JERUSALEM: Israel’s parliament is to meet in special session despite a pre-election recess, in a last-ditch attempt to stave off the closure of a debt-ridden commercial TV station, the government said yesterday. A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that he had agreed with Speaker Reuven Rivlin that the Knesset would reconvene “within the coming days to debate a proposed arrangement for the continued operation of Channel 10.”
The move came hours after the station, one of only two commercial television channels in Israel, said that its management had decided to fire its 500 staff and close at the end of the year. Directors, however, voted at a meeting late on Saturday night to wait 48 hours before sending out dismissal notices, in the hope of prodding the Knesset into action at the last minute, the Channel 10 website said. The station’s broadcast licence expires at the end of December but it says that its executives and treasury officials had previously hammered out an agreement under which it would clear its debts and its licence would be extended for two years. Set up a decade ago, Channel 10, one of only two commercial television channels in Israel, is heavily in debt to the state, with around 60m shekels ($15.8m) in unpaid bills.
String of attacks in Iraq kill 12
BAGHDAD: Attacks in Iraq including a string of bombings against Shia places of worship and a car bomb at a Kurdish political office killed at least 12 people and wounded at least 75 yesterday, officials said.
Two car bombs and seven roadside bombs targeted two Shia places of worship, known as husseiniyahs, in the north Iraq city of Kirkuk, one in the city’s north and another in its south, a senior police officer said. Doctor Jassem Abed from Kirkuk General Hospital said the blasts killed eight people - four women, two children and two men - and wounded 55. Oil-rich and ethnically mixed Kirkuk is part of a swathe of territory in north Iraq that the autonomous Kurdistan region wants to incorporate, over the strong objections of Baghdad.AFP
