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Republican presidential debate: 6 takeaways

Rubio called the real estate mogul's Trump University "a fake school." He invoked Trump's business record to question his sincerity on immigration, saying: "You're the only person on this stage that's ever been fined for hiring people that worked on your projects illegally."

Rubio pressed for more specifics, saying that "now he's repeating himself" -- an ironic response from a candidate who has been mocked as robotic for repeating talking points at speeches and debates.

Egypt has accused Palestinian Islamist group Hamas of involvement in the killing of Egypt's public prosecutor.

Hisham Barakat died in hospital after a bomb attack on his car in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis in March 2015.

The plot was "carried out on the orders of the Muslim Brotherhood in close coordination with Hamas", Egypt's interior minister said on Sunday.

ISIS Gains a Foothold in Gaza

GAZA CITY — The early hours of the morning of Nov. 24 began with a boom. The Israeli Air Force was hitting targets here in the Gaza Strip, shattering the pre-dawn quiet of this besieged coastal enclave.

Though some, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may want you to believe Hamas and ISIS are buddies and would work together, this isn’t the case.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

Two refugees from Iraq have been arrested on terrorism-related charges in California and Texas, accused of ties to jihadist groups.

The sheriff of the Oregon county where armed anti-government activists have occupied federal land has offered the protesters a "safe escort" out.

JERUSALEM –  As the nuclear deal with Tehran goes into effect, many Middle Eastern countries fear a newly emboldened Iran, flush with cash and international recognition, will grow more aggressive with what they see as meddling in conflicts across the region.

The deal, clinched last summer after intense negotiations, forced Iran to dismantle most of its nuclear program, a step that proponents say will prevent it from gaining the capability to make a bomb for well over a decade. The International Atomic Energy Agency on Saturday certified that Iran had met its obligations, paving the way for Western sanctions to be lifted and giving Iran access to $100 billion in frozen assets.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was an outspoken critic of the deal, making veiled threats to attack Iran and arguing against the agreement in a speech to the U.S. Congress last year over White House objections. He says the deal will not curb Iran's ultimate nuclear aspirations and does not impede Iran's longstanding support for Israel's worst enemies, like the Lebanese Hezbollah group — which is also involved in Syria on Assad's side — and the Palestinian Hamas.

The United Nations says 42,000 people in the area are at risk of starvation. And they make up only a fraction of the 400,000 in similar situations in other towns -- and millions more struggling in hard-to-reach areas -- because of the country's civil war, which is about to mark its five-year anniversary. Millions more Syrians have become refugees abroad.When a conflict lasts this long, when reports about the suffering it is inflicting become a relentless wave of depressing news, and when the forces at play are this complicated, many people are tempted to turn

The truth is that this war is not about to end anytime soon. It is a conflict in which the various sides are fighting for power, for territory, for sectarian advantage, for religion and ideology, but one in which no one seems to be fighting for the interests of the Syrian people themselves.Killing civilians, starving them, is a now common military tactic in the Syrian war.

The United Nations says it wants "unimpeded humanitarian access" to reach everyone who needs help in Syria. The latest word from the Assad regime is that it will allow food convoys. But pressure must be exerted so he keeps his word, and prevents the crisis from reoccurring here or elsewhere. One convoy, as we have already seen, does not end the siege.Assad has laid siege to other places before, notably Yarmouk, a Palestinian camp, and Eastern Ghouta, in the suburbs of Damascus. Yet for some reason the plight of the residents never seemed to reach the level of international concern expressed over fighting in Gaza or the actions of ISIS.

Powerful and damning accounts of the Bush administration’s determination to work what Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” and its elaborate efforts to legalize torture (including arduous attempts to narrowly define torture as leading to “serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage” is likely to result) can be found in two essential books, “The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,” edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, and “Standard Operating Procedure,” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris

An important personal perspective is now provided by Eric Fair’s candid and chilling new book, “Consequence,” which is at once an agonized confession of his own complicity as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and an indictment of the system that enabled and tried to justify torture.

In 2007, Mr. Fair says, he confessed everything to a lawyer from the Department of Justice and two agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, providing pictures, letters, names, firsthand accounts, locations and techniques. He was not prosecuted. “We tortured people the right way,” he writes, “following the right procedures, and used the approved techniques.”

Having bought into the popular conception of Israelis always responding to terrorism with righteous muscularity, this blind belief fits the preferred GOP narrative — that Israeli policy, and Israelis’ thinking, is monolithic and infallible, and that questioning it is a sign of political weakness.

There’s a way to support Israel which doesn’t include disabling our critical and intellectual faculties. That way would declare uncompromising support for Israel’s right to exist and for its right to defend itself, but also recognize that the country’s future as a Jewish homeland and as a democracy ultimately depends on making peace with its neighbors. The way to do that is for Israel to reach an agreement with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution

Defending Israel need not mean a free pass for the endless building of settlements or the indefinite extension of the occupation of the West Bank. And it doesn’t mean every Israeli approach to security is a good one

For decades, Jordan has taken in millions of Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees, earning it a reputation as an island of peace.

Yet Jordan also deports and blocks aid access to refugees and asylum seekers, regularly violating basic humanitarian principles, all in the name of maintaining that same “security.”

