Jerusalem (AFP) - Seven Israeli soldiers were to face a disciplinary hearing on Sunday after video emerged of troops beating an unarmed Palestinian in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

In the footage, which was widely disseminated by Palestinian media, men in Israeli military uniform were seen repeatedly striking the Palestinian civilian, including with a rifle butt near the back of the head and a punch in the face.

The beating was accompanied by the chanting of obscenities as the detainee lay helpless on the ground.

The army said seven soldiers were being investigated for possible disciplinary action over the alleged assault on Friday in the Jalazoun refugee camp near Ramallah, headquarters of the Palestinian Authority.

"Those involved will be brought before the regiment commander... for clarification and questioning regarding the incident and, if needed, we will take significant steps against them," a spokesman said.

"Preliminary investigation gives the impression that their behaviour is not consistent with that expected of IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers."

The army said the soldiers were responding to a violent demonstration by as many as 70 Palestinians who were throwing stones at them.

But the Israeli military has come under repeated criticism for its heavyhanded response to the nearly 50-year-old occupation of the Palestinian territories.

According to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 11 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the year.

EUTAW, Ala. (AP) — Jim Sterling didn't know what had hit his 156-year-old antebellum home when an earthquake struck Alabama's old plantation region early one morning last November. Startled, he grabbed a gun and ran outdoors.

In the pre-dawn chill, Sterling said, he found an odd scene: horses were galloping, cows mooing and dogs barking.

"I heard a boom and felt the shaking," Sterling said. "It really upset me."

More than a dozen weak earthquakes have followed in the seven months since in west Alabama's rural Greene County, and geologists are trying to figure out what is causing the seismic swarm in an area of the South more prone to tornadoes than earthquakes.

"It is interesting that recently there has been more activity there than in the last four decades," said Sandy Ebersole, an earthquake expert with the Geological Survey of Alabama.

Records from the U.S. Geological Survey show the first of 14 earthquakes occurred on Nov. 20, when a magnitude 3.8 earthquake was recorded about 10 miles northwest of the community of Eutaw. The second occurred in mid-December, followed by another in January and three within a few hours of each other on Feb. 19.

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In this Tuesday, June 9, 2016, photo, Jim Sterling stands in a hardware store where he works in Euta …

The tremors have continued ever since, with the most recent occurring June 6, when a magnitude 3.0 quake rattled the area. All the tremors have been weaker than the initial jolt in November, and Ebersole said some have been too slight for residents to detect.

Located about 35 miles from Tuscaloosa, the whole of Greene County has only about 8,700 residents, and the area where the quakes are occurring is sparsely populated. Farmlands and forests are dotted by hunting preserves and old homes left over from Alabama's past as a cotton-producing, slave-holding state.

Experts have installed a seismic monitor in a field to enable them to get better information about the quakes, none of which has caused major damage. Ebersole said researchers are trying to rule out potential causes such as blasting for quarries and sonic booms. They've even held meetings with rattled area residents.

The quakes could be linked to underground cracks, or faults, found in the area in recent years at varying depths, Ebersole said. But just what has been causing the ground to shake is unclear.

One potential source that regulators are discounting is hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," a process for extracting underground oil or natural gas that has been blamed for earthquake swarms elsewhere, including Oklahoma. Wastewater is sometimes injected underground, a method the government has blamed for quakes.

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In this Tuesday, June 9, 2016, photo, a post office stands in West Greene, Ala., where there have be …

While Greene County is on the edge of Alabama's primary region for oil and gas production, state geologist Nick Tew said no such production or disposal work is going on in the area where the quakes are occurring.

The mysterious shaking has left residents like Mark McClelland to protect themselves in the only way they can.

"After the second or third one I went to get some earthquake insurance," said McClelland. "It's not bad, about $150 a year."

The hearty construction methods and thick timbers used in his 163-old Greek Revival mansion provide some comfort to Barden Smedberg, who operates the house as a wedding venue and a bed and breakfast. One of the earliest quakes shook loose curtain rods from window frames at his Everhope Plantation, he said. But no other damage has occurred.

