Can Netanyahu Repair the Rift With the U.S.?

When an Israeli cabinet minister proposes that his country impose sanctions on the United States, his government is clearly in a state of distress. Pressure from the Obama Administration to freeze Israeli settlement construction and move toward a two-state peace with the Palestinians has reportedly spurred Minister-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled to recommended that Israel shop outside the U.S.

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Slain officer remembered as a ‘gentle giant’

After stints as a guard in the jails of Washington, D.C., and on the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, Stephen Tyrone Johns had settled in to a job he liked at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, family members said. “It seemed to be kind of laid-back — it didn’t seem to be that dangerous,” Leroy Carter, the stepfather who helped raise Johns since he was 3, told CNN affiliate WUSA-TV in Washington

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Introducing America’s First Black, Female Rabbi

The path to the pulpit has been as colorful as it has been unusual for Alysa Stanton, 45, America’s first-ever female African-American rabbi. Stanton, who was born to a Christian family, was formally ordained on June 6, having completed seven years of rabbinical training at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. Stanton will now assume her new role as the first nonwhite rabbi of Congregation Bayt Shalom, a 60-family synagogue in Greenville, N.C

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Obama in Dresden, Germany: the Non-Controversy Controversy

Sometimes location is everything. Other times, it’s just a convenient place to spend the night. On both sides of the Atlantic, much has been made of Barack Obama’s decision to spend Thursday night in Dresden, the German city known primarily as the site of a horrific bombing campaign by U.S.

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Iran’s Presidential Debate: Will Ahmadinejad’s Attacks Backfire?

Iran’s voters had been anticipating a heated discussion in their country’s first-ever presidential candidates’ debate, but even then, Wednesday night’s showdown between incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and moderate challenger Mir-Hossein Moussavi was a rough-and-tumble affair that exceeded expectations. And the new season of televised politics could get even nastier

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