World
US says Israel ‘more or less’ accepts framework deal for Gaza ceasefire
There is an agreement in place for a potential six-week truce in Gaza, a US official says, and Hamas must now decide.
The United States says Israel has essentially endorsed a framework for a proposed Gaza ceasefire and captive release deal, and it is now up to the Palestinian group Hamas to agree to it.
“There’s a framework deal. The Israelis have more or less accepted it,” a senior US official in the Biden administration told reporters on a conference call on Saturday.
“Right now, the ball is in the camp of Hamas,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The announcement comes a day before talks to reach a truce agreement are expected to resume in Egypt.
International mediators have been working for weeks to broker a deal to pause the fighting before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins around March 10.
The framework proposal includes a six-week ceasefire, as well as the release by Hamas of captives considered vulnerable, which includes the sick, the wounded, the elderly and women, the US official said.
A deal would also likely allow aid to reach hundreds of thousands of desperate Palestinians in northern Gaza, which humanitarian officials say are under threat of famine.
Israel has severely restricted the entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies into the Gaza Strip since its war began on October 7.
‘Impasses’
News of the framework deal “sounds like a significant development from the Americans because they want it to sound like a significant development,” said Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on Saturday.
“But it clearly looks like an attempt to pile on the pressure on Hamas before the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan begins in just over a week from now,” he added, saying that the proposal is presenting them with a six-week pause in fighting and the promise of more aid deliveries at a desperate time.
Earlier this week, senior Hamas official Basem Naim told Al Jazeera that “the gap is still wide” in reaching an agreement with Israel, as the Palestinian group is calling for a total ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
Naim’s comments followed remarks from Joe Biden on Monday that a truce was a week away – comments the US president later walked back on.
Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut, reporting from Tel Aviv, said there had not been any Israeli response to the Biden administration official’s comments about the ceasefire framework.
“Over the last week, the only thing we’ve been hearing about are impasses when it comes to this deal, and conflicting reports about where delegations are or are not being sent,” she said.
In recent days, several Israeli media outlets have reported that there will not be an Israeli delegation going to the next round of truce talks.
A senior Egyptian official said mediators Egypt and Qatar are expected to receive a response from Hamas during the Cairo talks reportedly scheduled to start on Sunday. The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not publicly authorised to discuss the sensitive talks.
Hamas has not backed away from its position that a temporary truce must be the start of a process towards ending the war altogether, Egyptian sources and a Hamas official told the Reuters news agency.
However, the Egyptian sources also said assurances had been offered to Hamas that the terms of a permanent ceasefire would be worked out in the second and third phases of the deal.
During a Qatari-mediated weeklong truce in November, 105 captives were released in exchange for 150 Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons.
World
Paramount Global Set to Unveil New Leadership Structure; Anxiety Runs High on Earnings Eve
As turmoil continues to surround the future of Paramount Global, details surrounding interim leadership and its proposed Skydance deal are coming to light, multiple sources told Variety.
Sunday was a consequential day in Shari Redstone’s ongoing exclusive bargaining window with David Ellison‘s Skydance, one that would see the Hollywood scion take majority ownership of Paramount Global and its owner National Amusements Inc. Skydance offered its “best and final” offer to Redstone on Sunday, sources added.
On the eve of its quarterly earnings call, two insiders familiar with Paramount Global said the board is expected to announce a new leadership committee to replace ousted CEO Bob Bakish. Expected to be named to these leadership roles are Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins, CBS chief executive George Cheeks and MTV Entertainment Group President Chris McCarthy, the sources said.
Multiple insiders close to Paramount’s ongoing sales process said that letting Bakish go was the right move, but the new leadership structure is problematic at this fragile moment. There will not be a sole leader guiding the corporation through a potential sales process, said the insiders, and Cheeks, Robbins and McCarthy are not accustomed to collaboration across their portfolios. All details that are raising internal and external anxiety. There is, of course, Redstone — who is being closely watched by Wall Street and the media sector.
A third source familiar with the company said Redstone has been resolute in preferring the Skydance bid, which promises to keep her family media empire in tact and on track to provide future shareholder value. Or, she could appease some of her shareholders and evaluate a competing offer from Apollo and Sony Entertainment — a deal that would call for major structural changes, with asset liquidation and job losses likely. And that’s if that scenario could survive inevitable regulatory scrutiny.
Heading into earnings, the company has yet to disclose whether its network carriage deal with Charter, the country’s second largest cable operator next to Comcast, has been renewed. It is set to expire April 30.
The flurry of weekend activity is sure to weigh heavy on Paramount Global’s share price on Monday, and change the economics of any potential sale. Paramount Global is scheduled to report first quarter 2024 results tomorrow after market close. The earnings call with analysts — sans Bakish but possibly with the new leadership team — is set to start at 4:30 p.m. ET.
World
Lawmakers call for release of Putin’s ‘political prisoner number one'
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers marked the two-year anniversary of Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza’s imprisonment by calling for his immediate release.
