KOENIG

A powerful earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.3 struck southern Japan early Saturday, barely 24 hours after a smaller quake hit the same region and killed nine people.

At least six people were killed in the latest quake, and Japanese broadcaster NHK said a number of calls were coming in from residents reporting people trapped inside houses and buildings. Video showed a resident, apparently rescued from underneath a collapsed house, on a stretcher being taken to a hospital by ambulance.

The quake shook the Kumamoto region at 1:25 a.m. Saturday, and several aftershocks soon followed. Japan's Meteorological Agency issued an advisory for a tsunami up to 1 meter (3 feet) high along the coast west of the epicenter in Kumamoto, but it was lifted less than an hour later.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow next week to discuss pertinent issues in key ares of bilateral relations, as well as pressing issues regarding the region. 

The Prime Minister's Office said on Friday that both parties will discuss current issues in key areas of bilateral relations. Additionally, the two are set to discuss pressing issues on the regional and global agendas, like the Palestinians and the conflict in Syria, among others.

This is the second meeting between the two leaders in recent months, as part of security cooperation surrounding the civil war in Syria, particularly in regards to flight arrangements of the air forces of the two countries. However, this is the first meeting between the two since the withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria, a move that surprised Israel.

The United States will consider taking its concerns over Israel's settlement activity, or over a general stall in negotiations toward a final-status solution with the Palestinians, to the United Nations Security Council, the State Department said on Thursday.

The Obama administration outlined its stance after several days of confusion over whether the US might or might not consider such a move.

"We understand that there is an early draft that the Palestinians have shared informally in New York," State Department spokesperson John Kirby said, asked by The Jerusalem Post to clarify whether the US would consider voting for or declining to veto a resolution addressing Israel's settlement activity in the West Bank.

Clinton accused Sanders of failing to provide a solution to the ongoing failure to negotiate a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. “Describing the problem is a lot easier than trying to solve it,” she admonished the senator.

Gaza, she said, had become “a terrorist haven that is getting more and more rockets shipped in…I don’t know how you run a country when you are under constant threat. Terrorist attack, rockets… you have a right to defend yourself.”

She also said pointedly that, “If [late Palestinian leader] Yasser Arafat had agreed with my husband at Camp David in the late 1990s to the offer that [then Israeli] prime minister [Ehud] Barak put on the table, we would have had a Palestinian state for 15 years already.”

Hamas is amassing fighters and materiel at a “surprisingly” quick pace in the Gaza Strip, a senior IDF officer told reporters on Thursday, but the terror group does not appear to be prepared for renewed direct conflict with Israel in the near future.

He stressed the terrorist organization would not again drag Israel into a war, and that any future conflict will be one undertaken at the initiative of the Jewish state.

Since the 2014 Operation Protective Edge in the beleaguered Strip, Hamas has been working tirelessly to replace its diminished ranks and rocket arsenal — and with some success, the high-ranking Southern Command officer told reporters.

“Hamas is a highly intelligent enemy. They surprise me and learn their lessons very quickly,” he said.

The United States on Thursday revealed for the first time that American ships have started conducting joint patrols with the Philippines in the South China Sea, a somewhat rare move not done with many other partners in the region.

At the same time, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced at a joint news conference with Philippine Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmi that the United States will be keeping nearly 300 troops, including Air Force commandos armed with combat aircraft and helicopters, in the Philippines through the end of the month. It's part of a military build-up sure to inflame tensions with Beijing in the South China Sea.

The U.S. will also begin sending forces on increased rotations into the Philippines, it was disclosed, to beef up training and to support increased military operations in the region.

The islands of Tiran and Sanafir are two tiny specks of land located at the entrance of the Gulf of Aqaba. “These are very small, entirely uninhabited pieces of land. There’s absolutely nothing there,” Yitzhak Levanon, a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt, said Wednesday in Jerusalem.

And yet, the islands continue to make headlines. In the last 70 years, they have changed hands nearly half a dozen times. This week, Tiran and Sanafir — which historically belong to Saudi Arabia but since 1950 were ruled by Egypt and twice captured by Israel — were in the news again as Cairo agreed to hand them back to Riyadh in exchange for the creation of a $16-billion investment fund.