"This house has been here since 1852. I don't think it's going anywhere," said Smedberg.

Even without much damage or a major shake to date, Sterling said he would still like to know what is causing the quakes.

"A lot of people are wondering what's going on," he said.

Beirut (AFP) - Kurdish forces closed in on a strategic jihadist-held border town in northern Syria on Sunday, prompting an exodus of fearful civilians from surrounding villages.

Backed by allied rebels and air strikes by a US-led coalition, Kurdish militia pressed their offensive on Tal Abyad, used by the Islamic State group as a gateway from neighbouring Turkey.

Late Saturday, the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) advanced to within five kilometres (three miles) of Tal Abyad, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The militia also seized at least 20 villages southwest of the border town, the Britain-based monitoring group added.

"They are on the eastern outskirts of Tal Abyad, but the southwestern front is much more difficult because it's more populated," said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.

A Kurdish activist who visits the front line daily said the area's mixed population of Kurds and Arabs was seeking refuge wherever it could.

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Syrians fleeing Tal Abyad wait at Akcakale border crossing to Turkey on June 14, 2015 (AFP Photo/Bul …

"Tal Abyad is almost completely surrounded," Arin Shekhmos told AFP.

An AFP correspondent on the Turkish side of the border reported that thousands of would-be refugees were queueing behind the barbed wire seeking asylum.

Another Kurdish activist in the symbolic battleground town of Kobane further west, liberated from IS by the Kurds earlier this year, said authorities there had set up a camp for the displaced.

"We are waiting for the whole border area to be liberated -- from northeastern Syria all the way to Kobane," Ebdi told AFP.

Tal Abyad lies on a mostly Sunni Arab part of the border between mainly Kurdish Kobane and Syria's most populous ethnic Kurdish region -- Hasakeh province -- in the northeast.

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Turkish soldiers use water cannon to move Syrians away from fences at the border near Tal Abyad on J …

Both Ebdi and the Observatory said the Kurds had already occupied the nearby town of Suluk, denying IS access to Tal Abyad from the east.

"IS has completely withdrawn from Suluk. The Kurds are combing through it now and clearing the mines and booby-trapped vehicles there," Abdel Rahman said.

He told AFP that US-led air strikes had been key in forcing the jihadists to withdraw.

On Saturday, the coalition said it had struck three IS tactical units near Kobane and had destroyed one of the group's fighting positions.

To the west in Aleppo province, coalition raids killed at least 12 IS fighters as they fought a rebel alliance for control of a supply route from Turkey, Abdel Rahman said.

Northern Syria is the most complex battleground in the country's more than four-year civil war, with IS fighting Kurdish militia, Syrian government forces and a rebel alliance including rival jihadists of Al-Qaeda.

When ISIS militants took control of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra last month, observers feared the world was set to lose a treasure of antiquity. The city, which houses ruins that date back thousands of years, is a UNESCO world heritage site. Historians say its destruction would represent a tragic defeat in the effort to preserve the cultural heritage not just of the Middle East, but of modern civilization itself.

(Palmyra)

On Friday, the proxy wars that, thanks in large part to US foreign policy, now plague the Middle East, took their toll on another UNESCO heritage site when Saudi warplanes decimated Old City, a 2,500 year-old collection of homes, towers, gardens, mosques, and public baths in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

NY Times has more:

A protected 2,500-year-old cultural heritage site in Yemen’s capital, Sana, was obliterated in an explosion early Friday, and witnesses and news reports said the cause was a missile or bomb from a Saudi warplane. The Saudi military denied responsibility.

The top antiquities-safeguarding official at the United Nations angrily condemned the destruction of ancient multistory homes, towers and gardens, which also killed an unspecified number of residents in Al Qasimi, a neighborhood in Sana’s Old City area.

