But now a punishing drought — and the unprecedented measures the state announced last week to compel people to reduce water consumption — is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been this state’s driving engine has run against the limits of nature.

The 25 percent cut in water consumption ordered by Governor Jerry Brown raises fundamental questions about what life in California will be like in the years ahead, and even whether this state faces the prospect of people leaving for wetter climates — assuming, as Mr Brown and other state leaders do, that this marks a permanent change in the climate, rather than a particularly severe cyclical drought.

These days, the economy is thriving, the population is growing, the state budget is in surplus, and development is exploding from Silicon Valley to San Diego; the evidence of it can be seen in the construction cranes dotting the skylines of Los Angeles and San Francisco. But even California’s biggest advocates are wondering if the severity of this drought, now in its fourth year, is going to force a change in the way the state does business.

US President Barack Obama has sought to accommodate Tehran and its sensitivities. He admitted that CIA participation in the 1953 putsch against liberal Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh had been a historical mistake. He also congratulated Iran on its new year holiday, Nowrus, calling the country a "great civilization," and he has written several personal letters to Supreme Leader Khamenei.

Despite all their differences, it appears that Secretary of State John Kerry is more comfortable negotiating with his smooth Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif, who studied international law in Denver, than with his coarser Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman. And US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, the former head of the physics faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seems to get along very well with Ali Akbar Salehi, the Number 2 man in the Iran delegation. It's no wonder, either, given that Salehi himself graduated from MIT.

If the nuclear negotiations do ultimately fail, Tehran will decry it as a humiliation. It will follow up by eliminating any restrictions and placing all of its energy into its effort to build a nuclear bomb. It will use national pride as the argument to oblige its people to persevere through difficult times.

In marking that anniversary, Pope Francis made plain his view of the vernacular Mass, one of the most visible changes ushered in by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The practice still pains Catholic traditionalists who mourn the loss of churchwide unity that came with a common language.

Allowing Catholics to pray in their local languages “was truly a courageous act by the church to draw closer to the people of God,” Pope Francis told a crowd gathered outside. “This is important for us, to follow the Mass this way. And there is no going back…Whoever goes back is mistaken.”

The situation will get worse and it will be difficult to move from state to state. After World War II the survivors came to the great men of Israel and Hasidic leaders and asked why they had not ordered the Jews of Europe to leave and immigrate to Israel or the United States before the war broke out? The truth must be told: they said and how much they said, begging Jews to please flee the burning ground, but part of the evil decree was that they were not listened to.

“Today,” the Riminov Rebbe said, “Listen to me carefully dear Jews, whoever has in his hand to get up and go and go to the Holy Land Israel as soon as possible while it is still is possible, this includes leaving large parts of South America and most of Europe.

“Also the US will be a place of danger in the war and it is still too early to say which states within the United States will survive, but many parts will be destroyed and poisoned, even civil war will break out in the United States and states will cut themselves off from the federal government. The US may not be used as a refuge but there will remain here survivors. Eretz Israel will be the safest place to survive the war, although there will also be terrible difficulties there.”

Time and money are both dwindling. No one knows precisely when the Athenian coffers will contain nothing but moths and lint. Trust, meanwhile, has long since run out. Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s quixotic finance minister, has accused the Brussels Group (comprising the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, and formerly known as the troika) of leaking the country’s latest reform proposals.

Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, is packing his bags for a trip to Moscow, following hot on the heels of his energy minister. Overtures have also been made towards Beijing. Domestically, things look increasingly bleak. Greece, which at one point looked like it was going to be the fastest growing European country this year, is weakening; tax receipts have collapsed. The government is already struggling to pay pensions, public sector salaries and other such sundries.

Meanwhile, €11.8 billion was pulled out of banks in January and swiftly followed by another €7.2 billion in February, rendering the country’s lenders increasingly dependent on emergency funding from the ECB. They may soon have to raise fresh capital to plug the widening holes in their balance sheets – if, that is, they can find amenable investors. It certainly feels like we are entering the end-game.

Forced Grexit would entrench a pervasive suspicion that EU bodies are ultimately agents of creditor enforcement. It would expose the Project’s post-war creed of solidarity as so much humbug. Greece could not plausibly remain in Nato if ejected from EMU in acrimonious circumstances. It would drift into the Russian orbit, where Hungary’s Viktor Orban already lies. The southeastern flank of Europe’s security system would fall apart.

Mr Tsipras is now playing the Russian card with an icy ruthlessness, more or less threatening to veto fresh EU measures against the Kremlin as the old set expires. “We disagree with sanctions. The new European security architecture must include Russia,” he told the TASS news agency. He offered to turn Greece into a strategic bridge, linking the two Orthodox nations. “Russian-Greek relations have very deep roots in history,” he said, hitting all the right notes before his trip to Moscow next week.

