India has launched its first observation mission to the Sun, just days after the country made history by becoming the first to land near the Moon’s south pole.

Aditya-L1 lifted off from the launch pad at Sriharikota on Saturday at 11:50 India time (06:20 GMT).

It will travel 1.5 million km (932,000 miles) from the Earth – 1% of the Earth-Sun distance.

India’s space agency says it will take four months to travel that far.

Congratulations all the #ISRO & entire Team 😊👏

Aditya L1 successfully launch! 🚀😍

1st Solar Mission of #INDIA 🇮🇳🌞🛰️#AdityaL1MissionLaunch #SolarMission #ISRO #isroindia #AdityaL1 #MissionAdityaL1 #INDvsPAK #AsiaCup2023 pic.twitter.com/1mzSs08xpl

— Vivek Shah (@VivekCenation30) September 2, 2023

India’s first space-based mission to study the solar system’s biggest object is named after Surya – the Hindu god of Sun who is also known as Aditya.

And L1 stands for Lagrange point 1 – the exact place between Sun and Earth where the Indian spacecraft is heading.

আজ ২রা সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০২৩ বেলা ১১টা ৫০ মিনিটে অন্ধ্রপ্রদেশের শ্রীহরিকোটা থেকে সফল উৎক্ষেপণ করা হলো 𝐀𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐲𝐚 𝐋𝟏(আদিত্য এল ১)-কে।🇮🇳🚀❤☀️#𝐈𝐒𝐑𝐎🛰 #𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐲𝐚𝐥𝟏𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 🚀#𝐀𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐲𝐚𝐋𝟏 #𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐲𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐤𝐚𝐫 #𝐈𝐒𝐑𝐎 #𝐢𝐬𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧🇮🇳 pic.twitter.com/TmyJ6EpSye

— Amar kowner (@AmarKowner) September 2, 2023

According to the European Space Agency, a Lagrange point is a spot where the gravitational forces of two large objects – such as the Sun and the Earth – cancel each other out, allowing a spacecraft to “hover”.

Once Aditya-L1 reaches this “parking spot”, it would be able to orbit the Sun at the same rate as the Earth. This also means the satellite will require very little fuel to operate.

Launches made by ISRO in 2023:
1. SSLV-D2/EOS-07 Mission.
2. LVM3-M3/OneWeb India-2 Mission.
3. PSLV-C55/TeLEOS-2 Mission.
4. GSLV-F12/NVS-01 Mission.
5. LVM3-M4/Chandrayaan-3 Mission.
6. PSLV-C56/DS-SAR Mission.
7. PSLV-C57/Aditya-L1 Mission.#ISRO #ISROMissions #ISRO_ADITYA_L1 pic.twitter.com/u5KJtWTP33

— Subhashis Das (Shann) (@das_shann) September 2, 2023

On Saturday morning, a few thousand people gathered in the viewing gallery set up by the Indian Space Research Agency (Isro) near the launch site to watch the blast off.

It was also broadcast live on national TV where commentators described it as a “magnificent” launch. Isro scientists said the launch had been successful and its “performance is normal”.

#AdityaL1 #ISRO pic.twitter.com/Kw170SUD7P

— CharanRaj (@thecharanraj) September 2, 2023

After an hour and four minutes of flight-time, Isro declared it “mission successful”.

“Now it will continue on its journey – it’s a very long journey of 135 days, let’s wish it [the] best of luck,” Isro chief Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said.

Project director Nigar Shaji said once Aditya-L1 reaches its destination, it will benefit not only India, but the global scientific community.

#AdityaL1Launch #AdityaL1#AdityaL1MissionLaunch #ISRO#AdityaL1 #MonzaGP #oafchttps://t.co/xVDteVt4hf

— NextPMRahul24 (@NextPMRaGA) September 2, 2023

Aditya-L1 will now travel several times around the Earth before being launched towards L1.

From this vantage position, it will be able to watch the Sun constantly – even when it is hidden during an eclipse – and carry out scientific studies.

Isro has not said how much the mission would cost, but reports in the Indian press put it at 3.78bn rupees ($46m; £36m).

