Sun:Michigan State Is Now Ashamed of Teaching History

Washington is Not Awash in Water

Despite recent rainfall most of Washington still suffers from drought and climatologists say the months ahead aren't likely to offer much relief.

The entire state is forecast to remain warmer than normal and much of the state east of the Cascades is likely to see below-average precipitation between now and January, according to the latest seasonal outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Around the first of the year, El Nino conditions are expected to begin pushing warm, tropical air into the Pacific Northwest, worsening the state's warm and dry spell, Washington state climatologist Nick Bond said.

The effects of the current drought might not be immediately apparent, especially in Western Washington, but the symptoms can be seen in below-average stream flows, low reservoir levels and dry soil moistures, Bond said.

There is An Existantial Threat to Israel, But It is Not Hamas

Israelis created a mass movement capable of organizing long marches and enormous weekly protests, every Saturday night, in cities and towns across the country. Unlike similar protest movements in other countries, this one did not peter out. Thanks to the financial and logistical support of the Israeli tech industry, the most dynamic economic sector in the country, as well as to organized teams of people coming from academia and the army reserves, the protests kept going for many months and successfully blocked some of the proposed legal changes. I was trying to understand why these Israeli protests had succeeded, and so I met tech-industry executives, army reservists, students, and one famous particle physicist, all of whom had participated in organizing and sustaining the demonstrations.

After the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel earlier this month, I listened again to the tapes of those conversations. In almost every one of them, there was a warning note that I didn’t pay enough attention to at the time. When I asked people why they had sacrificed their time to join a protest movement, they told me it was because they feared Israel could become not just undemocratic but unrecognizable, unwelcoming to them and their families. But they also talked about a deeper fear: that Israel could cease to exist at all. The deep, angry divides in Israeli politics—divides that are religious and cultural, but that were also deliberately created by Netanyahu and his extremist allies for their political and personal benefit—weren’t just a problem for some liberal or secular Israelis. The people I met believed the polarization of Israel was an existential risk for everybody.