WASHINGTON — What do you have to do to be recognized as a revolutionary Islamist group using terrorism, backed by Iran, to seek to wipe Israel off the map and kill the Jews? It isn’t easy. People keep trying to make you into something else – incipient moderate, multifaceted debating society – insisting that you just don’t really mean it.

Such is the case with Hamas. Every day – in speeches, articles, violence, mosque sermons and the media – Hamas makes its positions absolutely clear. And every day, someone in the West just doesn’t want to believe it.

Now Hamas has formed an alliance (of convenience?) with the Palestinian Authority, run by Fatah. It’s a remarkable situation, or would be anywhere outside of the Middle East.

After all, Hamas won an election, made a deal with the PA, and then staged a coup to take over the Gaza Strip that included shooting wounded Fatah fighters dead in hospitals. Fatah and the PA regularly repress Hamas on the West Bank. So why are they ‘working together?

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An Ohio school district is the latest to implement a controversial ‘pay to play’ policy, reports The Wall Street Journal. Medina Senior High, faced with budget cuts and repeated rejection of proposals to increase taxes, has started charging students for, well, just about everything. After-school sports, clubs, electives and even required courses such as Spanish all carry a price tag.

The Dombi family is feeling the strain; education and activities for their four children racked up a bill of $4,446.50 this year. And even then, they had to make some tough choices — their oldest daughter had to forgo choir as it would cost an additional $200.

‘It’s high school,’ Ms. Dombi told The Wall Street Journal. ‘You’re supposed to be able to try different things and see what you like.’

In a recent editorial, the Los Angeles Times questions the constitutionality of similar fees in California.

Charging fees to students to offset budget cuts is not legal, just as it would not be legal to announce that in an effort to make ends meet, schools will no longer accept students of Filipino descent, or girls. Student fees deny opportunities to low-income students and put […]

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If you weren’t already scared of GMO foods, this might be the story that changes the tides. We already know that GMO cultivation means erosion, depleted soils, and often killing all wildlife around the crops, but did you know that GMO watermelons have been exploding like land mines in China?

According to Grist:

Chinese watermelon crops just had an unfortunate run-in with the growth accelerator forchlorfenuron, which makes plants’ cells divide faster to pump up growth rates. Supposedly forchlorfenuron can bump up harvest schedules by two weeks and increase fruit size by 20 percent. But if farmers spray too late or in the wrong conditions, acres of melons explode like ‘land mines’ in a scene of carnage that one farmer said haunted his dreams.

These exploding watermelons have shined light on some farming mistakes. According to the Guardian:

The report said the farmers sprayed the fruit too late in the season and during wet conditions, which caused the melons to explode like ‘landmines’. After losing three hectares (eight acres), Liu said he was unable to sleep because he could not shake the image of the fruit bursting. ‘On 7 May, I came out and counted […]

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With flooding in Arkansas, Louisiana and the Missouri Bootheel, it is likely 40-percent of the national rice crop won’t be planted this year, according to Arkansas Farm Bureau officials.

Rice production in Arkansas has taken a hit from recent flooding with an estimated 300-thousand acre loss this year, resulting in a loss of $300Million in rice production. Arkansas is the largest rice-producing state in the nation, making up about half of the U.S. rice crop each year.

The Arkansas Farm Bureau says more than a million total acres of cropland are under water in that state and the damage to crops and forage is expected to exceed $500-Million. Winter wheat and cotton crops are also suffering.

AFB President Randy Veach, a cotton, rice and soybean farmer in Arkansas’ Mississippi County, says they’ve never seen flood levels this high before. He says there IS hope for soybeans, which could still be planted, but would be at risk of late planting complications.

They did get some rice in the ground in Arkansas prior to the flooding, but there are risks to the health of any of the crop that may survive.

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Since the early-1990s, scientists have known that farmers and other field workers are more likely to succumb to Parkinson’s disease because of their exposure to pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. But these studies fell short on showing a causal relationship between pesticides and the debilitating neurodegenerative disorder.

So, researchers turned to rodent models to prove the link. In the last decade, researchers found that three bug and weed killers promoted neurodegeneration in mice. And now, an independent team has validated those findings in a large epidemiological survey in humans.

The team led by Beate Ritz, an epidemiologist at the University of California-Los Angeles, estimated the average 25-year pesticide exposure for around 700 Californians, about half of whom developed Parkinson’s. Reporting in the European Journal of Epidemiology, the researchers found that people who lived or worked near farmlands treated with two commonly used agricultural fungicides – ziram and maneb – as well as the herbicide paraquat were three times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than those Parkinson’s disease than those were not exposed to these agricultural chemicals.

The results follow a previous study of residents from California’s Central Valley showing that people who lived near fields treated by two of these chemicals were […]

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