Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a secret meeting with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York last September, an Israeli official told me.
Why it matters: Israel hasn't had diplomatic relations with Morocco since start of the second intifada in 2000. The two countries had full diplomatic relations between 1995 and 2000 after the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki canceled a planned trip to Israel this week amid ongoing diplomatic fallout over comments by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Poland's role in the Holocaust, per AP.
Backdrop: At a Middle East conference in Warsaw last week, Netanyahu said that "Poles cooperated with Nazis" during the Holocaust, but had been quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying "the Poles," implying the whole nation of Poland was at fault. Israel and Poland have clashed on this semantic issue before, holding secret backchannel talks last year over a controversial Polish law that criminalized attributing crimes committed during the Holocaust to Poland.
Prosecutors for special counsel Robert Mueller said in a new court filing that President Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort should serve between 19.5 and 24.5 years in prison for the financial crimes for which he was convicted in a Virginia court last August.
"In the end, Manafort acted for more than a decade as if he were above the law, and deprived the federal government and various financial institutions of millions of dollars. The sentence here should reflect the seriousness of these crimes, and serve to both deter Manafort and others from engaging in such conduct."
Why it matters: This would essentially be a life sentence for the 69-year-old Manafort. He is also facing a separate case in D.C., where a judge recently ruled that he had violated his plea agreement with Mueller and could therefore lose out on any potential leniency he might be offered.
