Free Republic

Two Israeli soldiers have been pulled from combat duty and given 30-day jail sentences after one photographed the other swinging what appeared to be a sledgehammer at the head of a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon, the Israeli military said on Tuesday. Other troops who stood by but did nothing to intervene, the military said, have also been summoned and could face disciplinary action. The military replaced the damaged statue with a gleaming new sculpture of the crucifixion of Christ and released a photo of it. The extraordinarily swift administration of military justice by Israel was a tacit acknowledgment...

With the threat of a U.S. strike on Iran looming, the United States embassy in Jerusalem has told its workers that they may leave Israel and warned them that if they want to, it is vital that they do so immediately, according to an email from Ambassador Mike Huckabee sent to the U.S. mission Friday. The move followed meetings and phone calls through the night, Mr. Huckabee told embassy workers in the email, and resulted from “an abundance of caution” and conversations with the State Department in which officials agreed that the safety of embassy staff was a priority. Those...

The conference room in the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters of LinkedIn was packed with the stars of Silicon Valley. Top executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter gathered around a table; the billionaire Sean Parker looked on from a back row. The guest of honor: Cory A. Booker, the mayor of Newark. "He's part of this tide," said Gina Bianchini, an entrepreneur who was at the meeting, in May 2009. "It feels like he's one of us." Mr. Booker personally has obtained money for the start-up, called Waywire, from influential investors, including Eric E. Schmidt, Google's executive chairman. A year after...