NATION/WORLD
Trump holding off on moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem
WASHINGTON - Stepping back from a campaign promise and incurring Israeli ire, President Donald Trump acted Thursday to keep the U.S. Embassy in Israel in Tel Aviv for now instead of moving it to Jerusalem, a cautious move aimed at bolstering prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
Trump avoided a step that threatened to inflame tensions across the Middle East and undermine a push for peace before it even started. Still, the White House insisted Trump was merely delaying, not abandoning, his oft-cited pledge to relocate the embassy.
The praise from Palestinian and Arab leaders and the protest from Israelis showed just how far Trump has shifted from the unwavering support for Israel’s policies that he expressed during the 2016 campaign. As president, Trump has proceeded cautiously, hoping to preserve his ability to serve as an effective mediator for one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
The decision is a blow to Israeli hard-liners and their American backers who have long urged the United States and others to build their embassies in Jerusalem. Israel considers the holy city to be its capital and insists the city must not be divided; Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital for a future, independent state.
Convicted Auschwitz guard dies: Reinhold Hanning, a former SS sergeant whose conviction last year on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder for serving as an Auschwitz guard was hailed as a long-overdue victory for Holocaust victims, died on Tuesday in Germany, his attorney said Thursday. Hanning was convicted last June in Detmold state court in northwestern Germany and sentenced to five years in prison, though he never served time behind bars as his case was being appealed. Unlike most other death camp guards who have been brought to trial, Hanning, 95, apologized for his wartime service in Auschwitz from January 1942 to June 1944, telling Holocaust survivors from around the world who attended the proceedings that “it disturbs me deeply” to have been a part of the Nazis’ genocidal machinery. Nearly 1 million Jews and tens of thousands of others were killed in Auschwitz, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland.
44 migrants die of thirst: At least 44 migrants, including babies, have died of thirst after their vehicle broke down in the Sahara Desert as they were making their way to Libya, an official in Niger said Thursday. Niger is a major route for West African migrants making their way toward Europe. Some 300,000 migrants passed through the vast West African nation in 2016 alone, according to the International Organization for Migration. Most of the dead migrants were from Ghana.
Fossil find: Crews digging a tunnel for a new Los Angeles train line have found the remains of an ancient giant sloth. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Thursday a fossilized hip joint was discovered on May 16 in a layer of sandy clay 16 feet below a major thoroughfare where the new rail line is being built. The bone is from a Harlan’s ground sloth, a mammal that roamed the Los Angeles basin 11,000 years ago.