Featured

Kenya's Olympic 800m champion David Rudisha suffers a shock defeat at home for the first time as a senior runner.

The Serious Fraud Office opens a criminal investigation into British company Soma Oil and Gas.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

This analysis was co-published with the Los Angeles Times.

Last fall, farmers working the flat land along the Colorado River outside Blythe, California, harvested a lucrative crop of oranges, lettuce and alfalfa from fields irrigated with river water. But that wasn’t their only source of income. They made almost as much per acre from the seemingly dead squares of dry earth abutting those orchards and row crops, fields left barren for the season.

The money crop that the fallowed land produced was one of the West’s most precious commodities: water. Under an experimental trading scheme set up by the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe and the Metropolitan Water District — which supplies municipal water to the Los Angeles area, Orange and San Diego counties, and much of the Inland Empire — the farmers essentially leased millions of gallons of their Colorado River water to California’s coastal cities.

It’s a prototype of a trade that may soon become much more common, and the kind of win-win scenario that could help solve the West’s water crisis.

The Colorado River basin — which provides water to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — is entering its 16th year of drought. The nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, is nearly two thirds empty, in large part because even in wet years those seven states take more water from the river than the Colorado, on average over the last century, has provided.

This overuse — coupled with arcane laws discouraging conservation, subsidies encouraging profligate water management and political gamesmanship — has helped make the West’s water desperately scarce and left its governments unprepared for a changing climate. ProPublica has reported extensively on these failures in its five-part series “Killing the Colorado.”

But, as experts such as former Arizona Governor and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt point out, there is, in fact, a great deal of water available in the Colorado River basin. There is just a gross imbalance — institutionalized through law and policy and tradition — in who has access to it.

At the core lies a fundamental tension between agriculture, which uses about 80% of Colorado River water, and the watershed’s growing cities, which desperately want to use more of it. Both present convincing claims: Colorado River-irrigated agriculture — including lands in Southern California — provides about 15% of the nation’s food supply; meanwhile, cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and L.A. want to continue to grow in order to remain vibrant and serve their millions of residents, who drive the region’s other economies.

This standoff has long shadowed development in the West. It stirs up divisive politics, a fight generally couched in terms of which water user is more important, more deserving and more responsible in its stewardship of a scarce natural resource — agrarian food growers or the urban pioneers of new economies.

But debating whether farms or cities are “more deserving” ignores a simple fact embedded in the foundation of law governing the West and its water: Though most water is technically a public asset, the right to use it was long ago promised to individuals and is virtually irreversible, so long as the water is put to good use. Those rights are viewed by many as inviolable private property rights.

Farms — many of which were granted their water rights 100 years ago — believe they earned them, through more than a century of pioneering and risk they shouldered to settle and build the growing regions that now covet their water. And in most cases, the courts and state governments of the Colorado River basin back them up. Yet very few deny that in a rapidly urbanizing region, shifting more water to the cities is an existential necessity. The real question is how best to do it.

State leaders could boldly try to redesign — to modernize — the legal architecture that assigned all that water to farmers on a first-come-first-served basis. But policymakers seem unwilling to take on such a daunting task, in part because it could bring hefty political consequences and would inevitably draw legal challenges. Protecting claims to water, for instance, is written into Colorado’s Constitution. Many view the taking of water rights — or redistributing them — as a form of eminent domain and anathema to the independent streak running through Western American politics.

There is an emerging consensus that a solution lies not in taking farmers’ property, but in buying it, establishing markets that would allow water rights to be traded. These schemes essentially allow capitalism to take a stab at solving the crisis and at establishing a more logical and sustainable water balance in the West. The Western Governors Assn. has endorsed the idea, as have many environmental groups.

The idea is that the cities — or whoever wants the water — can pay for it. Farmers, often financially struggling, would be compensated for water and therefore for crop losses; they might even turn their water rights into a new path to profit.

One common hurdle is the legal problems that the outright sale of water rights runs into. A claim on water is usually attached to a specific piece of land and for a specific purpose. If the rights are separated from those lands or the uses violate the terms of the deal, the rights can die out or the transfers — which are already allowed to a limited degree in places — can be challenged by other water users.

