New satellite images released from Nasa this week showcase the dramatic reappearance of California's Tulare Lake after water swallowed swaths of land across the state's agricultural center that had long been dry.

Taken between the start of February and the end of April and colored artificially to help distinguish the water from vegetation and bare ground, the images highlight the scale of the transformation across the region still grappling with the aftermath of this winter's heavy rains and snow.

This isn't the first time the "ghost lake" has caused widespread flooding, but the onslaught of weather whiplash wreaked havoc on residents, agricultural workers and farms - and it's far from finished.

Tucked against the Sierra Nevada's white-capped peaks, the region will have to reckon with surges of snowmelt filling its waterways as the weather warms. On Thursday, the snowpack in the southern Sierra was 436% of normal for this time of year, according to California's department of water resources (DWR).

The western US has had an historic winter. From record-breaking cold spells to unprecedented amounts of snow, this has been a memorable cold season - and one that runs counter to the prophecies of the AGW party.

Starting with the cold - and according to data from the warmth-addicted NOAA - the US has set 7 all-time low temperature records so far this year (through April 24) compared to just one heat record, while 321 monthly lows have fallen in April alone (also through April 24) compared to 66 heat records.

Highest April 1st snow cover recorded this year

Regrading snow, in the official books going back to 2001, the largest area ever covered with snow/ice in the western US at the beginning of April so far was 2019's 1,030,820 sq km, but this year that figure was far exceeded, with satellite imagery showing that more than 1,149-960 sq km of the West was covered with snow and ice on 1 April.

By comparison, the average snowpack in the western US at the end of March is 242,000 square miles.

Is there a link between Psychiatric Meds and Mass Shootings?

Here's a question that every American should be able to answer: What percentage of the killers — that have carried out mass shootings across the United States — were on powerful psychiatric medications?

• a — 1%
• b — 25%
• c — 50%
• d — 75% or more

Why don't we know the answer to this question? Doesn't the United States have more mass shootings than any country in the world?

• Yes, it does.

And aren't these shootings the source of great suffering and anxiety?

• Yes, they are.

And don't most people genuinely want to know why these lone gunman feel compelled to kill innocent people?

• Yes, they do.

No lessens, no consequences

The Iraq war was spearheaded by a remarkably small group of people. It has become politically untenable to justify that overt disaster and some of the key architects of that war have, much belatedly, come to acknowledge as much. As late as 2013 Max Boot was still arguing there was No Need to Repent for the Iraq War. He had changed his tune by 2018, writing in his book The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, "I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost." Boot claims, "It was a chastening lesson in the limits of American power," yet in the same book complains that the modern conservative movement is "permeated with" racism, extremism and isolationism.

David Frum now describes the invasion as "a grave and costly error" and gives a thoroughly equivocal mea culpa. Robert Kagan says that the war "didn't go exactly the way we wanted it to" and that "many aspects of the war" were "unfortunate." Bill Kristol acknowledges that Iraq was "very difficult" and that "many things were done badly," but concludes, "I'm inclined not to think it was [a mistake]." Since the inauguration of Trump, Kristol has changed his mind on trans rights, on gays, on abortion — but not on the catastrophe that led to over a hundred thousand civilian deaths. He told Jewish Insider: "Ironically, I'd say I've changed or rethought my views more on domestic policy issues... Foreign policy, I haven't really changed my views. And I've been critical of Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan."

Despite the repeated disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere, these figures remain as combative as ever. In 2018 Kristol told Vox, "the fact that the public is, quote, "war-weary"... those instincts have be challenged." He told the Al Franken podcast that the Iraq intervention "didn't destabilize the entire Middle East, I wish it had destabilized some of those places more."

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been arrested as he appeared in a court in the capital, Islamabad, to face corruption allegations, sparking protests across the country.

The arrest on Tuesday is the latest twist in a months-long political crisis and follows several unsuccessful attempts to apprehend the cricketer-turned-politician, including a police raid in March at his residence in the eastern city of Lahore which he had managed to evade.