Sources close to the ruling Syriza party said the government is determined to keep public services running and pay pensions as funds run critically low. It may be forced to take the unprecedented step of missing a payment to the International Monetary Fund next week. Greece no longer has enough money to pay the IMF €458 million on April 9 and also to cover payments for salaries and social security on April 14, unless the eurozone agrees to disburse the next tranche of its interim bail-out deal in time.

“They want to put us through the ritual of humiliation and force us into sequestration. They are trying to put us in a position where we either have to default to our own people or sign up to a deal that is politically toxic for us. If that is their objective, they will have to do it without us,” the source said. Going into arrears at the IMF – even for a few days – is an extremely risky strategy. No developed country has ever defaulted to the Bretton Woods institutions. While there would be a grace period of six weeks before the IMF board declared Greece to be in technical default, the process could spin out of control at various stages.

“We are a Left-wing government. If we have to choose between a default to the IMF or a default to our own people, it is a no-brainer,” said a senior official. “We may have to go into a silent arrears process with the IMF. This will cause a furore in the markets and means that the clock will start to tick much faster,” the source told The Telegraph.

“You are hereby asked to evacuate the premises by April 2 at 7pm,” the notice reads in both Hebrew and Arabic. “Due to the work being done to rebuild the Holy Temple and the need to bring the Passover sacrifice, the area must be evacuated. We thank you for your cooperation,” the notice, signed in the name of “the Jewish People,” reads.

The notices were posted on the pathways leading to the entrance to the Mount by activists of the “Return to the Mount” organization. Two of the activists were caught while putting up the signs and were subsequently arrested by Jerusalem police. The group has also put up such notices in the past.

According to Jewish tradition, families or groups are instructed to take a lamb and roast it whole on the Temple Mount on Passover eve, for use during the evening's Passover feast. With the destruction of the Temple nearly 2,000 years ago, the requirement to bring the Sacrifice has been suspended.

As a small boy, Heyer was subjected to the misguided attention of his grandmother, who longed for a granddaughter and would dress young Walt in a purple chiffon dress, showering him with compliments as a beautiful girl, while withholding her affection whenever he was dressed as a boy. “That dress,” writes Heyer, “set in motion a life filled with gender dysphoria, sexual abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, and finally, an unnecessary gender reassignment surgery. My life was ripped apart by a trusted adult who enjoyed dressing me as a girl.”

Heyer has little patience for “enlightened” parents who think they are doing their children a favor by playing up their confusion and catering to their “dreams of being the opposite gender.” Though motivated by a desire to be open-minded and supportive, this parental behavior is ultimately destructive, says Heyer. In his early forties, Heyer eventually sought out a prominent gender psychologist for evaluation, and “he quickly assured me that I obviously suffered from gender dysphoria. A gender change, he told me, was the cure.”

Thrilled that he could finally attain his lifelong dream, Heyer underwent the surgical change, adopting his new identity as Laura Jensen, female. What followed is, according to Heyer, a common occurrence that few hear about. “The reprieve provided by surgery and life as a woman was only temporary,” he writes. “Hidden deep underneath the make-up and female clothing was the little boy carrying the hurts from traumatic childhood events, and he was making himself known.”

“Being a female turned out to be only a cover-up, not healing,” he writes. Later, a medical doctor re-diagnosed Heyer as having developed a dissociative disorder in childhood to escape the trauma of the repeated cross-dressing by his grandmother and sexual abuse by his uncle. “That should have been diagnosed and treated with psychotherapy. Instead, the gender specialist never considered my difficult childhood or even my alcoholism and saw only transgender identity,” Heyer writes.

Heyer blames gender specialists and trends in contemporary psychology for being far too quick to recur to the knife rather than helping patients deal with the deeper issues of their disorders. “It was a quick jump to prescribe hormones and irreversible surgery. Years later, when I confronted that psychologist, he admitted that he should not have approved me for surgery,” Heyer writes.

Prescription drugs have a disproportionately large effect on teenagers. A recent study published in Journal of Public Policy and Marketing sheds light on this issue, which the CDC has labeled an “epidemic.” Over 1,000 teenagers in 40 different regions around the US participated in an online survey that questioned them about their use of alcohol, tobacco, legal drugs and illegal drugs. Participants were asked if they suffer from anxiety, if they have a desire to be “popular,” how often they participate in exciting activities, and whether they consider using drugs risky.

The US government sees the China-dominated AIIB as competition to the US-dominated World Bank and Asian Development Bank. But now that it is clear even to the White House that the US can’t stop the tide, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew backpedaled vigorously on Tuesday. The government would welcome the AIIB, he suddenly said, as long as certain conditions are met, such as adequate transparency. So after this bruising setback, the US now has another opportunity to oppose China’s financial and monetary ambitions.

