Megadroughts Are Coming SOON. Thanks Climate Change

As bad as recent droughts in California, the Southwest and the Midwest have been, scientists say far worse "megadroughts" are coming — and they're bound to last for decades.

"Unprecedented drought conditions" — the worst in more than 1,000 years — are likely to come to the Southwest and Central Plains after 2050 and stick around because of global warming, according to a new study in the journal Science Advances on Thursday.

"Nearly every year is going to be dry toward the end of the 21st century compared to what we think of as normal conditions now," said study lead author Benjamin Cook, a NASA atmospheric scientist. "We're going to have to think about a much drier future in western North America."

There's more than an 80 percent chance that much of the central and western United States will have a 35-year-or-longer "megadrought" later this century, said study co-author Toby Ault of Cornell University, adding that "water in the Southwest is going to become more precious than it already is."

Read more here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02...

The Battle for Iraq: Shia Militias vs. the Islamic State

Last summer, the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept from Syria into northern Iraq, routing Iraqi security forces and seizing the city of Mosul. Soon afterward, the group declared the establishment of a dubious "caliphate" in the area it controls and rebranded itself the Islamic State. With Iraq's army weakened and radical militants advancing on Baghdad, the country's Iran-backed Shia militias — which have their own history of sectarian abuses — fought back, halting the Islamic State's progress.

The militias have successfully combated Islamic State fighters on the ground with the assistance of air strikes from a US-led military coalition. But their growing influence within Iraq's government amid accusations that they have harmed Sunnis in areas that they control has led many to fear that the militias threaten the country's fragile sectarian and political balance.

VICE News traveled to Iraq in December to witness firsthand how Shia militias are taking the fight to the Islamic State, and to document the fallout of their controversial rise to power.

Wombs for Rent in India (RT Documentary)

RTD crew travels to India to investigate its booming surrogacy industry. Surrogacy for profit is a controversial issue, due to fears that it may leave vulnerable women open to exploitation. However, those at centers such as the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in Gujarat are convinced of the benefits for all involved. Dr. Nayna Patel has so far helped over 500 childless couples become parents to their own offspring, while providing surrogate mothers with a life-changing sum of money. 

'Historian' On What Happens To Women When They Drive

A Saudi Arabian historian trying to justify the nation's ban on female drivers says women who drive in other countries such as the United States don't care if they're raped and that sexual violence "is no big deal to them."

Saleh al-Saadoon claimed in a recent TV interview that women can be raped when a car breaks down, but unlike other countries, Saudi Arabia protects its women from that risk by not allowing them to drive in the first place, according to a translation posted online by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

"They don't care if they are raped on the roadside, but we do," al-Saadoon said on Saudi Rotana Khalijiyya TV.

Mind Clones Coming Soon

An Artificial Intelligence pioneer is embracing the controversial idea of uploading the memories, thoughts and feelings of a living person into a computer to create a Mind Clone or “second self.” The prototype for this new self is called ‘Bina-48’.

Entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt has created a new robotic head that she hopes, one day in the future, humans will be able to upload their minds into. Bina-48 is named after Rothblatt’s real-life wife, Bina Aspen, and serves as a proof-of-concept for the futuristic idea. The robot version is designed to carry on a conversation, with scientists hoping that these mind clones could give human owners a sort of artificial afterlife

NP: ISIS video purports to show militants beheading 21 Coptic Christians on beach in Libya

A video purporting to show the mass beheading of Coptic Christian hostages has been released by militants in Libya claiming loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

The video, released late Sunday night, depicted several men in orange jumpsuits being led along a beach, each accompanied by a masked militant. The men are made to kneel and one militant, dressed differently that the others, addresses the camera in North American-accented English.

“All crusaders: safety for you will be only wishes, especially if you are fighting us all together. Therefore we will fight you all together,” he said. “The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama Bin Laden’s body in, we swear to Allah we will mix it with your blood.”

The men are then laid face-down and simultaneously beheaded.

The militant speaker then pointed northward and said, “We will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission.”

