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An employee at a Santa Ana auto parts store was the victim of an extortion scam on Monday evening, in what police first reported to be a robbery and kidnapping, authorities said Tuesday, Jan. 12. Officers initially said a suspect entered the AutoZone on South Bristol Street and McFadden Avenue, took cash and then abducted an employee. إعلان But on Tuesday, Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said the saga actually began when someone called the business and talked to the manager. “The manager got a call from someone who claimed that if he did not take money to them they’d send people with guns to the store,” Bertagna said. Bertagna said the manager took money from the business – he would not say how much – and waited for the extortionists to show up. When they didn’t, he left the premises on foot. “He was told to go somewhere to wire the money to an account,” he said. It was not immediately known where he went to wire the money or through what service. “The manager completed their directions out of fear,” Bertagna said. At the same time, police officers were searching the area for who they thought was a suspect who made off with the store’s money, Bertagna said. After the manager complied, he left the spot where he wired the money and flagged down a police car. Detectives eventually untangled the events and determined from the suspect’s phone number that they were probably in Mexico. Shortly after police found the store manager, someone called another AutoZone store and made the same demands to an employee. This time, the employee called police first, averting another transaction, Bertagna said. No injuries were reported during the incident. No suspects have been located. Authorities said it may be difficult to trace them because often original phone numbers used in such crimes are deactivated. A manager at the first AutoZone store declined to comment Tuesday. Extortion or kidnapping scams have been reported in past years. “It’s like when someone calls and says they just kidnapped your family member and they want money…but (the suspects) don’t actually have them,” Bertagna said. The calls often come from Mexico, police say. Authorities have advised people to call them immediately before following the caller’s directions. Typically callers will target people directly, however, not businesses like they did on Monday. “That’s a new thing for us,” Bertagna said.

Abe says government will reassess situation after discussions with expert panel in mid-May The government has called on residents to maintain a “new lifestyle” — even after restrictive measures over the new coronavirus have been relaxed — following Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s extension of the nationwide state of emergency to the end of May. While Abe and other top politicians have on multiple occasions stressed the long-term implications of the coronavirus pandemic, this is the first time the government has offered specific examples of how that might shape the lives of individuals in the coming weeks, months and possibly years. The threat of a second wave of infections will persist for months, with the disease likely lingering long after society reopens. In order to more permanently subdue the novel coronavirus, the panel said residents need to modify the way they go shopping, work, use public transportation, eat meals, host weddings and other celebrations, and play recreational sports. Just as before, people are advised to wear masks, stay 2 meters apart, frequently wash their hands with soap, change clothes upon returning home, work remotely and avoid riding public transportation during rush hour. Moving forward, however, the government is now advising people in Japan to refrain from speaking on public transportation, to avoid sitting side-by-side while eating meals and to exercise at home, among other measures. RELATED STORIES Abe to extend Japan's state of emergency through May 31 Abe extends Japan's nationwide state of emergency, but prepares to relax some restrictions Japan's workers and parents feel the strain as Abe extends state of emergency While these are not groundbreaking, the government suggesting the necessity of a shift to a “new lifestyle” signals a change in tone. Still, all requests and measures put forth by the central and municipal governments remain strictly voluntary, with no legal punishment for individuals or businesses that flout them. Questions also remain as to whether the government will provide additional financial support to struggling households, as well as businesses that have heeded requests to temporarily close or reduce operations. Abe announced Monday that the declaration of a state of emergency — first declared in seven prefectures on April 7 and later expanded to the rest of the country — would be kept in place until May 31. “We aim to resolve the state of emergency in the coming month, and we view it as a preparatory period toward the next stage of this outbreak,” he said. “This is going to be a long battle. But if we continue current measures that severely restrict the economy and society, we will not be able to make ends meet. We need to build a new normal as soon as possible.” Strict measures to prevent nonessential travel and business will be maintained in the 13 prefectures originally designated last month by the government as having a particularly high number of coronavirus cases. However, public parks, museums and other public facilities may be allowed to reopen in those designated prefectures so long as strict social distancing rules remain in place. Countermeasures may be relaxed in the other 34 prefectures leading up to May 31. The