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Israel broadened its assault on Gaza on Tuesday, wrecking the region's only power plant and killing dozens of Palestinians.

Barrages "destroyed Hamas's media offices, the home of a top leader and what Palestinians said was a devastating hit on the only electricity plant," The New York Times reports.

The bombings came on a day when hope briefly arose about a new cease-fire. Both Israeli and Palestinian officials in the West Bank discussed the possibility.

But Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, rejected the idea.

"We don't accept any condition of ceasefire," Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif said on Hamas broadcast outlets. "There is no ceasefire without the stop of the aggression and the end of the siege."

With Tuesday's bombings, which the Guardian described as "the most relentless and widespread" of the three-week-old conflict, the Palestinian death toll has exceeded 1,200.

The shelling of the power plant, which Palestinian officials described as taking a devastating hit, will bring additional hardship. The lack of electricity will make existing problems with water and sewage far worse.

"We need at least one year to repair the power plant, the turbines, the fuel tanks and the control room," Fathi Sheik Khalil of the Gaza energy authority told the Guardian. "Everything was burned."

On All Things Considered, NPR's Emily Harris described how one family in Gaza spent the Muslim holiday of Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan.

Some family members have been killed, others injured and nearly all displaced. "There are 53 people staying in this three-bedroom apartment," Harris reported, "including, the mothers say, at least eight infants."

On the diplomatic front, there was disagreement between the U.S. and Israel about what had been said in private conversations between top officials.

The White House dismissed as "totally false" a report on Israel's Channel 1 that President Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a telephone call Sunday that Israel must immediately end its military offensive in Gaza and was not in a position to choose which countries could mediate a cease-fire.

"We have seen reports of an alleged POTUS-Netanyahu transcript; neither reports nor alleged transcript bear any resemblance to reality," tweeted the National Security Council's press account.

For their part, Netanyahu's aids denied Secretary of State John Kerry's characterization of one of his many conversations with the Israeli prime minister. Kerry suggested Tuesday that Netanyahu had asked him to "try to get a humanitarian cease-fire," but the prime minister's staff said that the cease-fire idea was actually Kerry's.

Small fatty fish like mackerel, herring, sardines and anchovies are high in omega-3s, vitamin D and low on the food chain.

Those shining attributes have earned them plenty of nods from doctors and environmentalists alike, as we've reported. They're not among the most popular seafoods in the U.S., though, partly because of their fishy taste.

But if you knew that eating these fish would mean shrinking your carbon footprint a wee bit, would that convince you to buy them over say, that bag of frozen shrimp you just mindlessly threw into your grocery cart?

Robert Parker is betting that if you care about eating greener, you'll want to know about how much fuel it takes to catch your favorite fish. He's a Ph.D. candidate from Nova Scotia, studying the fishing industry at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

Parker and Peter Tyedmers, who directs the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, recently published an analysis of a fishing industry fuel use database Tyedmers developed. Their analysis finds that fisheries producing the small fish – sardines, mackerel, and anchovies — are "among the most energy and carbon-efficient forms of protein production." The paper appeared in the journal Fish and Fisheries on July 4.

They also found that fishing for shrimp and lobster are almost as fuel-intensive as raising livestock. As we've reported, raising livestock has more of an impact on the environment than any other food we eat.

For example, Parker says, to catch a metric ton (about 2,200 pounds) of sardines or anchovies, it takes about 5 gallons of fuel.

In contrast, to get the same amount of lobster or shrimp, you'd burn an average of 2,100 to 2,600 gallons of fuel.

Now, U.S. and Canadian lobster outfits "are a bit more efficient because of the higher lobster biomass in the ocean," he says. But they are still burning close to 264 gallons of fuel to catch those 2,200 pounds of crustacean.

So why is all this fuel getting burned? As the fishing industry has evolved in the last century from throwing out a few lines over the local dock to industrialized operations, we've been able to fish in more parts of the ocean and freeze our catch right on the boats.

But "a consequence of many of these advancements has been the increased reliance of fisheries on larger vessels, the motorization of fishing fleets with more powerful engines and the increased demand by fisheries for fossil fuels to power everything from propulsion and gear operation to on-board processing, refrigeration and ancillary services such as navigational aids," the paper says.

A jury has awarded former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura $1.8 million in a defamation suit against a deceased author.

The jury on Tuesday determined that Ventura was the figure described as a "celebrity" Navy SEAL in Chris Kyle's 2012 book American Sniper.

The SEAL was called "Scruff Face" in the book, but Kyle later identified him as Ventura, who became a professional wrestler and one-term independent governor after leaving the Navy.

Kyle wrote that in 2006 he had decked Ventura in a bar in California, after Ventura said that he hated America and that Navy SEALs "deserve to lose a few."

Ventura denied having said any such thing and said the account had hurt his career, as well as his standing among the community of SEALs. Kyle died last year but Ventura sued his estate.

"The verdict will tell the world Chris Kyle's story was a lie," David Bradley Olsen, Ventura's attorney, said. "One-point-five million people have bought the book. Millions more heard Fox TV trash Jesse Ventura because of it. And the story went viral on the Internet and will be there forever."

In testimony videotaped prior to his death, Kyle stood by his account.

"Legal experts had said Ventura had to clear a high legal bar to win, since as a public figure he had to prove 'actual malice,' " The Associated Press reports. "According to the jury instructions, Ventura had to prove with 'clear and convincing evidence' that Kyle either knew or believed what he wrote was untrue, or that he harbored serious doubts about its truth.

The jury voted 8-2 in favor of Ventura, awarding him $500,000 in defamation charges and $1.345 million for "unjust enrichment."

Jurors had been instructed to reach a unanimous verdict, but were unable to do so. Federal rules allow for split verdicts, if both sides agree.

"The decision came just a day after the jury sent a note to court saying it could not reach a verdict after five days of deliberation," Minnesota Public Radio reports. "U.S. District Judge Richard Kyle (no relation to Chris Kyle) told jurors to 'take one more shot' at coming to a consensus."

A class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, which are used on a lot of big corn and soybean fields, have been getting a pretty bad rap lately.

Researchers have implicated these chemicals, which are similar to nicotine, as a contributor to the alarming decline of bee colonies. That led the European Union to place a moratorium on their use, and environmentalists want the U.S. to do the same.

In a study published July 24, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey found that these chemicals are also leaching into streams and rivers in the Midwest — including the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. And that may be bad news for aquatic life in the region, the scientists say.

"We did the study because the use of the neonicotinoids has been increasing dramatically, especially in the Midwest," says Kathryn Kuivila, an environmental organic chemist with the USGS.

And since these chemicals are highly water soluble, it made sense to investigate whether they were present in the region's streams and rivers, Kuivila tells The Salt.

These pesticides aren't sprayed on. Instead, they're used to coat the seeds of many agricultural crops. But they still end up in the soil and then in the water that runs off farms.

Runoff transports the chemicals from the field to streams and rivers, and since they don't break down easily in the environment they can stick around in these bodies of water for long periods of time, the USGS study notes. And while they're not especially toxic to humans, they can harm a wide variety of insects. At certain concentrations, they can hurt other animals as well.

The Salt

Studies Show Why Insecticides Are Bad News For Bees