"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.”

The Air Force responded Wednesday night by hitting 29 targets in Gaza associated with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist groups. Earlier Wednesday Islamic Jihad had threatened to fire long-range rockets at Israel if the IAF were to attack. So far, the group has not done so. Gaza terrorists used long-range rockets against Israeli cities in late 2012, during the Pillar of Defense counterterror operation. Rockets struck the greater Tel Aviv region and the Jerusalem area, wounding one person.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a sharp warning to terrorist groups Wednesday, stating, “If there is no quiet in southern Israel, there will be a big noise in Gaza.”

Palestinian Arab media is reporting now that the IAF are repeatedly slamming Islamic Jihad posts in Rafah, Khan Younis, Deir al - Balah, Beit Lahiya in north Gaza and another target in the center. Hamas's military wing is also being targeted. No casualties have been reported yet. The entire operation, which was launched at 10 pm Wednesday Israel time, was quick - and deadly. The IDF announcement stating that the operation focused on the 29 targets also noted just 45 minutes after the fact that all IAF pilots had returned safely to base after completing their mission.

The IDF also noted that while Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the rocket fire, Hamas's control on the region renders them responsible for preventing escalation and terror activity. Earlier Wednesday, Hamas officials blamed Israel for the rocket fire on its own citizens, claiming "resistance is the right of the Palestinian people." "We hold the occupation responsible, we warn of the consequences of any escalation and we reiterate that resistance is the right of the Palestinian people to defend itself," AFP quoted Hamas spokesman Ihab al-Ghassin as saying Wednesday evening.

The comments were made in an interview with Israel's Channel Two. "Following an attack like this - a barrage of more than 50 rockets - there is no alternative to a full reoccupation of the entire Gaza Strip," he said. Immediately following the initial barrage - which was claimed by Islamic Jihad - Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu threatened a "forceful" response against those responsible.

In the last few minutes Israeli tanks clashed with terrorists in Gaza, destroying two unspecified "terror targets". Israel withdrew from Gaza in the 2005 "Disengagement Plan", which saw the withdrawal of all IDF positions and the destruction of all Jewish communities in the territory, along with the forced expulsion of the roughly 9,000 Jews living there.

At the time, right-wing leaders had warned the withdrawal would worsen, rather than improve Israel's security situation, and that troops would simply have to return to curb rocket-fire against nearby Israeli communities - a stance largely vindicated by the subsequent spike in rocket attacks following the seizure of the territory by Hamas, which prompted two separate counterterrorism operations.

"The second is that these attacks are completely indiscriminate, aimed at civilian populations and that is a demonstration of how barbaric they are," he continued. "The third point is that we must be absolutely clear in the international community and all friends of Israel and the Palestinian people as well that there is no violent route to statehood and that statehood can only be achieved through dialogue and discussion and through agreement between the Israeli and the Palestinian people."

President Shimon Peres also condemned the attack, and opined that the development made a peace deal that much more crucial, in his eyes, between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). "It’s a very severe attack," Peres noted. "Over 50 missiles were fired against a civilian population."