In the group’s official weekly newsletter, al-Naba, the terror group ISIS emphasized the economic impact of the fires, noting “many agricultural lands have been destroyed” and “tons of crops,” including wheat and barley, went up in flames in the jihadists’ “harvest of another kind.”
ISIS noted at the beginning of the article that it’s summer; terror groups, in encouraging the use of wildfire arson in the past, have stressed that picking dry, hot, windy weather will intensify their efforts.
Iraq’s Civil Defense Directorate said Monday 6,103 acres of farmland had burned in 136 separate fires over the past 18 days, spanning 11 provinces.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib said Sunday morning that House Democrats are “moving toward” a consensus that it’s time to weigh impeachment as an option.
The Michigan Democrat, who has been one of the most vocal advocates for impeaching President Donald Trump, said that the impeachment debate should be about holding Trump accountable, and that she and her colleagues aren’t able to pass important and necessary reforms when “the president of the United States continues to lie to the American people, continues to not follow through on subpoenas and give us the information that we need.”
When host Chuck Todd asked why she and others hadn’t been able to persuade a majority of House Democrats to back impeachment, Tlaib said: “I think it is moving toward that. It’s going to demand that.“

Frum passengers on an El Al flight who were diverted to Athens during a New York-Tel Aviv flight for fear that they would not reach Israel before Shabbos, have filed a class action lawsuit against the airline.
According to Channel 12 news, 52 passengers have filed the suit, demanding hundreds of thousands of shekels in compensation from El Al. El Al offered compensation to all 400 passengers on the flight in the form of a free round-trip ticket to any destination in Europe.
Attorney Asher Rotenbaum said the company had behaved irresponsibly and said the claimants wanted compensation for the “great anguish and distress caused,” with passengers forced to spend three days in Athens without a change of clothes and in sub-par conditions.

Iran sees no prospect of negotiations with the United States, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday, a day after US President Donald Trump said a deal with Tehran on its nuclear program was possible.
Washington withdrew last year from a 2015 international nuclear deal with Tehran, and is ratcheting up sanctions in efforts to strangle Iran‘s economy by ending its international sales of crude oil.
Trump said on Monday: “I really believe that Iran would like to make a deal, and I think that’s very smart of them, and I think that’s a possibility to happen.”

An Israeli citizen is suspected of trying to smuggle hundreds of thousands of balloons into the Gaza Strip, authorities reported last week.
According to the statement, 50-year-old David Cohen used his citizenship to skirt security checks at the Ashdod port on the import of the balloons to Chevron where the container was slated to be transferred to Gaza.
Hamas operatives have been using balloons to float explosives over the border to start fires in Israel. Thousands of acres in Israel have been burnt down in this way. Hamas agreed during the recent ceasefire to stop using the fire balloons but the agreement has not been kept.
{Matzav.com Israel News}

Palestinian Authority leader Abbas earlier this month inaugurated the “Martyr Khalil Al-Wazir Abu Jihad Faculty for Administration and Military Sciences” at the Al-Istiqlal University in Jericho, as part of the annual events marking the April 16 anniversary of Al-Wazir’s death.
Al-Wazir was a founder of Fatah and deputy to Yasser Arafat. He headed the PLO terrorist organization’s military wing and also planned many deadly terrorist attacks from the 1960s to the 1980s. These attacks, in which at least 125 Israelis were murdered, included the single most lethal terrorist attack in Israeli history—the hijacking of a bus and murder of 37 civilians, 12 of them children.
He was assassinated at his home in Tunis by Israeli commandos on April 16, 1988.

“The ‘deal of the century,’ or the deal of disgrace, will go to hell,” said Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas at a ceremony in Ramallah on Monday.
Speaking of the U.S.-sponsored conference in Bahrain scheduled for June 25-26, Abbas added that “the economic project they [the conference participants] are working on for next month will also go to hell … we said we are not going to accept this meeting and its results because they are selling us illusions that will lead to nothing.”
“The Palestinian Authority does not recognize this conference,” Abbas said.
The P.A. announced a boycott of the Trump administration at the end of 2017, following the official recognition by the United States of Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel.

A Jewish Amazon Prime member interrupted the company’s annual shareholders meeting last week and asked CEO Jeff Bezos to help her return a Haggadah to the online retail giant.
Bezos was conducted a Q&A session at the meeting in Seattle on Wednesday when Evie Schwerin asked, “Could you please return this for me?” proffering a Haggadah.
Schwerin had apparently ordered the Haggadah from Amazon and then realized that she already had a copy. According to tech news website GeekWire, she attempted to return the book four times, but was unsuccessful due to an incorrect email address, among other problems.
Bezos asked her to stay until the end of the meeting and said, “We’ll get that return taken care of.”

President Trump’s tweets have less of an impact now than they did two years ago, AXIOS reports.
The president’s “interaction rate” has been on the decline since taking office. The interaction rate is a metric that is used to measure engagement among Twitter users and considers retweets and likes divided by the amount of Twitter followers to determine the overall impact of a given post.
In November 2017, Trump’s interaction rate sat at 0.55%, later dropping to 0.32% in June 2017. As of this month, that it has declined to a 0.16% interaction rate.
During that same period of time, Trump’s followers on Twitter skyrocketed from 16.4 million in November 2016 to more than 60 million, which might be one of the causes of the lower interaction rate.