As bizarre as it sounds, laws restricting property owners from "diverting" water that falls on their own homes and land have been on the books for quite some time in many Western states. Only recently, as droughts and renewed interest in water conservation methods have become more common, have individuals and business owners started butting heads with law enforcement over the practice of collecting rainwater for personal use. (Access to the rainwater that falls on your own property seems to be a basic right, wouldn't you agree?)

Even though these laws restricting water collection have been on the books for more than 100 years in some cases, they're slowly being reversed thanks to efforts by citizens who have decided that enough is enough. Because if we can't even freely collect the rain that falls all around us, then what, exactly, can we freely do? The rainwater issue highlights a serious overall problem in America today: diminishing freedom and increased government control.

It is a calculated escalation that Islamic State is pursuing. It may even be that the images of destroyed artifacts are more effective than those depicting executions, because they are televised everywhere and not relegated to the depths of the Internet. And because we can understand the images of destruction - unlike the photos and videos of executions, which we see as acts of insanity beyond the scope of rational thought. We aren't just able to kill in the present, that is the message of these images, we are also able to destroy the past: We are the masters of both time and space. The caliphate's goal is to expand its path of destruction into the fourth dimension.

The global press uses terms like "monsters," "acts of barbarism" and "breaking taboos" to describe the actions of the IS terrorists. But is Islamic State really on an irrational rampage against the modern age? Are they really trying to bring back the Middle Ages? Or is it perhaps a rational plan, a propaganda trick calculated to pull the West into what the apocalyptic visionaries of IS see as the final battle? There is a widely held view that a jihadist who strikes a Mesopotamian statue with a hammer or uses a drill to destroy a winged bull from Nineveh is destroying the cradle of civilization, and this is certainly true. But it is also true that all of this didn't begin in February 2015 or in 2013, when Islamic State first appeared on the radar of Western media.

It began on March 20, 2003, when the American-led "Coalition of the Willing" invaded Iraq. It was this illegitimate war that created the "failed state" of Iraq in the first place, and today's threat arose from its ruins. The vacuum of power was what enabled the Islamists' fury to develop in the first place. The war on terror created today's terror being perpetrated by IS.

The argument holds that the IS approach, including its destruction of ancient cultural sites, can be viewed as more than merely the act itself. Instead, there is a tactic behind its actions, an escalation for the sake of escalation. Instead of a message from the 6th century, it is more of a military program intended to serve further conquests or the chance to finally draw the West into a last battle. After all, the logic behind Islamic State, and the logic underpinning the caliphate it has established, is that of constant conflict. A slowing of the expansion is not part of the plan.

All of this is evident in the scope of destruction: a methodical, nihilistic act of terror, perpetrated by an organization that in no way seeks broad support or even any form of sympathy. As Wood writes, it is important to take the apocalyptic desires of IS seriously. It's about the fight for "Rome," as IS says itself.

But some Palestinians see a silver lining to Mr Netanyahu’s election victory on such promises, arguing that it lays bare his – and Israel’s – lack of commitment to the two-state solution. That plays directly into the hands of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which since December has been accelerating efforts to secure Palestinian rights through the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other international bodies rather than through negotiations.

“What Netanyahu said wasn’t electioneering – that’s him,” chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told reporters in East Jerusalem Thursday afternoon. “Today the international community, and Israelis who believe in two states, must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us in order to preserve the two-state solution.”

Mr Erekat spoke directly after a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee, which Thursday set up a committee to implement a March 5 decision to end PA security coordination with Israel. While prominent Palestinian politicians have routinely threatened to end such coordination, which is widely credited with keeping calm in the West Bank and thwarting terrorist attacks against Israelis, Erekat says this time it’s for real.

He promised that there would be action within two weeks and that the PA would stop upholding its obligations for security coordination under the Oslo accords, though he declined to offer specific scenarios. However, he held out hope for a return to negotiations if Netanyahu apologized on television and said he would recognize the Palestinian state and end settlement activity.

