Free Republic

In recent days, prolonged water cuts across Tehran have created widespread panic among the Iranian capital’s 10 million residents. Last week, after years of drought and reduced rainfall and snowfall, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that Tehran’s residents would have to ration water—and eventually evacuate the capital—if there was no rain by late November. They’ve had years of warning, but Iran’s rulers have done nothing to resolve an increasingly existential water crisis. A few experts have been warning about the impending doom for decades. Most Tehranis, insulated from the hardships long faced by poorer, peripheral provinces, are only now feeling...

n a land where rivers have run dry, lakes have vanished, and fertile soil has turned to dust, men in clerical robes still stand on pulpits without shame and declare: “Women’s unveiled hair causes drought!” This is not satire, nor the delirium of a lone village cleric. It reflects the mindset of a regime that has ruled Iran for forty-six years, a regime still incapable of understanding that the connection between clouds and rain is scientific, not moral or religious. From its inception, the Islamic Republic was built on ignorance and superstition. Today, it stands idle before the greatest environmental...

Iran is set to turn off the water in several regions, including Tehran — as the country falls into the grips of its worst drought in decades. The Islamic Republic announced it would be shutting off its water supply on Saturday night due to the mounting crisis which will see the capital dry up — with officials contemplating evacuating it, Haaretz reported. “We are forced to cut off water supply to citizens on some evenings so that reservoirs can refill,” Energy Minister Abbas Alibadi said on state television Saturday.

Madani, who has long warned of environmental mismanagement in Iran, said the current water crisis across the nation was predictable. "The water bankruptcy situation was not created overnight," he said. "The house was already on fire, and people like myself had warned the government for years that this situation would emerge." President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that without rainfall before winter, Tehran could face partial evacuation, according to The Associated Press. Iran is facing its worst drought in decades, raising fears of evacuations in Tehran while threatening the regime’s stability and nuclear ambitions, according to a leading environmental expert. Kaveh Madani,...

A social media account affiliated with Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency published a pointed critique Friday of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accusing him of being unfit to govern due to alleged substance abuse and detachment from public needs. “How can a leader lead when they sleep half the day and spend the other half high on substances?” read the post in Farsi from the @MossadSpokesman account on X, formerly Twitter. It ended with a charged refrain: “Water, electricity, life!” The post, which was automatically translated from its original Farsi, did not name Khamenei directly but was widely interpreted as...

Barbra Streisand appears to have been shamed into cutting her water usage after shocking aerial photographs showed her Malibu yard looking lush and green despite California experiencing its worst drought in history. Residents across California have been demolishing pools, cutting back on showers and letting their lawns turn brown after experts estimated that there will be less than a year's worth of drinking water left in the state's reservoirs by the end of 2015. But recent aerial photographs have shown that many stars are keeping their yards well watered with their green lawns contrasting sharply with the dusty brown landscape...

Archaeologists have long debated why Maya communities in the Southern Lowlands suffered a period of widespread sociopolitical upheaval between a.d. 800 and 1000. During what is known as the Terminal Classic Period, dynasties collapsed, urban centers were abandoned, and populations dwindled, bringing an end to the Classic Maya civilization. According to a statement released by the University of Cambridge, potential new clues to the causes of this phenomenon have recently been identified in the Grutas Tzabnah cave in Mexico's Yucatán. Researchers analyzed oxygen isotopes in cave stalagmites that provided information about specific rainfall amounts during both the wet and dry...

***Kabul is running dry, withered by scarcer rainfalls and snow melts and drained by unregulated wells. It has become so dry that its six million people could be without water by 2030 — and are now fighting about it. Its water reserves are emptying nearly twice as quickly as they are getting replenished. The Taliban administration, short of cash, has so far been unable to bring water from nearby dams and rivers to the choking city. *** Kabul, surrounded by snowy mountains and crossed by three rivers, had never been known as a dry city. But while its population has...

Staff. July 25, 2025 Ilhan Omar’s Father and the Isaaq Genocide: The Truth Revealed. Between 1987 and 1989, the Somali military in which Colonel Nur Omar Mohamed, Ilhan Omar’s father, served as a senior officer executed a brutal and systematic campaign of genocide targeting the Isaaq people of the modern day Republic of Somaliland. This dark chapter in Africa’s history, which was known as the Isaaq Genocide, was a merciless military campaign that resulted in the killing of over 200,000 Isaaq civilians. It also involved widespread forced displacement, scorched‑earth destruction of the second and third largest cities (Hargeisa and Burao),...

Already prone to droughts, Iran has exacerbated the problem with poor water management policies, which Mr. Pezeshkian acknowledged on Monday. Climate change, too, has played a role; the country has weathered five consecutive years of drought. Now, the crisis has grown so extreme that the government shut down all government offices and services in Tehran and more than two dozen other cities across the country on Wednesday, creating a three-day weekend in an attempt to lower water and electricity usage. Fatemeh Mohajerani, a government spokeswoman, said cities could have similar closures once or twice a week going forward, and suggested...

