There will be no quick or easy wins – even on U.S. and Israeli terms. They have celebrated assassinating Iran’s supreme leader; their offensive has also killed more than 1,000 civilians so far, including scores of children, according to a U.S.-based rights group. As Iran retaliates, hoping America’s allies will try to rein it back, it is targeting U.S. bases and civilian sites across the region – even in Oman, which was at the forefront of efforts to stave off the war. Gulf powers are increasingly irate, though wary of acting on threats to go beyond defensive action. Israel has ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to leave a vast swathe of southern Lebanon, blaming Hezbollah’s retaliation for the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

An enduring light to a community

SWAMPSCOTT, Mass. – “No star fades faster than that of a high-school athlete,” the author John Grisham wrote in his 2006 book “The Innocent Man.” Today’s column is about a high school athlete whose star never faded – and whose star is casting a gentle light over the community he electrified as a football halfback, basketball guard and baseball shortstop for the Swampscott High Big Blue more than a half-century ago.

Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year – at an estimated total loss of $115billion. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.

We can do better for our country

When Black leaders proceeded from Selma to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1965 to demonstrate for voting rights, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched beside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “I felt my legs were praying,” he said.

Olympics help quell sports shortage

Usually this time of year it becomes a sports wasteland of sorts with football wrapped up and the wait for baseball to fire back up.

We’re finally traveling back to the moon

For more than a half-century, the moon has orbited the Earth without a close human witness, its pitted, rocky surface unexplored, its far side unexamined, its mysteries left fallow.

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