Netanyahu was already trying to walk back his comments on Thursday, saying in an interview with MSNBC that his position had not changed, and that he supported “a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution,” while adding the caveat that under current circumstances it is “not achievable.” The Palestinian leadership, however, is by no means giving up. Rather it is underscoring that it’s more urgent than ever to achieve a Palestinian state along 1967 borders, living side by side with Israel, due to the rising extremism in the region and Netanyahu’s resort to “racist” rhetoric. “So we cannot sit still,” says Mr Zumlot, senior foreign policy adviser for the Palestinian Fatah Party. “We must provide an alternative for both the Palestinians and Israelis because evidently the Israelis are leaderless.”

The move follows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decisive re-election Tuesday after the incumbent publicly abandoned his commitment to negotiate a Palestinian state — the basis of more than 20 years of US diplomatic efforts — and promised to continue the construction of settlements on occupied territory. The development also reflects deepening pessimism over the prospect of US-brokered negotiations delivering peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Shortly before this week’s election, the United States informed its diplomatic partners that it would hold off any moves in the UN Security Council designed to put Israel on the spot at the United Nations in the event that Netanyahu’s challenger, Isaac Herzog, won the election. But US officials signaled a willingness to consider a UN resolution in the event that Netanyahu was re-elected and formed a coalition government opposed to peace talks.

The United States has not yet circulated a draft, but diplomats say Washington has set some red lines and is unwilling to agree to set a fixed deadline for political talks to conclude. “The more the new government veers to the right the more likely you will see something in New York,” said a Western diplomat.

In the wake of Israel’s election, UN and Israeli officials exchanged sharp words after UN spokesman Farhan Haq called on the new Israeli government to halt “illegal settlement-building in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” In response to the statement, Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, snapped back: “If the UN is so concerned about the future of the Palestinian people, it should be asking … why Hamas uses the Palestinian people as human shields.”

And despite signals from Israel suggesting that Netanyahu might walk back his rejection, late in the campaign, of a Palestinian state under his watch, Obama officials say they are taking him at his word. “The positions taken by the prime minister in the last days of the campaign have raised very significant substantive questions that go far beyond just optics,” said a senior administration official, adding that recent Israeli government actions were in keeping with Netanyahu’s rhetoric.

While saying it was “premature” to discuss Washington’s policy response, the official wouldn’t rule out a modified American posture at the United Nations, where the US has long fended off resolutions criticizing Israeli settlement activity and demanding its withdrawal from Palestinian territories. “We are signaling that if the Israeli government’s position is no longer to pursue a Palestinian state, we’re going to have to broaden the spectrum of options we pursue going forward,” the official said.

There is no virtually no chance that the US will trim its financial or military support for Israel. But some analysts believe that going forward, Netanyahu may be vulnerable in international forums where the US has long been a bulwark against criticism of Israel and its presence in Palestinian territories.

More provocative to Israel would be any softening of Obama’s opposition to Palestinian efforts to join the International Criminal Court, which the Palestinian Authority will formally join on April 1. Under a law passed by Congress, any Palestinian bid to bring war crimes charges against Israel at the court will automatically sever America’s $400 million in annual aid to the Palestinian Authority, although some experts suggested Obama could find indirect ways to continue some funding — even if only to prevent a dangerous collapse of the Palestinian governing body.

The issue of a nuclear EMP attack was raised in the final hours of this week's elections in Israel when US authority Peter Vincent Pry penned a column for Arutz Sheva warning of Iran's threat to free nations. "Iranian military documents describe such a scenario — including a recently translated Iranian military textbook that endorses a nuclear EMP attack against the United States," he wrote. A knowledgable source said that the textbook discusses an EMP attack on America in 20 different places.

Arizona Republican Representative Trent Franks, who is leading an effort to protect the US electric grid from an EMP attack, has recently made similar claims based on the document translated by military authorities. Once sneered at by critics, recent moves by Iran and North Korea have given credibility to the potential EMP threat from an atmospheric nuclear explosion over the US.

