimistic headline in Russia’s business daily Kommersant that read, “A new season is beginning in relations between the United States and Russia.” Nobody seriously expects Russia to cede Crimea, and the Minsk II cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, brokered by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in February, is brittle at best, with constant clashes along the separation line.

Yet the United States and Germany seem more intent at this juncture on getting the Minsk agreement to stick than to push for a final settlement on the secessionist provinces, giving Ukraine time to gain control over its ravaged finances and get moving on needed reforms.

Deadly violence and street protests in Tunisia on Wednesday postponed talks intended to end a political standoff that had thwarted completion of a new constitution in the birthplace of, and a relative bright spot in, the Arab Spring revolts.

the second anniversary of Tunisia’s first free election, the promise appeared to have slipped away again with attacks from two fronts on the moderate Islamist governing party, from militant hard-liners on one side and secular political factions on the other.

slamist militants in Sidi Bouzid, an interior province, killed at least six security officers on Wednesday and wounded several others, apparently in an attempt to disrupt the reconciliation

President Barack Obama's Democratic allies have begun voicing frustration with widespread problems with aspects of his signature healthcare law

House Democrats have complained that technical issues with an insurance enrolment website had overshadowed the law's current and future benefits.

The health law, known formally as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and informally as Obamacare, was passed in 2010 and is Mr Obama's foremost domestic policy initiative.