Lake Mead. Notice the dark and light demarcation. That is the drop of the lake.

In 2016, Lake Mead water levels drop to new record lows (since it was filled in the 1930s) leaving Las Vegas facing existential threats unless something is done. Las Vegas and its 2 million residents and 40 million tourists a year get almost all their drinking water from the Lake and at levels below 1075ft, the Interior Department will be forced to declare a “shortage,” which will lead to significant cutbacks for Arizona and Nevada.

And now, two years later, the situation appears to be getting worse as The Wall Street Journal reports, in a prediction released Wednesday, the Bureau of Reclamation, a multistate agency that manages water and power in the West, said there is a 52% probability that water levels will fall below a threshold of 1,075 feet elevation by 2020.

“The very big concern is the perception that water supplies are uncertain,” said Todd Reeve, chief executive officer […]

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TWM — Travelling while Muslim.

After a week of exhausting travel in London, I wanted nothing more than to see my wife and children.

Customs and Border Patrol at Dulles had other plans.

On Aug. 6, I landed on UA919 from Heathrow to Dulles wearing my Ahmadiyya Muslim Community logo-embroidered press jacket. I cleared passport control with my Global Entry card, and called an Uber as I headed for the exit.

That’s when Customs and Border Protection, as one of the officers I encountered put it, “randomly selected” me for additional screening. What I experienced next involved harassment, threats of further interrogation, allegations that I was non-compliant and breaking the law, an attempt to confiscate my travel documents and childish stalling tactics — all courtesy of officials hired to protect Americans like me.

There’s a deep irony of my experience with the CBP that day. At an extremely busy Dulles airport, the CBP interrogation hall was virtually empty. A middle-aged white woman in a ponytail singled me out of the crowd.

“Hi sir, can […]

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US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) special agent preparing to arrest alleged immigration violators
Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty

Father-to-be Joel Arrona was about to meet his infant son when ICE agents apprehended him.

Arrona stopped for gas in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday while driving his pregnant wife, Maria del Carmen Venegas, to a local hospital for a scheduled C-section. ICE agents approached the car while it was parked at the gas station and asked the couple to present their identification. When Arrona said he didn’t have his ID with him, the agents took him into custody.

Security footage from the gas station obtained by CBS Los Angeles shows ICE agents leading away Arrona in handcuffs. The footage also shows Venegas frantically calling for assistance in the gas station’s convenience store.

Venegas drove herself the rest of the way to the hospital. She gave birth alone.

Venegas told CBS Los Angeles her husband has never been stopped by police and has never been in trouble with the law before.

ICE has previously claimed its enforcement operations are focused on […]

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In 2014, Portugal stood on the brink. Its economy had collapsed amid Europe’s debt crisis, and unemployment had doubled. As part of a bailout program with the International Monetary Fund, which had lent the country 78 billion euros ($90 billion) in 2011, its government imposed drastic cuts to wages, pensions and social security.

But then something remarkable happened. Rather than bow to the demands of its European debtors, the Portuguese government elected to reinvest in its public sector, restoring salaries and benefits to their pre-crisis levels. Four years later, the results speak for themselves.

“The government’s U-turn, and willingness to spend, had a powerful effect,” writes The New York Times’ Liz Alderman. “Creditors railed against the move, but the gloom that had gripped the nation through years of belt-tightening began to lift. Business confidence rebounded. Production and exports began to take off.”

Its recovery remains fragile, with unions lobbying for more public spending to reduce inequality. Still, Portugal’s reversal of fortune would appear to confirm what the 2008 financial crisis made abundantly clear: Austerity—the process of reducing government deficits through a combination […]

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We’ve got some disappointing news for all those people who voted for Donald Trump because he promised rising wages.

While Trump keeps saying wages are rising the official government data show that’s just not true.

Consider a worker paid the median wage, half make more and half less, of $600 a week in round numbers. If she got the average 2.8% raise on July 1, her gross pay rose by a bit under $17.

Now consider inflation since her last raise a year earlier. Inflation ran 2.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That means our model worker is actually making less in real wages. Its only 60-cents less each week, not that she’d notice, but less is less and most definitely is not more no matter how often Trump says otherwise.

Back in January, during his State of the Union address, Trump declared that “after years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.”  Trump and the White House have repeated that claim over and over ever since.

PolitiFact rated that mostly false “because…wage growth began under President Barack Obama.”

Indeed, I reported two years […]

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