government is strongly urging residents in those areas to continue isolating themselves in the days before and after the emergency declaration is lifted in their area. The government’s goal was to reduce human contact by 80 percent in a bid to contain the virus. While pedestrian traffic saw huge drops throughout the country — especially in Tokyo — the results still fell short of that target. Abe said the government will reassess the situation after a meeting with members of its expert panel around May 14. Shigeru Omi, a member of the expert panel who spoke alongside Abe during the prime minister’s news conference Monday night, said one focus for the country should be bolstering its testing quota. “At first, Japan conducted a limited number of tests because the country was focused on preventing severe cases and overburdening the health care system,” Omi said, pointing out that the coronavirus mortality rate in Japan remains less than a tenth of what’s being reported in several hard-hit European countries. “While the government’s efforts have led to more testing, that change isn’t happening as quickly as intended,” he said. “In order to provide test kits for those who need it, we need to continue increasing the country’s testing capacity.” Japan has been roundly criticized for its approach to conducting polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests on suspected coronavirus patients. Since the contagion reached its shores in early January, the country has been focused on individuals already suspected of infection. The government was adamant that targeted testing would prevent hospitals from being overburdened and stop the collapse of the country’s health care system. In recent weeks, numerous reports have described hospitals turning away sick individuals or denying them tests, most likely to avoid in-hospital infections or due to a lack of beds for COVID-19 patients. While testing has been gradually increasing over the past month, it still lags far behind many other countries. Experts say the abundance of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infections means comprehensive, proactive testing is the only way to gauge the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak. Without it, they say researchers won’t have enough data to draw conclusions about this new disease, and residents can’t be expected to respond appropriately.

The acting defense secretary ordered the spy agency to appoint Michael Ellis, who has been accused of having a hand in one of the Trump administration’s most contentious legal decisions. WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is moving forward with hiring a Trump administration loyalist, the agency said on Sunday, after the acting defense secretary ordered he be made the spy agency’s top lawyer. Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary, gave Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the spy agency’s director, until 6 p.m. on Saturday to install Michael Ellis as its general counsel. The deadline came and went with the National Security Agency remaining silent. But the agency said in a statement on Sunday that “Mr. Ellis accepted his final job offer yesterday afternoon. N.S.A. is moving forward with his employment.” He has not been formally sworn in, and it is not clear when that would happen. Mr. Ellis has been accused of having a hand in one of the more contentious legal decisions the Trump administration made: the attempt to stop John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, from publishing a damning book about the president. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Mr. Ellis’s allies had pushed for him to be installed before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is inaugurated. While it will be difficult to fire Mr. Ellis under Civil Service rules, the Biden administration could easily reassign him to another, less important post. Thanks for reading The Times. Subscribe to The Times The Biden transition team declined to comment. A senior official at the National Security Council and a former top lawyer to Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Ellis applied months ago to be the National Security Agency’s general counsel. He was one of three finalists, although he did not receive the highest score from the panel evaluating the candidates, according to people familiar with the hiring process. Nevertheless, White House officials told the Defense Department general counsel that the administration favored Mr. Ellis for the job. DEBATABLE: The sharpest arguments on the most pressing issues of the week. Sign Up Positioning a political appointee in a Civil Service job is a complex procedure requiring various approvals to prevent favoritism in the hiring process. With Mr. Ellis, the Office of Personnel Management eventually determined that the general counsel position was exempt from a policy requiring special approval, though those deliberations slowed the process. Mr. Ellis also had to seek a new security clearance. Although General Nakasone was not pleased that Mr. Ellis was chosen over career officials at the National Security Agency, he did not actively block or slow the process of installing Mr. Ellis, according to two people familiar with the matter. He did, however, insist that all procedures were followed and all approvals were put in writing. Editors’ Picks He Brought Moynihan Train Hall to Life, but Didn’t Live to See It James Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’s Why a Vogue Cover Created an Uproar Over Kamala Harris ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story At the Pentagon, Mr. Miller was angry that the agency’s leadership had slow-rolled Mr. Ellis’s