If Iran is in the news because of its nuclear program, the greatest threat to the country’s well-being isn’t economic sanctions or the Sunni-Shiite schism. Rather, the greatest threat to Iran may be that the country is running out of water. The problem is so severe that social unrest, economic dislocation, even out migration can all be imagined. One government advisor recently predicted that as many as fifty million Iranians—seventy percent of Iran’s population—may be forced to leave because of a lack of water. Water problems are a proxy for bad governance, and Iran has water problems galore. By contrast,...

Te world only has 10 weeks worth of grain left, the lowest levels ever seen, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine is creating a "seismic" threat to global food supplies, Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker told the United Nations Security Council. "[T]he Russia-Ukraine war did not start the food security crisis. It simply added fuel to a fire that was long burning. A crisis we detected tremors from long before the COVID 19 pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains," Menker told the United Nations. Her software company, Gro Intelligence, uses human and artificial intelligence to predict food security and...

Russian president Vladimir Putin has acknowledged crop shortages as pressure on the country’s economy continues to mount. Pressure is mounting on Russia amid labour shortages, international sanctions, record interest rates, and inflation, but Putin’s admission of shortages of key crops marks a milestone in the nation’s woes. Speaking yesterday in a televised meeting, he said: “Yesterday, I met with representatives from various business sectors, including agriculture. It turns out that we don’t have enough potatoes. “I spoke with Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko. He said, ‘We’ve already sold everything to Russia’.” Potato shortages have become a serious problem in neighbouring Belarus, with...

Last week I wrote about the concerns of a pair of North Korea analysts that something had changed in the tone of the rhetoric emanating from Kim Jong Un. Of course North Korea has a long history of belligerent talk and threats against the US but something about this seemed different and more urgent. Kim said he was giving up on reunification with South Korea. Instead, South Korea would now be considered the North’s top enemy.But it’s more than just empty rhetoric. Sometime over the past few days Kim ordered a monument meant to symbolize hope for reunification torn down.Kim...

Trump Works To End California's Man-Made DroughtAP California Democrats want fire victims to sue oil and gas companies. President Donald Trump wants them to have access to more water. After surveying the wildfire damage in Los Angeles, Trump issued an executive order to "ensure adequate water resources in Southern California." He cited the problems with fire hydrants running dry and empty reservoirs. He directed the Bureau of Reclamation to "deliver more water and produce additional hydropower" to high-need communities. That may seem impossible. California has been battling drought for years. In 2022, Scientific American declared the Southwest's megadrought was "the...

Mayor Eric Adams declared a drought warning Monday — and halted a major aqueduct repair project to preserve the city’s waters supply — as New York City faces the threat of severe water shortages. Adams also directed city agencies to roll back water usage and urged New Yorkers to voluntarily do the same amid the historic rainfall shortage and dwindling water reserves. “Our city vehicles may look a bit dirtier, and our subways may look a bit dustier, but it’s what we have to do to delay or stave off a more serious drought emergency,” Adams said at a press...

FacebookTwitterWhatsAppFlipboardLinkedInRedditEmailShare The government is considering culling its elephant population to address food shortages and combat the effects of an El Niño-induced drought. Farai Maguwu, Director of the Center for Natural Resource Governance, expressed concerns that the proposal to cull elephants would attract widespread condemnation, much like Namibia's decision. Zimbabwe has about 100,000 elephants with a carrying capacity of about 45,000 and is unable to sell some of the jumbos because of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The country is among five southern African nations heavily impacted by the drought, leaving millions food-insecure. Namibia's decision to cull...

For months, scientists have worried that drought around Mexico City, which has over 22 million residues, would cause the city to run out of water. That day is approaching fast, and there is no alternative. Some groups of people in the city or some set of essential services will suffer within a few months or even weeks. The reservoirs of the Cutzamala water system, which provide about one-fifth of the city’s water, are essentially dry. The only available option is to attempt to take water from the aquifers below the city. There is not a large enough supply, and as...

The rooster bottle won’t get shipped anywhere until at least September.Marnie Shure is a writer and editor with over a decade of experience. For the past six years, she has been primarily focused on food publications, covering restaurant reviews, recipes, breaking news, fast food and grocery taste tests, industry trends, and more. She previously helmed The Takeout, a Midwest-based food website. Over the past few years, fans of Huy Fong Sriracha, the hot and garlicky chili pepper sauce in the iconic rooster bottle with the green cap, have experienced a roller coaster of emotions and heartbreak typically reserved for sports...

The effects of a “snow drought” are still plaguing parts of the West, after a stretch of warm, dry weather last month accelerated the season’s snowmelt, federal meteorologists reported. While California’s Sierra Nevada has received sufficient snow this season to escape such a designation, the same cannot be said for areas in the northern Rocky Mountains and Washington State, according to an update issued Wednesday. In those areas, which are enduring “the most severe snow drought,” snowpack at many lower elevations has melted one to four weeks early, per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Integrated...