Isro says the orbiter carries seven scientific instruments that will observe and study the solar corona (the outermost layer); the photosphere (the Sun’s surface or the part we see from the Earth) and the chromosphere (a thin layer of plasma that lies between the photosphere and the corona).

The studies will help scientists understand solar activity, such as solar wind and solar flares, and their effect on Earth and near-space weather in real time.

Former Isro scientist Mylswamy Annadurai says the Sun constantly influences the Earth’s weather through radiation, heat and flow of particles and magnetic fields. At the same time, he says, it also impacts the space weather.

“Space weather plays a role in how effectively the satellites function. Solar winds or storms can affect the electronics on satellites, even knock down power grids. But there are gaps in our knowledge of space weather,” Mr Annadurai told the BBC.

India has more than 50 satellites in space and they provide many crucial services to the country, including communication links, data on weather, and help predict pest infestations, droughts and impending disasters. According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), approximately 10,290 satellites remain in the Earth’s orbit, with nearly 7,800 of them currently operational.

Aditya will help us better understand, and even give us a forewarning, about the star on which our lives depend, Mr Annadurai says.

“Knowing the activities of the Sun such as solar wind or a solar eruption a couple of days ahead will help us move our satellites out of harm’s way. This will help increase the longevity of our satellites in space.”

The mission, he adds, will above all help improve our scientific understanding of the Sun – the 4.5 billion-year-old star that holds our solar system together.

India’s solar mission comes just days after the country successfully landed the world’s first-ever probe near the lunar south pole.

With that, India also became only the fourth country in the world to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, after the US, the former Soviet Union and China.

If Aditya-L1 is successful, India will join the select group of countries that are already studying the Sun.

Japan was the first to launch a mission in 1981 to study solar flares and the US space agency Nasa and European Space Agency (ESA) have been watching the Sun since the 1990s.

In February 2020, Nasa and ESA jointly launched a Solar Orbiter that is studying the Sun from close quarters and gathering data that, scientists say, will help understand what drives its dynamic behaviour.

And in 2021, Nasa’s newest spacecraft Parker Solar Probe made history by becoming the first to fly through corona, the outer atmosphere of the Sun.

World Opinions + BBC News

L’article Aditya-L1: India successfully launches its first mission to the Sun.. Video est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Israel’s parliament has sworn in Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, inaugurating the country’s most far-right, religiously conservative government in history.

Netanyahu, 73, took the oath of office on Thursday, moments after Israel’s parliament, or Knesset, passed a vote of confidence in his new government. Of the parliament’s 120 members, 63 voted in favour of the new government, with 54 votes against.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s incoming hardline government put West Bank settlement expansion at the top of its list of priorities on Wednesday, vowing to legalise dozens of illegally built outposts and annex the occupied territory as part of its coalition deal with its ultranational allies.

The coalition agreements, released a day before the government is to be sworn into office, also included language endorsing discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on religious grounds, as well as generous stipends for ultra-Orthodox men who prefer to study instead of work.

The package laid the groundwork for what is expected to be a stormy beginning for Netanyahu’s government and could put it at odds with large parts of the Israeli public and Israel’s closest allies abroad.

Its lengthy list of guidelines was led by a commitment to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel”, including “Judea and Samaria”, the biblical names for the West Bank.

Israel captured the West Bank in 1967 along with the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The Palestinians seek the West Bank as the heartland of a future independent state. In the decades since, Israel has constructed dozens of Jewish settlements there that are now home to about 500,000 Israelis living alongside about 2.5 million Palestinians.

Most of the international community considers Israel’s West Bank settlements illegal and an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. The US has warned the incoming government against taking steps that could undermine the dwindling hopes for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Netanyahu’s new government – the most religious and hardline in Israel’s history – is made up of ultra-Orthodox parties, a far-right ultranationalist religious faction affiliated with the West Bank settler movement, and his Likud party. It is to be sworn in on Thursday.

Several of Netanyahu’s key allies, including most of the Religious Zionism party, are ultranationalist West Bank settlers.

