Hundreds of thousands of trees died in the historic drought of 2012, and many more will succumb in the next few years, scientists say.

‘This is just beginning,’ says Janna Beckerman, a plant pathologist at Indiana’s Purdue University. ‘I suspect we’ll see trees still dying for the next two or three years.’

Indiana’s white cedar and Florida cypress trees began dying in late summer, she says, and Alberta and Colorado blue spruce are succumbing now.

Trees affected by a 2010-11 drought still are dying across Louisiana, says Keith Hawkins, a Louisiana State University AgCenter forester. Some trees ‘reached a threshold from which they can’t recover – especially older, larger trees,’ he says.

About 301 million trees died in rural Texas because of that drought, the Texas A&M Forest Service says.

Tree deaths are dismaying some communities:

Brookings, S.D., has lost about 300 trees to drought, says Peter Colson, director of the city’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Forestry. ‘It’s expensive,’ he says. ‘The trees we plant run $35 to $200 a pop.’ The city cut back on tree planting last fall because ‘we didn’t have the manpower or equipment to water hundreds of trees,’ Colson says.
More than […]

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I’m not given to making grand predictions, but in this case I can’t resist: the very real spiritual transformation at the heart of mysticism is about to explode into the secular mainstream, and the consequences may just revolutionize our scientific understanding of the mind.

Yowzer! No doubt the reader’s New Age flapdoodle-detector is now shrieking. Bear with me. Let’s first get the tricky business of defining enlightenment out of the way.

For expediency’s sake, I’ll define enlightenment as a complex and multi-faceted process by which the mind comes to know – and over time rest more securely in – its own ground. As this happens, our habitual sense of being a separate and bounded self begins to fade. Ultimately, the person for whom this happens no longer feels themselves to be an autonomous entity looking out at an external world; rather, they feel themselves, more and more, to be an intimate part of that world’s humid expression, an unfolding natural process no different than anything else in nature. As a result, practitioners report a liberating sense of freedom, ease, spontaneity. The volume of self-referential thought often decreases, although, since enlightenment happens along a deepening continuum, they are still routinely trapped in old […]

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A secretive funding organization in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate ‘counter movement’ to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organization, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

Some commentators believe that such convoluted arrangements are becoming increasingly common to shield the identity and backgrounds of the wealthy supporters of climate scepticism – some of whom have vested interests in the fossil-fuel industry.

The Knowledge and Progress Fund, whose directors include Charles Koch and his wife Liz, […]

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Las Vegas exudes an all-you-can-eat mentality. People walk between casinos carrying giant cups of slushy liquor; advertisements blare from speakers on the streets pitching the best shows, best food and best deals; escalators take you across streets and directly into malls. You spend your time buying something, eating something, or watching something. Either way, it’s consume, consume, consume.

But this hunger is hard to satiate and it takes its toll, revealing the city’s central dichotomy – it is a destination of both the high-brow and the down and out, the high rolling and the thrifty, a megaphone of riches and poverty. And nowhere is this more apparent then in one of Las Vegas’ most contentious relationships – with water. If you walk the Strip, you’ll see gondolas floating on canals of aqua pool water, misters spraying overheated tourists in the hot sun, pirate ships docked in rocky coves, and fountains everywhere you look.

The abundant water is a mirage, although it wasn’t always. Las Vegas got its name, meaning ‘the meadows,

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Conservative Christian radio hosts Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner explained on a Tuesday segment of their ‘Generations with a Vision

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