Pry has suggested ways for Iran to deliver a nuclear attack: by ship launched off the East Coast, a missile or via satellite. Either way the result could be destruction of all or part of the US electric grid, robbing the public of power, computers, water and communications for potentially a year.

The very existence of a draft provided perhaps the clearest indication the sides were nearing a written agreement as they raced to meet a March 31 deadline for a framework pact. The deadline for a full agreement is the end of June. Officials said the tentative deal imposes new limits on the number of centrifuges Iran can operate to enrich uranium, a process that can lead to nuclear weapons-grade material.

The sides are zeroing in on a cap of 6,000 centrifuges, officials said, down from the 6,500 they spoke of in recent weeks. That's also less than the 10,000 such machines Tehran now runs, yet substantially more than the 500 to 1,500 that Washington originally wanted as a ceiling. Only a year ago, US officials floated 4,000 as a possible compromise.

But US officials insist the focus on centrifuge numbers alone misses the point. Combined with other restrictions on enrichment levels and the types of centrifuges Iran can use, Washington believes it can extend the time Tehran would need to produce a nuclear weapon to at least a year. Right now, Iran would require only two to three months to amass enough material if it covertly seeks to "break out" toward the bomb.

According to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, currently the expectation is that machines, which now account for 10 percent of all manufacturing tasks, are likely to perform about 25 percent of them by 2025. (To understand the economics of this transition, one need only consider the American automotive industry, where a human spot welder costs about $25 an hour and a robotic one costs $8. The robot is faster and more accurate, too.) The Boston group expects most of the growth in automation to be concentrated in transportation equipment, computer and electronic products, electrical equipment, and machinery.

Meanwhile, algorithms are writing most corporate reports, analyzing intelligence data for the NSA and CIA, reading mammograms, grading tests, and sniffing out plagiarism. Computers fly planes — Nicholas Carr points out that the average airline pilot is now at the helm of an airplane for about three minutes per flight — and they compose music and pick which pop songs should be recorded based on which chord progressions and riffs were hits in the past. Computers pursue drug development — a robot in the UK named Eve may have just found a new compound to treat malaria — and fill pharmacy vials.

Xerox uses computers — not people — to select which applicants to hire for its call centers. The retail giant Amazon “employs” 15,000 warehouse robots to pull items off the shelf and pack boxes. The self-driving car is being road-tested. A number of hotels are staffed by robotic desk clerks and cleaned by robotic chambermaids. Airports are instituting robotic valet parking.

Researchers have devised a method of bypassing a fundamental barrier to the rapid spread of genes within a population. They believe that it could be used to spread malaria-resistant genes in mosquitoes to prevent transmission of disease to people. However, it could also be used to spread harmful genes rapidly in the wild, which has led other researchers to call for the imposition of strict safety controls over such research in case of an accidental escape from a laboratory.

The scientists have already demonstrated that it works in fruit flies reared in a high-security laboratory. When a genetically modified fly was mated with a normal fly, the mutated gene was passed on to about 97 per cent of the offspring, instead of the usual one-in-three proportion dictated by classical genetics.

"As a globally connected society and an export-based economy, Germany, more than others, depends on a functioning rules-based order," said Steinmeier, stressing that "the European Union is the world's most sophisticated example of a regional order. As such, we need to defend it."

With regard to the Ukraine conflict, Steinmeier pointed out: "We need to make sure that the military situation is calmed down in order to set the preconditions necessary to bring about a political process stipulated in the Minsk agreements." On the tense relations between the EU and Russia, Steinmeier said much "depends on whether Russia will be steering or disturbing the political process [in Ukraine]. The question will be whether we will be able to restore the trust that has been shattered."

Each year, the National Science Foundation releases a multi-million dollar study that monitors societal change in the adult population of the United States. The NSF researches things like life satisfaction, race relations, crime and punishment, and religion. For the past decade, this study has shown a steady decrease in the number of religious Americans.

