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Jewish sailor Bill Pinkney, first Black person to circle the globe solo, dies at 87
(JTA) — Captain Bill Pinkney, a Jewish sailor who became the first African American to sail around the world solo, died Thursday. He was 87 and had suffered a fall.
Starting in 1990, the Chicagoan’s 22-month, 27,000-mile journey aboard a 47-foot cutter captivated thousands of schoolchildren who followed his trip via an educational television channel. The footage was used in an award-winning documentary, “The Incredible Voyage of Bill Pinkney,” that aired on the Disney Channel, National Geographic and PBS stations.
The former cosmetics executive also wrote a children’s book in 1994, “Captain Bill Pinkney’s Journey.”
A very different journey also captivated readers in 2019, when Pinkney and his former wife, Ina Pinkney, were featured in a New York Times photo essay about their marriage and extremely amicable divorce. Bill, who grew up poor on Chicago’s South Side, and Ina, who grew up Jewish in Brooklyn and Long Island, married in 1965. It was his second marriage.
Ina was 21 years old when she met Bill at a coffee place in Greenwich Village. “As soon as I spotted him across the crowded room, I said to my friend, ‘Susan, I’m going to marry him,’” Ina told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday. “And I sat down and I talked to him for a little bit, and we went out and we had something to eat. And that was it. It was a done deal for me. And what even helped more is that he was Jewish.”
Yet although Bill considered himself Jewish starting in childhood and converted to Judaism as an adult, her parents broke off contact with the couple and none of her relatives attended the wedding.
According to Ina, Bill was 12 years old when he came home from church with his mother, who divorced his father when Bill was 6. “He said, ‘I can’t go there anymore.’” When his mother asked why, Bill explained, “Because all I hear about is that everything gets better after you die. It can’t be that way.” His mother encouraged him to discover something he could believe in, and after a visit to the library, the preteen announced, “I’m Jewish.”
When Ina, who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home, and Bill were engaged, Bill decided to go through a formal conversion, choosing the Hebrew name “Barak ben Avraham Avinu.” When Ina asked why he felt he needed a formal conversion, Bill explained, “Because without this I could not be buried in a Jewish cemetery next to you.” Ina said that, late in life, Bill would regularly Zoom into services held at the Hebrew Congregation of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and she would occasionally join him online.
The two were married for 36 years. The couple went their separate ways in 2001, when Bill decided to continue to pursue his sailing dreams and Ina her career as a celebrity baker and chef in Chicago.
“My life was on the sea, hers was on the land,” Bill told the New York Times in 2019. According to Ina, Bill would say, “If it doesn’t have a lobby, it would never be her hobby” – that is, she preferred a hotel or a cruise ship over the sail boats he favored. Ina used saltier language to describe how bored she felt on the water.
He later married Migdalia Vachier Pinkney. She survives him, along with his sister, Naomi Pinkney, as do a daughter from his first marriage and two grandchildren.
William Pinkney was born Sept. 15, 1935, in Chicago. After serving eight years in the Navy, he became a makeup artist and designed a line of women’s cosmetics, eventually working as a marketing manager for Revlon and director of cosmetics marketing for Johnson Products Company. He became director of marketing for the Chicago Department of Human Services in 1980, according to the History Makers.
Pinkney first learned how to sail small cargo skiffs while stationed in Puerto Rico with the Navy in the 1950s. He began sailing in earnest on Lake Michigan when working in Chicago.
Pinkney also served, starting in 2000, as the first captain of the reconstructed Amistad, the Spanish schooner whose crew was killed in a revolt by enslaved Africans in 1839. The reconstruction of the ship was inspired by Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film, “Amistad,” about the revolt; as captain, Pinkney took schoolteachers to Africa on a route tracing the Middle Passage crossing by which enslaved Africans were taken from Senegal to the Americas.
In recent years he ran a charter boat business in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.
Pinkney was also a senior advisor for National Geographic. In 2021, he was inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame.
Discussing his round-the-world voyage on a boating website, Pinkney said that one of the highlights was sailing past South Africa two weeks after Nelson Mandela had been released after 27 years behind bars. “I sailed past Robben Island, where he’d been imprisoned, flying a red, black, and green spinnaker, the colors of the African liberation movement,” said Pinkney. “As an afterthought, I should’ve put a big yellow Star of David on there as well [laughing], because I’m Jewish.”
