Israel’s president has hit back at Benjamin Netanyahu after the prime minister said in reference to the country’s Arab minority that Israel was “not a state for all its citizens”. Less than a month before the 9 April election in which the prime minister hopes to win with the support of far-right politicians and voters, Netanyahu wrote on Instagram that: “Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.”

While not mentioning the prime minister – a long-time political foe – by name, Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, criticised what he said were recent “entirely unacceptable remarks about the Arab citizens of Israel”. “There are no first-class citizens, and there are no second-class voters. We are all equal in the voting booth. We are all represented at the Knesset [parliament],” said Rivlin, who holds a largely ceremonial role.

Netanyahu’s comments referenced a deeply contentious “nation state” law passed last year declaring that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country. Critics of the law have said it amounted to “apartheid” for the 1.8 million Arabs in Israel with citizenship, who make up about a fifth of the total population. They consist of Palestinians who remained on their land following wars surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948. Others either fled or were expelled from their homes.(theguardian)…[+]

The first coral reef in Italy has been identified, according to researchers. The underwater ecosystem extends for at least two and a half kilometres on the Adriatic coast near Monopoli, in Puglia. It is the first mesophotic coral reef – a term applied to ecosystems with low levels of light – to be found in the Mediterranean.

These types of reef “are found at depths ranging from 30–40 metres … up to 200 metres”, the researchers write in the study published in Nature. For this reason, the colours of the coral reef in Puglia are more subtle than the better-known varieties in the Pacific. “The famous Australian or Maldivian coral reefs rise almost to the surface of the water, making the most of the sunlight that is the real fuel of these ecosystems,” said Prof Giuseppe Corriero, the director of the department of biology at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, who led the research project. “[Mesophotic reefs] are very rare, because they manage to survive and grow despite the lack of light.“In the early 1990s I worked as a marine biologist in the Maldives. But I never thought I’d find a coral reef, 30 years later, a stone’s throw from my house.”(theguardian)…[+]

CARACAS– Furious Venezuelans lined up to buy water and fuel yesterday as the country endured a fourth day of a nationwide blackout that has left already-scarce food rotting in shops, homes suffering for lack of water and cell phones without reception. Authorities have managed to provide only patchy access to power since the outage began on Thursday in what President Nicolas Maduro called an act of U.S.-backed sabotage, but critics insist it is the result of incompetence and corruption.

The government  suspended school and business activities for the following day without providing any information on a likely time frame for resolving the situation, leaving many fretting that it could extend indefinitely. The country’s worst-ever power outage comes as Maduro faces a hyperinflationary economic collapse and an unprecedented political crisis. Opposi-tion leader Juan Guaido in January invoked the constitution to assume the presidency after declaring Maduro’s 2018 re-election a fraud. Angry residents of the Caracas neighbourhood of Chacao yesterday set up barricades along a main avenue and on side streets to protest the continued blackout.(Reuters)…[+]