installment for months despite his going through the standard hiring process and being selected for the position, a senior U.S. official said. So Mr. Miller ordered the agency to swear Mr. Ellis in, a move The Washington Post reported on Saturday. In a statement, the Pentagon defended Mr. Ellis’s hiring, saying he was properly selected by the Defense Department general counsel. “To be clear, congressional or media interest in a particular hiring action are not justification under the merit system principles and process to delay placing a selected qualified individual in a position,” the statement said. Mr. Ellis is seen as a smart lawyer. But the push to install him in a permanent government job puzzled some. According to former officials, he is likely to enter the general counsel’s office under a good deal of suspicion and will have an uphill battle to win the confidence of General Nakasone. Mr. Ellis will be a member of the Senior Executive Service, a Civil Service job that has strong protections against firing. However, civil servants can be easily moved in the Defense Department, so he could be given a legal job elsewhere in the sprawling department — overseeing compliance with environmental regulations at a remote military base, for example. When he was on the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Ellis was a trusted adviser to Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California. Mr. Ellis held various roles in the Trump administration, including serving as a lawyer for the National Security Council and then the White House’s senior director for intelligence. At the White House, Mr. Ellis overruled the decision by a career official to clear Mr. Bolton’s book for publication, even though he had no formal training in the classification of national security information. The Justice Department, under pressure from President Trump, sued Mr. Bolton to recoup his profits from the book. A judge overseeing the case issued a ruling on Thursday that makes it highly likely that Mr. Bolton’s lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, can question White House officials like Mr. Ellis about whether the classification decisions were made in bad faith. Should Mr. Ellis take over as general counsel, at least for a time, he may be able to stall that testimony. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Mr. Ellis is also being investigated by the Defense Department inspector general examining accusations that he retaliated against Yevgeny Vindman, who goes by Eugene and worked with Mr. Ellis as a lawyer for the National Security Council. Mr. Vindman is the twin the brother of Alexander S. Vindman, the former Army lieutenant colonel who testified against Mr. Trump in his first impeachment trial. Early in Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Ellis provided Mr. Nunes intelligence reports that associates of Mr. Trump were swept up in foreign surveillance by American intelligence agencies. The material is at the heart of Mr. Trump’s frequent accusation that the Obama administration spied on his campaign. Allies of Mr. Trump have pushed to declassify documents that some conservatives believe would buttress those claims, including last-minute pressure in recent days. But in reality, Mr. Ellis will have little direct power to declassify those documents or overcome General Nakasone’s objections to their release. It is not clear precisely what led the Pentagon to push General Nakasone to speed Mr. Ellis’s hiring. However, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Miller on Friday to discuss various issues, according to the senior U.S. official.

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agat Prakash Nadda has been made the working national president of the Bharatiya Janata Party. According to sources, the decision was taken in a BJP parliamentary board meeting which was chaired by PM Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah, senior leaders Sushma Swaraj, Ram Lal among others. Speaking on JP Nadda's appointment, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said, "Amit Shah handled the responsibility of being BJP chief successfully for five years. Now that he has become home minister, he [Amit Shah] requested someone else take charge of the party. BJP Parliamentary board has selected JP Nadda as the working president." Delhi: Senior BJP leaders present bouquets to JP Nadda at the BJP Parliamentary Board meeting being held at the BJP headquarters. pic.twitter.com/sgvmAx2tym Amit Shah will remain party's national president, Rajnath Singh clarified. JP Nadda's appointment comes days after the BJP had announced that current BJP chief Amit Shah will continue in the position for now. Amit Shah will remain BJP president till the forthcoming state assembly polls are over i.e. December 2019. The BJP will likely get a new president by the start of next year. The 59-year-old Nadda, who is a Rajya Sabha member as well as the former health minister, will be overseeing BJP's election strategy for the upcoming state assembly polls. He will be steering the BJP through Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand and Maharashtra assembly polls which will be conducted in the second half of 2019. JP Nadda had been the front runner to replace Amit Shah as the BJP president. Nadda was part of the previous Narendra Modi government. Known to keep a low profile and get things done, Nadda was instrumental in furthering Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programmes including Ayushman Bharat, the health-insurance scheme of the government. It is only after these assembly polls that the process of organisational elections will start within the BJP.

