Arab Spring Winter
• AFP: Filipino president Benigno Aquino said he’ll pull his personnel from the UN’s Golan observer force if they don’t receive better protection — particularly anti-tank and anti-airplane equipment, plus protection from chemical weapons.
The Philippines had warned in recent weeks that it was considering pulling out its 341 soldiers from the force after 25 of them were kidnapped by Syrian rebels in two separate incidents this year.
• CNN‘s Fred Pleitgen spent some time with pro-Assad Palestinian gunmen in the Yarmouk refugee camp. It’s ironic to hear a Palestinian foreigner decrying foreigners from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
• JTA: At an EU meeting to discuss blacklisting Hezbollah, Bulgaria revealed new evidence further implicating the Lebanese terror group.
A Bulgarian representative to the European Union said Wednesday that investigators have discovered that a Hezbollah operative was the owner of a printer used to produce fake documents that facilitated the July 19 bombing of a bus filled with Israeli tourists in Burgas.
• Syrian rebels are now squabbling over long-awaited shipments of heavy weapons. AP coverage.
• For more commentary/analysis on the Syria situation see NY Times columnist Tom Friedman and the Christian Science Monitor‘s Nicholas Blanford.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• For commentary/analysis on the Iranian situation, see Mordechai Kedar, The Atlantic, Amir Taheri, and Dominic Lawson.
• Too many conflicting interests in this Wall St. Journal report (via Google News). I wouldn’t want to be in Bibi’s shoes:
A lawsuit in a New York federal court has put Israel’s leader in an extraordinary bind, between nurturing a growing relationship with China and pursuing commitments to fight terrorism and helping an American family seeking recompense for the death of a son.
The challenge comes to a head in July, when a former Israeli official is scheduled to testify in a terror-financing case that began six years ago, when the Israeli government asked Florida residents Tully and Sheryl Wultz to sue the Bank of China and pledged to help them with the case, the couple said.
• If you’re trying to make sense of Egypt’s fuss over Ethiopian plans to dam the Nile River, Zvi Mazel (Israel’s former ambassador to Egypt) provides excellent background in a Jerusalem Post commentary. A separate assessment by Dr. Jacques Neriah concludes that Egypt is powerless to stop the dam and that Mohammed Morsi’s using Ethiopia to distract attention from bigger domestic problems.
(Image of Aynaw via YouTube/Michael Heath)
For more, see Thursday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
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