Daily Water Allocation Could Be the Next California Drought Strategy

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Photo Credit: AP / Rich Pedroncelli
You probably know your Social Security number, your driver’s license number and perhaps the latest wrinkle in mattress marketing, your sleep number.

But do you know your drought number?

The latter represents the amount of water you are allowed to use per day. If you don’t know it, you probably should. Not knowing could cost you money. As California’s severe drought moves into a fourth year, state and local water agencies are working on something called “allocation-based rate structures,” a kind of precursor to water rationing that’s all the rage in Sacramento and in some areas such as Santa Cruz, Irvine and Santa Monica.

Here’s how it works: Your local water company, special district or city assigns you and your household a number in gallons — a daily water allocation. Usually, one number applies to maximum indoor water use, i.e. showers, kitchen and bathroom faucets, dishwashers, clothes washers, etc., and an extra allocation is assigned for outdoor use such as lawn irrigation.

Using census records, aerial photography and satellite imagery, an agency can determine a property’s efficient water usage.

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Alleged Drug Smuggler Tried to Use a U.S. National Guard Bag

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Photo Credit: APA suspected drug smuggler trying to move four kilograms of cocaine from the Texas border to Connecticut drew the suspicion of authorities because he used a bag with the U.S. National Guard logo on it. The value of the seized cocaine ranged from $160,000 near the Texas border to $640,000 at its final destination.

The arrest came when a U.S. Border Patrol agent at the Falfurrias checkpoint got information about an upcoming drug load and stopped a passenger bus that was travelling north, according to court records obtained by Breitbart Texas.

One of the agents went into the bus and asked Hector Samuel Perez, a 26-year-old legal resident from Mexico, where he was headed. Perez said he was headed to Houston to see his sister; the agent’s suspicions had been peaked because he saw that the traveler had a shoulder bag with the National Guard logo on it.

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Michigan Mom Turns to Prayer and Social Media for Miracle to Save her Son

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsIn a pessimistic world, a Michigan mother is looking for a miracle to save her terminally ill four-year-old son – and she’s turning to prayer and social media to find it.

Tammi Curtis Carr of Ann Arbor was given the horrifying news Tuesday that her toddler, Chad, had an inoperative tumor on his brain stem. According to Carr, her son fell on Monday and hit his nose.The mother of three took her youngest to the hospital to make sure he didn’t have a concussion but what the MRI revealed was much worse.

Chad was diagnosed with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, a rare brain tumor that primarily affects children, and once diagnosed, the average rate of survival is nine to twelve months.

On Wednesday, Carr posted a message on her Facebook page hoping the power of prayer could help heal her young boy.

“We now need prayers and it’s my hope that this goes viral and millions fall in love with (Chad) and send him prayers,” she wrote. “It’s going to take a miracle and I believe it can happen and I hope you will help and spread his story!”

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Children Arrange for Doctor to Euthanize Their Parents

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Photo Credit: LifeNewsIf this doesn’t scare you, nothing will.

A doctor has agreed to murder euthanize a healthy elderly Belgian couple who don’t want ever to live apart–and their three children approve. One even procured the death doctor. From the Daily Mail story:

Their son, John Paul, 55, approached their doctor to request their euthanasia – which was legalised in Belgium in 2002 – but the doctor refused because there were no grounds for it. John Paul found another doctor willing to perform the killings in an unnamed hospital in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium in which 82 per cent of euthanasia cases are performed.

Francis said he and Anne were grateful for the arrangement. ‘Without our son and our daughter, it would never have succeeded,’ he said. ‘We are not sad, we are happy,’ he continued. ‘When we were told we could leave life together smoothly we were on a little cloud. It was as if we had spent all that time in a tunnel and suddenly we came into the light again.’

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Clinton Foundation Denies (Unconvincingly) It Had “Escorts” Follow NYT Reporter To Bathroom

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Photo Credit: Stephan SavoiaHillary Clinton’s paranoia about the press was shockingly on display at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York City last week. Veteran New York Times reporter Amy Chozick reported that working press covering the event were herded into a “press corral” in order to keep them apart from the speakers and audience -and especially from Hillary. So stringent were the restrictions on their movements that they couldn’t even go to the bathroom without being accompanied by escorts. Chozick said hers actually “waited outside the stall” to accompany her back to the Corral. (““At Clinton’s Event, A Really Close Watch on Reporters”“)

Chozick described what happened:

“…perhaps the person who stands out is the friendly 20-something press aide who the Clinton Global Initiative tasked with escorting me to the restroom. She waited outside the stall in the ladies’ room at the Sheraton Hotel, where the conference is held every year.”

According to an article on BuzzFeed.com, Clinton Foundation officials vehemently deny that anyone “deliberately” followed any reporter to the bathroom or was asked to do so. They claimed that “after looking into the matter, they found no proof that a volunteer “deliberately” followed a reporter to the bathroom. Aides said that as a matter of policy, CGI staffers and volunteers had never been instructed to accompany press inside restrooms.” (“Clinton Foundation Denies Sending Press Escorts Inside Bathrooms”)

But this unprecedented attempt to control the press has happened at CGI meetings before. It’s not the first time. It’s just the first time they got caught by a national newspaper.

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Cancer Victim 'Came Back to Life' in her Grave

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Photo Credit: AlamyShocked visitors to a Greek cemetery were left horrified when they heard banging and muffled calls for help coming from the grave of a woman who just been buried.

