Turkey has condemned Israel for passing a new law that proclaims Israel as a “Jewish nation-state”.

The law adopted by Israeli parliament disregards the norms of universal law and the rights of Palestinian Israeli citizens, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday, Xinhua news agency reported.

The law’s declaration of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital city is null and void in the eyes of the international community, the ministry added.

The ministry also called on the international community to respond to the law that eliminates the vision of a two-state solution.

The controversial law, supported by the right-wing government, passed by 62 votes in favour and 55 votes against after discussions that lasted until early Thursday morning.

The law defines Israel as an “exclusively Jewish state,” stating that only Jews have the right of self-determination in Israel and revokes the status of Arabic as an official language.

Arabs represent about 20 per cent of Israel’s 9 million population.

Police in Malaysia have arrested seven people for alleged links with the Islamic State (IS) terror organisation, including a man who threatened to assassinate the Malaysian King and the Prime Minister, police said on Thursday.

Four Malaysians, including one woman, and three Indonesians were arrested during operations between March 12 and March 17, Efe news quoted the Inspector General of Royal Malaysia Police, Mohamad Fuzi Harun, as saying.

One of the Malaysians used his Facebook account to threaten to assassinate the Sultan of Johor, who is the current head of state, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, and Minister of Religious Affairs, Mujahid Yusof Rawa, saying they do not govern the country in accordance with Sharia law.

The other three Malaysians allegedly contacted or sent money to Malaysian IS militants in Syria and Iraq, or showed their intention to join the extremist groups in the Middle East.

Two of the three Indonesians admitted having links with extremist organizations in Indonesia, while one, declaring himself a follower of the IS, admitted his plan of travelling to Syria to join them.

Around 300 people with links to IS have been arrested in Malaysia in recent years, while about 100 Malaysians are fighting in Iraq and Syria with militant groups.

Malaysia has a population of nearly 30 million, 61 percent of which belong to the Muslim community.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been “pretty stunning” but what the humanity is going to see soon will be even more profound, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has stressed.

Addressing thousands of partners at the ‘Microsoft Inspire’ event here on Wednesday, Nadella said that the potential is for us to be able to turn every industry into an AI-first industry, be it healthcare or agriculture.

“We want to be able to make sure that they can take their data, in a secure, privacy-preserving way, and can work that into AI capabilities,” he told the gathering.

“As we look forward, the opportunity for us to serve our customers in this new era of the Intelligent Cloud and the Intelligent Edge is far greater,” Nadella said.

According to him, Microsoft is going to infuse everything with AI.

“It’s going to have perception capability, language capability and autonomy that’s going to be built into the applications going forward.

“Autonomy is not just about a few self-driving projects. This is about autonomy everywhere,” the Microsoft CEO added.

On its Azure Cloud offerings, Nadella said the computing needs will go far beyond the data centre.

“We are going to take Azure to Azure Stack, to Azure IoT Edge and to Azure Sphere. This is a ubiquitous, distributed computing fabric,” he noted.

Nadella said that Microsoft 365 will help customers have people-centred experiences rather than device-centred experiences.

The tech giant which has touched $800 billion valuation for the first time, was scheduled to release its quarterly results late on Thursday.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani received eight requests from his US counterpart for a meeting, presidential chief of staff Mahmoud Vaezi announced on Wednesday.

Vaezi said US President Donald Trump’s requests were made during Rouhani’s visit to New York for a United Nations General Assembly meeting in September 2017, according to Xinhua.

He did not elaborate, however, about Rouhani’s response to Trump’s meeting invitation.

In September 2013, Rouhani and former US President Barack Obama talked over the phone during the 68th annual session of the UN General Assembly. It was the highest-level contact between the two countries in more than three decades.

Israel’s parliament on Thursday passed into law a controversial bill that defines the country as an exclusively Jewish state.

The “Jewish nation state” bill downgrades Arabic as an official language and says advancing Jewish settlement is a national interest. It also states that the “whole and united” Jerusalem is its capital, BBC reported.

Israeli Arab MPs condemned the legislation but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised it as a “defining moment”.

The bill, backed by the country’s right-wing government, says that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it”.

It was passed after a stormy session in the Knesset that lasted more than eight hours. Sixty-two MPs voted for the bill, with 55 against.

However some clauses were dropped following objections by Israel’s president and attorney-general, including a clause that would have enshrined in law the creation of Jewish-only communities.

Israeli Arabs make up about 20 per cent of the Israel’s population of about nine million people.

They have equal rights under the law, but have long complained of being treated as second class citizens and say they face discrimination and worse provision of services such as education, health and housing.

Arab MP Ahmed Tibi said the bill’s passing represented the “death of democracy”.

Adalah, an Arab rights NGO, said the law was an attempt to advance “ethnic superiority by promoting racist policies”.

Last week, Netanyahu defended the law, saying: “We will keep ensuring civil rights in Israel’s democracy but the majority also has rights and the majority decides.”