Associated Press: UN: Israel didn't comply with UN call to stop settlements

Israel took no steps to comply with a Security Council call to stop all settlement activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and instead authorized "a high rate" of settlement expansions in violation of international law, the United Nations said Friday.

U.N. envoy Nickolay Mladenov told the council the large number of settlement announcements and legislation action by Israel indicate "a clear intent to continue expanding the settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory."

He was delivering the first report to the council on implementation of the resolution it adopted in December condemning Israeli settlements as a "flagrant violation" of international law. The resolution was a striking rupture with past practice by President Barack Obama who had the U.S. abstain rather than veto the measure as president-elect Donald Trump demanded. [...]

He called "the January spike" in illegal settlement announcements by Israel "deeply concerning." During that month, he said, two major announcements were made for a total of 5,500 housing units in Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank exclusively controlled by Israel.

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The Huffington Post: Canada Passes Anti-Islamophobia Motion In Spite Of Trolls

In a vote split 201-91 in favor of the non-binding motion, the Parliament agreed to “condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination.” The motion, dubbed M-103, also tasks the Parliament with establishing a committee to investigate policies that could be aimed at “reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia in Canada.”

Iqra Khalid, a Liberal member of Parliament who is Muslim, introduced the motion in December as a response to rising anti-Muslim sentiment. It took on renewed significance in January after a mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec City left six worshippers dead. [...]

The motion set off a number of protests and counter-protests across the country as members of Parliament debated it ahead of the vote. A survey published Thursday by polling non-profit Angus Reid Institute found that 42 percent of Canadians said they would vote against the motion. Just 29 percent said they would vote in favor.

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Deutsche Welle: Merkel and the rise of the right

Schwetzingen may represent a turning point for Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The city of 22,000, near Heidelberg, has been selected as the site of a quiet insurrection - a prearranged revolution, so to say. On March 25, members of the party's right wing will seek to end what they see as a shift to the left in the CDU. Their organizational platform: "Liberal-Conservative Awakening in the Union," is designed to unite Merkel critics around the country. [...]

It was then, in Königswinter, near Bonn, that 50 representatives from five federal states drafted a 30-point position paper. Among their demands: Germany must be able to better defend itself. And: Financially undisciplined eurozone countries must face the threat of expulsion from the currency union. The paper also called for a limit on the number of refugees allowed to enter the country, and for more control over German and EU borders. Such criticisms had been articulated before. Grumbling within the CDU began back in the summer of 2015, when Chancellor Merkel first opened the country's borders to refugees on a massive scale. [...]

The CDU's right-wing members feel that law and order policies must once again be the essential core of the party. That ignores the fact that the CDU became stronger and more popular under the centrist policies of its then-leader, Helmut Kohl. The former chancellor was seen as a modernizer that brought the party up to date with the world around it. Angela Merkel has continued along that path. Along the way she jettisoned party traditions such as compulsory military service and even abandoned nuclear power - long celebrated as the energy source of the future by the CDU. She gained a lot of ground for the party among urban voters with such moves. Now there is even wide support for same-sex marriage within the CDU.

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Politico: The Man Who Would Beat Bibi

Benjamin Netanyahu is a survivor. He’s beaten back what looked to be near-certain defeat at the polls more than once. He’s outlasted hard-line rivals and liberal critics to become Israel’s longest continuously serving prime minister, and if he can hang on two more years, would even outdo David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s idolized founding father, to claim the overall record in the job. [...]

The late Shimon Peres, the peacemaker behind the Oslo Accords who was beaten by Netanyahu in an election he was widely expected to win, was famous for saying the polls are like perfume, best to be smelled not drunk. Are these latest surveys showing Netanyahu’s vulnerability and Lapid’s surprising strength, for real? And do they matter at a time when Trump and his advisers actually seem to be getting serious about rekindling a peace process just about everyone else had given up for dead? [...]

Labels aside, whatever he’s doing seems to be working, and Lapid’s newfangled politics—heavy on the requisite tough talk about Israeli security but with an emphasis on good governance and boosting Israel’s economy—have improbably vaulted him and Yesh Atid, the party he founded in 2012, to first place in survey after survey over the past several months. The latest polls generally show Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future” in Hebrew), leading Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party by about four seats in parliamentary elections. [...]

Enter Lapid, a polished talker with a lush head of anchorman-silver hair who tells me he is running as “an extreme moderate,” preaching centrism as the new populism and a sort of gauzy patriotic nationalism that tends to give his former colleagues in the world of liberal journalism fits. Lapid, who served a stint as finance minister in a short-lived coalition with Netanyahu, now tours the world as a sort of shadow foreign minister, tangling with increasingly vocal Western advocates of boycotting Israel as a result of its continued occupation of the West Bank and ongoing settlement building there. “With the world of alternative facts, the country is under attack” by advocates of the budding boycott movement, Lapid tells me animatedly, and he is at his most passionate these days taking on those who prefer beating up on what he invariably calls “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

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FiveThirtyEight: How Trump Lost On Health Care

It showed that Republicans — now in control of the House, the Senate and the presidency — couldn’t band together on a major priority. It suggests that the divides among Republicans, a theme of the Obama years, remain a problem for the party. In fact, those divides could be even wider in the Trump era: In the health care debate, not only did the deeply conservative House Freedom Caucus break with party leadership, as it often has (arguing the legislation was not conservative enough), but a bloc of more centrist members emerged from the other side of the political spectrum, arguing that the bill was too conservative. And Trump, who has cast himself as a master negotiator, couldn’t get fellow Republicans behind him, making him look ineffectual in comparison to his three predecessors as president, who all got their first legislative priority through Congress in their first year in office. [...]

Broadly, there were four blocs of GOP members opposed to the legislation: those from the conservative and anti-establishment House Freedom Caucus; those in districts that Hillary Clinton won or almost won in 2016, putting them in some political peril if they backed a bill that is very unpopular; those associated with the Tuesday Group of more centrist House Republicans; and a few who are kind of mavericks, sometimes voting against the position of GOP congressional leaders and Trump. But there were some “no’s” outside of those four blocs, and many members within those four blocs who said that they supported the AHCA. (Some members fall into in more than one of these groups.) [...]

With this defeat, Trump avoids two potentially negative outcomes: getting mired in the details of health care policy for months and months, as he and the congressional Republicans try to write a bill the party can agree on; and secondly, dealing with the political fallout of pushing through an unpopular bill. Former President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, after spending close to a year working on it. And the ACA vote was a major factor in Democrats losing a bunch of congressional seats in the midterm elections later that year.

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