JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

• A Republican leader, a Democratic Jewish congresswoman and the ADL pushed back against the Obama administration's continuing rebukes of Israel for its settlement announcement last week.
• Austrian politics is roiling over the question of whether the lone challenger to Austria’s president in the upcoming election is a Nazi sympathizer.
• Israel will open a new embassy in New Zealand next month amid signs of warming relations between Wellington and Jerusalem.
• An Iranian Jewish family was arrested at Ben-Gurion Airport after trying to smuggle more than 30 pounds of opium into Israel.
• Israel has sealed off the West Bank for 48 hours for fear of Arab rioting.

• Jewish groups are upset with recent actions by the Presbyterian church regarding its Israel policies.
• Supporters of 11 university students arrested for disrupting a campus speech expressed concern about "Zionist influence" on the disciplinary process.
• U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the keynote speaker at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual policy conference.
• The European Parliament called for the immediate release of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
• Jill Biden, wife of the U.S. vice president, toured and praised a New Israel Find-backed program that the philanthropy says would be endangered by a proposed Israeli law.

• Two Israeli soldiers have been charged with inappropriate conduct during the Gaza war.
• Israel's announcement of new housing starts during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's visit was a "disaster," Abraham Foxman said in a rare rebuke.
• The U.S. State Department annual human rights report cited Palestinian incitement and Israel's denial of some basic Palestinian needs as ongoing problems in the region
• Brandeis University's Muslim chaplain issued an appeal for the return of his Koran days after his campus office was vandalized.
• A Swedish court ruled that the man accused of organizing the theft of the "Arbeit Macht Frei” sign from the front gate of Auschwitz can be extradited to Poland.

• The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum welcomed its 30 millionth visitor this week.
• A Kassam rocket fired from Gaza landed in the western Negev, causing damage to a building.
• A British journalist held in Gaza for nearly a month was released.
• Israel's Civil Administration, accompanied by Israeli troops, destroyed six new building foundations in Jerusalem's Etzion bloc.
• The Palestinian Authority canceled a ceremony to honor a woman who led the 1978 hijacking of a bus in which 35 Israelis were killed.

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