Gaza: Thousands of Gaza residents returned to destroyed homes and neighborhoods today, searching for possessions and burying the dead, during a 12-hour humanitarian pause in fighting. Some large areas had been reduced to rubble.

  Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed. The bodies of 20 people were recovered from one home. Eighteen of the dead were from a single family.

  The announcement of the brief ceasefire came only hours after Israel rejected a proposed weeklong ceasefire while threatening “significantly” expanded ground operations in Gaza. US Secy. of State John Kerry had been pushing for a seven-day humanitarian ceasefire, but the Israeli security cabinet didn’t like the terms.

  Gaza’s governing Hamas party had demanded as a condition that Israel lift its seven-year economic blockade.

   While reluctant to criticize Israel, much of the western world is becoming uncomfortable with the Israeli action. Several thousand demonstrators carrying Palestinian flags marched in NY yesterday. More than 800 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, the vast majority of them civilians.

Peace Be Upon You: A video released on the Internet shows militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria blowing up the revered tomb of the Prophet Jonah in Mosul. The story of Jonah, who was said to have been swallowed by a whale for three days, appears in both the Bible and the Koran. The Sunni militants cleared the shrine of worshippers and took about an hour to rig it with explosives. The man who took the video can be heard saying, “No, no, no. Prophet Jonah is gone. God, these scoundrels.”

Nation: A 400 square mile wildfire that has burned northeast of Seattle for the past month has destroyed about 300 homes, according to a local sheriff. The number was previously reported at 150. The Carlton Complex fires continue to burn as 2,500 firefighters try to bring them under control.

The Obit Page: Bel Kaufman, the former NY City schoolteacher whose first novel “Up the Down Staircase” skewered the inane and bureaucratic world of public education, has died in Manhattan at age 103. The book published in 1965 was told through fictitious, memos, notes, and conversations that many readers thought were the real thing. “Dear Sir or Madam, In reply to your request for resignation, please be advised that yours was filled out improperly.”

  Kaufman was born in Russia and remembered a time during the revolution in 1917 when soldiers broke into her family’s luxurious home. To this day the title of her novel is a catchphrase to describe things gone wrong.

Haboob: A dust storm that looked like a special effect rolled over Phoenix yesterday, leaving a coating of grit over the city. The phenomenon, known by its Middle Eastern nomenclature as a “haboob”, was a 2,000-foot billowing wall of dirt and sand.

Copy That: An epidemic of plagiarism appears to be sweeping the country. The website Buzzfeed has fired one of its writers after finding 40 instances in which he lifted sentences and phrases from other sites. This while a US Senator is under investigation for possible plagiarism at the US Army war College. And the Newton, Mass. superintendent of schools was recently fined for appropriating words from a speech delivered by his state’s governor. David Fleishman used the common plagiarist plea that “it was a mistake” rather than, “Yes, I committed the capital crime of the academic world.”

Wikid Congress: Wikipedia has blocked editorial changes made from congressional IP addresses because of a series of recent changes described as “persistent disruptive editing.” Some of the changes were made to conspiracy theory pages, congressional profiles, the John F. Kennedy assassination report, and an account of the first moon landing. Evidently Congress and its 9,000 staffers need something to do while doing nothing.

  Our favorite is an edit that described former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an “alien lizard who eats Mexican babies.” It just had a ring of truth to it.

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