Free Republic

There’s more bad news over at Grand Canyon National Park: All of the park’s hotels on the South Rim will be closing indefinitely to overnight visitors as of Saturday, Dec. 6. Properties that will shutter include El Tovar, Bright Angel Lodge, Maswik Lodge, Yavapai Lodge and Trailer Village, park officials stated in a news release. The closures come on the heels of the devastating Dragon Bravo Fire on the park’s North Rim, which destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, the visitor center, a wastewater treatment plant and more than 100 other buildings. The South Rim’s hotels are closing due to...

National Resources Limited claims massive new gold and copper discovery, raising hopes for a mining bonanza and fears of local conflict At the Pakistan Minerals Investment Forum 2025, Muhammad Ali Tabba, chairman of National Resources Limited (NRL) and CEO of Lucky Cement, unveiled what he claimed are hitherto unknown substantial gold and copper reserves in Balochistan’s Chagai district. Announced in the company of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief General Muhammad Asim Munir, Tabba’s claimed discovery signals a potential turning point for Pakistan’s laggard mining industry at a time global gold prices are touching record highs of over...

Pakistan’s top general has set off alarm bells with an unprecedented warning—delivered not in Islamabad, but from Tampa, Florida. Speaking at a private dinner, Army Chief Gen Asim Munir said, "We are a nuclear nation. If we think we are going down, we’ll take half the world down with us." According to reports, this marks the first known instance of a nuclear threat being issued from American soil against another nation. The remarks came during a function hosted by businessman Adnan Asad, Tampa’s honorary consul, where around 120 guests of Pakistani origin were present. Security at the gathering was tight—cellphones...

Experts warn drought and water mismanagement have made the city's development unsustainable Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has suggested his country's capital will need to be moved from Tehran due to ecological unsustainability in the city. Speaking at a meeting in Qazvin, the president warned that relocating the capital would become unavoidable given the overcrowding and water shortages in the city of 9.7 million. His government has proposed the underdeveloped Makran region in southeastern Iran as a possible new location. "When we proposed relocating the capital, we lacked the budget - otherwise it might have happened," Pezeshkian told officials. "People said...

A misconduct probe into the boss of Silicon Valley’s largest water supplier has dragged on for a year – with no answers as to what the agency has discovered — while he continues to collect paychecks. A Santa Clara Valley Water spokesperson has confirmed CEO Rick Callender is still on leave. But the agency won’t say whether the investigation has concluded, or how much public money the agency has spent thus far to both investigate and pay its leader.

Iran is facing a mounting crisis, one that is driving their nation to the brink of disaster. This disaster is not the result of Israel or the United States dropping bombs on Iran, nor the result of crippling sanctions. The catastrophe Iran is facing is an unprecedented drought. The skies are shut up, the clouds are dry, the reservoirs are empty, the land is parched, and catastrophe looms. Here are some of the sobering facts about this deepening crisis, which constitutes the worst drought in the nation’s recorded history. Iran has suffered six consecutive years of drought. 10% of the...

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...

Water has power. So much power, in fact, that pumping Earth’s groundwater can change the planet’s tilt and rotation. It can also impact sea-level rise and other consequences of climate change. Pumping groundwater appears to have a greater consequence than ever previously thought. But now—thanks to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters—we can see that, in less than two decades, Earth has tilted 31.5 inches as a result of pumping groundwater. This equates to .24 inches of sea level rise. “Earth’s rotational pole actually changes a lot,” Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University and study...

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...

Then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you.— Deuteronomy 11:17Mother Nature may accomplish something that neither the U.S. nor Israel could ever have contemplated: the evacuation of Tehran's 9.7 million inhabitants. Iran is currently experiencing its fifth consecutive year of drought, and the autumnal rainfall is about a quarter of that in 2024, that would be two millimeters. In short, Tehran...

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,...

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.

