The Beijing meet, analysts say, was staged to show that North Korea-China ties are back on track, with photographs of energetic handshakes and an account of a heartfelt toast from Kim.

The message to the United States: any moves on North Korea must go through Xi.

Since China is North Korea’s most important ally, some might think it prudent to avoid antagonizing them right before the start of talks between Washington and Pyongyang. Instead, Trump has continued making moves expected to set off a trade war, hitting China with $50 billion in tariffs last week. While this doesn’t fundamentally change China’s interest in seeing a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis on its border, it may make Beijing less eager to help secure an outcome that’s advantageous to the U.S.

Analysts say North Korea has been hurt by tightening UN sanctions and would need Beijing’s support for any softening of trade restrictions.

China wanted to show its importance as a partner to North Korea and ease worries about being sidelined in negotiations between the Koreas the United States.

Even if the intent here was not to commit an attack, the infiltrations revealed serious gaps in army defenses near the border. It’s no secret that the fence around the Gaza Strip, which was built after the disengagement and presented as the latest technology at the time, has become outmoded and can hardly serve its purpose anymore.

Beginning Friday, Hamas hopes it can mobilize large crowds to set up tent camps near the border. It plans a series of demonstrations culminating with a march to the border fence on May 15, the anniversary of Israel’s establishment, known to Palestinians as “the Nakba,” or catastrophe…

“Hamas has realized it’s besieged from three sides; Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, political science professor at Gaza’s al-Azhar University. “It feels the crisis is suffocating.”

Israel cannot permit damage to its security infrastructure or attempts by the demonstrators to cross the barrier. If this occurs, IDF will use force…

Hamas’s attempt to draw a parallel between the reality in Gaza and the Holocaust by the march on the Gaza border necessitates a very strong response by Israel, mobilizing the international community to step up the pressure on the Hamas leadership. It is also necessary to prepare for an eventuality of a protracted campaign, with potential for escalation that is liable to develop on the border with Gaza.

Still, it is the massacres that might move the political needle. We’ve been in a similar place before — the outpouring of anger and grief that followed the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre felt like a galvanizing moment. But it dissipated as the grief faded. We can’t let that happen again. This is a moment that must be seized and, finally, converted into meaningful change.

Saturday’s #MarchForOurLives was billed as a protest against gun violence. But for many Americans on the Right, it felt like they were under attack…

If these Americans get the message that Democrats and the Left are declaring them Public Enemy #1, if they feel like their culture and values are under assault, that’s one way to get a relatively unmotivated GOP base fired up for the midterms.

Will the aftermath of this weekend’s March for Our Lives be any different? It’s hard to know the difference between the cynical argument and the realist one. The White House, both houses of Congress, and most state legislatures and governor’s mansions are under the control of the Republican Party, which remains firmly in hock to the gun lobby… But there are grounds for optimism. First, the marches on Saturday were unprecedented not just in numbers—far more than a million people participated around the country—but also in geographic spread.

First they tried to beat him at the polls. They lost miserably.

Then they unleashed America’s most powerful and penetrating espionage apparatus against him at the height of the presidential campaign. And got caught red-handed…

Frustrated, exhausted and completely out of ideas, the Grand Cyclops of the Washington Swamp has finally resorted to the only thing that has resulted in a presidential impeachment since Reconstruction: a raunchy sex scandal.

As it turns out, yes. The most significant aspect of the Stormy Daniels case is not the sexual relationship, which she says was consensual – a rather novel concept given the many allegations of sexual assault levelled at Mr. Trump. What matters is the Trump team’s alleged use of non-disclosure agreements, payoffs, and threats to intimidate a target into silence – allegations that Mr. Trump and his enthusiastic backers have had to defend for decades.

…this is much more than a sex scandal. More important and disturbing was Daniels’ account of being threatened with serious harm in 2011 unless she stopped talking publicly about her affair with Trump.

Daniels said that soon after she gave an interview about their relationship (published by In Touch earlier this year, with former employees at the magazine telling CBS that the article had initally been spiked in 2011 because Cohen threatened to sue), an unknown man approached her in a Las Vegas carpark when she was with her baby daughter, and told her to “Leave Trump alone. Forget the Story.”

