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A lake that dried up 80 years ago looked set on Tuesday to reappear, as monster rainfall accumulated over California's wet winter season overwhelms the state's rivers.
Even as spring appeared in the northern hemisphere, there was no let-up for America's most populous state, with forecasters predicting another 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain and up to 4 feet (120 centimeters) of snow over the mountains.
"Another significant event... on top of everything that has come before is going to cause some major problems," meteorologist Daniel Swain said on Twitter.
In California's Central Valley, authorities issued evacuation orders for residents of communities in Tulare County, where a lake that dried up around World War II was set to reappear.
"Increasingly serious high water prospects in what is shaping up to possibly be a record Kings River runoff season have led the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Sacramento District to announce plans to begin a rare flood release into old Tulare Lakebed," said a statement from the King's River Conservation District (KRCD).
"Releases growing to 1,500 cubic feet per second... will begin taking the flood flows to the former lakebed in Kings County.
"They are anticipated to continue indefinitely, USACE officials said, possibly lasting until sometime in the summer."
Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake in the western United States, fed chiefly by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada range.
But as the area was developed for agriculture and rivers were diverted for irrigation, the lake shrank, and by the middle of the 20th century, it had become farmland.
It has flooded periodically since, including in 1983 when record snowfall covered the mountains, with 2023 shaping up to rival those totals.
Calling it "the winter that just doesn't want to end," the National Weather Service (NWS) in Reno, on the eastern side of the Sierra, said Tuesday this year is the second snowiest season in 77 years.
The western United States has been pummeled by a train of atmospheric rivers -- moisture-laden ribbons that ferry water from the Pacific over land.
The region has been suffering from a decades-long drought, but so much rain and snow has fallen this winter that the once-parched soil is now saturated.
Each successive rain event brings the threat of flooding, with the ground unable to soak up any more water.
On Tuesday, the NWS issued flood warnings to parts of San Francisco and areas south of there, and urged people to be exceedingly careful when travelling.
"Water levels are extremely high on area rivers, creeks, and streams. Heavy rainfall below 4,000 feet could cause flooding or worsen ongoing flooding today into Wednesday night," the NWS in Hanford tweeted.
© Agence France-Presse
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French scientist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, known as the father of the abortion pill, said it was "scandalous" and "a setback for women's freedom" that the US state of Wyoming has banned the drug.
Baulieu, who at the age of 96 is still working on treatments for depression and Alzheimer's, did not mince his words about the ban.
"It is a setback for women's freedom, particularly for those in the most precarious position who do not have the means to go to another state" to get an abortion, he told AFP in an interview.
Last week Wyoming became the first US state to outlaw the use of the abortion pill.
It was the latest point marked for conservative anti-abortion activists in the United States after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to the procedure last year, leaving the policy to individual states.
Baulieu said he had dedicated a large part of his life to "increasing the freedom of women," and the ban was a step in the opposite direction.
Born in Strasbourg in 1926 to Jewish parents, Baulieu was raised by his feminist mother after his father, a doctor, died when he was a boy. At the age of 15, Baulieu joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation.
He went on to become a self-described "doctor who does science," specializing in the field of steroid hormones.
Invited to work in the United States, Baulieu was noticed in 1961 by Gregory Pincus, known as the father of the contraceptive pill, who convinced him to focus on sex hormones.
Back in France, Baulieu designed a way to block the effect of the hormone progesterone, which is essential for the egg to implant in the uterus after fertilization.
"I wanted to make a contragestive," which stops gestation, he told AFP.
Partnering with the French Roussel-Uclaf laboratory, the oral drug RU-486, also known as mifepristone, was developed in 1982, providing a safe and inexpensive alternative to surgical abortion.
But there was a long battle for the drug to become authorized in the United States, where anti-abortion activists dubbed it the "death pill".
'Fanaticism and ignorance'
In early March, French President Emmanuel Macron praised Baulieu's resilience when he presented the scientist with the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'Honneur, the top rank in France's honors system.
"You, a Jew and a resistance fighter, you were overwhelmed with the most atrocious insults and even compared to Nazi scientists," Macron said.
"But you held on, for the love of freedom and science."
Baulieu's wife Simone Harari Baulieu, a media producer in France, said "adversity slides off him like water off a duck's back".
She added that the recent "step backwards" in the United States was propelled by "fanaticism and ignorance".
Even at age 96, Baulieu heads into his office at the Kremlin-Bicetre University Hospital in the southern suburbs of Paris three times a week.
Stacks of photos, diplomas and binders contain "the work of a lifetime," the scientist said, adding that he still wants to "be useful".
His latest award is pinned to his blue suit, but Baulieu said he "never seriously hoped to receive such honors".
"It was a pleasure, but what interests me is improving people's health."
'Driving force'
The team in his lab are continuing research he began years ago aiming to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease, as well as treatment for severe depression, for which clinical trials begin in the coming months.
Baulieu said "there is no reason we cannot find treatments" for both illnesses, which have stubbornly evaded many previous attempts.
Julien Giustiniani, the team leader at the Baulieu Institute, which was created to finance research into dementia, said Baulieu was "always enthusiastic".
"He is a driving force for us," Giustiniani said.
Though Baulieu now uses a cane to walk, he exudes a tireless energy.
He partly credits using DHEA, a natural hormone produced by the adrenal gland, which Baulieu first described in the 1960s and has been touted as an anti-ageing supplement.
The causes that have dominated his life were "women, brain health and longevity," Baulieu said.
"I would be bored if I did not work anymore," he added.
© Agence France-Presse
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Ahead of a possible indictment of Donald Trump, law enforcement agencies are investigating "chilling" threats, including against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, according to top Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig.
Leonnig was careful to say she is not aware of any of the threats being deemed credible, but also noted that "all sorts of law enforcement agencies" seem to be taking much more interest than some agencies did in the weeks before the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
"I have received copies and screenshots and internal documents and emails flagging concerns about specific protests, investigations into specific online threats that have been made that are not yet determined to be 'credible and likely to occur' but have been chilling nonetheless in terms of the threats that have been made about killing certain people," Leonning, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, said Tuesday on MSNBC's "Deadline" White House."
"Claims of, you know, 'Alvin Bragg needs to needs to die,' and claims online that could just be, you know, bravado, but are being seriously investigated and checked into this time around, ones that were not checked into as clearly at all in the weeks before January 6, despite significant warnings to the FBI about what these threats meant."
Mirroring Leonnig's reporting, Rolling Stone, citing law enforcement reports, on Tuesday noted: "Violent extremists are advocating lethal attacks and proclaiming their willingness to die for the cause."
"U.S. Capitol Police, the D.C. Fusion Center, and the Federal Highway Administration have all circulated warnings about the uptick in online threats over the past 48 hours. The bulletins and threat assessments detail some of the online threats and discussions about the use of specific tactics and methods for carrying out attacks — including online discussions about lethal attacks if Trump is arrested."
On Saturday in an explosive series of social media posts Donald Trump urged his supporters to "protest" and "take our nation back."
That “announcement was met with an immediate increase in violent online rhetoric and expressed threats toward government and law enforcement targets perceived as participating in a political persecution of the former president, as well as calls for ‘Civil War’ more generally.”
The DC Fusion Center, which analyzes threats, in a report stated it “assesses that potential criminal justice actions taken toward a former US president — or actions perceived to be taken toward the former president — remain a ‘line in the sand’ for [Domestic Violent Extremist] communities and thus have the potential to manifest in violence toward government targets or political officials,” Rolling Stone added.
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