http://www.vox.com/2014/7/17/5902177/9-questions-about-the-israel-palestine-conflict-you-were-too

This article was more of a wikipedia style thing than a news article from a site I have never heard of, Vox, but I found it really helpful. I learned a lot about the history of israel-palestine conflict and how differently the two groups see it. I think part of the problem was the Brittish mandate and the UN’s plans to partition the region into Palestine and Israel. Palestinians saw that as some sort of imperialist theft, while the jews felt they had the right to a homeland. My mom always tells me about this stuff and something about how the dwarves in LOTR are like the jews but I never totally understood what she was talking about. I think this relates a lot to the CG chapter about international conflict. The way the one author describes misunderstanding between U.S. and Chinese perspective reminds me of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Syrian_coup_d%27état

I read this wikipedia article to learn more about how the baath party in Syria came to be. It brought up a lot of stuff about Arab nationalism and Nasser that we talked about early on in the semester. It again seems like some of the root of the conflict in Syria has to do with external forces colonizing or “mandating” things, in this case the French. It also amazes me how incredibly old Syria is. In a subsequent wikipedia article clicking spree I learned that the length of time domesticated dogs have been around is the same amount of time it took homo sapiens to first wear clothes. It took another 160 something thousand years for humans to learn who to write, and dogs are only 35,000 years old! Dogs also have the longest known DNA strands out of all the animals, which is why there’s so many variations of them. Maybe in a couple hundred thousand years dogs will use that as a basis to say they’re better than cats and start an international (or interplanetary) cat-dog war.