More than 115 cases of eye damage reported in Ontario after solar eclipse
More than 115 people who viewed the solar eclipse in Ontario earlier this month experienced eye damage after the event, according to eye doctors in the province.
Israel's new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett opened his first Cabinet meeting on Sunday by slamming Iran's newly-elected president and calling on world powers to "wake up" to the perils of returning to a nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Later in the day, Bennett warned Gaza's militant Hamas rulers that Israel would not tolerate even minor attacks from the territory in the wake of last month's 11-day war, saying "our patience is running out." But Israel also said it would allow limited agricultural exports from Gaza for the first time since the war was halted by an informal cease-fire.
Iran's hard-line judiciary chief, Ebrahim Raisi, was elected Saturday with 62% of the vote amid historically low turnout. He is sanctioned by the U.S. in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Raisi has not commented specifically on the event.
At the Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Bennett said Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had chosen the "hangman of Tehran" to be the country's next president, a man "infamous among Iranians and across the world for leading the death committees that executed thousands of innocent Iranian citizens throughout the years."
Raisi's ascendancy comes at a sensitive time for the region, as Iran and world powers ramp up efforts to resurrect Tehran's tattered 2015 nuclear deal, which granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.
For weeks, Iranian and American diplomats have been negotiating a return to the accord in Vienna through European intermediaries. Talks resumed Sunday, the first round since the election that put hard-liners firmly in control across Iran's government.
Israel was staunchly opposed to the landmark nuclear deal and welcomed then-President Donald Trump's decision to unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from it. Since then, the agreement has unraveled, with Iran abandoning all its limitations on enrichment after the Trump administration restored crippling economic sanctions. Tehran is currently enriching uranium at its highest levels ever, though still short of weapons-grade levels.
Although the White House has yet to weigh in on Iran's election, President Joe Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that the outcome was unlikely to affect nuclear negotiations because Iran's supreme leader wants the deal restored.
"The person who makes the decision about whether Iran will go back into the Iran nuclear deal, will assume its nuclear obligations under international law, is not the president of Iran, it is the supreme leader of Iran, and that person did not change from before the election," Sullivan said on CNN's "State of the Union."
Bennett said Raisi's election was "the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement and to understand who they're doing business with. These guys are murderers, mass murderers."
Israel, which is believed to have its own undeclared nuclear arsenal, has long opposed arch-enemy Iran's nuclear program and has vowed to prevent Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Iran insists its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes.
Earlier this month, Israel's outgoing Mossad intelligence chief signaled that Israel was behind a string of recent attacks targeting the country's nuclear program.
Bennett heads a broad coalition of parties ranging from hard-line Jewish nationalists to liberal factions and a small Islamist party. His government was sworn in last week, sending Benjamin Netanyahu to the opposition after a record 12 years as prime minister.
Later on Sunday, at a memorial ceremony for Israelis killed in the 2014 Gaza war, Bennett warned Hamas that Israel "will not tolerate violence, we will not tolerate a drizzle."
He appeared to be referring to incendiary balloons launched from Gaza in recent days that have set fields ablaze inside Israel. Last week, Israel launched airstrikes on two occasions in response to the balloons sent by activists mobilized by Hamas.
Last month's Gaza war was halted by an informal cease-fire. Egyptian mediators have met with Israeli and Hamas officials in recent weeks to try and shore it up. Hamas is demanding the lifting of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed on the territory when it seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007.
Israel says the blockade is needed to keep Hamas from importing military resources, while the Palestinians and human rights groups view it as collective punishment of the territory's more than 2 million Palestinian residents.
COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees civilian affairs in Gaza, said that starting Monday it would allow the "limited export of agricultural produce" from Gaza for the first time since the war ended.
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Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe in Washington, Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
More than 115 people who viewed the solar eclipse in Ontario earlier this month experienced eye damage after the event, according to eye doctors in the province.
A Sherwood Park family says their new house is uninhabitable. The McNaughton's say they were forced to leave the house after living there for only a week because contaminants inside made it difficult to breathe.
A man has been handed a lengthy hunting ban and fined thousands of dollars for illegally killing a grizzly bear, B.C. conservation officers say.
The B.C. NDP has asked the federal government to recriminalize public drug use, marking a major shift in the province's approach to addressing the deadly overdose crisis.
The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) says it's investigating an interaction between a uniformed officer and anti-Trudeau government protestors after a video circulated on social media.
An emergency slide fell off a Delta Air Lines jetliner shortly after takeoff Friday from New York, and pilots who felt a vibration in the plane circled back to land safely at JFK Airport.
Sophie Gregoire Trudeau says there is 'still so much love' between her and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as they navigate their post-separation relationship co-parenting their three children.
George Mallory is renowned for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s. Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Mallory’s hopes and fears about ascending Everest.
A loud explosion was heard across Hamilton on Friday after a propane tank was accidentally destroyed and detonated at a local scrap metal yard, police say.
As if a 4-0 Edmonton Oilers lead in Game 1 of their playoff series with the Los Angeles Kings wasn't good enough, what was announced at Rogers Place during the next TV timeout nearly blew the roof off the downtown arena.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.
When identical twin sisters Kim and Michelle Krezonoski were invited to compete against some of the world’s most elite female runners at last week’s Boston Marathon, they were in disbelief.
The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
A family from Laval, Que. is looking for answers... and their father's body. He died on vacation in Cuba and authorities sent someone else's body back to Canada.
A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”