Militants in Libya had been holding 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians hostage for weeks, threatening them with death. The makers of the video identify themselves as the Tripoli Province of ISIS — the Islamic militant group that controls about a third of Syria and Iraq. The Associated Press could not immediately independently verify the video.

The Egyptian government declared a seven-day mourning period and President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi convened an emergency national security meeting to discuss a response. El-Sissi sent condolences to “the victims of terrorism,” according to a statement released by the presidency.

Qalini Sanyout, whose two nephews were among the hostages, answered the phone Sunday night amid the sound of wailing in the background.

“What can we say? Can someone tell us if this is true.” he said repeatedly. “The whole village is in mourning. Men are covering their heads with dust and mud.”

Read more from National Post here

Watch: Drew Leith & the Foundation - With You (Official Video)

The long awaited debut single from the upcoming DLF album has a new video. Sit back and saddle up for this fun-filled party video. From the dank basement stage to the bright lights of a big city country bar...this video is fun from the onset. When you're done, head on over to the website and catch a live show for yourself. You won't regret it!

www.drewleith.com

Will People Respond To Stop Rape? Experiment (VIDEO)

Experiment in Sweden where sounds of a woman screaming coming from a parked car and see how many people stop. Only 15% did.

Watch the original video here here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4QzZ...

Obama's ISIS War Authorization Means Endless War Lives On

President Obama on Wednesday formally asked Congress to authorize a three-year military campaign against the terrorist group the Islamic State that would avoid a large-scale invasion and occupation but in addition to air power could include limited ground operations by American forces to hunt down enemy leaders or rescue American personnel.

A proposal sent by the White House to Capitol Hill on Wednesday would formally give the president the power to continue the airstrikes he has been conducting since last fall against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, as well as “associated persons or forces.” The measure would set limits that were never imposed during the wars of the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq by expiring in three years and withholding permission for “enduring offensive ground combat operations.

“I do not believe America’s interests are served by endless war or by remaining on a perpetual war footing,” Mr. Obama said in a televised statement in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Wednesday afternoon."* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

*Read more here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/us/...

Don't Go To Thailand For Plastic Surgery

When British woman Joy Williams went into the SP Clinic in Bangkok last October, she must have believed she was about to undergo a straightforward cosmetic operation, at a very reasonable price, and at a modern facility which has been widely used, and often praised, by other patients from overseas.

But her wounds became infected, and she died under anaesthetic as the clinic tried to correct what had gone wrong.

Her doctor, Sompob Sansiri, has been charged with recklessly causing her death, and the SP Clinic closed down. It turned out he was not licensed to carry out surgery.

Ms Williams was one of thousands of foreigners who come to Thailand every year for cosmetic surgery.

There are good reasons for this. The prices are typically a third of what they cost in Europe or the US, the medical facilities are often first-class, and Thai doctors have developed specialist expertise in some cosmetic procedures.

Read more here: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-3143...

Apple most valuable US company ever worth $700bn

Apple has become the first US company to be worth more than $700 billion, which is nearly double its nearest rival, Exxon Mobil.

This new high comes after record sales of big-screen iPhones and a fourth-quarter profit that was the largest in corporate history.

READ MORE: Apple posts biggest quarterly earnings in corporate history

Shares in the US tech giant rose 1.9 percent on Tuesday and closed at just over $122, breaking the record for the highest US market capitalization. The company continued its growth streak Wednesday, as the share price rose another 1.52 percent in early trading to reach $123.80. In 2000, it was Microsoft that became the first American company to close with a $600 billion valuation.

Apple’s sales are rising incredibly fast in China, a vast market in which the firm earned $38 billion in 2014, up from $1 billion a few years ago, said Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook while speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. He also added that Apple earned $50 billion in emerging markets over the past calendar year.

The record $18 billion quarterly profit was driven by the sale of 74.5 million iPhones.