      At Birzeit University (BZU) in the Israeli occupied West Bank, just north of Ramallah, a growing cohort of young Palestinian students are studying for their M.A. in Israel Studies. The program’s first cohort was admitted in 2015. By the summer of 2019, nearly thirty Palestinian students will have received their degree. In the Birzeit classroom, students and faculty are, in their words, “trying to produce Palestinian knowledge of Israeli society” through deep, critical engagement with Israeli culture, politics and society, often working with primary texts in their original Hebrew. In the process, they are fundamentally remaking the dominant paradigm of Israel Studies as it has been configured in the United States and increasingly in Great Britain, with its proud “advocacy” mandate on behalf of the Israeli state. Birzeit’s program turns this paradigm inside out, providing students with a radical alternative. The idea for the program began informally in 2010 with conversations between Birzeit faculty members, at the behest of the University president, and the Ramallah-based Institute for Palestine Studies. There was some minor disagreement among faculty about the program’s founding principles, evident in disputes over its naming: “settler-colonial studies,” favored by some, was rejected in favor of “Israel Studies.” After approval from the Palestinian Ministry of Education, funding was eventually secured through a partnership with the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, an institute headed by former Palestinian member of Israel’s Knesset (Parliament) and Birzeit faculty member, Azmi Bishara. The first Birzeit students in Israel Studies matriculated in the fall of 2015. Like the broader Birzeit student po[CENSORED]tion, the majority of M.A. students come from the Ramallah area, with smaller numbers from other West Bank locales, including Jerusalem, and the occasional student from the Gaza Strip who receives the requisite permits from Israel. The financial incentives are considerable: thanks to support from The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, the program has the means to provide students with full scholarships and living stipends and thus it can attract some of Birzeit’s best students. Most of the program’s faculty are Birzeit professors, but it also employs part-time faculty from other institutions, including Palestinian scholars from inside Israel. The program’s mandate is clear: to establish a Palestinian base of critical knowledge about Israel and its settler-colonial history through deep engagement with Israeli political systems, religious thought, society and culture. The program’s current director, Dr. Munir Fakher Eldin, a historian of modern Palestine, characterized its rationale this way: The idea for this program came out of the certain realization that it’s absurd to be under occupation for 50 years, with over a century of conflict with Zionism, and not have any Palestinian production of academic knowledge on Israel. So the basic idea is that we need this expertise… But this idea raised lots of questions. Can you study Israel and break with Israeli mainstream knowledge production? And the answer was: yes, of course. The program’s curriculum is robustly interdisciplinary. All students receive intensive training in Hebrew and have the opportunity to pick from a roster of courses in such subjects as Zionist ideology and history; Judaism, Jewish history and thought; society and political systems within ‘48 Palestine; Israeli demography; Israeli political economy; Israeli culture and literature, and the list goes on. A settler-colonial framework is central within the curriculum, as is a comparative analytic framework, as Dr. Fakher Eldin suggests: My basic strategy is to show them that all of the atrocities of Zionism and the occupation are basically comparable atrocities. They exist in a wider context. In my special class entitled “The Land Question,” for example, we don’t only speak about settler colonialism and the Zionist land grab. I also talk about capitalism, because settler-colonialism benefited from the history of private property… In other words, I [dismantle] the sense of extreme uniqueness. This is something new in the students’ minds and it’s a very important lesson. Complicating the Story When I met Izz Al-Deen Araj at Birzeit in November, 2018, he was in the final months of his M.A. work. A resident of Ramallah, he had also completed his B.A. at Birzeit, as had the vast majority of his colleagues in the program, with a major in sociology. He had opted for the program’s three-year thesis-track (some students elect only coursework, completed in two years) and when I met him, was finishing a thesis about the politics of demography within the Israel—that is, the ways that the Israeli and Palestinian demographic balance figures within internal political debates. His next step, he hoped, was a PhD program in the U.K., provided that the requisite visas from Israel could be obtained. The Bir Zeit University Israeli Studies program (Photo: Rebecca L. Stein) Echoing the accounts of others, he described his learning experience as a process of continual surprise particularly so during his thesis research. The diversity and complexity of Israeli positions on the question of demography exceeded all prior expectations: One side argues that we should keep the Jewish majority and we don’t want more land. The other argues that land is more crucial and we shouldn’t be as concerned with the demographic problem. I was amazed at how this discussion became the main factor [in determining] the left wing and the