In the coalition agreement between Likud and Religious Zionism, Netanyahu pledges to legalise wildcat settlement outposts considered illegal even by the Israeli government. He also promises to annex the West Bank “while choosing the timing and considering the national and international interests of the state of Israel”.

Such a move would alienate much of the world, and give new fuel to critics who compare Israeli policies in the West Bank to apartheid South Africa.

The deal also grants favours to Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician who will be in charge of the national police force as the newly created national security minister.

It includes a commitment to expand and vastly increase government funding for the Israeli settlements in the divided West Bank city of Hebron, where Ben-Gvir lives among a tiny settler community amid tens of thousands of Palestinians.

That agreement also includes a clause pledging to change the country’s anti-discrimination laws to allow businesses to refuse service to people “because of a religious belief”. The legislation drew outrage earlier this week and concerns about impingement of LGBTQ+ rights. Netanyahu has said he will not let the law pass, but nonetheless left the clause in the coalition agreement.

Among its other changes is placing Bezalel Smotrich, a settler leader who heads the Religious Zionism party, in a newly created ministerial post overseeing West Bank settlement policy.

Netanyahu is returning to power after he was ousted from office last year after serving as prime minister from 2009 to 2021. He will take office while on trial for allegedly accepting bribes, breach of trust and fraud, charges he denies.

His partners are seeking widespread policy reforms that could alienate large swaths of the Israeli public, raise tensions with the Palestinians, and put the country on a collision course with the US and American Jewry.

The Biden administration has said it strongly opposes settlement expansion and has rebuked the Israeli government for it in the past.

Earlier on Wednesday, Israel’s figurehead president expressed “deep concern” about the incoming government and its positions on LGBTQ+ rights, racism and the country’s Arab minority in a rare meeting called with Ben-Gvir, one of the coalition’s most radical members.

The government platform also mentioned that the loosely defined rules governing holy sites, including Jerusalem’s flashpoint shrine known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the al-Aqsa mosque compound, would remain the same.

Ben-Gvir and other Religious Zionism politicians had called for the “status quo” to be changed to allow Jewish prayer at the site, a move that risked inflaming tensions with the Palestinians. The status of the site is the emotional centre of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

World Opinions- Agencies

L’article Analysis. Netanyahu government makes West Bank settlement expansion its priority est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

The Atlas Lions are now looking to become the first side from the continent to make it through to the semi-finals.

s Morocco’s history-making football team prepares to take on 2016 European champions Portugal in the World Cup quarter-final, expectations are high.

There were jubilant scenes in Qatar, Morocco, across the Arab world, in Europe and in Africa after Morocco beat fancied Spain on penalties to reach the quarter-finals.

Morocco are now bearing the hopes of a continent and battling the weight of history: No African side has ever made it beyond this stage of a World Cup.

Fans across the globe are creating a carnival-like atmosphere in Doha!

Catch all the action from the #FIFAWorldCupDaily by Hisense – free on FIFA+

— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) December 10, 2022

“At some point in Africa, we have to be ambitious and think why not win the World Cup, even if it’s going to be hard,” Morocco’s Walid Regragui said in the aftermath of the triumph over Spain.

Having reached their first quarter-final, the 1976 African champions seem poised to eclipse the achievements of Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002, and Ghana in 2010.

Those losses inflicted by England, Turkey, and Uruguay respectively, all triggered scenes of heartbreak for Africans.

🎬 The next blockbuster from #FIFAWorldCup studios: 🇲🇦 vs 🇵🇹 #Qatar2022 pic.twitter.com/K5WzgOb3DG

— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) December 10, 2022

An amazing job so far’

Morocco, who reached the round of 16 at the 1986 World Cup, are the only team from outside Europe or South America to make it to this stage in Qatar.

Well-organised, Morocco are in form – they are yet to lose at this World Cup and have conceded only one goal in their past seven games.

Predictions for Morocco v Portugal? 🇲🇦🇵🇹

Dizzy DROS has had his say 👀 pic.twitter.com/fKFkbtBZ93

— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) December 10, 2022

They have extended their unbeaten run in the World Cup to five games and kept a clean sheet in six out of their last seven in all competitions.