The fight over the Colorado River’s dwindling resources is made for MAGA — but so far the Trump administration has been playing it straight. President Donald Trump loves a good water war — and the biggest one yet is about to land in his lap. A quarter century of climate change and drought has driven water levels along the Colorado River and its two main reservoirs to historic lows, threatening supplies that support 40 million people and economies from Phoenix to Denver to Los Angeles. The seven states that share the West’s most important river are locked in battle over...

Scientists have recreated the conditions inside a young planet, with magma and hydrogen, and uncovered a surprising way water might form. In the early chaos of planetary formation, before crusts cooled or atmospheres settled, water might already have been bubbling into existence. Not from icy comets or far-flung asteroids, but from the blistering union of magma and hydrogen gas. That’s the picture emerging from a new study led by Carnegie Science researchers, who’ve managed to reproduce the extreme conditions of young rocky planets in a lab. Their results suggest that planets may be able to make their own water, deep...

The U.S. has deployed troops and anti-ship missiles into the northern Philippines as part of almost continuous, joint war drills throughout the country. One goal is to block the Bashi Channel and deny Chinese warships access to the Pacific Ocean if Beijing launches an attack on Taiwan. As a former Philippine military chief told Reuters: You can’t invade Taiwan if you don’t control the northern Philippines.BATANES, Philippines - Marilyn Hubalde still remembers the first time she heard the thunderous chop of military helicopters swooping over this northernmost outpost of the Philippines, less than 90 miles from Taiwan. It was April...

Everyone knows staying hydrated is important, but new research highlights just how important it is for a less obviously related area of health—sleep. In the hypohydrated state, participants slept about an hour longer than their baselines on average, but, they reported having a significantly harder time falling asleep and feeling more fatigued the next morning. The study had 18 college-aged males report to the lab for four consecutive days. On the first day, they established a baseline hydration status. On the second day, they were euhydrated, meaning they were well-hydrated from having consumed 500 milliliters of water the evening prior....

BlackRock has finally come for our utilities.Here’s this, from a new article by Katya Schwenk at Jacobin:BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has its tentacles in all facets of American life. The behemoth is buying up grocery brands, dental practices, apartment buildings, and nursing homes. But the opaque industry of private equity has mostly stayed away from electric utilities, the regulated companies that supply power to homes and businesses, because they often don’t yield quick returns.That’s changing. Last year, the BlackRock subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners and a Canadian pension fund announced a $6.2 billion deal to buy Minnesota Power….That deal...

​Albuquerque, New Mexico- On Saturday August 16, Abortion Free New Mexico volunteers arrived at the Whole Woman's Health abortion center in Albuquerque to encourage moms with hope and help. Upon arrival the Water Authority was present and informed volunteers that the building had no running water. About an hour later one of the abortion center workers' husband arrived in a pickup truck with Texas license plates and began tinkering with the main water line for the building. Even though the building had no running water at least two couples went in for abortion procedures. One was dropped off by a...

Both the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory observatory SPHEREx snapped new images of 3I/ATLAS this week, almost two months after it was first spotted in the skies above Chile. 3I/ATLAS glows red in the new images with a seemingly threatening aura, though most scientists believe the object to be merely a 12-mile-wide interstellar comet. The snaps showed that 3I/ATLAS is “outgassing” as it approaches the Sun, which was expected. However, the object is dumping out a conspicuous amount of carbon dioxide and a surprisingly small amount of water and carbon monoxide, according to experts, including Harvard...

The Texas General Land Office (GLO) has formally objected to a plan by Pilot Water Solutions LLC to drill three new saltwater disposal wells in the Permian Basin, warning the project could contaminate state-owned crude reserves in North America’s top oil field, according to the Dallas Morning News. Founded in 1836, the GLO manages 13 million acres of state land and generates billions of dollars for Texas public schools through oil and gas leasing. It argues the proposed disposal sites in Loving County near the New Mexico border pose “significant risk” to mineral interests under its control. Bloomberg reports that...