Apple’s CEO also revealed the company plans to invest about $850 million in a California solar farm to cut its energy bill. The construction of the project, in partnership with First Solar, is expected to start in mid-2015 and finish by the end of next year, Reuters says. Cook called it his company’s “biggest, boldest and most ambitious project ever,” and said it was part of Apple's commitment to clean energy and corporate responsibility.

Shares in First Solar rose nearly 5 percent on the news and continued to rise in after-hours trading.

Read more via RT here

‘Hostile to privacy’: Snowden urges internet users to get rid of Dropbox

Edward Snowden has hit out at Dropbox and other services he says are “hostile to privacy,” urging web users to abandon unencrypted communication and adjust privacy settings to prevent governments from spying on them in increasingly intrusive ways.

“We are no longer citizens, we no longer have leaders. We’re subjects, and we have rulers,” Snowden told The New Yorker magazine in a comprehensive hour-long interview.

There isn’t enough investment into security research, into understanding how metadata could better be protected and why that is more necessary today than yesterday, he said.

The whistleblower believes one fallacy in how authorities view individual rights has to do with making the individual forsake those rights by default. Snowden’s point is that the moment you are compelled to reveal that you have nothing to hide is when the right to privacy stops being a right – because you are effectively waiving that right.

“When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights – you don’t have to justify why you need freedom of speech.”

In that situation, it becomes OK to live in a world where one is no longer interested in privacy as such – a world where Facebook, Google and Dropbox have become ubiquitous, and where there are virtually no safeguards against the wrongful use of the information one puts there.

In particular, Snowden advised web users to “get rid” of Dropbox. Such services only insist on encrypting user data during transfer and when being stored on the servers. Other services he recommends instead, such as SpiderOak, encrypt information while it’s on your computer as well.

“We're talking about dropping programs that are hostile to privacy,” Snowden said.

The same goes for social networks such as Facebook and Google, too. Snowden says they are“dangerous” and proposes that people use other services that allow for encrypted messages to be sent, such as RedPhone or SilentCircle.

The argument that encryption harms security efforts to capture terrorists is flawed, even from a purely legalistic point of view, Snowden said, explaining that you can still retain encryption and have the relevant authorities requesting private information from phone carriers and internet providers on a need-to-know basis.

And the penchant for close, secretive cooperation with the government will only cost companies money and jobs, Snowden added, because no one would want to buy a phone made by a company that provides inherent backdoors for third parties to access your information.

“The same rights that we inherited our children deserve to inherit the same way,” Snowden said.

“But ultimately we have to remember that political reform in the United States is not going to solve the problem globally. Governments [everywhere] are going to have their own national laws. And these can be terrible governments… so, because of that, you have to use secure communications… the real key is that companies willing to collaborate with the government and compromise their products and services do not deserve to be trusted with your data. Because if they do it for one government, they’ll do it for another government,” Snowden said.

For consumers to retain trust in the services they use, they need to fight for the very idea of privacy, to keep the topic in focus, he said, adding: “I speak with computer scientists and cryptographers every day to try to figure out how we can create solutions” for metadata to be appreciated and viewed as someone’s own private business.

“There are solutions, there are ways forward, and we need to pursue them, to work toward them,”Snowden said. “And we need to say that this is an effort worth doing.”

The whistleblower continues to lead a secretive existence in Russia, where he’s been stranded since June 2013, hiding from his own government, which is seeking to prosecute him for his crimes behind closed doors.

“I’ve told the government again and again in negotiations, you know, that if they’re prepared to offer an open trial, a fair trial in the same way that Dan Ellsberg got, and I’m allowed to make my case to the jury, I would love to do so,” Snowden said. “But to this point they’ve declined.”

Read more from RT here

Rope used to hang Saddam Hussein on sale

A piece of the rope that was used to execute former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein has been put up for auction with the latest bid standing at $7 million.

The current owner of the morbid object is Iraqi politician Dr. Mawaffak al-Rubaie, who led the dictator to his death.
Numerous people, including a rich Israeli family, a religious organization in Iran and two Kuwaiti businessmen have expressed a serious interest in buying it, Middle East news website, Al-Araby al-Jadeed, reported.