Musarrat Jamshed Cheema, a leader of Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, confirmed the arrest on Tuesday to Al Jazeera.

"He went for his biometrics procedure from where he was picked by the Rangers," she said, referring to the paramilitary force.

Many of the supposedly independent consumer, medical and civil rights groups that created the appearance of broad support for the mandate received funding from one of the vaccines' manufacturers.

In the midst of a contentious debate about Chicago's plan to force employers to require their workers to take the COVID-19 vaccine, Karen Freeman-Wilson, president of the Chicago Urban League, appeared on television to dismiss complaints that such rules would disproportionately harm the Black community.

"The health and safety factor here far outweighs the concern about shutting people out or creating a barrier," Freeman-Wilson said on WTTW in August 2021.

Despite western sanctions imposed on Russia over the Ukraine conflict, some Asian and specifically West Asian economies are importing significant amounts of Russian gasoline at discounted prices, and reselling it with windfall profits to the EU under their brand names.

Western sanctions have forced Moscow to actively diversify its energy exports - oil and gas exports accounted for 45 percent of the Russian government's 2022 budget - and it has rapidly filled the gap left by its diminished oil exports to Europe with new customers in China, India, and the Persian Gulf nations.

Despite the EU's prohibition on seaborne exports, during the initial quarter of the current year, Russian seaborne crude oil exports amounted to 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd), surpassing the 3.35 million bpd recorded at the onset of the Ukrainian conflict a year ago.

First reported by Michael Shellenberger, new details about the "Burisma leak" tabletop exercise of summer 2020 reveal a notable betrayal of principle by two famed papers

Last December, Michael Shellenberger reported in a #TwitterFiles thread that the Aspen Institute hosted a "Hack-and-Dump Working Group" exercise in the summer of 2020 titled, "Burisma Leak," which predicted with uncanny accuracy an upcoming derogatory story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden's lost laptop.

The documents Shellenberger published showed how at least five media figures, including David Sanger and David McCraw of the New York Times, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, then-Daily Beast and future Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman, and Rick Baker of CNN worked alongside Twitter and Facebook's chief moderation officers, Yoel Roth and Nathaniel Gleicher, to plan a response to a hypothetical damaging exposé about Joe Biden's son.

The "Burisma Leak" exercise predicted many elements of the real response to the New York Post's coming Hunter Biden story, including complaints from influential Democratic congressman Adam Schiff about its "source and veracity," and public statements from "former senior intelligence officials" falsely raising the specter of a "Russian operation."

The U.S. approved the first vaccine for RSV on Wednesday, shots to protect older adults against a respiratory virus that's most notorious for attacking babies but endangers their grandparents, too.

The Food and Drug Administration decision makes GSK's shot, called Arexvy, the first of several potential vaccines in the pipeline for RSV to be licensed anywhere.

The move sets the stage for adults 60 and older to get vaccinated this fall — but first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must decide if every senior really needs RSV protection or only those considered at high risk from the respiratory syncytial virus. CDC's advisers will debate that question in June.

'I spent over 50 years as a physician and educator at Penn Med. Now I'm using civil rights legislation to protect the profession — and American patients.'

For better or worse, I have had a front-row seat to the meltdown of twenty-first-century medicine. Many colleagues and I are alarmed at how the DEI agenda — which promotes people and policies based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation rather than merit — is undermining healthcare for all patients regardless of their status.

Five years ago I was associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, and prior to that, codirector of its highly regarded kidney division. Around that time, Penn's vice dean for education started to advocate that we train medical students to be activists for "social justice." The university also implemented a new "pipeline program," allowing ten students a year from HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) to attend its med school after maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). And the university has also created a project called Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project (PMAS) in order to "reshape medical education. . . by creating social justice-informed medical curricula that use race critically and in an evidence-based way to train the next generation of race-conscious physicians." Finally, twenty clinical departments at the medical school now have vice chairs for diversity and inclusion.