On one level, the legal proceedings in Germany could ultimately be a disappointment for the fight for independence. Should Mr Puigdemont be extradited, it would be a repudiation of Catalan complaints that he is a victim of a politically motivated witch-hunt concocted by a vengeful Spanish state.

But whatever happens, the separatists can celebrate a return to the headlines. The debate over Catalonia is in full flow in Europe — just where independence campaigners want it.

The arrest comes at a particularly combustible time for the European Union, which is coping with Britain’s pending exit from the bloc, a right-wing populist upheaval in Italy, growing labor unrest in France, frictions between Brussels and the increasingly authoritarian governments of Hungary and Poland, and a growing clash with Russia.

It is also a difficult time for the Catalan separatists, who appear to be running out of options within the country’s political framework.

[Germany faces] a tough dilemma: failure to extradite will be read in Madrid as a betrayal of first principles by a key EU partner; extradition offers Puigdemont the martyrdom that Catalan nationalism appears to crave.

In an apparent paradox, which reflects the destructive dynamic of the struggle between resurgent Catalan and Spanish nationalisms, his arrest probably suits the basest interests of both sides. It is unlikely, however, to assist in resolving this conflict, and restore a functioning government and democratic normality to Catalonia.

Time is ticking down for the world’s most powerful industry. Oil companies could only have a few years before demand for their product stops growing and begins to decline. Bank of America analysts predicted in January that an explosion of electric vehicles may “cause global oil demand to peak by 2030.”

If and when peak oil demand occurs the world will still require a lot of oil. And obviously, that peak is still years away by any estimate. But it could cause investors to rapidly lose confidence in oil companies… The world saw a preview of this sort of thing a decade ago, when a surge of renewables in Europe destroyed the region’s growth market for coal and natural gas.

A persistently slow recovery in oil prices and debate over the impact electric vehicles may have on demand may not seem like a recipe for the start of a new “Golden Age for Big Oil,” but Goldman Sachs is confident that that’s the case.

Analyst Michele Della Vigna writes that plenty of investors think that oil producers have their best years in rising-oil-price environments, because it would seem to make intuitive sense. Yet in reality, history tells a different story, with energy companies’ returns diluted with cost inflation and inefficiencies that come with these expansionary phases.

It’s a different story post-2020, where there’s a growing concern that the oil industry might not be able to keep up with continued demand growth because it’s not reinvesting enough money into longer-term projects. That could result in a big shortfall in supplies, potentially fueling a significant spike in oil prices in the coming years.

Yet despite the integrity of its scriptural core, Judaism, as Goodman emphasises, was never monolithic. At different points in time, it rubbed up against other faiths, influencing and also borrowing from them. Taking in three millennia of religious thought and practice, Goodman’s scholarship is formidable. It ranges across the theological writings of the first-century Roman historian Flavius Josephus through the mounting religious doubts of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza to Joseph Soloveitchik’s encouragement of Orthodox Jews in the 20th century to participate fully in the secular world.

Right off the bat, then, Schama shows that actual Jewish history is considerably more complex than the official story allows. Jews were always diasporic, living outside the land of Israel as well as in it. And Jews were always religiously innovative, contesting the centralized authority of priesthood and orthodoxy. In Schama’s treatment, the Jews of Elephantine sound remarkably like many American Jews today: “worldly, cosmopolitan, vernacular.”

For Schama, Jewishness comprises anything Jews have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived.

it is the advent of Trumpian politics — its nonstop carnival of paranoia; its scapegoating of Hispanics and African-Americans; its anti-immigrant phobia — that has rung Weisman’s alarm bells, which accounts for his subtitle: “Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.” More sinister for him than the foaming lunacies of the neo-Nazis is the alt-right’s embrace of conspiracy theorists; the routine mutation of fantasy into fact; the appetite for seeing secret hands (George Soros for instance) at work in plots to undermine America — all of which have a whiff of late Weimar about them, not to mention the long history of populist anti-Semitism in the United States. Better, Weisman believes, to be fretfully vigilant than torpidly complacent.