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans say their religious preference is "none." This has increased almost 20 percent since the 1990s, when the percentage of Americans who affiliated as nonreligious was in the single digits. In comparison, around 24 percent of Americans affiliate as Catholic, the largest religious denomination in the United States. If the trend keeps increasing, in a few years the largest religion in the United States could be no religion at all.

The number of Americans never attending church or other worship services each weekend is at an all time high. More than a third of Americans say they never attend a worship service.

Last week, a trio of Google researchers published a paper on a new artificial intelligence system dubbed FaceNet that it claims represents the most-accurate approach yet to recognizing human faces. FaceNet achieved nearly 100-percent accuracy on a popular facial-recognition dataset called Labeled Faces in the Wild, which includes more than 13,000 pictures of faces from across the web.

Trained on a massive 260-million-image dataset, FaceNet performed with better than 86 percent accuracy. However, the approach Google’s researchers took goes beyond simply verifying whether two faces are the same. Its system can also put a name to a face — classic facial recognition — and even present collections of faces that look the most similar or the most distinct.

This is all just research, but it points to a near future where the types of crime-fighting, or surveillance-enhancing, computers we often see on network television and blockbuster movies will be much more attainable.

“In the long term, if we don’t make it available we’re afraid they’ll just take it,” said Charlie Mathews, a fourth generation rice farmer with senior rights to Yuba River water. He and his fellow growers have agreed to sell 20 percent of their allotment to Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Water District as it desperately searches to add to its dwindling supply.

It’s not really surprising that Southern California is looking for a place to buy water. But what is making news is how much they’ve agreed to pay for it: $700 per acre foot of water. Just last year, rice farmers were amazed when they were offered $500 per acre foot. This new price means growers will earn a lot more money on the fields they don’t plant, making water itself the real cash crop in California. “It’s much more than we ever expected to get.”

“But at the same time, that just shows the desperation of the people that need it,” Mathews said. The ripple effect of this will be felt around the entire state. If a Bay Area water district needs to buy more water, it will now be competing with Los Angeles to do it. “They have to pay whatever the last price, the highest price, people will pay,” Mathews said.

The regulations, carrying fines up to $500, add to restrictions put in place last year that rein in outdoor water use — for example, barring people from hosing down driveways. The new terms tread deeper into homes, businesses and the lives of most Californians, and are indicative of the state’s worsening water woes. “We are not seeing the stepping up and the ringing of alarm bells that the situation warrants,” said Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, which voted unanimously for Tuesday’s conservation mandates.

Conservation efforts statewide have fallen short of Governor Jerry Brown’s call for 20 percent reductions. Year-over-year water use in California dropped only about 10 percent during the last seven months of 2014, the period tracked by state officials. While the water board has empowered local water agencies to fine customers for violating state rules, most water departments, including the Bay Area’s five largest agencies, have not imposed penalties.

The western corn rootworm appears to have evolved to eat the corn that was bioengineered to defeat it. That has led the US Environmental Protection Agency to consider limits to continuous corn planting — experts say the practice of planting corn for three or more years in the same field has helped rootworms build up resistance.

"The GMO crops are available, and they've done a great job for a long time, but now we have a very formidable adversary with the western corn rootworm," said Brad Howe, a corn grower who farms in Gilman, Illinois, near where some rootworm resistance problems have been found. "They seem to be a pest that is able to constantly adapt to its environment and continue to change. So we've been fighting it and fighting it."

Monsanto's corn seed business has accounted for about half of its consolidated annual gross profits. Citi Research recently indicated that Monsanto's corn seed is gaining share, citing a survey of farmers in the Corn Belt.

The western corn rootworm has been around in the Corn Belt for decades but the voracious bugs started gaining resistance in the past several years to several varieties of engineered corn that utilize insect-specific toxin proteins, experts say. Rotating intermittently from corn to soybeans usually gets rid of the problem, but not always.