As California’s drought persists, a growing awareness of scarcity in the state’s urban regions has put agricultural water use under the political microscope.

At the beginning of April, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered cities to cut their water use 25 percent, at the same time further exposing the tensions between competing demands (Greenwire, April 2).

Federal and state officials are taking pains to defend the agriculture industry. Earlier this week in Reno, Nev., drought experts discussed how to counter the public perception that agriculture is getting off easier than the rest of the state.

Ann Mills, the Agriculture Department’s deputy undersecretary for natural resources and environment, said she had been spending “the better part of my days and some nights” working on correcting the “misperception that bubbled up” after Brown issued his executive order.

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Companies that get products halal certified have been targets of a campaign that claims halal certification funds terrorism.

Conducted largely through social media and online networks, Australian anti-Islam groups have been demanding companies that carry halal certification labels drop them.

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Does the First Amendment stop at the laboratory door?

Over the past decade, federal government scientists have expressed increasing concern over the extent to which they can speak their minds without retribution about matters that may affect public health. And the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit group, this month released a new report giving good grades for policies governing employee speech at most of 17 federal agencies that it examined.

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In the 1976 film “Network,” a news anchor, played by the late actor Peter Finch, urges his television audience to open their windows and shout the infamous phrase, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

According to people I’ve talked to on the ground in Oregon, that may be something close to what many residents there are feeling right now. But instead of shouting out the window, Oregonians are petitioning and phoning their senator, Ron Wyden, to ask him to oppose granting so-called fast track authority to President Obama.

Granting that authority would allow the president to speed two dangerous international trade pacts through Congress, and Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Finance, is a critically important figure whose support will be necessary for the passage of the agreements—known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP.

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NEW YORK – President Obama’s attorney-general nominee, Loretta Lynch, admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that her investigators in the money-laundering probe of HSBC were aware of evidence compiled by whistleblower John Cruz but she chose, nevertheless, not to bring criminal charges.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/03/lynch-admits-she-had-whistleblowers-evidence-on-banksters/#U3sBwoJttTPQE2f7.99

China’s government has provided a list to the United States of Chinese officials suspected of corruption who are believed to have fled there, according to a state-run newspaper.

Xu Jinhui, the head of the anti-graft bureau at the state prosecutor, told theChina Daily that a priority list of alleged Chinese corrupt officials believed to be at large in the United States has been provided to US authorities.

Chinese officials said last year more than 150 economic fugitives, many of them described as corrupt government officials, were in the US.

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For a candidate who ran on a promise to have the most transparent administration ever, Barack Obama is unusually fond of opacity.

On Monday, USA Today reported:

The White House is removing a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, making official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office.

With almost unbelievable irony, the president’s lengthening of the shadow of secrecy over the Office of Administration happened on National Freedom of Information Day, a day set aside by activists to call for greater transparency in government.

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With its adoption of a robust resolution on Montenegro earlier this month, the European parliament has become the latest EU institution to voice its serious concern over the Balkan country’s complacency on its eventual accession.

Parliament’s resolution is a damning indictment of the Montenegrin government’s sclerotic pace of reform, clear recalcitrance and utter irresponsibility.

MEPs are rightly worried to see how little progress Montenegro has made in addressing fundamental issues around the protection of foreign investors in the country.

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Things just got worse for HSBC.

Its private banking arm faces new criminal charges after a French magistrate officially requested that the Swiss bank be brought to trial over a suspected tax-dodging scheme for wealthy customers, the Guardian reports.

The request for trial comes after a series of allegations against the bank that date back to 2008, when former HSBC employee Herve Falciani handed over thousands of confidential files from the bank to French tax authorities.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/explanation-of-hsbc-tax-evasion-scandal-2015-3#ixzz3UN5033cu

Editor’s note: This article is part two of a series.  Part one is here.

In his book America on Six Rubles a Day, Yakov Smirnoff wrote that in Soviet Russia, they didn’t report plane crashes.  They would instead build an airfield around the crash site and announce that the plane landed ahead of schedule.  A more subtle approach is to make one doubt his own judgment with a rapid succession of simultaneous contradictory narratives, even if they merely project the Kremlin’s own methods.

Appearing as equal dots on the public radar, all these nonsensical chaff theories begin to compete for equal space and attention with the objective reality.  For as long as the mystery continues, manufactured absurdities will be debated on equal terms with facts, trivializing the crime, dishonoring the victim, eroding the public trust, and minimizing the moral and emotional impact.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/03/killing_nemtsov_predicted_by_putin_carried_out_by_the_motherland.html#ixzz3UCqWGRMy