Kara-Murza, who lives in solitary confinement in a Siberian maximum-security prison, was sentenced to 25 years last April for treason and other related charges as Russian authorities continue their crackdown on domestic dissent.
The Moscow City Court claimed Kara-Murza was guilty of “high treason“ for “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian Armed Forces” when he delivered a speech to the Arizona House of Representatives in 2022 that criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
His sentence is the longest term handed down to a political prisoner in the post-Soviet era.
Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., co-led a group of 80 bipartisan lawmakers urging the Biden administration to declare the Russian dissident as “unlawfully and wrongfully detained.”
Fox News Digital obtained a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Cardin and other lawmakers demanding Kara-Murza’s release and the aforementioned designation.
“There is little time left to end the ongoing and unjust detention of U.S. Legal Permanent Resident and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza,” the letter read in part. “Mr. Kara-Murza’s family has grave concerns that he may not survive much longer. His situation is even more perilous following the killing of Alexei Navalny. Mr. Kara-Murza is the most prominent imprisoned democracy activist still alive in Russia.”
The State Department referred Fox News Digital to spokesperson Matthew Miller’s remarks on Kara-Murza’s two-year imprisonment anniversary but did not provide specifics when asked about efforts to give the Russian opposition leader the designation sought by U.S. lawmakers.
“The Department of State continuously reviews the circumstances surrounding the detentions of U.S. nationals overseas, including those in Russia, for indicators that they are wrongful. When making assessments, the Department conducts a legal, fact-based review that looks into the totality of the circumstances for each case individually,” a spokesperson said.
Russian human rights lawyer and the Center for European Policy Analysis’ Democracy Fellow Grigory Vaypan told Fox News Digital that Kara-Murza is now Russia’s “prisoner number one.”
AMERICAN BALLERINA WITH DUAL CITIZENSHIP ARRESTED IN RUSSIA, FACING LIFE IN PRISON FOR DONATING $51 TO UKRAINE
“He’s definitely political prisoner number one on Putin’s list, and his life is certainly in danger now that we see with the murder of Navalny that Putin’s regime demonstrates to the world that it’s willing to kill political prisoners in Russia,” Vaypan said.
He added that Kara-Murza, who was reportedly poisoned twice in 2015 and 2017 by agents of the Russian state, is essentially on “Putin’s death row.”
“His health is deteriorating. He has never fully recovered from the effects of those two poisonings. Now, he is not only in prison, he’s on solitary confinement, which is basically indefinite. He can be in his tiny prison cell for many months, and with the effects of those two poisonings, his health is getting worse,” Vaypan explained. “This is why it would be fair to say that he’s essentially on Putin’s death row now.”
Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group, counts roughly 700 political prisoners in Russia today.
Political prisoners are further isolated and punished in an effort to prevent them from continuing to speak out against the Russian authorities. They can be put into solitary confinement, deprived of food, mail, phone calls with relatives or family visits.
RUSSIAN POET SENTENCED TO 7 YEARS IN PRISON FOR RECITING VERSES AGAINST WAR IN UKRAINE
“There’s a wide array of those measures that the Russian prison authorities can resort to. And we’re increasingly seeing that, especially after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion [of] Ukraine, we’ve seen more people jailed for exercising their right to free speech,” Vaypan told Fox News Digital. “And we’ve seen an increasing number of people being further harassed and pressured even while in prison.”
Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, reflected on the deaths of other Russian opposition figures like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov at the hands of the Putin regime.
“[They] target the most courageous, the most principled, those Russians who risk not only their freedom but very often their lives to show you that Russia can be different,” she said at an event on Capitol Hill.
“As my husband put it, and I quote, ‘It is my hope that when people in the free world today think and speak about Russia, they will remember not only the war criminals who are sitting in the Kremlin but also those who are standing up to them because we are Russians too.’”
World
At least four dead in US after dozens of tornadoes rip through Oklahoma
Hospitals across the state reported about 100 injuries, including people apparently struck by debris.
At least four people were killed and dozens more injured after multiple tornadoes wreaked havoc in the central state of Oklahoma in the United States.
The tornadoes caused extensive damage in the town of Sulphur, home to about 5,000 people, flattened buildings, threw vehicles into the air and ripped the roofs from houses.
“You just can’t believe the destruction,” Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt said during a visit to the hard-hit town on Sunday afternoon. “It seems like every business downtown has been destroyed.”
A four-month-old baby was among the dead, Hughes County Emergency Management Director Mike Dockrey told Oklahoma television station KOCO.
Stitt said about 30 people were injured, including some who were in a bar when the tornado struck.
Hospitals across the state reported about 100 injuries, including people apparently cut or struck by debris, and more than 20,000 residents were still without electricity on Sunday evening.
Stitt issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency in 12 counties due to the severe weather, while in a call with the Oklahoma governor, President Joe Biden offered the federal government’s full support with recovery efforts, the White House said in a statement.
The National Weather Service (NWS) reported that 38 possible tornadoes hit the area and that the worst of the storms rolled through Central Oklahoma on Saturday into early Sunday morning, spreading into northwest Texas, western Missouri and Kansas.
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