Hasta La Gadget!

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli airstrikes leveled a seven-floor office building and severely damaged a two-story shopping center in the Gaza Strip early Sunday, signaling a new escalation in seven weeks of fighting with Hamas.

The strikes in the southern town of Rafah came just hours after Israel bombed an apartment tower in Gaza City, collapsing the 12-story building with 44 apartments. Around 30 people were wounded in the strikes, but no one was killed, Palestinian officials said. The targeting of large buildings appears to be part of a new military tactic by Israel. Over the weekend, the army began warning Gaza residents in automated phone calls that it would target buildings harboring “terrorist infrastructure” and that they should stay away.

A senior military official confirmed that Israel has a policy of striking at buildings containing Hamas operational centers or those from which military activities are launched. The official said each strike required prior approval from military lawyers and is carried out only after the local population is warned.

However, he said, there was now a widening of locations that the military can target. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss the matter with reporters.

Speaking ahead of Israel’s weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Gaza residents to keep their distance from Hamas militants.

“I call on the people of Gaza to immediately evacuate any structure that Hamas is using to commit acts of terror,” he said. “Every one of these structures is a target for us.”

In the 12-story apartment tower, the target was a fourth-floor apartment where Hamas ran an operations center, according to Israeli media. In the past, Israel has carried out pinpoint strikes, targeting apartments in high-rises with missiles, while leaving the buildings standing. However, this time a decision was made to bring down the entire tower, according to Channel 10, an Israeli TV station.

The military declined immediate comment when asked why it collapsed the entire building instead of striking a specific apartment.

Meanwhile, Gaza militants continued to fire rockets and mortar shells at Israel, including at least 10 on Sunday, one of which wounded three people on the Israeli side of the main Gaza crossing, the military said. The Erez crossing is used by journalists, aid workers and Palestinians with Israeli permits to enter or leave Gaza.

That was in addition to more than 100 on Saturday, most aimed at southern Israel.

Elsewhere, five rockets were fired from Syria and fell in open areas in northern Israel. It was not immediately clear whether they were fired by pro-government forces or rebel groups.

Amid persistent violence, Egypt has urged Israel and the Palestinians to resume indirect talks in Cairo on a durable cease-fire, but stopped short of issuing invitations.

Several rounds of indirect talks between Israel and Hamas have collapsed, along with temporary cease-fires that accompanied them. The gaps between Israel and the Islamic militant group on a new border deal for blockaded Gaza remain vast, and there’s no sign either is willing to budge.

The Israeli military said it had carried out some 20 strikes on Gaza since midnight Saturday. Gaza police and medical officials reported eight fatalities.

In Rafah, Israeli aircraft bombed the seven-story Zourab building, which houses an office of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry. Witnesses said the building was leveled and that the strikes caused severe damage to nearby shops, homes and cars. It was not immediately clear if anyone was wounded or killed.

Another strike hit a nearby shopping center with dozens of shops, sparking a fire that gutted the two-story building and wounding seven people. After daybreak Sunday, smoke was still rising from the site as shop owners inspected the damage. Windows and doors had been blown out in nearby buildings.

The military said the two buildings were attacked because they housed facilities linked to militants, but did not provide details. Twenty-two people were wounded in the strike on the tower in Gaza City.

Palestinian health official Ashraf al-Kidra, who confirmed the casualty figures for the strikes, said two people were killed in a pair of airstrikes near a coastal road on Sunday, including one on a group of people coming out of a mosque after morning prayers.

Two more fatalities were registered when a motorcycle following a car evacuating the wounded from the strikes was targeted, he said.

Another man was killed in an airstrike on a car, and an 18-month-old infant and a 17-year-old were killed in an airstrike on an apartment building in Gaza City. Three people were killed in an airstrike on a house in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, police said.

The U.N. estimates that more than 17,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair since the war began on July 8. In some of the attacks, family homes with three or four floors were pulverized.

However, the weekend strikes marked the first time large buildings were toppled.

Since the fighting began, Israel has launched some 5,000 airstrikes at Gaza, while Gaza militants have fired close to 4,000 rockets and mortars, according to the Israeli military.

More than 2,100 Palestinians, including close to 500 children, have been killed, according to Palestinian health officials and U.N. figures. Israel has lost 64 soldiers and four civilians.

Israel says it is targeting sites linked to militants, including rocket launchers, command centers and weapons depots. The U.N. says about three-fourths of the Palestinians killed have been civilians.

