Level IV Crisis

Image: French Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaks during the questions to the government session at the National Assembly in Paris, France, November 16, 2016. REUTERS/Charles Platiau

reuters.com - November 17th 2016  - Michelle Martin and Joseph Nasr

The European Union is in danger of breaking apart unless France and Germany, in particular, work harder to stimulate growth and employment and heed citizens' concerns, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in the German capital on Thursday.

Valls said the two countries, for decades the axis around which the EU revolved, had to help refocus the bloc to tackle an immigration crisis, a lack of solidarity between member states, Britain's looming exit, and terrorism.

"Europe is in danger of falling apart," Valls said at an event organized by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. "So Germany and France have a huge responsibility."

Vegetation grows between boat docks at the now defunct Echo Bay Marina in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Thursday, May 19, 2016, near Las Vegas. Lake Mead's surface was at its lowest level Wednesday since the reservoir was created.
(AP Photo/John Locher)

Lake Mead's drop to an all-time low is another sign that solutions to the West's prolonged drought may involve creative approaches to water allocation and conservation.

csmonitor.com - by Lucy Schouten - May 21, 2016

Extended droughts has shrunk the country's largest reservoir to an all-time low, and leaders in the West's water planning say the area's water users must shift how they view their most valuable resource.

“California and the rest of the West are now at a point where they really can’t dismiss ideas that once would have been considered downright silly,” Rich Golb, former president of the Northern California Water Association, and now a Vancouver-based water consultant for PacificComm, LLC, told The Christian Science Monitor. 

Lake Mead, hemmed in by the Hoover Dam, is the largest manmade reservoir in the United States and supplies water to California, Nevada, and Arizona, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.

United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon with actor Leonardo DiCaprio during his designation ceremony as the UN Messenger of Peace. Photograph: EPA

Julian Borger - New York The Guardian
21 Sep 2014 16.55 BST

More than 140 heads of state and government fly in to New York this week for the United Nations general assembly amid apprehension that international order is unraveling at an accelerating pace, while the world's leaders seem ever less willing or able to deal with the proliferating threats.

The UN's humanitarian agencies are in danger of being completely overwhelmed by the multiple crises. Ebola is spreading rapidly across West Africa, swamping rickety national health systems and a thus-far underfunded UN effort to stop its advance. The spread of Islamic State (Isis) extremists in the Middle East, feeding on the destruction of the Syrian civil war and exposing the weakness of the Iraqi state, has similarly outpaced patchy international efforts at containment.

Across newspapers, TV, and Internet, confidence no higher than 22%

gallup.com - by Andrew Dugan - June 19, 2014

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' faith in each of three major news media platforms -- television news, newspapers, and news on the Internet -- is at or tied with record lows in Gallup's long-standing confidence in institutions trend. This continues a decades-long decline in the share of Americans saying they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers or TV news, while trust in Internet news remains low since the one prior measure in 1999.

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