Given that the islands are in a strategically crucial location for Israel, officials in Jerusalem were quick to assert that they were unperturbed about the deal.

Riyadh gave Jerusalem written assurances that it intends to respect Israel’s rights to free passage through the Strait of Tiran, a crucial lifeline to Israel’s only Red Sea port in Eilat.

"During his final year in the White House, US President Barack Obama is preparing a metaphorical roadside IED for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It cannot be that the tainted relations between the two leaders will not end with Obama exacting some sweet revenge." Variations of the above statement have been uttered for a while now by senior American and Israeli officials since Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress last year during his campaign against Obama and his nuclear agreement with Iran. 

This week, the New York Times brought the fraught Obama-Netanyahu relationship back into the headlines when the paper expounded on the US president's possible future revenge against the Israeli leader that will be served up cold in the form of a UN Security Council resolution on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Several officials have said that Obama has grown so frustrated with trying to revive Middle East peace talks that he may lay down his own outline for an Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution, in the form of a resolution in the United Nations Security Council, the Times reported.

“There will be a great temptation to do something in the final year. “For a president who came out faster and more aggressively on the Middle East than any of his predecessors, there is a gnawing sense of incompletion and perhaps even failure,” Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told the Times last month.

Mohamed Abrini, nicknamed ‘man in white’ or ‘man in hat’ due to the security camera footage circulated before he was arrested as one of the perpetrators of the terror attacks in Brussels, told his interrogators that one of the attackers’ targets was the waiting area for passengers flying to Tel Aviv.

The United States remains opposed to one-sided action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the United Nations Security Council, the State Department said on Tuesday, faced with questions on its stance over two fresh initiatives.

Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, "firmly shut" the door on any prospective resolution the US considers biased against Israel. "Our position hasn’t changed in terms of action on this issue at the UN Security Council," he said in a Tuesday briefing with reporters.
 

Asked if that means the US opposes such action, Toner added: "Opposed to it." 
 

Two Russian warplanes buzzed a U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Poland multiple times this week, a defense official tells Fox News.

In one incident, the USS Donald Cook (DDG-75) was conducting flight operations with a Polish helicopter Tuesday when two Russian Su-24 attack aircraft approached at an “unsafe” speed and altitude and buzzed the Navy destroyer as the Polish helicopter was taking off from the destroyer’s flight deck.

When asked how close the Russian jets came to the destroyer, one official who had seen a photo of the incident said, “very close.” Turkey shot down a Russian jet of the same type in late-2015 after the aircraft entered Turkish airspace.

A bipartisan group of senators has asked NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to pull the league's 2017 All-Star game from North Carolina because of a law in that state that many say discriminates against gay and transgender people.

The letter asks Silver to "take a stand against this latest form discrimination and move the 2017 NBA All Star Game away from Charlotte, N.C.," following the passage of a new state law last month that prevents local governments from, for example, allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice.

Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; Pat Leahy, D-Vt.; Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.; Patty Murray, D-Wash.; and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., signed the letter sent Tuesday. Kirk is the only Republican signed onto the letter and is running for re-election this year.

"We hold no ill-will towards the people of Charlotte, who passed an antidiscrimination measure that HB2 overturned, or towards the people of North Carolina," the senators wrote in the letter. "However, we cannot condone nor stand idly by as North Carolina moves to legalize and institutionalize discrimination against the LGBT community. Nor should the NBA allow its premier annual event to be hosted in such a state."

As US-led offensives drive back Islamic State in Iraq, concern is growing among US and UN officials that efforts to stabilize liberated areas are lagging, creating conditions that could help the militants endure as an underground network.

One major worry: not enough money is being committed to rebuild the devastated provincial capital of Ramadi and other towns, let alone Islamic State-held Mosul, the ultimate target in Iraq of the US-led campaign.

Lise Grande, the No. 2 UN official in Iraq, told Reuters that the United Nations is urgently seeking $400 million from Washington and its allies for a new fund to bolster reconstruction in cities like Ramadi, which suffered vast damage when US-backed Iraqi forces recaptured it in December. 

"We worry that if we don't move in this direction, and move quickly, the progress being made against IS may be undermined or lost," Grande said.