With the war showing no signs of winding down, educational officials in the territory said they were delaying the start of both U.N. and government-run schools. Classes in both were supposed to begin Sunday.

The U.N. said it would begin a gradual back to school program this week “to help students and teachers start to transition into a new school year.”

“Despite the difficult circumstances, the (U.N.) stands by the refugee committee here in Gaza,” said Scott Anderson, deputy director of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees in the territory. “Even though we can’t start the school year as we would normally it is very important that the children have structure in their lives and we will continue their education by any means possible.”

The nearly two-month Gaza war stems from the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank by Hamas operatives in June, which triggered a massive Israeli arrest campaign in the West Bank, followed by an increase in rocket fire from Gaza.

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Enav reported from Jerusalem.

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — As armored vehicles rumbled through downtown Kiev in an ostentatious celebration of Ukraine’s independence, pro-Russian rebels who are battling government forces in the east paraded captured soldiers down the besieged streets of Donetsk and displayed charred wreckages of destroyed Ukrainian tanks.

Sunday’s rival demonstrations on Ukraine’s 23rd anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union underscored the bitter divide in a country already five months into warfare and making plans for potentially years more of tensions. President Petro Poroshenko, addressing a highly militarized independence rally in Kiev, vowed to defeat the rebels and safeguard Ukraine’s border with Russia by sharply raising defense spending for the coming three years. He warned that Ukraine too often in history had been caught by surprise from eastern invasions.

“It is clear that in the foreseeable future there will always, unfortunately, be the threat of war,” Poroshenko said. “And we not only have to learn to live with that. We must always be prepared to defend our independence.”

The rebels responded with their own show of strength in their stronghold of Donetsk, parading dozens of captured soldiers through the streets as bystanders tossed eggs and bottles at them. The insurgents also dumped battle-scarred Ukrainian military equipment on a central square, a bold rebuke to Kiev’s announcement that it plans to strengthen its military.

While public support and mobilization for Kiev’s campaign against the separatists is growing in much of the country, resentments fester in much of the east, where civilian casualties and shelling, often from Ukrainian military positions, have become a part of daily life.

In Kiev more than 20,000 people, many waving the country’s blue and yellow flags or donning traditional embroidered shirts, watched the parade on Kiev’s Independence Square, where months of protests earlier this year ended in the ouster of the country’s former pro-Russian president.

Poroshenko announced he would raise military spending by 40 billion hryvnia ($3 billion) through 2017, an effective 50 percent increase from current budget targets.

Ukrainian military leaders have pleaded for extra resources as they face a potentially protracted fight against separatists. In recent weeks, Kiev’s troops have scored heavy gains in territory and encircled the east’s regional capitals of Luhansk and Donetsk. The United Nations estimates that more than 2,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting since April, a toll that rises almost daily.

Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian National Security Council, told journalists Sunday that 722 members of Ukraine’s armed forces have died in the fighting, with five killed and eight wounded in the past day alone.

In Donetsk, militants paraded captured soldiers, some dressed in military fatigues and others in tattered civilian clothes, through a central square as people in a crowd of several thousand shouted abusive slurs at them.

One visibly agitated man yelled obscenities as he held an infant in one arm. A woman shouted “Hang the fascists from a tree!” Other women rushed at the prisoners, trying to kick and slap them, and were restrained by rebel fighters.

The rebels placed several fire-blackened, shrapnel-shredded Ukrainian military vehicles in Donetsk’s main square. Russian nationalist songs blasted from speakers as supporters posed for photos in front of a destroyed tank. The crowd appeared on edge as dozens of fighters gathered in formation, then quickly dispersed at the sound of artillery fire in the distance.

“Today is the so-called independence day of what was Ukraine. And look what has happened to their equipment. This is what has become of Ukraine!” said a pro-Russian rebel fighter who identified herself by her battle name, Nursa, pointing at the remains of a Ukrainian troop transport.

One onlooker grabbed a Ukrainian flag from the wreckage of one tank and threw it to the ground. Several others trampled on it, wiping their feet and spitting.

Alexander, a 40-year-old businessman from Donetsk who declined to give his surname, said the Ukrainian flag had no place in the city.

“I feel this is no place for this flag. The great achievement here is that people can see it in the state that it deserves to be in,” he said.

