She introduced herself as “Anna Elena,” supposedly a Canadian citizen engaged in road safety advocacy in the United Kingdom. She reached out asking for assistance with her “life-saving work in Israel.” But, as revealed by Israel’s Shin Bet security service, she was actually working for Iranian intelligence. Her initial instructions seemed harmless—putting up posters—but they gradually turned into more dangerous assignments, including digging up a planted phone, paying others to carry out tasks, and even proposing acts of violence and sabotage.

While completing a master’s degree in data analysis, Palwasha Zahid moved from Dallas to a town near Silicon Valley. The location made it easy to visit the campuses of tech stalwarts such as Google, Apple, and Nvidia. Zahid, 25, completed her studies in December, but so far she hasn’t found a job in the industry that surrounds her. “It stings a little bit,” she said. “I never imagined it would be this difficult just to get a foot in the door.” Young people graduating from college this spring and summer are facing one of the toughest job markets in more than a decade. The unemployment rate for degree holders ages 22 to 27 has reached its highest level in a dozen years, excluding the coronavirus pandemic.

The Knesset Subcommittee on Foreign Policy and Public Diplomacy, led by Yesh Atid MK Moshe Tur-Paz, held a session on Wednesday to evaluate global perceptions of Israel following Operation Rising Lion, the military campaign against Iran.
Prior to the session, the committee reached out to the Harris-Harvard polling institute for data intended to gauge the effectiveness of Israel’s international messaging efforts. According to the committee, the purpose was “to understand the state of Israel’s public diplomacy, the challenges it faces, its successes in crafting effective campaigns, and how well it understands key target audiences in the US.”

The first astronauts in more than 40 years from India, Poland and Hungary arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday, ferried there by SpaceX on a private flight. The crew of four will spend two weeks at the orbiting lab, performing dozens of experiments. They launched Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. America’s most experienced astronaut, Peggy Whitson, is the commander of the visiting crew. She works for Axiom Space, the Houston company that arranged the chartered flight. Besides Whitson, the crew includes India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, a pilot in the Indian Air Force; Hungary’s Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer; and Poland’s Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, a radiation expert and one of the European Space Agency’s project astronauts on temporary flight duty.

New details are emerging about the extent of American involvement in Operation Rising Lion, Israel’s military campaign to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and cripple its military might. It has now been revealed that U.S. Air Force refueling planes assisted the Israeli Air Force throughout the campaign, conducting mid-air refueling for Israeli fighter jets on their long-range missions to strike targets inside Iran. The American support helped ease the burden on Israel’s aging and limited fleet of aerial tankers as Israeli warplanes executed hundreds of sorties deep into enemy territory.

Israeli Defense Minister Yisrael Katz said in a televised interview Wednesday night that Israel had been prepared to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but never had a viable opportunity. “If he had been in our sights, we would have taken him out,” Katz told Channel 13. “We wanted to eliminate Khamenei, but there was no operational opportunity.” The comments mark the first public confirmation that the Israeli war cabinet seriously considered targeting Iran’s highest-ranking figure — a move that would have shattered diplomatic norms, likely triggered a regional war, and tested the outer limits of U.S.-Israeli coordination.

* Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell now heads into his next challenge: a potential threat that President Donald Trump could undermine his authority by soon naming his pick to head the central bank. * In the wake of the intense criticism, Wall Street has been buzzing over the potential for a “shadow chair,” or someone Trump could install as a central bank gadfly until Powell’s term expires. * A report indicated that Trump is considering naming the successor sooner than expected in an attempt to influence interest rate policy.

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