Thurs: The crazy f------ relatives still live in the house

This Won't Result In Much, But Someone was VERY Sloppy 

A second batch of classified documents discovered by US President Joe Biden's aides were found at his home garage in Delaware, the White House said.

The documents contained Obama-Biden Administration records, a statement by Mr Biden's special counsel said.

A first batch of documents were found at a private office in Washington DC that Mr Biden used after his term as vice-president.

The matter is under review by the US Department of Justice.

Mr Biden's special counsel, Richard Sauber, said the president is fully cooperating with the Department of Justice to ensure the files are stored properly by the US National Archives.

The discovery of the documents have been called a political embarrassment for Mr Biden, as it comes during an ongoing investigation into former President Donald Trump's own alleged mishandling of classified files.

Is It a Drought Or Is It a Flood? It's Two, Two, Two Problems in One.

California is a land of booms and busts. Nowhere is that clearer than in its rivers, trickling a month ago during drought and now suddenly swollen as fearsome storms pummel the state.

“There’s no Goldilocks moments in California,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California. “It’s either incredibly wet or incredibly dry.”

Six powerful storms supercharged by atmospheric rivers have struck the state since Christmas, according to State Climatologist Michael Anderson. Three more are expected in the coming days. At least 17 people have died, mudslides have poured onto roadways, and hundreds of thousands have lost power at times.

And despite all that water, state leaders are bracing for the possibility of more drought this summer in parts of the state.

“California is experiencing — coincidentally — both a drought emergency and a flood emergency,” said Karla Nemeth, the director of the state Department of Water Resources, adding that she attributed the situation to the impacts of climate change.

The situation has revealed a tension at the heart of climate concerns in the West: Communities aren’t getting precipitation when they most need it. And much of the infrastructure meant to help alleviate California’s too-wet/too-dry cycles — its extensive reservoir system — was designed long before there was recognition that climate change could intensify droughts and storms.

Now, communities balance dueling priorities. They’re desperate to store as much water as possible in reservoirs for hotter, drier summers, but some have been pressed to release some of the recent rainwater to manage flooding that could be juiced by a warmer atmosphere.

Weeks of intense rain still haven’t filled the state’s largest reservoirs, which reveals how severely the drought withered its water supply. Overall, much of the precipitation that has fallen during the atmospheric river storms won’t be stored for summer use.

“The vast majority of the water on the land is running off,” Mount said. “There is no economically viable way to store it.”

California is defined not only by its yearslong drought cycles, but also by its annual dry season, which runs roughly from May to September.

The time of highest demand for water — late spring and summer — is when nature provides very little precipitation to California.

That leaves the state’s reservoirs — in groundwater, snowpack and a system of dams — to fill the seasonal gap and help the state ride out prolonged stretches of drought.

“California would be a shell of itself if it was not for water storage,” Mount said. “We wouldn’t exist here.”

In a normal year, snowpack can provide about a third of California’s water supply. Groundwater typically accounts for about 40% to 60% of the water supply, depending on how dry conditions have become.

California counts on a system of about 1,400 human-made surface reservoirs and thousands upon thousands of miles of levees to manage surface water. About two dozen large reservoirs are responsible for more than half of the overall storage.

The reservoirs are designed not only to store water, but also to manage streamflows during the periods of heavy rainfall or snowmelt so downstream communities don’t flood.

“We are in this constant tension,” Mount said. “You want to capture every drop you can. However, these are multipurpose dams — they also have to do flood control. To do flood control, you want dams as empty as possible.”

So, Soledar?

As of Thursday morning, it’s difficult to say who actually controls the town of Soledar. Russia’s massive assault on that location has certainly gained them ground, though numerous videos of different groups of Russian soldiers being taken out by artillery, or drones, or a heavy machine gun emplacement certainly show that the cost of Russia’s advance has been extremely high.

As of this moment, videos just released by Ukrainian sources show Ukrainian soldiers reportedly in a portion of Soledar talking about how they were continuing to hold that position. On the other hand, the moneyman behind Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced yesterday that Soledar had been completely captured. He was then contradicted by the Russian ministry of defense.

Right now, any attempt to determine the situation in Soledar means sorting through an astounding flood of propaganda. Prigozhin may have only declared the town captured yesterday, but plenty of Russian sources, military bloggers, bots, and enthusiastic tankies got there ahead of him, declaring that Soledar had been taken now, or now, or absolutely now. Of course, with devastating loses by Ukraine. The sheer number of such reports is overwhelming, and it’s hard to read page after page on Telegram or Twitter declaring that the town has fallen—statements often repeated in the news media—without coming to the conclusion that Russia has somehow made some huge achievement.

In fact, there are plenty of accounts ready to testify that the capture of Soledar is far more important than Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Kharkiv. Because come on, what’s the liberation of 12,000 square kilometers, hundreds of localities, and cities like Izyum, Borova, and Lyman next to moving the line 2 km at Soledar?

The best of the worst of Russian propaganda on Thursday has to be the claim that citizens of Kharkiv—a city that had been battered by Russian missiles and artillery daily since the beginning of the invasion—were so thrilled to get the news about Russia’s capture of Soledar that they decided to celebrate Russia’s achievement with a fireworks display. This claim is repeated over and over on both Twitter and Telegram across hundreds of accounts and channels.

As twisted as that idea may be, it’s not as dark as the claims circulating on pro-Russian sites that 100, or 300, or 400, or maybe 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers were “trapped” in Soledar and decided to commit suicide. Yes, that’s also a thing the tankies are claiming this morning.