He further said that the issue was resolved in 1947, when UN Resolution 181, which divided Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, was passed. This resolution, said Kerry, referred to "Jewish state" several times. Kerry also said that former PA Chairman Yasser Arafat explicitly recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has insisted that the PA recognize Israel as a Jewish state in order to reach a peace agreement, explaining that the Arabs’ refusal to recognize Israel stands at the heart of the conflict. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly insisted that the PA would not recognize Israel as a Jewish state and has also stressed that the future Palestinian state would not include the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier.

According to the monthly Peace Index poll conducted for the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University, this applies to both Israeli Jews and Arabs. The poll found that two-thirds of the Jewish public does not trust Kerry’s framework agreement to take account of Israel’s security as a crucial factor. Among the Arab public, 53% said that Kerry is not putting Israel’s security interest first, with 32% believing the opposite.

The poll further found that a large majority - 74% - of the Jewish public in Israel is convinced that the Americans are exerting more pressure on Israel than on the Palestinian Authority to accept the secretary of state’s framework agreement, even though its details are not yet clear. The results of the poll indicate that Kerry, who has worked very hard to appeal directly to the Israeli public over his push for peace, has yet to convince Israelis that his efforts will bear fruit.

US and European officials argue that Moscow is orchestrating the referendum and waging an intimidation campaign with thousands of Russian troops controlling the region. If Russian-backed lawmakers in Crimea go through with the Sunday referendum, Kerry said the US and its European allies will not recognize it as legitimate under international law.

The US and Europe on Monday would then unite to impose sanctions on Russia, Kerry told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Thursday during a hearing on the State Department's budget. “There will be a response of some kind to the referendum itself,” Kerry said. “If there is no sign [from Russia] of any capacity to respond to this issue… there will be a very serious series of steps on Monday.”

“Our hope is to have Russia join in respecting international law. …there is no justification, no legality to this referendum that is taking place,” he said. “The hope is that reason will prevail but there is no guarantee of that.”

“Sooner or later we will have to take control of Gaza, in order to get rid of the Hamas regime,” Steinitz said. “We do not need to reoccupy it permanently, but we do need to remove from Gaza the option of firing rockets on us. If and when the moment comes when we must retake Gaza – and that moment is coming soon – the operation will have to be a very quick one,” said Steinitz.

An operation like this is likely to be distasteful to Israelis, but there really is no choice, said Steinitz. “This really should have been done in 2012, in Operation Pillar of Defense, when they fired rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The IDF entered Gaza and managed to halt the firing of rockets for a time, but I was of the opinion that we should have continued.”

"This is not the course we normally take or prefer to take, but under these conditions, it presents us with the best way to get fish out there," said Steve Martarano, a spokesman for the federal Fish and Wildlife service. California is in its third year of a dry spell that threatens to break all records in the most populous US state, including possibly laying idle a half million acres of cropland, a loss of production that could cause billions of dollars in economic damage.

The vast majority of California's salmon come from four Sacramento River Basin-area hatcheries established to restore the state's salmon habitat, which was disrupted by construction of dams. A smaller number of salmon are born in hatcheries in the Klamath River system. In a typical year, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife trucks about half of the 18.2 million salmon fry born in its three Sacramento River Basin hatcheries to the ocean.

Residents would have as few as 15 minutes notice to flee to higher ground, and as many as 10,000 would perish. Scientists last year published this grim scenario for a massive rupture along the Cascadia fault system, which runs 700 miles off shore from Northern California to Vancouver Island. The Cascadia subduction zone is less known than the San Andreas fault, which scientists have long predicted will produce The Big One. But in recent years, scientists have come to believe that the Cascadia is far more dangerous than originally believed and have been giving the system more attention.

The Cascadia begins at a geologically treacherous area where three tectonic plates are pushing against each other. The intersection has produced the two largest earthquakes in California in the last decade — Sunday's 6.8 temblor off Eureka and a 7.2 quake off Crescent City in 2005. The area has produced six quakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater in the last 100 years, the California Geological Survey said. Officials in Northern California as well as Oregon and Washington are beginning to address the dangers.

Twitter is awash with #BDS tweets, implying that the extremists who demand that the West stop buying goods produced by Jews are in the ascendancy. The reality is rather different.

Israel has one of the most technologically advanced economies on earth, with a hi-tech sector that we can only envy. It's 16th on the UN's Human Development Index, classified as "Very Highly Developed". Its medical, scientific and hi-tech equipment inventions are everywhere. And with free trade agreements with the European Union, the United States, the European Free Trade Association, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Jordan and Egypt, its trading success is growing, not collapsing as the boycotters would have us believe.

With the United States and Europe struggling to come up with a response to Moscow’s Ukrainian land grab, the German chancellor is considered one of the few world leaders the Russian president will deign to hear out – even if he dislikes what she’s saying. “Merkel’s personal rapport with Putin has never been very good,” Dr Susan Steward, a Russian expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told Yahoo News. “But their relationship is still professional and not unproductive.”

That’s largely because Germany remains Russia’s most important European economic partner, with last year’s trade balance of €76 billion roughly split between exports from both countries. While Germany remains deeply reliant on Russian natural gas and oil, it exports vast quantities of precision machinery, chemicals and cars to Russia. This mutual economic dependency means Berlin has taken a more cautious approach toward levying sanctions on Moscow than some other European Union nations – but it also gives Merkel a modicum of leverage over Putin. “One can’t just go on like nothing has happened,” she said at an extraordinary EU summit in Brussels last week, according to the DPA news agency.

The Istanbul talks were called to decide on the council, which the Orthodox have been preparing on and off since the 1960s, but the Ukraine crisis overshadowed their talks at the office of spiritual leader Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. As the prelates left a special service at Saint George’s Cathedral, a woman in the crowd called out in Russian “Pray for Ukraine!” Two archbishops responded: “You pray, too!”

One of the main questions facing the 2016 council will be how to balance relations among the Orthodox now that the Russian church, after seven decades of subjugation under communism, has re-emerged as an influential voice in world Christianity. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who will meet Roman Catholicism’s Pope Francis in Jerusalem in May, is the senior-most Orthodox leader, but his Istanbul-based church is tiny, with none of the resources the large Russian church enjoys.

Despite the prestige of his post, he has no authority over other churches, unlike the power the pope has in Catholicism, the world’s largest church with 1.2 billion members. The communiqué stressed that all decisions at the council would be taken by consensus, a position the Russians strongly defended in preparations for the meeting. On the Middle East, the patriarchs denounced "the lack of peace and stability, which is prompting Christians to abandon the land where our Lord Jesus Christ was born."

Cosmos — which features an introduction by President Obama — has already stirred controversy with a lengthy segment in the first episode which deliberately pits religion against science, providing an animated story about the Catholic Church's persecution of the 16th-century monk and astronomer Giordano Bruno, which TIME argues provides a clear message to viewers: "there is a right side and a wrong side of intellectual history, and Cosmos is not afraid to say that science is on the right one."

In a recent interview with WNYC host Brian Lehrer, Tyson added to the controversy, addressing people of faith who confuse religious texts with scientific works: “If you start using your scripture, your religious text as a source of your science, that’s where you run into problems, and there is no example of someone reading their scripture and saying ‘I have a prediction about the world that no one knows yet because this gave me insight let’s go test this prediction and have that theory turn out to be correct.”