Jewish & World News

The Simon Wiesenthal Center ranks Germany, Italy and the U.S. as the most successful at investigating and prosecuting Nazi war crimes over the past year. In its annual report covering April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2012, released Thursday, the center said there was a fivefold increase in convictions from its previous report, from two to 10. Nine of those convictions were in Italy and one was in Germany.

The United States has indirectly informed Iran, via two European nations, that it would not back an Israeli strike against the country's nuclear facilities, as long as Tehran refrains from attacking American interests in the Persian Gulf, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Monday. According to the report, Washington used covert back-channels in Europe to clarify that the US does not intend to back Israel in a strike that may spark a regional conflict.

Former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk said that the United States "was convinced that Israel would attack" Iran's nuclear program during the spring months earlier this year, speaking in an interview with Army Radio on Thursday. After no Israeli strike took place, Indyk said that the US officials felt as though they had been duped by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak's ruse.

The US military has prepared contingency plans to send special operations teams into Syria to secure that country's chemical weapons stockpiles should they fall from the control of Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday evening.

A new report by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services revealed that over the past seven years 405 Israelis have petitioned for asylum in the US, and 116 such requests were granted. According to a Monday report in Yedioth Ahronoth, the petitioners claimed that they were persecuted by the authorities on religious, political, racial or national grounds; or that their lives were in mortal danger in Israel.

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, U.S. sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Wednesday. The sources said that Obama's order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence "finding," broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.

In what appears like a clear endorsement of a presidential candidate, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday night that Barack Obama has been the most supportive president on matters of Israeli security throughout the two countries' diplomatic relations. In an interview aired late Monday night on CNN, Barak told Wolf Blitzer that the Obama administration’s support of Israeli defense and intelligence establishments was far greater than under any other administration he remembered working with since and including President Jimmy Carter.

The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in. The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel.

A growing number of countries are flocking to Israel to study border security as the Defense Ministry works to complete the construction of a physical and technological barrier along the Egyptian border. In August, a delegation from India will arrive to study the various technologies used by the IDF to secure the borders with the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Egypt, and which could be implemented as part of India’s own fence with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Shindand Air Base has an 8,000-foot runway, a gleaming new headquarters complex and a cadre of motivated Afghan pilot candidates. Because of the way Washington operates, however, it lacks warplanes. The budding Afghan air force was supposed to receive $355 million worth of planes custom-made for fighting guerrillas well ahead of the U.S. withdrawal in 2014. Equipped with machine guns, missiles and bombs, those reliable, rugged turboprop aircraft are cheaper to operate and easier to maintain than fighter jets.

While Americans might enjoy throwing politically-charged barbs at their neighbors to the north, Canadians now have at least one reason to be smug. For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American, according to a report cited in Toronto's Globe and Mail. And not just by a little. Currently, the average Canadian household is more than $40,000 richer than the average American household. The net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, compared to around $320,000 for Americans.

Iraq has rejected a U.S. offer to receive half of the country's Jewish Archives, which were removed from Iraq in 2003 following the U.S. launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The refusal appeared last month in the Iraqi newspaper al-Sabah, according to the Press TV news service.

Washington - U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday he would extend a national state of emergency over Syria for another year, citing the Arab state's continuing support for terrorists and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

Washington - The U.S. listed China and Russia as the world’s worst offenders in failing to protect copyrights and patents, saying pirated movies and music worldwide cost American companies revenue. The U.S. Trade Representative’s annual report on patent and copyright infringement also calls out Thailand, Canada and India to toughen legal protections and crack down on those making illegal copies.

Washington - An Iranian navy plane that approached a U.S. aircraft carrier last week was flying as low as 300 feet as it neared the USS Eisenhower, U.S. military officials said Wednesday.

American bear hug? Interior Minister Eli Yishai has been officially invited to visit the White House. The decision is apparently the result of the US Administration's desire to forge closer ties with the minister they perceive to be behind the east Jerusalem construction turmoil during Vice President Joe Biden's visit in Israel.

The Iranian struggle against sanctions steps up a notch: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is planning to arrive in New York Monday in order to participate in the convention of 189 countries signed on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

A North Korean torpedo attack was the most likely cause for the sinking of a South Korean warship last month, according to a U.S. military official. The United States believes the ship was sunk by the blast of an underwater explosion, but that the explosive device itself did not come in contact with the hull of the South Korean ship, the official said. This is the same conclusion expressed by South Korean military officials.

Iran's political turmoil has prompted a growing number of the country's officials to defect or leak information to the West, creating a new flow of intelligence about its secretive nuclear program, U.S. officials said.

Officials in the US administration were the ones who leaked suspicions that Hezbollah had acquired Scud missiles from Syria, in order to "lay the groundwork for a proposal to the UN Security Council, to put together a resolution on the deployment of UN forces along the Syrian-Lebanese border," the Kuwaiti Al-Rai newspaper reported Sunday.