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Bipartisan letter, signed by 360 lawmakers, will remind Obama that sanctions relief on Iran requires new legislation from Congress. A bipartisan letter on Iran signed by 360 members of Congress will be sent to President Barack Obama, one of its House signers said on Thursday, according to The Hill. The letter, similar to the one 47 Senate Republicans recently sent to Tehran's leaders, reminds the administration that permanent sanctions relief on Iran as part of a deal to rollback its nuclear program would require new legislation from Congress. It comes as international negotiators approach a March 24 deadline to reach...

Trip was arranged before election but is likely to be a 'victory celebration' for Netanyahu and Obama's arch rival. Speaker of the United States House of Representatives John Boehner is expected to visit Israel in about a week. Boehner, a member of the Republican Party, is U.S. President Barack Obama’s arch rival and the man who invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make his controversial speech in Congress. Senior Israeli officials who asked to remain anonymous said Boehner will begin his visit, which has not yet been announced publicly, on March 31, heading a delegation of Republican Congress members. The...

Starting off her interview with newly reelected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell acknowledged his win – then told him how bad it was: "Prime Minister, congratulations on your victory. But – there's always a but – critics and analysts here and around the world are saying, 'At what cost?' Your hard turn right on the Palestinian issue, what you said about the Arab voters coming out in droves, they say, are costing you, costing you support around the world." Netanyahu pushed back on her assertions: "Well, neither one is – the...

US Senate Democrats and Republicans agreed on Thursday to delay until at least mid-April any vote on a closely watched bill that would require President Barack Obama to submit any nuclear agreement with Iran for Congress' approval, congressional aides said. Republican Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had said he wanted to have the committee vote next Thursday. But Senate Democrats balked, reluctant to advance legislation the Obama administration has said could have a "profoundly negative impact" on the delicate nuclear talks with Iran, just as negotiators struggled to meet a late-March deadline for a framework...

SPITE TOWARD BIBI “HARDENED” OBAMA’S RESOLVE TO DO IRAN NUKE DEAL NYT: “[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s] objections to a nuclear deal with Iran, and his decision to firmly ally himself with Mr. Obama’s Republican opponents in expressing his ire over the Iran talks, may well have hardened the president’s decision to push for an agreement, one Obama adviser said Wednesday.” [Watch Fox: Netanyahu will be interviewed by Megyn Kelly, airing on “The Kelly File” tonight at 9 p.m. ET] White House steps up attacks - Fox News: “ In its first public response to Netanyahu's election triumph, White House...

Mar 19, 2015 Congressional hearing probes Iranian reach in Latin AmericaReaction from Amb. Roger Noriega, former US ambassador to the Organization of American States

Rising above the scene of the world’s worst nuclear accident is the spectacular sight of the largest moveable structure ever created on land. The complex of nuclear power plants at Chernobyl has dominated this corner of northwest Ukraine for decades but the new construction towers over it all. The project is to build what is called a New Safe Confinement – in effect, a giant cover, a kind of dome, to fit over the building that houses the reactor that exploded on 26 April, 1986. The radiation immediately above the reactor is still far too intense for the new enclosure...

A draft nuclear accord now being negotiated between the United States and Iran would force Iran to cut the amount of hardware it could use to make an atomic bomb by about 40 percent for at least a decade, while offering immediate relief from sanctions that have crippled Iran's economy, officials told The Associated Press on Thursday. As an added enticement, elements of a U.N. arms embargo against Iran could be rolled back. The very existence of the draft provided perhaps the clearest indication that the sides were nearing a written agreement as they raced to meet a March 31...

Zionist Union co-leader Tzipi Livni said Thursday she was very concerned with the election results, which currently show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party leading with 30 seats while her faction trails with 24 mandates. "The results here are not just a victory for Netanyahu, they are actually a victory for hate and fear," she told Army Radio in reference to the premier's last-minute bid to garner votes by warning that the right-wing faced danger from the large turnout of Israeli Arab pollster.

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had a poisonous relationship long before Mr. Netanyahu swept to victory on Tuesday night in elections watched minute-by-minute at the White House. But now that Mr. Netanyahu has won after aggressively campaigning against a Palestinian state and Mr. Obama’s potential nuclear deal with Iran, the question is whether the president and prime minister can ever repair their relationship — and whether Mr. Obama will even try. On Wednesday, part of the answer seemed to be that the president would not make the effort. In strikingly strong criticism, the White...

