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Daybreak: Reconciliation on the Rocks

Plus, Assad the war criminal? and more in the news

by
Marc Tracy
June 20, 2011
Bashar al-Assad arriving in Amman, Jordan on March 20, 2009.(Salah Malkawi/Getty Images)
Bashar al-Assad arriving in Amman, Jordan on March 20, 2009.(Salah Malkawi/Getty Images)

• Palestinian reconciliation looks precarious, with a planned meeting between the two sides being called off over disagreement on whom the prime minister should be (more specifically, on whether it should be Salam Fayyad). [NYT]

• The United States is looking into whether it can bring war crimes charges against Syrian President Bashar Assad. [NYT]

• Calls have increased to postpone Egypt’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for September, in order to give parties less organized than the Muslim Brotherhood a better chance. [AP/WP]

• Jackson Diehl argues that the Obama administration’s engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict belies its broader trend of humility in foreign policy. [WP]

• The Yale Anti-Semitism program, whose recent closing drew a spate of (vague, scattershot) criticism, will be reborn very soon in a slightly different from. [Yale Daily News]

• Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’s Armenian-Jewish wife and a prominent dissident in her own right, died at 88. David Remnick has a nice appreciation. [NYT]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.