Another is the concern that selling rights and moving the water away can permanently dry up land, ensuring it can never again be farmed, a scenario that harms rural communities and could in the long term lessen the nation’s ability to produce food.

Once again, the technical difficulties and the political realities of such maneuvering may overwhelm efforts to establish a water market.

This is where Palo Verde farms and MWD may have found an ideal compromise. By basically leasing their right to water instead of selling it, the farmers aren’t permanently divorcing their water from the land. Over the last decade they have been testing a transaction allowed by Colorado River water law where they leave a portion of their water unused — and MWD can take it. Rules limit how much water can be transferred and for how long. It has been shown to keep the majority of the water on the land, keep farms in business, encourage water’s efficient use, and also turn water into a cash crop that cities want to pay for.

MWD and Los Angeles, of course, would prefer to own the water they deliver to users. Indeed, MWD showed its willingness to throw cash at the problem in July by buying some 12,000 acres of Blythe farmland, in order to control its water rights.

But by trading water for money in a much more limited and temporary way, farmers and agriculture can survive and cities can win access to additional water when they need it most. It requires stringent rules and limits to work, but enough such deals, and the West may have found a regulated, structured yet market-inspired solution for the future.

For more coverage of the water crisis in the West, see ProPublica's five-part series "Killing the Colorado."

The founder of MtGox - once the world's biggest Bitcoin exchange - is arrested by Japanese police investigating loss of nearly $400m.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are expecting a baby girl.

A Mauritian man who is living in the camp at Calais dubbed "the Jungle" has decided to give up trying to enter the UK.

by Terry Parris Jr.

Some of the best #MuckReads we read this week. Want to receive these by email?  Sign up to get this briefing delivered to your inbox every weekend.

High-speed police chases have killed thousands of innocent bystanders (USA Today)

High-speed police chases have killed thousands of innocent bystanders http://t.co/djWpaPBNSM

— MariaTFowler (@MariaTFowler) July 30, 2015

"Police chases have killed nearly as many people as justifiable police shootings, according to government figures, which are widely thought to under count fatal shootings. Yet chases have escaped the national attention paid to other potentially lethal police tactics."

A dream undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act (The New York Times)

You got to read all of @jimrutenberg on voting rights. Groundbreaking stuff on legal&political backstory http://t.co/7UPi5K2YhD

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) July 30, 2015

"'After a black president had won two elections, five justices arrogantly said they knew more than the evidence considered by 98 senators,' he said. 'Then on June 25 — a day that will go down in political infamy — they voted to gut Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, and thereby nullified preclearance under Section 5 — which meant, on June 26, 2013, we had less voting rights than they had on August 6, 1965.'"

How a little known agency mishandled several billion dollars of stimulus money trying to expand broadband coverage to rural communities (POLITICO)

Sen. Heller, at spectrum hearing, raises my story on a failed fed rural broadband program. Calls RUS a "disaster" http://t.co/D1UUg3RzY3

— Tony Romm (@TonyRomm) July 29, 2015

"More than 40 of the projects RUS initially approved never got started at all, raising questions about how RUS screened its applicants and made its decisions in the first place. But a bigger, more critical deadline looms for those broadband projects still underway: If these networks do not draw all their cash by the end of September, they will have to forfeit what remains. In other words, they may altogether squander as much as $277 million in still-untapped federal funds, which can't be spent elsewhere in other neglected rural communities."

Unlocked: The understaffing of juvenile hall (Youth Radio)

Great #muckreads by @youthradio on the worsening conditions & rising costs at Alameda County Juvenile Hall https://t.co/pVsx3B7NVI

— Joanna Lin (@joannalin) July 30, 2015

"According to county records obtained by Youth Radio -- guards at Alameda County's Juvenile Hall used pepper spray 147 times last year. Ninety percent of state-run juvenile correctional agencies don't allow guards to carry pepper spray at all. But here, with guards working an average of 30 hours of overtime per week, there has been an increase in the use of force on juvenile inmates -- like guards performing take-downs or handcuffing detainees. The department calls these acts "use of physical and mechanical restraints," and that number has nearly tripled in the last five years."