“How they’ve built up to this stage has been the most impressive thing,” Michael Oti Adjei of Ghana’s Media General Group, told Al Jazeera. “They sacked the coach before the tournament and brought in somebody who was not afraid to make decisions and the tactical discipline.

“Most of the time, we’ve spoken about African heads dropping in the most important moment. Of course, Morocco has to show that that will not be the case in the semi-final against Portugal. Regragui has done an amazing job so far.”

Not since Ghana’s famous run in South Africa in 2010 has the continent united and rallied behind an African nation on the global stage.

“Morocco has genuinely captured the hearts and imagination of Africa with their bravery and nous,” Solace Chukwu, senior sports editor at Pulse Sports, told Al Jazeera.

“This comes through even on social media – there is a real sense of people identifying with Morocco, of them flying not just a North African or Arabic flag, but an African one.”

The sentiment is echoed by Gabriel Zakuani, former captain of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s team.

“As an African, watching another country from the continent go far in the tournament makes me very proud, “ he said.

“They look very solid and also look very dangerous going forward. Ziyech has taken them to a different level. I think this run has given more respect to African football and should they beat Portugal, which is quite possible; it will take the continent’s game to a different level.”

A turning point

There is the sense that a semi-final place is long overdue for Africa and while Portugal pose a major challenge, they are perhaps the most surmountable of the remaining teams in the competition.

Still, the Seleção das Quinas are no pushovers. The decision of coach Fernando Santos to leave Cristiano Ronaldo out of the starting lineup for the round of 16 meeting with Switzerland was justified when replacement Goncalo Ramos struck thrice.

It is a marker of Portugal’s quality and strength in depth. And in the likes of Bernardo Silva and Bruno Fernandes, they boast some of the World Cup’s leading creative players.

It is a stark contrast with Morocco, who are worried about the fitness of several key individuals ahead of their meeting. So far in the competition, Regragui has been reluctant to shuffle the pack too much, confident in his first XI and seemingly in little else besides.

On paper, the odds are stacked against the Atlas Lions.

Nevertheless, the fire of an African dream burns bright. “I grew up watching a handful of teams dominate football so it’s refreshing to see what Morocco is doing,” Tunisian journalist Souhail Khmira said. “It’s nice to see the tables turning. There’s a collective hope that Morocco will break the African record at the World Cup.”

With their heroic upsets so far uniting a continent in support of them, a Morocco win over Portugal would be wildly celebrated once again across the North African country and in the Moroccan diasporas in cities across Europe. But just as importantly, it would deepen the respect for the team globally, as the outsiders who made their mark.

World Opinions + Aljazeera

L’article Carrying hopes of Africa, Morocco aim for World Cup semi-finals est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the most significant political leader globally of the second half of the 20th century and one of the greatest reformers in Russian history. By the time he resigned as president of the USSR during its final throes, he had played the decisive role in making Russia a freer country than it had ever been.

The new tolerance and liberties at home, together with the transformation of Soviet foreign policy, emboldened the peoples of eastern and central Europe to send their communist rulers packing and to reject Moscow’s overlordship. As Gorbachev was also the most pacific of all Soviet – perhaps of all Russian – leaders, not a shot was fired by a Soviet soldier while the Warsaw Pact countries achieved independence from 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell in November that year, or when Germany was reunited in 1990.

There is a popular fallacy in the west that the Soviet Union had reached crisis point by 1985, that the Communist party’s politburo chose Gorbachev as general secretary because he was a reformer, and that therefore he had no option but to undertake radical changes. An authoritarian regime is in crisis when its laws and commands are no longer obeyed, when there is persistent mass protest and, in particular, when such social unrest is accompanied by open splits within the political elite.

But none of this was present in 1985 – in fact, such unrest did not occur until a few years into Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. Far from crisis leaving no option but reform, it was radical reform that provoked crisis. The new freedoms enabled the repressed grievances of 70 years, including ethno-national grievances, to rise to the surface of political life.