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The post Jewish sailor Bill Pinkney, first Black person to circle the globe solo, dies at 87 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Hamas Says No Interim Hostage Deal Possible Without Work Toward Permanent Ceasefire
Explosions send smoke into the air in Gaza, as seen from the Israeli side of the border, July 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing said on Friday that while the Palestinian terrorist group favors reaching an interim truce in the Gaza war, if such an agreement is not reached in current negotiations it could revert to insisting on a full package deal to end the conflict.
Hamas has previously offered to release all the hostages held in Gaza and conclude a permanent ceasefire agreement, and Israel has refused, Abu Ubaida added in a televised speech.
Arab mediators Qatar and Egypt, backed by the United States, have hosted more than 10 days of talks on a US-backed proposal for a 60-day truce in the war.
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on a call he had with Pope Leo on Friday that Israel‘s efforts to secure a hostage release deal and 60-day ceasefire “have so far not been reciprocated by Hamas.”
As part of the potential deal, 10 hostages held in Gaza would be returned along with the bodies of 18 others, spread out over 60 days. In exchange, Israel would release a number of detained Palestinians.
“If the enemy remains obstinate and evades this round as it has done every time before, we cannot guarantee a return to partial deals or the proposal of the 10 captives,” said Abu Ubaida.
Disputes remain over maps of Israeli army withdrawals, aid delivery mechanisms into Gaza, and guarantees that any eventual truce would lead to ending the war, said two Hamas officials who spoke to Reuters on Friday.
The officials said the talks have not reached a breakthrough on the issues under discussion.
Hamas says any agreement must lead to ending the war, while Netanyahu says the war will only end once Hamas is disarmed and its leaders expelled from Gaza.
Almost 1,650 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed as a result of the conflict, including 1,200 killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, according to Israeli tallies. Over 250 hostages were kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.
Israel responded with an ongoing military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
The post Hamas Says No Interim Hostage Deal Possible Without Work Toward Permanent Ceasefire first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran Marks 31st Anniversary of AMIA Bombing by Slamming Argentina’s ‘Baseless’ Accusations, Blaming Israel
People hold images of the victims of the 1994 bombing attack on the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community center, marking the 30th anniversary of the attack, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Irina Dambrauskas
Iran on Friday marked the 31st anniversary of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires by slamming Argentina for what it called “baseless” accusations over Tehran’s alleged role in the terrorist attack and accusing Israel of politicizing the atrocity to influence the investigation and judicial process.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on the anniversary of Argentina’s deadliest terrorist attack, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 300.
“While completely rejecting the accusations against Iranian citizens, the Islamic Republic of Iran condemns attempts by certain Argentine factions to pressure the judiciary into issuing baseless charges and politically motivated rulings,” the statement read.
“Reaffirming that the charges against its citizens are unfounded, the Islamic Republic of Iran insists on restoring their reputation and calls for an end to this staged legal proceeding,” it continued.
Last month, a federal judge in Argentina ordered the trial in absentia of 10 Iranian and Lebanese nationals suspected of orchestrating the attack in Buenos Aires.
The ten suspects set to stand trial include former Iranian and Lebanese ministers and diplomats, all of whom are subject to international arrest warrants issued by Argentina for their alleged roles in the terrorist attack.
In its statement on Friday, Iran also accused Israel of influencing the investigation to advance a political campaign against the Islamist regime in Tehran, claiming the case has been used to serve Israeli interests and hinder efforts to uncover the truth.
“From the outset, elements and entities linked to the Zionist regime [Israel] exploited this suspicious explosion, pushing the investigation down a false and misleading path, among whose consequences was to disrupt the long‑standing relations between the people of Iran and Argentina,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said.
“Clear, undeniable evidence now shows the Zionist regime and its affiliates exerting influence on the Argentine judiciary to frame Iranian nationals,” the statement continued.