A three-part investigation.

by Nina Martin

In 2006, Alabama lawmakers passed a bill aimed at punishing parents who turned their kitchens and garages into do-it-yourself meth labs, exposing their children to toxic chemicals and noxious fumes. Support was bipartisan, the vote was unanimous, and the bill was quickly signed into law.

Nine years later, authorities in Lauderdale County in northern Alabama have sought to use that same law to deny a 29-year-old pregnant inmate in the local jail — accused of exposing her fetus to drugs — the right to have an abortion. In doing so, they have pushed the abortion wars into uncharted territory and highlighted just how central the issue of drug use in pregnancy has become to the battle over Roe v. Wade.

The case of the woman, identified only as Jane Doe, is extraordinary in many ways, including how abruptly it seems to have ended — or maybe hasn't. Earlier this month, after the woman told jail officials she was in her first trimester and wanted an abortion, the Lauderdale district attorney took the unprecedented step of petitioning a juvenile court to strip her of parental rights to her unborn child. Doe's fetus was given a court-appointed lawyer. The proceedings, like most everything that happens in juvenile court, were secret.  

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on the woman's behalf, demanding that she be granted a medical furlough or supervised travel to a Huntsville abortion clinic for appointments she made before her arrest. "I am very distraught," woman said in a declaration in the ACLU case. "[I] do not want to be forced to carry this pregnancy to term."

Alabama is one of the most anti-abortion states in the country — a testing ground for new ideas to limit access to the procedure. But federal courts routinely slap down the state's more restrictive efforts, including a 2014 law requiring court-appointed attorneys for the fetuses of minors seeking a judge's permission for an abortion — a concept with clear echoes in the Jane Doe case.

The ACLU's arguments seemed likely to prevail. Then, on Wednesday, two days before rulings were expected in the juvenile and federal court cases, the woman did an about-face. "After much consideration and counsel, I ... have decided that I no longer desire to pursue an abortion procedure and intend to carry the unborn child to full term and birth," she said in an affidavit to the federal court. "I have arrived at this decision of my own volition and choosing ... without any undue influence, duress or threat of harm."

The latest twist came late Thursday, when the federal judge hearing the ACLU suit, U.S. District Court Judge Abdul K. Kallon, ordered the woman to be brought to his Huntsville courtroom on Friday so he can hear for himself why she changed her mind. The session is closed to the public.

Doe's attorney in the criminal court case, Elizabeth Berry, did not return several phone calls. Chris Connolly, the Lauderdale district attorney, was unavailable for comment, his office said. Earlier this week, Connolly acknowledged that, "We oppose this [abortion] morally," adding, "It is the policy of the state of Alabama to protect all life — born or unborn."

The strange case alarmed women's rights advocates and civil libertarians, who say they can't recall a similar effort by local authorities anywhere in the country to deprive an adult, mentally competent woman of her parental rights while forcing her to continue a pregnancy.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine who writes often about reproductive issues, reached back to the 19th century for an analogy. Forcing a woman to forgo an abortion that she wants and to bear a child that she has no desire to parent "conscripts [her] into a chattel-like status," Goodwin said. "The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. You can't have enslaved bodies no matter what the state's intention may be."

"Nuts," is how Heather Fann, a Birmingham lawyer who heads the state bar association’s family law section, described the juvenile court action. "In terms of how family court generally establishes these issues ... you cannot adjudicate parental rights" until a child is born.

The right of inmates to obtain an abortion has been litigated frequently over the years, and courts have consistently said that incarceration doesn't cancel out that right. Jane Doe's sudden change of heart stunned her federal-case lawyers — and stirred their suspicions.

"This lawsuit is about Jane Doe's constitutional right to make her own determination regarding her own pregnancy rather than having the state court judge, the district attorney or the sheriff make that decision for her," said Randall Marshall, legal director for ACLU of Alabama. "If this is truly her own decision [to move forward with the pregnancy], it must be respected."

Still, he said, "the circumstances under which this affidavit was obtained are highly suspicious and raise serious red flags," adding lawyers are "in the process" of trying to understand exactly what happened.

Marshall worried that law enforcement officials throughout Alabama will become even less accommodating toward inmates seeking abortion. "There is an incredible amount of pressure that [government] forces can bring to bear on someone who is an inmate ... to try to prevent her to exercise her federally protected right."