right wing in Israel. So much of what he had learned about Israel was entirely new to him, he said, noting the influence of the ultra-orthodox Jewish po[CENSORED]tion on the Israeli political and social landscape, the numerous inequalities inside the state’s Jewish po[CENSORED]tions, the tremendous variance in political discourses and the list went on. Such complexity, he said, had forced a rethinking of both the political paradigms and theoretical models on which he had previously relied. When I finished the first semester, I was totally shocked because we all know about Israel [when we enter the program]. But I understood that most of what I knew was… not exactly wrong but…well, I started to think more deeply about Israeli society. On the one hand, he said, he “started to think about Israel as a settler-colonial society, not [merely] as soldiers.” But this, too, he felt was inadequate to the variability of the Israeli social and political landscape. “We understand the conflict through one model: settler-colonialism or apartheid. But I think we can use more complex models…. Can we understand the administration of the West Bank in the same frame as we understand the [administration] of Gaza?” The work of complexifying students’ prior knowledge about Israel is perhaps the program’s chief mandate. In the process, prevailing Israeli and Palestinian discourses and political models come under critical scrutiny. Again, Fakher Eldin: I believe in thinking critically and thoroughly, and having the courage to ask difficult questions. In our case, it’s very easy to over-simplify the occupation of Israel, to create certain conventions about what Zionism is. And these are very critical positions because we are the victims of Israel. But in most cases, this is the only thing we know about Israel: the violence that it inflicts on Palestinians. We also need to move beyond this and study the Israeli system that produces this violence…You can problematize power in very important ways if you know the power system. In my conversations with faculty and students, I learned of numerous student experiences along these lines—that is, of classroom and research experiences that challenged their prior conceptions of Israeli history, politics, and society. Professor Nabih Bashir, a scholar of Jewish intellectual thought in the medieval period, told a similar story about his students’ first encounter with Judaeo-Arabic literature in his course on Jewish history and thought: After some introductory classes, after they became familiar with the Hebrew Alphabet, I give the students pages of an old manuscript to read… My most delightful moments are seeing their excitement after they have the tools to read it. The Master’s Tools Marah Khalifeh was a student in the Israel Studies program’s first MA cohort; she entered in 2015 and completed her degree in 2017. When she began the program, she said, “Israel was something abstract: the enemy, the colonizer. I didn’t know more than that.” She left, she said, with an “in-depth knowledge about Israeli society…It’s part of knowing your enemy, part of the knowledge of resistance.” When Marah started, she had just completed her B.A. at Birzeit in English literature; within the program’s thesis track, she focused on the writings of Israeli Mizrahi author Sami Michael. It was the polyvalence of Michael’s personal history that most intrigued her, his refusal to fall neatly into state-authorized categories: “He’s a communist, he’s Iraqi, a non-Zionist as he calls himself. And he’s Israeli. I tried to explore how he deals with these multiple and contradictory identities in this colonial context.” On the one hand, she said, her prior conception of Israel as a colonial, perpetrator state was inadequate as a way to understand to Michael’s identity as (in her view) both “the victim and the assailant.” Yet when she considered the possibility of interviewing Sami Michael for her research, a proposition she would eventually reject, she found returning to core anti-colonial principles: “At first I thought to myself, he’s Iraqi [so that’s ok]. But at the end of the day, he’s Israeli and he was in the army, and he’s part of this colonial society… He’s using the tools that Israel gives him. He’s not creating new tools.” Her discussion of the Birzeit program frequently returned to Audre Lorde’s trope of the “master’s tools.” It was in these terms that she described the Palestinian relationship to the Israeli legal system, the subject of one of her Israel Studies seminars. The material fascinated her, even as it underscored the need for alternative Palestinian political instruments: How you can you legally colonize a people?…[The Israeli state] tries to be legitimate and follow the law. Yet, at the same time, it’s the Israeli law that is legitimizing the occupation of the West Bank, and legitimizing the Nakba itself… So are we, as Palestinians, using the Israeli legal system or is it the system using us?