The Long View: Every reader of this article will be dead or of old age before the Arab "revolution" is complete. Palestinians are the only ones not to benefit from it

Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the highly influential leader of the Lithuanian sect of ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews, was known for his unyielding hardline rulings on complicated elements of Jewish law. As an eminent Posek, a decider of Jewish law, a title earned not by appointment but by scholarship, reputation and communal trust built up over decades, Elyashiv applied the Torah and Talmudic law to modern times, ruling on conversion, marriage, divorce and even the legitimacy of wigs made in India.

A seven-decade old cultural taboo will be broken next month when an Israeli symphony orchestra will play works by Richard Wagner inside the country for the first time since the state's foundation in 1948.

It is surprising that the legacy of so titanic a figure as Ariel Sharon does not figure more in Israeli public discourse than it does. But the left never wholly warmed to the scourge of the Palestinians; those on the right, meanwhile, felt bitterly betrayed by his withdrawal from Gaza.

Walking upright allowed habilis to start developing craftwork skills. Carpentry or stone sculpting requires very precise hand-to-eye co-ordination. Skills like these need well developed motor-neurone skills and sophisticated hand and finger co-ordination – processes that probably encouraged the evolution of bigger brains. Recent studies have shown that relative to other mammals, Homo habilis had a brain at least four times larger than it should have been for his size and weight.

Cooler temperatures tend to mean that less water evaporates from the seas, resulting in reduced rainfall in many inland areas. Such conditions gave birth to the great grasslands of today which replaced forested areas that need larger quantities of rainwater to sustain them. The prairies of North America, the pampas of Argentina and the grassland steppes of Europe and Central Asia all emerged during this Ice Age.