Police said a cemetery worker and two people visitors heard a woman’s voice from inside the 49-year-old cancer patient’s grave on Thursday.

The sounds were reportedly heard by the passers-by shortly after the last relatives of the deceased had left her funeral in the northern town of Peraia.

They are believed to have dug up the grave to try to save her, but by the time they got her out of the ground she had suffocated inside the coffin, according to Greek media.

A doctor summoned to the cemetery pronounced her dead, but dismissed claims that she had revived and had called for help.

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Florida Woman Arrested for Possession of… SpaghettiOs?

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Photo Credit: Amanda / Creative CommonsA Florida woman has been released after she was arrested for possession – of SpaghettiOs.

According to the Gainesville Times, police arrested Ashley Huff, 23, when they found a “suspicious residue” they believed to be meth on a spoon inside the car she was riding in.

Huff was subsequently charged with possession of methamphetamine.

Huff repeatedly told police that there was “no way in hell” that the substance was drug residue, according to Hall County assistant public defender Chris van Rossem.

Huff was unable to afford her bail and spent more than a month in jail while her attorney attempted to arrange a plea bargain.

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Obama Praises Muslim Cleric Who Backed Fatwa on Killing of U.S. Soldiers

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Photo Credit: APBy Adam Kredo.

President Barack Obama favorably quoted and praised on Wednesday in his speech before the United Nations a controversial Muslim cleric whose organization has reportedly endorsed the terror group Hamas and supported a fatwa condoning the murder of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Obama in his remarks offered praise to controversial cleric Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah and referred to him as a moderate Muslim leader who can help combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL or ISIS) radical ideology.

However, Bin Bayyah himself has long been engulfed in controversy for many of his views, including the reported backing of a 2004 fatwa that advocated violent resistance against Americans fighting in Iraq.

This is not the first time that the Obama administration has extoled Bin Bayyah, who also has served as the vice president of a Muslim scholars group founded by a radical Muslim Brotherhood leader who has called “for the death of Jews and Americans,” according to Fox News and other reports.

The State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau (CT) was forced to issue multiple apologies earlier this year after the Washington Free Beacon reported on its promotion of Bin Bayyah on Twitter.

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OBAMA DEFENDS ISLAM, SMACKS ISRAEL, AMERICAN RACISM AT UN

By Ben Shapiro.

On Wednesday, on the first anniversary of President Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations in which he called for ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, Obama attempted to rally support for his airstrikes against Assad’s terrorist opposition. Taking on issues ranging from Iran to Russia, from Ukraine to Syria, from global warming to Ebola, Obama pledged to utilize American might in service to the United Nations, speaking grandly of the beauty and power of the world’s least effective and most morally bankrupt international institution.

Obama opened with a Dickensian world of Manichean opposites:

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen: we come together at a crossroads between war and peace; between disorder and integration; between fear and hope.

He then offered delegates a choice between paper and plastic.

Actually, he stated that the world has never been better off, praising the increase of member states at the UN and the decrease in poverty (neglecting, of course, that that decrease in poverty is a direct result of the rise of global capitalism), as well as the iPhone. “I often tell young people in the United States that this is the best time in human history to be born, for you are more likely than ever before to be literate, to be healthy, and to be free to pursue your dreams,” Obama said, apparently forgetting the last two decades of human history.

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Alaska Physician Shuts Down Practice, Citing Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller After a long list of Obamacare failures in Alaska, one physician is shutting down his decades-old practice, charging that the health-care law and other federal PROGRAMS are “unsustainable” for practicing doctors.

Dr. William Wennen, a plastic surgeon, is closing his Fairbanks practice after 38 years of working in the state. Dr. Wennen blames federal HEALTH INSURANCE PROGRAMS, citing Obamacare, Medicaid and MEDICARE, for shutting down his practice.

“It is an unsustainable system,” Dr. Wennen wrote to his customers in a letter obtained by The Daily Caller. “I am personally writing off upwards of three quarters of a million dollars annually in free/uncompensated care.”

“My reasons for closing down the office are simply economic,” Wennen wrote. “The governmental agencies that are supplying ‘medical insurance’ to the elderly, the disadvantaged, the indigent and the sick, injured, or disabled have placed an unrealistically low value of worth on physician’s services.”

Medicaid typically has the lowest physician reimbursements of any federal program. Doctors have been protesting pay cuts for services through Medicaid and Medicare. It’s increasingly difficult for customers to actually find health care providers that accept the coverage — especially in private practice, where doctors are more hard-pressed to be profitable than at big-budget hospitals.

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WATCH: Obama's Disrespectful ‘Semper Latte’ Shocks and Offends

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Photo Credit: Instagram As he disembarked from his U.S. Marine Corps helicopter in New York, today, the president returned a formal military salute with a sloppy and careless salute while wielding a coffee cup, prompting some to dub it the “latte salute.”

The Daily Caller helpfully points out that this happened “only a few hours after he dispatched the nation’s military on their attack mission into northern Syria.”

Not seeing a problem, the president’s aides published the video on his Instagram account.

ABC excused the sloppy salute, saying, “while it is protocol for U.S. service members in uniform to salute the commander in chief, it’s not required for a civilian president to salute back, military experts say.”

Ronald Reagan is said to have begun the practice back in 1981.

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