The idea that poor economic performance in the mid-1980s had forced reform through is belied not only by the country’s quiescence under Gorbachev’s predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko, but the fact that Gorbachev prioritised political over economic reform. This did nothing to improve conditions in the command economy – for in the new political climate, commands could be circumvented or ignored, and people became free not merely to grumble in private but to complain in public about queues and shortages.

It was as late as 1990 that Gorbachev embraced a market economy in principle, stressing that it should be of a social democratic type. However, by then he had lost much of his earlier political authority and did not take the risk of moving to market – and higher – prices for basic foodstuffs and utilities, so the Soviet economy ended in limbo, neither centrally controlled nor market-driven.

Yet Gorbachev’s political reforms were extraordinarily bold. He had an unusually open mind for any political leader, never mind a Soviet Communist party general secretary. The glasnost (greater transparency) Gorbachev advocated from the outset of his leadership developed, with his blessing, into a freedom of speech and, increasingly, of publication. By 1989, literary works, whose very possession in underground or foreign editions had been a criminal offence, were published in Moscow in huge print-runs – among them George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Dissidents were released from prison and exile and the rehabilitation of those unjustly repressed in the past (begun under Nikita Khrushchev and abandoned by Leonid Brezhnev) was resumed. Gorbachev encouraged a new freedom of communication across frontiers. That included an end to the blocking of foreign broadcasts and a developing freedom of travel and of emigration.

During less than seven years in the Kremlin, Gorbachev achieved the kinds of reforms that no previous Soviet leader – or any other potential successor from Chernenko’s politburo – would have contemplated. The changes were also beyond the wildest dreams of western leaders in 1985 (as Margaret Thatcher acknowledged) and of Soviet reformers at that time, as I know from my conversations with them.

That did not prevent some of those same reformers castigating Gorbachev by 1990 for his supposed “half- measures” and transferring their allegiance to Boris Yeltsin.

He began in 1985 as a communist reformer. By 1988 he had turned into a systemic transformer. As he put it in 1996: “Until 1988 I had the same illusions as previous reformers. I believed that the system could be improved. In 1988 I realised we needed systemic reform. The system had to be replaced.” That was not merely a retrospective judgment. Addressing a closed meeting of regional party secretaries in April 1988, Gorbachev asked: “On what basis do 20 million (party members) rule 200 million?” He answered his own question: “We conferred on ourselves the right to rule the people!”

Two months later he startled most delegates at the 19th party conference by announcing that contested elections for a new legislature with real powers would take place not later than the spring of the following year – and in March 1989 they were duly held. They marked an end to “democratic centralism”, for party members were allowed to compete against one another on fundamentally different policy platforms. This was merely a first step in trial-and-error democratisation, but after it, the Soviet Union could never be the same again.

That the Soviet communist system ceased to exist was not an unintended consequence of Gorbachev’s actions, for he and his most likeminded associates consciously dismantled that system.

What Gorbachev did not intend was the dissolution of the Soviet state. He strove to keep as many republics as possible within a “renewed union” by negotiation and voluntary agreement and turn what had previously been a pseudo-federation into a genuinely federal state. He failed in that endeavour, but resisted calls from party and state officials, including the leadership of the KGB, to use the ample coercive power at their disposal to maintain the union by force.

Gorbachev was in failing health in recent years and saddened by the way his greatest achievements – using the office of party leader to dismantle the very system that was the source of his power, and playing the most important part in ending the cold war – were being destroyed. As a boy in a peasant household in southern Russia, he had been especially close to his Ukrainian maternal grandparents. War between Russia and Ukraine in 2022 was for him the ultimate devastating blow. In one of his last interviews a few years ago, he was asked what he thought his epitaph should be. His answer was: “We tried”.

By Archie Brown is emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University. His latest book is The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War / theguardian

L’article Analysis. A peaceful yet radical social transformer: Mikhail Gorbachev leaves a blazing legacy est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Behind the announcement Thursday that Israel and Morocco will establish their first formal diplomatic ties, there lies almost six decades of close, secret cooperation on intelligence and military matters between two nations that officially did not acknowledge each other.

