Israel and Lebanon agreed Thursday to extend their ceasefire by three weeks. President Trump announced the extension after a meeting at the White House that included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, the Washington Post reported.
The meeting had been scheduled at the State Department as a working session between the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors. Three hours before it was to begin, it was moved to the White House. Both parties were told the president would join.
“The Ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon will be extended by THREE WEEKS,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I look forward in the near future to hosting the Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, and the President of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun.” He said the United States would “work with Lebanon in order to help it protect itself from Hezbollah.”
The original ceasefire lasted ten days. It was set to expire Sunday. This is day 56 of the conflict, which began February 28 when the United States and Israel launched military operations targeting Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure. Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire even as the talks were underway, Axios reported. Secretary of State Rubio said Trump’s involvement in the mediation “made it possible” for the extension to happen, France 24 reported.
On August 11, 2006, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1701, ending a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah. The resolution called for Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, deployment of 15,000 Lebanese troops to the south, and the disarmament of Hezbollah. Israel withdrew. The Lebanese army deployed. Hezbollah was never disarmed.
The European Union on Wednesday finalized a €90 billion loan to Ukraine, ending months of political gridlock. The package includes €60 billion for defense and €30 billion for budget support, the European Council announced. The loan is interest-free, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The Council also approved a twentieth package of sanctions against Russia, the Kyiv Independent reported. Brussels said the first disbursement would come in the second quarter of this year.
Hungary had blocked the loan since February, when Ukraine halted oil shipments through the Druzhba pipeline. Prime Minister Viktor Orban wrote on X that he would not stand in the way “once oil deliveries are restored,” Euronews reported. Ukraine reopened the pipeline. Hungary and Slovakia both dropped their vetoes, EU Observer reported.
Orban’s political standing had already weakened. On April 12, he lost Hungary’s parliamentary elections to Peter Magyar, whose Tisza Party won 138 of 199 seats on 53.6 percent of the vote, CNN reported. Turnout was 77 percent, the highest in Hungary’s post-Communist history. Orban is expected to leave office in May.
The loan is structured so that Ukraine repays only when Russia pays war reparations. The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 used a similar framework. The United States provided roughly $50 billion in military aid to its allies, with repayment expected after the war. Britain made its final Lend-Lease payment on December 29, 2006. The war had ended sixty-one years earlier.
Two people have been arrested in an alleged conspiracy to attack Congregation Beth Israel, a synagogue in Houston. Angelina Han Hicks, 18, of Lexington, North Carolina, was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit assault with a deadly weapon. A 16-year-old in Harris County, Texas, was charged with conspiracy to commit capital murder, NPR reported.
Prosecutors said the plan was to “kill as many Jews as possible by driving through a congregation at the synagogue,” according to ABC News. Hicks is held on $10 million bond. Court documents named two additional suspects, identified only as “Teegan” and “Angel,” who haven’t been arrested, CNN reported. FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau received a tip Tuesday that “an individual out of Lexington, North Carolina was planning a mass casualty event at a Jewish Day School near Houston, Texas.” The arrests, Patel said, “likely saved lives.”
The congregation closed Wednesday and reopened Thursday. On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. It remains the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in American history.
Airlines across Europe are cancelling tens of thousands of flights because they are running short of jet fuel.
Lufthansa announced it is cutting 20,000 short-haul flights through October, a reduction that will save 40,000 metric tons of fuel. SAS cancelled 1,000 flights in April. KLM reduced capacity by 80 flights. Ryanair’s CEO said the airline would cancel flights and reduce summer capacity if the shortage continued, CNBC reported. The cause is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran closed the strait during the war with the United States and Israel, and oil shipments to European refineries slowed to a fraction of their normal volume. Jet fuel prices rose 103 percent month-on-month as of March, according to the International Air Transport Association. In the United States, the price nearly doubled, from $2.50 a gallon on February 27 to $4.88 on April 2, CNBC reported. The head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe could run out of jet fuel within six weeks. Europe’s summer travel season begins in weeks.
In October 1973, OPEC imposed an oil embargo on the United States in response to American support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Gasoline prices quadrupled. Congress imposed a national 55 mile-per-hour speed limit. That crisis reshaped American energy policy for a generation. This time the product is jet fuel, not gasoline, and the disruption is concentrated in Europe. The cause is the same: a war in the Middle East and a chokepoint closed.
The White House on Thursday accused Chinese entities of conducting “industrial-scale campaigns” to extract capabilities from American artificial intelligence systems. Michael Kratsios, the president’s science and technology adviser, issued a memo describing the practice, known as distillation, and accused the entities of “exploiting American expertise and innovation,” NPR reported. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has made similar claims, saying China shouldn’t be allowed to advance what it called “autocratic AI” by “appropriating and repackaging American innovation,” according to CNBC.
Kratsios said the administration would work with AI companies to identify the activity and find ways to punish offenders. On Capitol Hill, the House Foreign Affairs Committee offered unanimous bipartisan support this week for a bill to sanction foreign actors who extract capabilities from closed-source American AI models. China’s Foreign Ministry said the claims were groundless.
The Export Administration Act of 1979 controlled the sale of advanced technology to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Wassenaar Arrangement of 1996 extended those controls to forty-two nations. The technology changes. The argument does not.
And in St. Amant, Louisiana, a building at 12341 Highway 431 is ready for its first visitors.
The St. Amant Library and Community Center, a joint project between the Ascension Parish Library and the parish government, holds its ribbon-cutting Saturday morning, the Baton Rouge Advocate reported. The building is 37,000 square feet. The library occupies 16,495 of them. It has a 3D printer, a laser cutter, a CNC mill, woodworking equipment, a virtual reality room, an audiovisual recording studio, and sewing machines, the Weekly Citizen reported. The community center side has a teaching kitchen, basketball courts, and pickleball courts.
It is Friday. This was the week a ceasefire was extended, a €90 billion loan cleared its last veto, a plot against a Houston synagogue was uncovered before anyone was harmed, a fuel crisis deepened across European airports, and the United States accused China of stealing its artificial intelligence. And in a parish along the Mississippi, south of Baton Rouge, a community built itself a library with a laser cutter in it. The doors open tomorrow. That’s the day.