In April, lead prosecutor Sebastián Basso — who took over the case after the 2015 murder of his predecessor, Alberto Nisman — requested that federal Judge Daniel Rafecas issue national and international arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over his alleged involvement in the attack.
Since 2006, Argentine authorities have sought the arrest of eight Iranians — including former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died in 2017 — yet more than three decades after the deadly bombing, all suspects remain still at large.
In a post on X, the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA), the country’s Jewish umbrella organization, released a statement commemorating the 31st anniversary of the bombing.
“It was a brutal attack on Argentina, its democracy, and its rule of law,” the group said. “At DAIA, we continue to demand truth and justice — because impunity is painful, and memory is a commitment to both the present and the future.”
31 años del atentado a la AMIA – DAIA. 31 años sin justicia.
El 18 de julio de 1994, un atentado terrorista dejó 85 personas muertas y más de 300 heridas. Fue un ataque brutal contra la Argentina, su democracia y su Estado de derecho.
Desde la DAIA, seguimos exigiendo verdad y… pic.twitter.com/kV2ReGNTIk
— DAIA (@DAIAArgentina) July 18, 2025
Despite Argentina’s longstanding belief that Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah terrorist group carried out the devastating attack at Iran’s request, the 1994 bombing has never been claimed or officially solved.
Meanwhile, Tehran has consistently denied any involvement and refused to arrest or extradite any suspects.
To this day, the decades-long investigation into the terrorist attack has been plagued by allegations of witness tampering, evidence manipulation, cover-ups, and annulled trials.
In 2006, former prosecutor Nisman formally charged Iran for orchestrating the attack and Hezbollah for carrying it out.
Nine years later, he accused former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — currently under house arrest on corruption charges — of attempting to cover up the crime and block efforts to extradite the suspects behind the AMIA atrocity in return for Iranian oil.
Nisman was killed later that year, and to this day, both his case and murder remain unresolved and under ongoing investigation.
The alleged cover-up was reportedly formalized through the memorandum of understanding signed in 2013 between Kirchner’s government and Iranian authorities, with the stated goal of cooperating to investigate the AMIA bombing.
The post Iran Marks 31st Anniversary of AMIA Bombing by Slamming Argentina’s ‘Baseless’ Accusations, Blaming Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jordan Reveals Muslim Brotherhood Operating Vast Illegal Funding Network Tied to Gaza Donations, Political Campaigns
Murad Adailah, the head of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, attends an interview with Reuters in Amman, Jordan, Sept. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jehad Shelbak
The Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements, has been implicated in a wide-ranging network of illegal financial activities in Jordan and abroad, according to a new investigative report.
Investigations conducted by Jordanian authorities — along with evidence gathered from seized materials — revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood raised tens of millions of Jordanian dinars through various illegal activities, the Jordan news agency (Petra) reported this week.
With operations intensifying over the past eight years, the report showed that the group’s complex financial network was funded through various sources, including illegal donations, profits from investments in Jordan and abroad, and monthly fees paid by members inside and outside the country.
The report also indicated that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken advantage of the war in Gaza to raise donations illegally.
Out of all donations meant for Gaza, the group provided no information on where the funds came from, how much was collected, or how they were distributed, and failed to work with any international or relief organizations to manage the transfers properly.
Rather, the investigations revealed that the Islamist network used illicit financial mechanisms to transfer funds abroad.
According to Jordanian authorities, the group gathered more than JD 30 million (around $42 million) over recent years.
With funds transferred to several Arab, regional, and foreign countries, part of the money was allegedly used to finance domestic political campaigns in 2024, as well as illegal activities and cells.
In April, Jordan outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most vocal opposition group, and confiscated its assets after members of the Islamist movement were found to be linked to a sabotage plot.
The movement’s political arm in Jordan, the Islamic Action Front, became the largest political grouping in parliament after elections last September, although most seats are still held by supporters of the government.
Opponents of the group, which is banned in most Arab countries, label it a terrorist organization. However, the movement claims it renounced violence decades ago and now promotes its Islamist agenda through peaceful means.
The post Jordan Reveals Muslim Brotherhood Operating Vast Illegal Funding Network Tied to Gaza Donations, Political Campaigns first appeared on Algemeiner.com.