Once home to the largest Jewish community in the western part of Georgia, Lailashi is now a remote village with no Jews to speak of, although efforts have been made recently to preserve its synagogue. It is also the location of an extremely rare codex of the Pentateuch, thought to have been written in the 10th century and complete save for a few chapters. Thea Gomelauri writes in a December 2020 article:

The provenance of the Lailashi codex . . . is as mysterious as its authorship and its ownership. According to the legend, the codex was brought to Georgia on an angel’s wings. The villagers saw a floating book in an unnamed river, and they rescued it from the stream. This unique codex was said to have miracle-working powers. It became an object of [veneration] for both Jews and Georgians.

How this priceless codex was “found” in a small, unprotected community synagogue during the unfortunate times of the Soviet reign is unclear. . . . The codex . . . was seized by the Communist authorities, and was brought to Tbilisi. Originally, it was kept in the Georgian Museum of Jewish History, but the museum was closed in 1951 [at the height of Stalinist anti-Semitism]. In 1957, the Lailashi manuscript emerged in the possession of the Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts of the Georgian Academy of Sciences.
.
What makes the Lailashi codex unique among its counterparts is that this treasure of biblical scholarship is entirely understudied. The only scholarly article about it appeared in 1968 in [a Georgian-language journal], but the codex has never been studied by Hebrew paleographers. . . . Supposedly, it was written by different people and at different locations: in Palestine, Egypt, and Persia.

Last week, Jordanian police arrested sixteen members of the country’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood for acquiring explosives, trying to manufacture drones, and planning rocket attacks. The cell was likely working in coordination with Hamas (the Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood) and Hizballah, and perhaps receiving funding from Iran. Ghaith al-Omari provides some background:

The Brotherhood has been active in Jordan since the 1940s, and its relations with the government remained largely cooperative for decades even as other political parties were banned in the 1950s. In exchange, the Brotherhood usually (but not always) supported the palace’s foreign policy and security measures, particularly against Communist and socialist parties.

Relations became more adversarial near the turn of the century after the Brotherhood vociferously opposed the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. The Arab Spring movement that emerged in 2011 saw further deterioration. Unlike other states in the region, however, Jordan did not completely crack down on the MB, instead seeking to limit its influence.

Yet the current Gaza war has seen another escalation, with the MB repeatedly accusing the government of cooperating with Israel and not doing enough to support the Palestinians.

Jordanian security circles are particularly worried about the MB’s vocal wartime identification with Hamas, an organization that was considered such a grave security threat that it was expelled from the kingdom in 1999. The sentiment among many Jordanian officials is that the previous lenient approach failed to change the MB’s behavior, emboldening the group instead.