“I am profoundly distressed by the loss of human lives as well as the damage inflicted on one of the world’s oldest jewels of Islamic urban landscape,” said the official, Irina Bokova, the director general of Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization...

“This heritage bears the soul of the Yemeni people; it is a symbol of a millennial history of knowledge, and it belongs to all humankind,” Ms. Bokova said.

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Just two weeks after California's farmers - with the most senior water rights - offered to cut their own water use by 25% (in an attempt to front-run more draconian government-imposed measures), AP reports that the California government has - just as we predicted - ignored any efforts at self-preservation and ordered the largest cuts on record to farmers holding some of the state's strongest water rights. While frackers and big energy remain exempt from the restrictions, Caren Trgovcich, chief deputy director of the water board, explains, "we are now at the point where demand in our system is outstripping supply for even the most senior water rights holders."

With "the whole damn state out of water," AP reports State water officials told more than a hundred senior rights holders in California's Sacramento, San Joaquin and delta watersheds to stop pumping from those waterways.

The move by the State Water Resources Control Board marked the first time that the state has forced large numbers of holders of senior-water rights to curtail use. Those rights holders include water districts that serve thousands of farmers and others.

The move shows California is sparing fewer and fewer users in the push to cut back on water using during the state's four-year drought.

"We are now at the point where demand in our system is outstripping supply for even the most senior water rights holders," Caren Trgovcich, chief deputy director of the water board.

The order applies to farmers and others whose rights to water were staked more than a century ago. Many farmers holding those senior-water rights contend the state has no authority to order cuts.

The reductions are enforced largely on an honor system because there are few meters and sensors in place to monitor consumption.

California already has ordered cuts in water use by cities and towns and by many other farmers..

The move Friday marked the first significant mandatory cuts because of drought for senior water rights holders since the last major drought in the late 1970s. One group of farmers with prized claims have made a deal with the state to voluntarily cut water use by 25 percent to be spared deep mandatory cuts in the future.

The San Joaquin River watershed runs from the Sierra Nevada to San Francisco Bay and is a key water source for farms and communities.

Thousands of farmers with more recent, less secure claims to water have already been told to stop all pumping from the San Joaquin and Sacramento watersheds. They are turning to other sources of water, including wells, reservoirs and the expensive open market.

Some farmers have built their businesses around that nearly guaranteed access to water.

Jeanne Zolezzi, an attorney for two small irrigation districts serving farmers in the San Joaquin area, says she plans to go to court next week to stop the board's action. She said her clients include small family farms that grow permanent crops such as apricots and walnuts without backup supplies in underground wells or local reservoirs they can turn to when they can't pump from rivers and streams.

"A lot of trees would die, and a lot of people would go out of business," said Zolezzi. "We are not talking about a 25 percent cut like imposed on urban. This is a 100 percent cut, no water supplies."

California water law is built around preserving the rights of such senior-rights holders. The state last ordered drought-mandated curtailments by senior-water rights holders in 1976-77, but that order affected only a few dozen rights holders.

* * *

As NASA concluded previously, as difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought.NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

Several steps need be taken right now.

First, immediate mandatory water rationing should be authorized across all of the state's water sectors, from domestic and municipal through agricultural and industrial. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is already considering water rationing by the summer unless conditions improve. There is no need for the rest of the state to hesitate. The public is ready. A recent Field Poll showed that 94% of Californians surveyed believe that the drought is serious, and that one-third support mandatory rationing.

Second, the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 should be accelerated. The law requires the formation of numerous, regional groundwater sustainability agencies by 2017. Then each agency must adopt a plan by 2022 and “achieve sustainability” 20 years after that. At that pace, it will be nearly 30 years before we even know what is working. By then, there may be no groundwater left to sustain.

Third, the state needs a task force of thought leaders that starts, right now, brainstorming to lay the groundwork for long-term water management strategies. Although several state task forces have been formed in response to the drought, none is focused on solving the long-term needs of a drought-prone, perennially water-stressed California.