… It’s like trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. “Two Colonial Geographies” At BZU, students have the opportunity to learn from Palestinian professors and researchers from ’48—the Palestinian terminology of choice to refer to Palestinian communities residing inside Israel as citizens. While they comprise the decided minority of the BZU faculty, their imprint on student learning is particularly striking within the Israel Studies program. Professor Magid Shihade was one such professor. A resident of the Galilee and expert in postcolonial theory, he taught in the program from 2015-2018, including a course on ‘48 Palestinian society and politics. He found that most of his students were encountering this material for the first time: namely, the history of Israeli state-sponsored discrimination, de-development and de-education within its Palestinian communities. For his students, the course material was novel and important; but their personal encounter with him, and other professors from ’48, was equally eye-opening. Marah Khalife: In the day to day, we [Palestinians from the West Bank] do not deal with Palestinians from ‘48. The idea of being able, for instance, to live in Nazareth and be in Ramallah in the afternoon was new to me. For us from ‘67 [West Bank] it’s hard to be in two places, in two colonial geographies, during the same day. You either wake very early in the morning or arrive very late at night. But for the professors [it was different]: you call him in the morning and he’s in Nazareth and by 2 o’clock he’s in the class with us. So it’s reimagining Palestine. The place of ‘48 Palestinian students within both Israeli and Palestinian universities has shifted considerably over the last decade. On the one hand, there has been an influx of these students into the West Bank, particularly to the Arab American University (AUJ) in Jenin (a private college, founded in 2000), attracted by its paramedical training and proximity to the Galilee. For the institution, they are a much-needed source of revenue, and actively courted. Today, they represent 55 percent of AUJ students. Other universities in the West Bank such as Al Najah University in Nablus are now courting Palestinian students from inside Israel, eager for the revenue. The same period has seen a concurrent rise in the number of ‘48 Palestinian students enrolled in Israeli universities. In prior decades, Israeli universities were effectively off-limits to Palestinian citizens, given stringent admission requirements that tended to favor Jewish Israeli students. Today, numerous Israeli institutions trumpet their growing Palestinian student po[CENSORED]tions as evidence of democratic inclusion. Such is the case at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, now actively courting Palestinians from East Jerusalem. Critics of this policy charge Hebrew University with cementing the annexation of Palestinian Jerusalem. At BZU, Palestinian faculty from ‘48 function within something of a legal gray zone. According to Israeli law, Israeli citizens are not permitted to enter Area A (the sector of the West Bank administered by the Palestinian Authority, where the university is located). As Professor Bashir notes: “The fact is that every time we, as Palestinians from Israel, go through the Israeli checkpoints, we are actually breaking the Israeli law.” For the time being, the Israeli authorities have elected to turn a blind eye. Normalization? BZU’s Israel Studies program is not without Palestinian precedents. Al Quds University in Jerusalem began its Israel Studies program in 2005, housed within its International Studies M.A. program. The BZU program also work closely with the handful of other Palestinian research centers that study Israeli politics and society, including Mada al-Carmel (The Arab Center for Applied Social Research, Haifa-based) and Madar (The Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies, Ramallah-based). Like the BZU and Al Quds program, both are post-Oslo institutions. The Israel Studies program also has regional precedents. For decades, in institutions of higher education across the Middle East, Arab students have had the opportunity to study Hebrew and Zionist ideology as part of a “know your enemy” educational paradigm. Educational projects of this kind also existed beyond the university context. In the 1970s, for example, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s research center in Beirut engaged in its own educational program along these lines, including Arabic translations of foundational Zionist writings. But today, no regional equivalent of the Birzeit program exists outside of Palestine due to the taint of normalization—projects that normalize relations with Israel, therein legitimizing its policies and regime on both sides of the Green Line. BZU and Al Quds University offer the only degree-granting M.A. programs in Israel Studies in the Arab World. BZU’s Israel Studies program, for its part, has not faced such critiques from within the institution despite the university’s strong anti-normalization stance and support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [BDS] movement. “It’s never been an issue on campus,” says BZU Professor of Anthropology Rema Hammami. “Even the student groups who have raised normalization as an issue around specific events and professors, have never raised them towards the Israel Studies program.” Normalization aside, some students and faculty still voice unease with the program’s central tenets. Professor Shihade was among those program founders who raised early concerns about the program’s name—preferring “settler-colonial studies” as a means of differentiating the program from the hegemonic scholarly paradigm in the United States and Great Britain. He reported a similar unease among some of the students he taught—less so within the classroom than beyond, when they returned home to their families. “When the students say, ‘we are doing Israel Studies,’ they are looked at in a slightly suspicious way from the society in general.” The Birzeit program is raising more eyebrows within Israeli university settings, particularly amidst growing international support for BDS. For most Israelis, the very mention of BZU harkens back to a threatening history of