Headlines

• Prime Minister Netanyahu calls meeting with top security officials, plans more discussions in coming days on extension of sovereignty to parts of West Bank.

Jerusalem, Jul.1.– Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to discuss a possible annexation of parts of the West Bank with the US administration, his office said in a statement Wednesday, the target day the premier had set to begin the contentious process.

At the same time, Netanyahu convened top Israeli security brass, including National Security Adviser Meir Ben Shabbat on Wednesday, to discuss the issue, the statement said. “In the coming days there will be additional discussions,” it added.

The movement CITIZENS TAKEOVER OF EUROPE emerged in the spring 2020 to promote a forward-looking and citizens-centered European participatory democracy within a successful Conference on the Future of Europe, that puts citizens at the heart of the process."

This international conference was scheduled to start on Europe Day last May 9, 2020, for a two-years long discussion on how to proceed with European unification.

The idea of ​​the conference began in a public letter that the French President Emmanuel Macron addressed to the "citizens of Europe" a few weeks before the 2019 European elections, suggesting to "organize a European conference to propose all the changes necessary for our political project, without taboos, including a revision of the treaties". After the 2019 European elections, the designated Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (CDU/EPP) adopted this idea in her political guidelines. 

Abdelmalek Droukdel, Algerian jihad veteran, was killed in northern Mali during an operation on Wednesday, the Defense Minister announced.

Mali, June 6.– In military jargon, we speak of “mowing the lawn” to evoke the operations of elimination of the jihadist leaders, constantly replaced. The man who was killed on Wednesday was more of a tree than a clump of grass. Its roots go deep into the history of Algerian terrorism, the matrix of armed groups that are swarming in the Sahel today. Abdelmalek Droukdel, 50, was the emir of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqmi).

The Algerian was the link between global jihad - he corresponded with Al-Qaeda cadres - and local jihad - most of the Islamist groups in the Sahel have pledged allegiance to him . At the start of the dark decade, he had interrupted his engineering studies to join the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), a bloody movement responsible for the campaign of attacks in France in 1995.

Surrounded on all sides by foes, Xi Jinping faces mounting obstacles to his goal of  ‘national rejuvenation.’

May 28.– As China reopens its economy after months of lockdowns, the country’s leadership has initiated a broad offensive to expand its influence at home and abroad. A new Hong Kong security law that attemps to stamp out dissent in the autonomous region sparked another round of anti-Mainland protests. Meanwhile, China has scaled up military exercises in the Yellow Sea, which will extend into the South China Sea this summer.

Now a standoff between forces on the Sino–Indian border has opened a new front in Beijing’s offensive. This latest development in a decades-old dispute between the world’s two most populous countries underscores the myriad obstacles that Chinese president Xi Jinping faces in his goal of “national rejuvenation.”