President Trump’s well-documented clashes with California owe plenty to politics, culture and personality. But at bottom, what drives the president’s toxic relationship with the nation’s most populous state is this: his near-obsessive desire to be seen as a winner…

The Golden State is the seat of an entertainment industry that dismissed him as a reality television creation, the home of a business culture where his real estate dreams were stymied and, now, the headquarters of a resistance movement that has tried to cast a cloud over his legitimacy as president.

Despite his clash of ideas with liberal-minded Hollywood, Trump managed to win the vote against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in one Beverly Hills district, according to the Times. While the rest of Los Angeles’ west side went decidedly blue, voters in the neighborhood surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel — one of Trump’s favorite hangouts — voted 54% in favor of the New York businessman.

California and the Trump administration are engaged in an all-out war over immigration enforcement, the president’s signature issue on the campaign trail and in the White House. It is a deeply personal battle in the nation’s most populous and economically powerful state, where 27 percent of the 39 million residents are foreign-born.

A deal worked out by Netanyahu and Litzman late on Sunday would have a conscription bill pass in Shaked’s committee on Monday and a preliminary reading in the Knesset, then continue to be legislated after the Knesset’s spring recess. UTJ, which refused to vote for the budget at the height of the dispute, are now expected to vote in favor and enable its passage before the recess.

Talks between Netanyahu and Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman are expected to be key to resolving the dispute.

If no agreement is finalized, the Knesset is likely to vote to disperse itself Wednesday and initiate elections.

In the political arena, everyone is now waiting to see whether Minister of Defense Avigdor Liberman, leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, who has been vocally critical of the haredi parties’ demands, will give his consent to the agreement between Netanyahu and Litzman…

If Liberman agrees, the coalition will proceed later this week to the vote on the 2019 state budget, and the political crisis, in its present version, will be over.

It’s an upside-down world: coalition talks make the headlines, while the issues at the center of the talks – as crucial to Israel’s future as any election, and possibly more – become a sideshow. What are they fighting about? Yes, about the future of the government. But also about whether ultra-Orthodox Israelis will join the military, and in what numbers, and under what terms, and at what pace.

The coalition is important, but the issue of burden-sharing is more important. And once more Israelis watch their leaders willing to trade a highly valued principle – that we all need to share the burden of service – for a short-term political gain. They should be ashamed for doing this. We should be ashamed for letting them do this. That is, not making it a real electoral priority.

A prominent US Jewish group on Saturday slammed Russian President Vladimir Putin for suggesting earlier in the day that Russians who sought to influence the results of the 2016 US presidential elections could have been Jews, saying his remarks were “eerily reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

He was being insincere and deliberately dense, refusing to engage on the question of whether the Kremlin is responsible for the Internet Research Agency’s alleged cyber attacks against the U.S. Raising the possibility that the perpetrators might be ethnically Jewish or Tatar or Ukrainian rather than Russian is immaterial to the question of whether they had Kremlin support, which is exactly why Putin said it — to demonstrate how little interest he had in answering Kelly’s questions seriously.

But he did not single out Jews, and unless this is the start of a disturbing new trend, there is no evidence that he intended to dog whistle to anti-Semites.

There were those who saw in it classic Russian Judeophobia. But some, especially those who had read the entire transcript, believed Putin was simply “reeling off names of different nationalities. In Russia, Jews are members of a nation, not just a religion.”

Taken in light of the entire interview, this actually makes sense. “But even if in this case there’s no proof that Putin was using anti-Semitism,” warned one of his defenders, “that doesn’t mean he doesn’t do so routinely in other cases. It’s like a particular blend of tea he doesn’t care for himself, but is OK with others drinking.”

Israel suffers from a severe public transport infrastructure deficit, according to the OECD’s biennial Economic Survey of Israel published today. The OECD says that this public transport deficit causes congestion, air pollution, poor access to place of employment, especially for disadvantaged groups living in peripheral regions. The report says, “Better infrastructure in disadvantaged areas, especially Arab cities, would improve job prospects and well-being.”

The international economic group OECD warned that Israel’s housing bubble could see a “severe” correction in the coming year, but predicted continued high growth for the Jewish state in its annual Economic Survey on Sunday…

At the same time, the survey pointed to several weak points in the Israeli economy that the government should address if it the country seeks to maintain its trajectory of growth, including the floor being pulled out from under high housing prices.

The survey’s authors said there was a high chance of a “severe” correction in housing prices, which could adversely affect the economy as a whole.

…the report states that while unemployment in Israel is low, the share of the working poor in Israel is high—and rising. This is because Israel’s marginalized groups, notably Arabs with Israeli citizenship and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, are often relegated to low-paid jobs due to their lower education and skill levels.

Despite comprising around 20% of the population, Arabs with Israeli citizenship only account for 1.4% of the lucrative technology jobs in Israel, according to an August 2017 report by the Israeli ministry of finance. Ultra-Orthodox Jews make up around 10% of the population but only 0.7% of the tech sector.

Two slumping political figures met in a symbolic embrace in Lille, France, on Saturday, but it was not clear whether the encounter would lift the faltering fortunes of either Stephen K. Bannon or Marine Le Pen.

Mr. Bannon, the former chief strategist for President Trump, was warmly applauded when he addressed the party congress of the anti-immigrant National Front, led by Ms. Le Pen. Striding angrily about the stage, he delivered a populist pep talk to a crowd still smarting from Ms. Le Pen’s crushing defeat in last year’s presidential election.

Revamp talk aside, upon this weekend’s evidence, the National Front by any other name will smell just about as sweet – or foul, depending on the nose of the beholder – as it did before.

“The name must be a cry for unity, a call to join us, sent to everyone who has France at heart,” Le Pen declared Sunday…

“The National Front name carries an epic and glorious history that no one should deny. But you know, for many French people, it is a psychological blockage,” she explained on stage.

The last thing Le Pen needed was for her embarrassing dad – 89-year-old Jean-Marie, the party’s founder, whom she expelled in 2015 – to re-emerge from retirement and remind everybody that toxicity is built into the party’s DNA.

…He stands by his claim that the Holocaust was a “detail of history” and that the German occupation was “not particularly inhumane”…

Since succeeding her father in 2011, Marine Le Pen has jettisoned much of his legacy. His Thatcherism has given way to statist, protectionist economic policies…

The urban loop… [is] overly optimistic about well such a system could perform in practice and at scale. A subway train breaking down is bad enough, but what happens when one of this theoretical system’s thousands of track components get stuck and traps dozens of people movers in a tunnel? How much does it cost to maintain hundreds of tracks and cars versus a smaller number of high-capacity ones? How is building a maze of hydraulic platforms all over the city more efficient than a smaller number of frequent transit corridors?

…hyperloops are no longer quite so hypothetical. A handful of firms are now competing to develop the necessary technology. And in addition to designing the magnetically levitated pods and testing them on small-scale tracks, the firms are taking preliminary steps to set up hyperloop routes in the U.S. and abroad.

Despite some positive praise since, there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical. To start, a real-world Hyperloop system would require a large network of vacuum tubes. As sharp turns are impossible, it will be difficult to obtain the space, especially above the ground in densely populated areas. That means the network is most likely to be built underground, and the high cost of tunnelling must also be factored in. It’s not hard to imagine a civic works project that escalates into the billions.