radical political organizing during the first Palestinian uprising (1987-1991), when students and faculty were on the political frontlines. Professor Nabih, who also holds a faculty position at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, spoke of the suspicion he faces from his Jewish Israeli colleagues: The moment they know that I am teaching in a Palestinian university, they start with their interrogation, as if there are Jewish secrets that I am going to expose to the enemy …They can’t imagine that some guy from Ramallah would want to study Judaism without having evil impulses. Thus far, there has been little Israeli media or state scrutiny of the BZU program; but one imagines that, within the current political climate, such scrutiny is only a matter of time. “Our Own Tools” The growth of the Israel Studies program coincides with new challenges for Palestinian universities in the West Bank. During the last year and half, Israel has denied visa extensions to many international professors and scholars teaching at these institutions, particularly those actively supporting BDS. According to some recent reports, nearly half of the foreign faculty working in West Bank universities have been denied in the last year and a half. BZU’s faculty has been heavily impacted. The University, represented by the Palestinian legal advocacy organization Adalah, is currently bringing a legal case to the Israeli high court. At BZU, as across the West Bank, student education continues under conditions of duress. Students and faculty are under perpetual surveillance, questioned and arrested on a regular basis. “We already have an education in Israel Studies,” many students noted wryly, thanks to the experience of living under military rule. And while all of Palestine’s institutions of higher education suffer under military occupation, the Israel Studies program is subject to a unique set of constraints that confront students and professor alike in the most benign details of their daily educational work. Fakher Eldin: The power relations are against you as a Palestinian researcher [in this field]: you can’t interview your enemy, you can’t do ethnography, you can’t easily teach and study Israeli sources…There are many constraints, but there are also many ways to overcome these disadvantages. I think we we’re seeing the fruits from the students who are writing theses. They’re coming up with very interesting ideas about Israeli politics. Within Palestine’s constrained financial and political present, the professional futures for students in the Israel Studies program are admittedly uncertain. Some graduates hope to pursue to Ph.D.s in related fields in Europe or the United States. Others have moved on to governmental or media work within Palestine, or have joined the neoliberal NGO workforce. For her part, Marah Khalife is just beginning a job at the newly opened Palestine Museum, housed on campus, where she believes that her critical analytic skills will be put to good use. When one studies the BZU Israel Studies program from the vantage of the United States, amidst the growth of donor-driven Israel Studies programs with their unapologetic advocacy commitments, it appears as a radical act of intellectual and political refiguration. In the hands of its faculty and students—in their close work with the details of Israeli politics and society, in their openness to the surprises and complexities that emerge from taking archives and histories seriously—the very notion of “Israel Studies” is being wholly remade. Here, again, Marah Khalifeh:

Turkey has formally charged 99 generals and admirals in connection with the weekend's thwarted coup attempt, just under a third of the country's 356 top military officers. Authorities have banned all academics from travelling abroad, as the purge of state employees suspected of being connected to the failed coup continues. More than 50,000 people have been rounded up, sacked or suspended. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to announce further measures. President Erdogan, seen here outside his Istanbul home, is now back in Ankara for meetings As soon as it became clear that the coup had failed on Saturday, the purges began - first with the security forces, then spreading to Turkey's entire civilian infrastructure. Human rights group Amnesty International has warned the purges are being extended to censor media outlets and journalists, including those critical of government policy. "We are witnessing a crackdown of exceptional proportions in Turkey at the moment. "While it is understandable, and legitimate, that the government wishes to investigate and punish those responsible for this bloody coup attempt, they must abide by the rule of law and respect freedom of expression," Amnesty's Turkey researcher Andrew Gardner said. Turkey is struggling to return to normal in the aftermath of last week's abortive coup The WikiLeaks website has been blocked in Turkey after it released thousands of emails purportedly showing exchanges between ruling AKP officials.　 The documents - ranging from this month back to 2010 - were obtained a week before the attempted coup and the source has no connection to that event, WikiLeaks says. Turkish daily Cumhuriyet said that one of the emails contained a letter sent to President Erdogan. "My family and I suffered in our own country because of your actions. Aren't we as precious as Egyptian Esma?" it says, in a reference to Mr Erdogan's tears on TV after the daughter of a Muslim Brotherhood politician was killed in Egypt. Other emails contain media reports on Fethullah Gulen and his movement.