Resentment has grown in the east as residential areas have increasingly come under fire. Early Sunday, artillery shells struck several residential buildings as well as a major hospital and morgue in downtown Donetsk, although nobody was reported killed.

In Kiev, Lysenko denied that Ukraine’s forces were responsible for the shelling of any residential buildings or hospitals.

An estimated 300,000 of Donetsk’s population of 1 million have fled the fighting, and many of those who remain have gone weeks without electricity or running water, and have spent recent days staked out in bomb shelters.

Conditions are worse in the city of Luhansk, whose war-reduced population of a quarter-million people has suffered under constant fighting over the past weeks.

Lysenko said 68 civilians had been wounded there in the past 24 hours, but could not confirm whether anyone had been killed.

In another symbolic move, Poroshenko traveled south to the predominantly Russian-speaking port city of Odessa to give a second speech on Sunday. Ukrainian television showed footage of navy ships bobbing by the shore on a stormy, turbulent sea. Ukraine lost much of its coastline when the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea was annexed by Russia in March, and the loyalty of local authorities in Odessa to Kiev has been a top priority for the new government.

Poroshenko and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to meet Tuesday in Minsk, Belarus, alongside other European Union leaders. The two leaders have not met since early June, and many hope that the talks could help defuse the conflict in east Ukraine.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday cautioned against expectations of a decisive breakthrough at the much-anticipated meeting.

“The meeting in Minsk certainly won’t yet bring the breakthrough,” she said. “But you have to speak to one another if you want to find solutions.”

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Mills reported from Moscow. Associated Press reporters Vitnija Saldava in Kiev, Ukraine, and Peter Leonard, Dalton Bennett and Nicolae Dumitrache in Donetsk, Ukraine, and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

During a book signing in Florida on Saturday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was confronted by a group of Dreamers over his vote against Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also known as DACA.

Earlier this month, House Republicans voted to end the Obama administration program that has helped more than 550,000 young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents to remain and work in the U.S. for a renewable two-year period. Many Republicans have blamed the policy for the recent surge of unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, despite there being little evidence to support the talking point.

“A couple weeks ago you voted for defunding DACA,” one Dreamer asked Ryan, who was signing copies of his new book, The Way Forward. “It would put me and my sister up for deportation. We just had a question — do you want to deport me and my sister?”

Ryan largely ignored the question, pressing the activists to “read the position in the book.” The activists were escorted away from the congressman.

He was later confronted again by Ray Jose, an organizer with immigrant youth organization United We Dream. Jose was escorted out of the book store by a security guard.

Ryan’s office did not immediately return The Huffington Post’s request for comment.

Watch the full video above.

The 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate was also met with protesters at a book tour stop in Chicago last Thursday, as activists accused Ryan of flip-flopping on immigration. (Ryan has previously voiced support for bipartisan immigration reform.)

CAIRO (AP) — A star soccer player has died after he was hit in the head by an object thrown from the crowd during a game in Algeria’s top league.

The Confederation of African Football says 24-year-old striker Albert Ebosse of Cameroon died in the hospital Saturday night.

His team, JS Kabylie, was playing USM Alger in the northern city of Tizi Ouzou. Kabylie says the forward was hit at the end of the game in which Ebosse had scored in the 2-1 home loss. Ebosse was the leading scorer in the Algerian league last season.

Kabylie says a police investigation will be opened. African confederation President Issa Hayatou expects “exemplary sanctions to be taken against this grave act of violence.”

The A Game of Thrones board game was clearly made by and for fans of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. The game is much easier to understand and appreciate if you’ve read the novels, or at least watched the HBO series. But even if you don’t know the difference between a wildling and a white walker, you’ll appreciate Aaron Jenkins’ impressive 3D version of the board game.

At 3′ x 5′, Aaron’s custom game board is over 2.5 times larger than the original. Mountains, forests and castles rise out of the board; Aaron even made sculpted versions of the icons on the map, such as the ports, supply barrels and power icons. He even added some details that are not on the original map, such as Castle Black and the Wall.

Aaron also made his own version of the game’s other parts and tokens, such as the round marker, the supply track and the wildling track. I’m not sure if he made the large version of the game’s three special tokens though.

Aaron also bought miniatures and then painted them according to the colors of the different Houses, with the exception of the ships, which he sculpted and cast himself.

Place a march order and head to Aaron’s blog to see more images and info about how he made the board game.

[via Polygon]