Are the Israeli people sick? According to Haaretz Columnist Gideon Levy, who was unsurprisingly not pleased with the results of Tuesday’s elections in Israel, the answer is “yes.” In an opinion column he published shortly after the results were announced, Levy called for the replacement of the Israeli people for re-electing Benjamin Netanyahu. Levy wrote that, “the first conclusion that comes to my mind two minutes after the release of the election results is particularly depressing: We have to replace the people. [What's necessary] is not more elections to change the leadership of the State, but rather a general election...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's victory in the Israeli election will not hamper US efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, the State Department said Wednesday. The Israeli leader opposes any accommodation with Tehran and came to Washington during the campaign to address US lawmakers and denounce the agreement under negotiation as a "bad deal." "We've been long familiar with the views of the prime minister on Iran. We don't think that his win has impacted the Iran negotiations, or will," said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. US Secretary of State John Kerry is in Lausanne for talks this week...

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) told The Algemeiner today that The New York Times has an anti-Netanyahu obsession. The media watchdog made the comments in response to a strongly worded editorial in The Times decrying Prime Minister Netanyahu’s election victory on Tuesday. “Anyone who wasn’t already aware of The New York Times mindset just has to read today’s paper on Israel’s elections to realize how pervasive is the anti-Netanyahu obsession at that newspaper,” said Senior Media Analyst Ricki Hollander of CAMERA. CAMERA also accused the paper of being anti-Israel. Hollander said that the newspaper...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's victory in the Israeli election will not hamper US efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, the State Department said Wednesday. The Israeli leader opposes any accommodation with Tehran and came to Washington during the campaign to address US lawmakers and denounce the agreement under negotiation as a "bad deal." "We've been long familiar with the views of the prime minister on Iran. We don't think that his win has impacted the Iran negotiations, or will," said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. US Secretary of State John Kerry is in Lausanne for talks this week...

Among the most disappointed with the results of Tuesday's elections are the activists of the V15 group – the organization that may or may not have been funded by American and European interests, but whose aim was to remove Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from office. “A confusing night turned into a painful morning,” the group said in a statement. “It was painful not because we lost, but because we have no faith in the winners.” V15 – Victory in 2015, a project of the One Voice group – was accused of being operated and funded by anti-right groups abroad, which...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's victory in the Israeli election will not hamper US efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, the State Department said Wednesday. The Israeli leader opposes any accommodation with Tehran and came to Washington during the campaign to address US lawmakers and denounce the agreement under negotiation as a "bad deal." "We've been long familiar with the views of the prime minister on Iran. We don't think that his win has impacted the Iran negotiations, or will," said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. US Secretary of State John Kerry is in Lausanne for talks this week...

The White House said Wednesday it still believes a two-state solution is the best way to find peace in the Middle East, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state. This comes after a comment by the White House, saying it will evaluate its approach to Mideast peace process. President Barack Obama believes a two-state solution is "the best way to resolve the situation," according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest, who added that Obama had not yet called to congratulate Netanyahu on his election victory. The White House also said it was "deeply...

When the 20th Knesset is sworn in on March 31, there will be quite a few quantitative changes in the legislature's makeup, according to Wednesday's results. The official election results will come on Thursday, after all the votes by soldiers and others who vote away from their hometown are counted, so some of these numbers are subject to changes, though they're likely to be minor. The 71.8 percent voter turnout is a 16-year peak, the highest since 1999, when it was 78.7%, according to research by the Israel Democracy Institute, and the number of parties that passed the 3.25% electoral...

The latest pre-election surveys had predicted that Zionist Union would outperform Likud, likely based on voters’ prioritization of socioeconomic issues. Likud’s apparent victory, however, might affirm that Israeli voters still place a high priority on security. Following Netanyahu’s much-debated March 3 speech to the U.S. Congress about Iran, an Israel Hayom-New Wave Research Institute poll revealed that 41 percents of Israelis would place their trust in Netanyahu to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, far more than the 6 percent of respondents who chose Herzog. (Fifteen percent said they trust U.S. President Barack Obama the most with the Iranian nuclear...

There’s two things that are clear. The Israeli public does not want a leftwing government, and the Israeli public does not like how Israel’s leftwing media tried to manipulate the elections. The suspiciously timed “investigations” against Netanyahu fueled by the constantly repeated reports of those investigations only helped Netanyahu in the polls, until the media finally realized they needed to back off the reporting because it was backfiring. And then there was V15′s campaign. The Israeli people aren’t stupid. They saw the media manipulation. They understood about the foreign funding, and they hit back. The news media’s outright lying about...