Mai mulţi parlamentari au iniţiat un proiect potrivit căruia cetăţenii români pot să facă donaţii la MApN pentru dotări, iar în schimb pot să primească compensaţii, inclusiv grade militare, chiar şi cel de general, vicepremierul Gabriel Oprea şi ministrul Mircea Duşa nefiind de acord cu propunerea. Propunerea legislativă pentru "crearea şi desfăşurarea unui mecanism de donaţii benevole private, care să colecteze fonduri utilizabile exclusive în dotarea logistică a MApN", semnată de 32 de deputaţi şi senatori, se află în consultare publică la Camera Deputaţilor. Conform proiectului, fondurile vizate se vor obţine prin donaţii publice directe, fiind vărsate de către persoanele fizice într-un cont al Trezoreriei sau în alte conturi dedicate, alocate publicului de către societăţi de microfinanţare - crowdfunding. "Fondurile atrase şi colectate în aceste conturi dedicate vor fi utilizate exclusiv în activitatea de dotare logistică a MApN cu tehnică de luptă şi muniţia aferentă noi, moderne, performante", propun iniţiatorii. În anexele la proiectul de lege sunt stabilite şi o serie de "beneficii pentru donatorii privaţi". Astfel, pentru o sumă mai mică sau egală cu 100 de euro, la o singură donaţie sau cumulat anual, sunt prevăzute: deductibilitate pentru sumele donate, reducere de 1% din toate impozitele datorate statului pe anul respectiv, promovare (publicare) benevolă a fiecărui donator într-o listă naţională a donatorilor pe acest proiect, oferirea unei diplome ce are înscrisă suma donată. Pentru o sumă între 100 şi 1.000 de euro, la o singură donaţie sau cumulat anual, iniţiatorii propun: deductibilitate pentru sumele donate, reducere de 2% din toate impozitele datorate statului pe anul respectiv, promovare (publicare) benevolă a fiecărui donator într-o listă naţională a donatorilor pe acest proiect, invitare de participare ca oaspete la toate manifestările şi sărbătorile publice ale MApN, oferirea unei diplome ce are înscrisă suma donată şi a unei distincţii publice militare. În cazul celor care donează între 1000 şi 5.000 de euro, dar cu obligaţia donării anuale, în acelaşi cuantum, timp de cinci ani, este prevăzută, în plus, oferirea gradului MApN de subofiţer în rezervă. Celelalte beneficii menţionate anterior sunt valabile şi în acest caz, cu diferenţa că reducerea din impozite propusă este de 4%. Pentru donaţiile între 5.000 şi 10.000 de euro, timp de şapte ani, este propus ca la sfârşitul intervalului să fie oferit gradul MApN de ofiţer inferior în rezervă. Dacă donaţiile sunt între 10.000 şi 50.000 de euro, timp de nouă ani, se propune oferirea gradului de ofiţer superior în rezervă. Dacă donaţiile sunt de cel puţin sau mai mult de 50.000 de euro, anual, pe o durată de cel puţin 12 ani, se propune oferirea gradului MApN de general în rezervă. Pentru ultimele trei categorii de donatori, mai sunt propuse şi: deductibilitate pentru sumele donate, reducere de 8% din toate impozitele datorate statului pe anul respectiv, promovare (publicare) benevolă a fiecărui donator într-o listă naţională a donatorilor pe acest proiect, invitare de participare ca oaspete la toate manifestările şi sărbătorile publice ale MApN, oferirea unei diplome ce are înscrisă suma donată, a unei distincţii publice militare şi a unei medalii publice de stat. Vicepremierul Gabriel Oprea şi ministrul Apărării Mircea Duşă au declarat, luni, că nu sunt de acord cu proiectul prin care cetăţenii care fac donaţii pentru armată să primească, în schimb, grade militare. Întrebat în legătură cu proiectul potrivit căruia cetăţenii români pot să facă donaţii la MApN pentru dotări, dar în schimb pot să primească compensaţii, inclusiv grade militare, chiar şi cel de general, Oprea a spus că nu este de acord ca cei care fac donaţii să primească grade militare, dar este un lucru bun ca oricine să poată ajuta Ar[CENSORED]. "Nu am văzut acest proiect, dar este foarte clar stabilit în legislaţie, gradele sunt acordate de miniştrii Apărării sau de şeful Statului Major General în anumite condiţii de vechime, de vârstă, de studii. Oricine poate ajuta Ar[CENSORED] română sub diferite forme, şi este un lucru bun, nu se acodă în schimb gradele militare decât în anumite forme clar stabilite de lege şi de regulamentele militare", a spus Oprea. "Nu sunt de acord, ca cetăţean al României, să se facă donaţii şi să se primească grade militare", a adăugat Oprea, adăugând că cei care pot ajuta foarte mult Ar[CENSORED] română sunt primarii. Ministrul Apărării Naţionale, Mircea Duşa, a spus, la rândul său, că nu i se pare corect să se ofere grade în armată contra donaţii şi că statul român trebuie să asigure finanţarea. "Nu mi se pare corect. Eu cred că statul român trebuie să asigure finanţarea Ministerului Apărării şi că un asemenea proiect de lege cu donaţii pentru armată, sigur, e bun, orice iniţiativă ... Încă nu am analizat-o, când va veni la minister pentru analiză ne vom exprima punctul de vedere. Ar[CENSORED] României este cea mai apreciată instituţie a statului român de către po[CENSORED]ţie şi consider că statul trebuie să facă eforturile necesare pentru finanţarea ei", a spus Duşa.