Israel has helped Morocco obtain weapons and intelligence-gathering gear and learn how to use them, and helped it assassinate an opposition leader. Morocco has helped Israel take in Moroccan Jews, mount an operation against Osama bin Laden — and even spy on other Arab countries.

The collaboration — uncovered in an array of interviews conducted and documents unearthed over many years — reflects a longstanding Israeli policy of building covert ties to Arab regimes where common interests — and enemies — could be found. In particular, Israel pursued a so-called periphery strategy, reaching out to more distant states that were far removed from the Israeli-Arab territorial dispute or that had hostile relations with Israel’s own enemies.

Moroccan Jews on the beach in Gibraltar in 1961 while in transit to Israel.Credit…Jack Garofalo/Paris Match, via Getty Images

The Moroccan-Israeli relationship stemmed in part from the large number of Jews in Morocco before the birth of Israel in 1948, many of whom would migrate there, making up one of the largest parts of Israel’s population. Some one million Israelis are from Morocco or descended from those who were, ensuring a deep, abiding interest in that country more than 2,000 miles away.

When Morocco gained independence from France in 1956, it banned Jewish emigration. Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, smuggled out many Jews, but the operation was exposed in 1961, when a Mossad ship carrying such migrants sank, killing most of those aboard.

The next month, a new Moroccan king, Hassan II, took power, and Israel made a highly successful effort to cultivate him. Israeli agents met with the Moroccan opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, who asked for help overthrowing the king; instead, the Israelis told Hassan of the plot.

The king permitted mass emigration of Jews and allowed Mossad to establish a station in Morocco. Israel provided weapons and trained Moroccans in using them; it supplied surveillance technology and helped organize the Moroccan intelligence service; and the two shared information gathered by their spies — the start of decades of such cooperation.

King Hassan II of Morocco, right, confers with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, second from left, and Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, left, in Rabat, Morocco, in 1993.Credit…Nati Harnik/Associated Press

A crucial moment came in 1965, when Arab leaders and military commanders met in Casablanca, and Morocco allowed Mossad to bug their meeting rooms and private suites. The eavesdropping gave Israel unprecedented insight into Arab thinking, capabilities and plans, which turned out to be vital to Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces in preparing for the 1967 war.

“These recordings, which were truly an extraordinary intelligence achievement, established our feeling, of the top I.D.F., that we will win the war against Egypt,” Gen. Shlomo Gazit, who later become the chief of military intelligence, said in a 2016 interview.

Shortly after that intelligence coup, at the request of Moroccan intelligence, Mossad located Mr. Ben Barka, the opposition leader, and helped lure him to Paris. There, Moroccans and allied Frenchmen abducted him. He was tortured to death, and Mossad agents disposed of the body, which was never found.

A decade later, King Hassan and his government became the back channel between Israel and Egypt, and Morocco became the site of secret meetings between their officials, ahead of the 1978 Camp David accords and normalization of relations between the former enemies. Israel later helped persuade the United States to provide military assistance to Morocco.

In 1995, Moroccan intelligence joined in an ultimately unsuccessful Mossad plan to recruit Osama bin Laden’s secretary, to find and kill the leader of Al Qaeda, according to a former Mossad official who was a partner in that planning, and who asked not to be named when discussing intelligence operations.

For years, Hassan II’s successor, King Muhammad VI, has sought Israel’s help in winning American acquiescence to Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara, which finally came to fruition in Thursday’s announcement. Since 2006, Serge Bardugo, a leader of the small Jewish community remaining in Morocco, has been the king’s ambassador in that effort, meeting with Israeli officials and American Jewish leaders.

Occasionally these meetings were attended by Yassin Mansuri, a longtime friend of the king’s who heads Morocco’s external intelligence agency. Mr. Mansuri, in turn, met directly with his Israeli counterpart, Yossi Cohen, the chief of Mossad, conducting some of the negotiations that led to the agreement to normalize relations.

By Ronen Bergman – nytimes.com

L’article Israel-Morocco Deal Follows History of Cooperation on Arms and Spying est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.