Maurice McCaney, the lawyer who was appointed to represent the woman the in parental rights case, said confidentiality rules prohibit him from discussing the circumstances leading to Doe’s change of mind and affidavit. “I will say … that she is doing this of her own volition. She wasn’t promised anything, she wasn’t threatened with anything. This was a decision she made on her own,” he said.

In Jane Doe's case, a major source of pressure has been Alabama's "chemical endangerment of a child" statute, which has played a central — yet largely unacknowledged — role in everything from her arrest and detention to the district attorney's rationale for the juvenile court case.

The law makes it a felony to "knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally" expose a child to "a controlled substance, chemical substance, or drug paraphernalia" and carries exceptionally stiff penalties: one to 10 years in prison if a child suffers no ill effects, 10 to 20 years if a child is harmed, and 10 to 99 years if a child dies.  

The statute took effect at the height of the methamphetamine panic of the mid-2000s. The intent was to protect children living in homes that had become dangerous drug factories, state Rep. Patricia Todd, a Democrat from Birmingham, noted in an amicus brief in 2012.

But within months of its passage, prosecutors began arguing for a broader interpretation, declaring that "a child" could be a fetus and "an environment in which controlled substances are produced or distributed" could be a womb. Since then, hundreds of pregnant women and new mothers have been prosecuted under the law, putting Alabama at the forefront of a growing national trend to hold women criminally accountable for actions during pregnancy that authorities deem potentially harmful to a fetus.

The prosecutions have surged since 2013, when the Alabama Supreme Court weighed in, ruling that under state law, the word "child" includes embryos and fetuses from the moment of conception. It was the first time a state high court had said that drug users could be prosecuted from the earliest weeks of pregnancy. Advocates of personhood — the idea that fetuses are fully human, with all the legal rights that being human implies — hailed the decision as a turning point in their movement's efforts to dismantle the foundations of Roe. (Read ProPublica's story about the Alabama justice behind those decisions.)

At the time, women's rights groups warned that the Alabama ruling would have implications far beyond drug use in pregnancy, potentially including the right to abortion.

District Attorney Connolly specifically cited the Alabama Supreme Court's chemical-endangerment ruling in his motivation to terminate Doe's parental rights. "It was in that ruling that the [justices] said it is the policy of the state of Alabama to protect unborn and born children in Alabama," he told the Florence TimesDaily.com.

The exact circumstances of the woman's arrest in late June have not been made public, but according to court files, drugs were involved. The woman found out she was pregnant shortly before her arrest and was already in the process of arranging an abortion when she was placed in custody.

In her ACLU declaration, she noted that getting an abortion in Alabama is always a lengthy process, requiring a visit to a clinic for abortion counseling at least 48 hours before the procedure itself — and that nearest clinic was in Huntsville, 75 miles away. Though she was still in her first trimester, time was of the essence. "I do not know how long I will be in jail," she said in her ACLU statement, "but it could be several months."

The county sheriff's department, which runs the jail, said that under its policies abortion is not a medical emergency and that the woman needed to follow "proper department procedure" by getting a state a court order to obtain a furlough. The sheriff's attorneys argued that not requiring her to comply would show favoritism toward a particular class of inmates — those seeking an abortion — and would subject the department to a barrage of requests from inmates "to be transported for medical care at whim."

Sara Ainsworth, legal director of the New York–based National Advocates for Pregnant Women, has been tracking the Alabama cases and the larger national trend it represents.

"This case, as wild as it is, is the next obvious step," she said. "Once women are viewed as wholly separate from the fetuses they're carrying, you're pitting women in opposition to their own pregnancies, their own bodies. You have created a situation where a woman's personhood is secondary."

Update, July 31, 2015: After today’s hearing in U.S. District Court, Judge Abdul K. Kallon said he was satisfied by the woman's responses and would dismiss the federal lawsuit filed by her with the ACLU, AL.com reported. Chris Connolly, the Lauderdale district attorney, said his office's efforts to strip the woman of parental rights are being put on hold while she goes to a drug treatment program, according to The Associated Press.

A government-related agency in the US has published a report on privacy concerns relating to facial recognition.

Thousands of people in Mali's capital are flocking to see what it believed to be a religious sign that suddenly appeared on a wall of a toilet.