However, another current affairs website, Middle East Eye, says that Dr. Al-Rubaie wants more cash than the $7 million offered so-far.

Saddam Hussein, the former President of Iraq, was in power for more than 23 years until being deposed from power by an American-led invasion in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people, including many Kurds and Shias, are believed to have been killed during his brutal rule on account of their political and religious views.

Caleb Maupin, a political analyst, told RT: "This just shows how cheap justice has become when they are selling the implements of execution - profits really dominate everything, nothing is really sacred. If you look at all the countries the US has invaded whether it's Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yugoslavia, which suffered from US bombing, never did they bring stability, never did they bring peace. They bring chaos and destruction. War is really motivated by profits and this is just a further illustration of that."

Dr. Al-Rubaie was himself tortured by forces working for Saddam because of his political beliefs. He believes that Saddam deserved to be executed and he told the Independent in 2013 that he had nothing but contempt for the old man as he led him to the gallows.

“I was hoping to see him show some remorse for the terrible crimes, the hundreds of thousands of his own citizens that he and his henchmen killed. But there was nothing,” he said.

However, the grisly auction has sparked criticism from human rights groups, while one campaigner, Ahmeed Saheed, told Al-Araby-Al-Jadeed that he thinks the proceeds from any sale should be given to the Iraqi treasury.

Saddam was found guilty of crimes against humanity by the Iraqi Special Tribunal in 2004, although many rights groups including Amnesty International believed the trial to have been unfair.

As many as 206,000 people have died since the US invasion in 2003, and the country is now battling a bloody insurgency, with Islamic State militants in control of many areas of the north and west of Iraq, amid other sporadic acts of violence, bombing and killings between the Sunni and Shia populations.

FULL STORY: http://on.rt.com/cpfj8c

No Sex On The Mars One Mission. INTERVIEW

So far 700 finalists are in the running to be the first group of humans to attempt starting a civilization on Mars. Mars One Spaceship is a one way ticket. Would you do it? What does it take? Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss. 

"Mars One, an interplanetary travel nonprofit, will soon select the next round of wannabe astronauts from the nearly 700 current finalists. While making a short movie about the competition for The Guardian, we at Stateless Media had a chance to speak to a few people vying for one of the coveted seats on a Mars One Spaceship. I learned the following: they are all really smart, incredibly brave, and a little bit crazy.

Actually, they're a lot of bit crazy. And that’s a good thing. Because it takes a certain kind of person to choose to live the rest of their lives stranded on a desert planet with no breathable air, no Netflix, no Snapchat, no Game of Thrones, no General Tso's Chicken, and no long, romantic walks on the beach. Oh yeah, and no sex. Like I said, crazy.” * 


*Read more here from http://boingboing.net/2015/02/09/meet...

Man Has Sexual Relationship With A Dolphin

Dolly the dolphin died of a broken heart. At least that's how Malcolm Brenner sees it.

Some would call Brenner, who had sex with Dolly more than four decades ago, a pervert or an animal abuser or, at the very least, a damaged man. But to this day, Brenner, who is now the subject of a documentary, describes the encounter as a beautiful, almost spiritual experience.

The two met in 1970 when the New College of Florida student was on his first freelance photography assignment. He was supposed to take pictures for a book about Sarasota's Floridaland—one of those hokey roadside attractions that populated the Sunshine State before multimillion-dollar theme parks pushed them out. Soon, however, he was sidetracked by the dolphin.

Dolly swam to the other side of the tank when the unfamiliar human with horn-rimmed glasses and shoulder-length curls first jumped in. She eventually came around, says Brenner, who photographed the dolphin for nine months. Once, as he was rubbing her back, Dolly flipped over to present her genital slit. Later, she started rubbing her teeth on the photographer's arm in what he describes as an erotic way. When he wouldn't give her what she wanted, Dolly would retaliate by pushing him 12 feet underwater.

Read More Here: http://www.vice.com/read/we-spoke-to-...