China is trying to get the IMF to bestow reserve currency status on the yuan, which would add the yuan to a glorious basket that includes the dollar and the euro – currently the dominant reserve currencies with a 63% and 22% share respectively. So it has been lobbying core members of the IMF behind the scenes for support, and they’re coming around despite US conniptions, the Wall Street Journal reported. Despite these US conniptions, the writing is on the wall, at least for the long term. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde summarized it last week while in China: The yuan as a reserve currency, she said, is more a matter of when, not if.

For China, it’s part of a long-term strategy, and not dependent on the next election cycle: reign in the power of the dollar – and the benefits it conveys to the US – by elevating the yuan and transferring some of those benefits to China. It won’t happen on a straight line. A “hard landing” or the outright implosion of the China bubble would be one of the zigzags along the way. But it will happen, and the US government is only able to slow down the process.

With a swift and sudden rise to power two months ago, the machinations of Mohammed, King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz’s favored son, remain elusive and his skill untested, even as he leads an aggressive — and escalating — Arab coalition intervention against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. In just a week of fighting, he’s become a poster boy for the Saudi-led military campaign, known as “Operation Decisive Storm,” as well as an embodiment of his country’s recent shift toward a more hawkish foreign policy in the region.

Yet he is a man whose youth and inexperience have left him almost invisible until now. Even the prince’s age is a matter of speculation and debate. Some peg him as young as 27. Others say he could be as old as 35. “He is a mystery,” says Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. More than a half-dozen other analysts and Middle East experts interviewed by Vocativ paint the prince in equally ambiguous terms.

As questions about Prince Mohammed grow, at least one thing is clear, observers say. He’s emerged as one of the most influential players in the House of Saud, and likely the youngest to yield any real influence. After ascending to the Saudi throne in January, his father, King Salman, moved swiftly to consolidate power, appointing the prince to three key cabinet posts. He made Mohammed defense minister and head of a newly-formed economic council. He also placed the prince in the role of chief of the royal court, the equivalent of White House chief of staff.

While the finer details have yet to be elaborated, the significance of this deal should not be underestimated. It will do much to defuse tensions around the Iranian nuclear programme and represents the culmination of more than a decade of political wrangling. While it is far from a perfect deal - many will argue that it rewards Iranian bad behaviour - the alternative would have been no deal at all and a significant deterioration of the diplomatic and security context. For western powers, the agreement will roll back elements of the Iranian programme and maintain an acceptable distance between Tehran and the bomb.

Among the measures announced, Iran’s 19,000 centrifuges will be reduced by two-thirds and the underground enrichment facility at Fordow will be converted into a research facility with enrichment activity confined purely to Natanz alone. For Iran, the deal allows it to keep a good amount of its nuclear programme while providing phased relief from economic sanctions as Tehran takes steps to implement the final deal if it is agreed by the end of June. If Iran fails to implement a deal then the sanctions will ‘snap back’ into place.

Crucially, a delicate dance of diplomacy has allowed both sides to present the outcome as a victory to domestic audiences, even if the naysayers – particularly in Tehran and Washington - will remain potential thorns in the side of successful implementation of the deal. But if the deal constitutes a pragmatic solution to a complex problem, it is also something of a Faustian bargain. While limiting Tehran’s nuclear activities and providing for an intrusive inspection regime, the deal also leaves Iran with a considerable enrichment capacity and the technical know-how to advance its nuclear programme at speed.

While major world powers and Iran made genuine progress in reaching a broad agreement in Switzerland on Thursday, the real test looms at the end of June when the deal must be finalized. "This is an encouraging development, but of course the devil lies in working out the details,” said Edwin Lyman of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group that is typically highly critical of nuclear power.

The marathon talks in Lausanne had been finely balanced between success and collapse, and Obama himself cautioned on Thursday that "success is not guaranteed" despite the agreement. Obama’s Republican rivals showed no signs on Thursday of retreating from plans to propose legislation that Obama says would undermine the talks, including a bill requiring that any final deal be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress.

US Senator Marco Rubio, a prospective presidential candidate, called the initial terms of the Iran deal "very troubling" and vowed to work to impose additional sanctions. Obama faces the challenge of calming Israel, which sees Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat and has previously hinted it might attack Iran's nuclear sites if it believes Tehran is making a dash to build an atomic bomb in defiance of any eventual final deal.

“Iran’s behavior in Syria and Iraq and Yemen, all of those places, is going to continue to muddy the waters for Obama in the Middle East,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations. “But there may be enough traction here to get to the next phase of negotiations.”