Years ago, this man was an ornithologist, he said. He’d worked at a reserve in the central Syrian Desert with more than a thousand Arabian gazelles and oryxes, specializing in tracking the bald ibis, a rare bird that once migrated between the Levant, the Gulf, and Central Africa. Then he had to flee from Palmyra to Raqqa to Rukban, where his six children and wife are living among at least 50,000 displaced people in tents and mud shelters. The bald ibis has since gone extinct in the Middle East.

For years, conservatives have rightly pointed out that Islamist terrorists don’t spring from an ideological or cultural vacuum. It usually takes a village, real, virtual or proverbial, to make an Islamist terrorist — one composed of hate-spewing imams, TV programs saturated with anti-Semitic and anti-Western conspiracy theories, neighborhood vigilantes enforcing fundamentalist religious strictures, and political leaders excusing, reflecting or disseminating many of the same beliefs and attitudes.

Conservatives used to understand the danger. Why care about social formalities, modes of dress, niceties of speech, qualities of restraint? Not simply because manners make the man, although they do, but because manners also shape political cultures

What are the villages from which Sayoc and Bowers hailed? For Sayoc it was the real-world villages of the Trump rally, with its mob-like intensity and unquestioning fidelity to one supreme leader. For Bowers, it was the virtual villages of Twitter and alt-right social networks, digitally connecting angry loners who follow nobody.

The explosive tell-all about President Trump, Fire and Fury, has been available for purchase for less than a week, but many of its readers are ready to render a verdict on its impact.

For the president’s detractors, the bestseller offers bona fide proof that Trump is unfit for office; for his supporters, it is nothing more than tabloid fiction written by an author with a questionable reputation.

This is especially true when it comes to the president’s foreign policy decisions, to which Fire and Fury dedicates ample space.

Seventy years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is still alive in Germany -- and apparently getting worse.

So concerned are Germany's lawmakers, they've just established a high-level commissioner post to fight discrimination against the Jewish community.

Even after decades of rigorous political education and intense, self-critical soul searching, 9% to 10% of Germans express classic anti-Semitic feelings, according to a 2017 report commissioned by the Bundestag. Many more, up to 50%, harbor more mild anti-Semitic prejudices.

They are then sent forth, as Vladimir Putin himself put it, “to protect Russian interests” in the rest of the world. Alumni include the president of Azerbaijan, the foreign-affairs ministers of Slovakia and Mongolia and Russia’s own foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who regularly returns to give the commencement address.

What does Russia really want?

“To be an autonomous player, to uphold its identity of a great power which is strategically independent.” Russia, he explained, did not want to dismantle the trans-Atlantic world order by splintering NATO and demolishing the European Union, as was frequently suggested by the Western press

College students have risen up to fight racism on campuses across the country. But it is often those very same students who subject Jewish students to anti-Semitism.

It was this disquieting, yet growing, trend of hate speech and crimes directed towards Jewish students within the UC system that spurred Mokhtarzadeh and Rosenberg, both Jewish sophomores at UCLA, to attend the conference.

The campus was supposed to be their new home, their new safe space—so why didn’t they feel that way?

Two of the Jewish people serving in the US Senate -- Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jon Ossoff of Georgia -- have taken leading roles in calling for evenhanded American policy on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and for an immediate cease fire, respectively. And the liberal Jewish lobbying group, J Street, has provided important political support for politicians, whether Jewish or not, to criticize Israel's relentless bombing of Gaza in response to Hamas' rocket attacks on Israel without the risk of being smeared as being anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic.

Military-grade autonomous drones can fly themselves to a specific location, pick their own targets and kill without the assistance of a remote human operator. Such weapons are known to be in development, but until recently there were no reported cases of autonomous drones killing fighters on the battlefield.

Now, a United Nations report about a March 2020 skirmish in the military conflict in Libya says such a drone, known as a lethal autonomous weapons system — or LAWS — has made its wartime debut. But the report does not say explicitly that the LAWS killed anyone.

The Kargu-2 is an attack drone made by the Turkish company STM that can be operated both autonomously and manually and that purports to use "machine learning" and "real-time image processing" against its targets.

It includes eight parties, drawn from the hard right, the left and the center — and one Arab party. A more intuitive governing coalition would have comprised only of parties on the right, which together hold a slim majority of Israel’s Parliament.

Netanyahu — like Trump, his ally in global affairs — is the subject of serious allegations of abuse of government. Prosecutors indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges in 2019, and the trial has been delayed partly because of Covid-19 restrictions.

His attempts to fend off the charges and remain in power have left many Israelis worried about a collapse in judicial independence and the rule of law, much as Democrats were anxious about Trump’s norm-breaking, as David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explained to me. But there is also a big difference: While Republicans have overwhelmingly stood by Trump, a meaningful number of Netanyahu’s ideological allies have chosen to break with him.

Benjamin Netanyahu's run as the longest-serving Israeli prime minister may be coming to an end. Naftali Bennett, leader of the small right-wing party Yamina, announced Sunday evening he is working toward a coalition agreement with Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist party Yesh Atid, to join a new government.

"After four elections and a further two months, it has been proven to all of us that there is simply no right-wing government possible that is headed by Netanyahu. It is either a fifth election or a unity government," Bennett said.

The "change" coalition will likely be made up of parties from the right to the left of Israeli politics, but it would still almost certainly need some sort of outside support to reach the 61-seat threshold. That support may come from outside the government, such as one of the Arab parties, most likely the Islamist United Arab List, led by Mansour Abbas.