King Abdullah II of Jordan will meet Monday with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, on his first visit to the West Bank in five years, officials confirmed Saturday
Mohammed Shtayyeh, a senior executive of Abbas’s Fatah party, told AFP the Jordanian ruler and the PA president would discuss “efforts to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, stalled since 2014.
The visit will last a few hours, another Palestinian official said.
This would mark the first time in five years that Jordan’s king has visited the PA, coming on the heels of a high-stakes standoff over metal detectors and other security measures at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and strained diplomatic ties between Israel and Amman.
Abdullah will need to traverse the Israel-controlled West Bank to reach Ramallah, and the visit must be coordinated with Jerusalem.
There was no confirmation of the king’s visit from Israel.
Jordan was a key player in efforts to calm tensions after Israel installed metal detectors and other security measures at the Temple Mount following a July 14 terror attack there in which three Arab Israelis shot dead two police officers using guns they had smuggled into the holy site. The new Israeli measures prompted the Waqf Islamic Trust, which administers the site, to announce a boycott that devolved into nightly clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces.
Earlier this week, Abdullah announced that he would donate 1 million Jordanian dinars ($1.4 million) to the Waqf, which is funded by Amman.
Abdullah also said Wednesday that Jordan was continuing to push for the prosecution of an Israeli embassy guard who killed two Jordanians during the height of tensions last month.
Israel says the guard was assaulted by one of the Jordanians in a suspected nationalistic attack.
After Netanyahu warmly greeted the guard upon his return to Israel, Abdullah said there would be diplomatic consequences.
Jordan, which considers itself a custodian of Jerusalem holy sites, was seen as playing a key role in lowering tensions, releasing the guard to Israel at the same time as Israel removed the metal detectors. Israel later rolled back other security measures as well, after almost two weeks of violent protests in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
As the Iraqi Kurdish leadership continues to battle Daesh in an effort to free Yazidis from captivity and liberate towns and villages, Sputnik takes a look at the city of Sinjar, which was liberated two years ago but where Daesh still haunts its people.
Heyri Bozan, a representative of the Yazidis in the Kurdish Regional Ministry for Religious Affairs, spoke to Sputnik in an interview about the liberated city of Sinjar, stressing that many Yazidi women and children are still prisoners of Daesh.
On August 3, 2014, Daesh terrorists captured the city of Sinjar in Iraq. In the next few days, the terrorists executed hundreds of Yazidi men and captured thousands of women and children. Many of them were taken to Syria.
Bozan said that over the last three years 3,092 Yazidis have been saved from Daesh but another 3,325 people still remain in the clutches of the terrorists.
“Daesh still holds 3,325 Yazidis in captivity. Most prisoners are women, girls and children. Yazidi men had been executed by the militants, whereas, women and their daughters have been sold,” Bozan said.
He further said, “We succeeded in saving part of the Yazidis held by Daesh in Mosul and its environs, in Syria and elsewhere. The children, whom we managed to save, told us that Daesh changed their names to Islamic ones. They also used children as suicide bombers and continue to do so now,” the representative said.
The Yazidis are an independent tiny Kurdish religious community living primarily in northern Iraq's Nineveh province.
Daesh has been responsible for committing an ongoing genocide against the Yazidi minority group in both Syria and Iraq since August 2014. As a result, thousands of Yazidi men, women and children have been captured, killed, sexually enslaved and tortured by Daesh terrorists.
China has stepped up its rhetoric in an increasingly tense border row with India, hinting at the possibility of military action in a propaganda push that analysts are calling "genuinely troubling."
For more than a month, Indian and Chinese troops have been locked in a standoff on a remote but strategically important Himalayan plateau near where Tibet, India and Bhutan meet.
On Thursday, Chinese defence ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang warned that Beijing had shown restraint but had a "bottom line."
"No country should underestimate the Chinese forces'... resolve and willpower to defend national sovereignty," he said in a post on the ministry website.
It is a line that has been echoed almost word for word this week by the foreign ministry, the official Xinhua news agency, the ruling Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, the official military news website of the Chinese armed forces, and other outlets.
Wednesday, the foreign ministry released a 15-page document of "facts" about the border dispute, which included a map of alleged intrusions and photographs of what it stated were Indian troops and military vehicles on China's side of the frontier.
Calling for the "immediate and unconditional" withdrawal of Indian troops, it warned Beijing would "take all necessary measures" to safeguard its interests.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Thursday that India was building roads, hoarding supplies and deploying a large number of troops in the area.
"This is by no means for peace," Geng said.
Most are aware by now that North Korea has tested (successfully) another ICBM missile, and its nuclear ambitions are more concrete by the day. The mainstream media and the Obama administration are the creators of the public’s skepticism and denial regarding North Korea’s capabilities. The Obama administration consistently and deliberately downplayed the true strengths and capabilities of North Korea over an eight-year period. Such a downplay was further enabled by key press conferences in which members of the U.S. military’s command structure (specifically those serving in the Pentagon) were made to parrot the administration’s denial.
By “pulling Pentagon officials out” and having them categorically deny North Korea’s capabilities, it set the tempo to create a false narrative that Obama and his minions would champion throughout the eight years. Pentagon officials (Admirals and Four-star Generals) were periodically “rotated” into these press pools to downplay the abilities of North Korea to launch a nuclear missile against the United States.
This obfuscation, orchestrated by Obama and parroted by those general officers who were about to retire in a couple of years was a precise and deliberate weakening of the United States’ defensive stance against a nation that declared its intentions to strike her.
All the experts on the subject were marginalized and labeled either as “crackpots,” or just scoffed at with their opinions relegated to page A-14, just above a coupon for “Captain Crunch” and at the bottom of the page of the newspaper. The public bought it. They swallowed the pill offered by the government-media complex, and in their own narcissistic hubris, discounted the efforts of a “backwards” country such as North Korea to send a nuke to the U.S.
Not anymore.
Now the media is grudgingly, painfully admitting what cannot be hidden: North Korea has more than enough capability to hit the United States. All of it. The North Korean ICBM test on Friday, July 29 proves they can strike the U.S. anywhere. Here you go:
“Looks like it pretty much can get to New York, Boston, and probably falls just short of Washington [DC]. If those numbers are correct, the missile flown on a standard trajectory, the missile would have a range of 10,400 km (6,500 miles), not taking into account the Earth’s rotation. However, the rotation of the Earth increases the range of missiles fired eastward, depending on their direction. It is important to keep in mind that we do not know the mass of the payload the missile carried on this test.”
-David Wright, Senior Scientist, Global Security Program, Union of Concerned Scientists to CNBC
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