As the country keeps its eyes trained on Houston, another natural disaster is ravaging states far to the north.

With red flag warnings covering 200,000 square miles of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas saying the danger for new wildfires is imminent, firefighters continue to battle blazes that have burned huge swaths of land.

This summer has been particularly dry and windy for our northern neighbors and a lack of moisture and unfortunate weather has led to hundreds of wildfires burning across Montana, Idaho and northern California.

Rainfall at this point hasn't been much help; lightning strikes on Wednesday sparked at least 40 more in a state already on fire,according to the Great Falls Tribune. High winds are pushing the fires and helping them spread.

Firefighter Brent M. Witham of Mentone, California, died in early August after a tree fell on the 29-year-old.

Smoke is so heavy in Montana that planes couldn't fly over the fires to check their size or status, the Tribune said on Wednesday.

Back in July, Gov. Steve Bullock declared a state of emergency in Montana. The declaration was issued July 24, sometime after the federal government denied the state's request for aid. Three days later, the feds reversed their decision and sent FEMA in to help.


"Over the coming days, additional National Guard resources will be mobilized to continue to support the men and women fighting these fires," he said. "Our top priority remains firefighter safety and protecting Montanans and their property."

The town's 1,800 residents have been on high-alert with no end in sight, as new fires crop up every day - ten new ones popped up on Friday alone.

Towns in Montana, Idaho and other high Rocky Mountain areas are being smothered by the smoke from nearby wildfires, including Seeley Lake. The town is near a 34,000-acre fire and, according to the Great Falls Tribune, has been near a burning wildfire since July.

The fires have burned up more than 500,000 acres already, and the smoke from those fires is reaching southward to northern Colorado.

Air quality for the Denver metro area, as well as the Greeley and Fort Collins areas is unhealthy for sensitive groups, according to the state's website.

While Colorado and Wyoming are faring far better than parts of Montana and South Dakota, haze is still visible in some areas.

At this point, there's no end in sight. With the emergency declaration, Montana's governor is also mobilizing the state's National Guard to try and assist the firefighters in the region.

Fires in rural parts of the state have destroyed people's homes and, according to the Associated Press, the most recent estimates show they've cost the state $71 million so far.

(sott.net)

The rainy season is usually welcomed in parts of Africa as a timely break from the heat of the dry season. But so far, in 2017, the rains have given way to flood disasters which have led to a death toll numbering in hundreds.

Like severe floods in southern Asia, the disasters in Africa have been largely under-reported compared to similar events in Houston where Hurricane Harvey, a once in a "500-year storm" has wreaked havoc. But while the devastation in Houston could have hardly been avoided, many of the recent flood disasters in Africa have been exacerbated by years of poorly planned drainage systems. In another contrast, while rescue and relief operations in Houston have successfully saved countless lives and helped survivors, the same can't be said in parts of Africa that have been badly flooded, worsening the death toll. Across Texas, 50 people have been reported dead due to the tropical storm but across Africa, intense rains and mudslides killed at least 1,240 people in August.

Freetown, Sierra Leone

In mid-August, Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, was rocked by its worst natural disaster in recent times as a devastating mudslide destroyed homes and buried hundreds under the debris. An unofficial death toll suggests more than 1,000 casualties as, with hundreds still missing, the possibility of finding any survivors dimmed in the days after the tragedy. Sierra Leone's president Ernest Bai Koroma described the mudslide as overwhelming and called for "urgent support." The mudslide comes only three years after the Ebola outbreak which killed nearly 4,000 people.

It's not the first time Freetown—which records the highest annual rainfall in Africa—has suffered severe flooding. But the coastal city's problems have been worsened by decades of poor waste disposal habits and the government's lack of urban planning. More than half of homes in Freetown are defined as slums and most are built on hillside outskirts at the cost of rapid deforestation making the mudslide more devastating than it should have been.

Niamey, Niger

#MakurdiFlood ...God help us pic.twitter.com/KG69CfDNcr

— Peace Eziuzor (@treaspeace) September 3, 2017

Jidenna, the US-born Grammy-nominated musician with a Nigerian father, has also launched a social media campaign to raise money for victims of the flood.

The floods in Benue are also not a new event. "This happens every year and will likely happen next year, but the government pays lip service to it," Uma tells Quartz. "If we had working drainage systems, this would not happen."


(sott.net)

Low water levels revealed the strange jelly creatures at Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Within Stanley Park's "Lost Lagoon," a strange amorphous blob of life has appeared. The gelatinous "brain" is known as thePectinatella magnifica, or, more commonly, the "magnificent" bryozoan. What appears to be a single alien organism is instead the gelatinous gathering of hundreds of individual bryozoan "zooids." At a fraction of a millimeter each, it takes a lot of them to form into these oddly cerebral communities.

The gelatinous creatures are hermaphrodites, possessing all requisite reproductive organs within each individual. They spread from their gelatinous communal clumps via "statoblast," where clumps of cells are detached from a zooid that can reproduce themselves asexually to form another brain-like colony. Fossil records have placed ancestors of the modern bryozoan as far back as 470 million years, but they have never been spotted outside of areas east of the Mississippi River.

Their unique life cycle and method of sustenance mark them as a potentially "invasive" species. Because they sustain themselves on algae in nutrient-rich water, their proliferation could very well mean starving out other local organisms vital to a region's ecosystem.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why the bryozoan has begun to spread northward, or if it even has. In a 2012 report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it was suggested that a warming climate could be to blame for their northward migration.

Stanley Park Ecology Society's Celina Starnes is skeptical, however. She "[doubts] this is the first time" that the strange creatures have been this far north. First, because they are so easily confused for clusters of salamander eggs or rocks. Their naturally muddy color also makes it exceptionally easy for them to escape notice altogether.

University of British Columbia Biology Professor Ian Walker tends to agree, though the research is far from comprehensive. While he understandably hesitated to pass a final verdict on the bryozoan presence in Stanley Park, he noted that other bryozoans have been spotted in the Okanagan Valley, west of Vancouver.

According to Walker, "it's something that could have been easily overlooked in the past." Further, Walker theorizes that "we're near the northern limit of them. With a warming climate, they might migrate somewhere farther north. I can only really speculate how they might have spread."

If nothing else, at least we have finally located a known surplus of brains. Whether it will be enough to account for the seeming worldwide shortage remains to be seen.

(sott.net)

Early snows are already starting across North America August 31st snows in New Hampshire, Labrador & Quebec Canada and unidentifiable cloud formations over Georgia, USA. Solutions to expensive installation costs for greenhouses, lets look at what rural Chinese farmers are doing in cold climates.

(sott.net)

After 7 years of systematic and pathological lying, and fabricating thousands of fraudulent news reports about Syria, by now it's widely understood that US and UK media have now lost all credibility by now. Even since the defeat of the western-backed terrorist occupation of East Aleppo in December 2016, western corporate media outlets dispatched various trained gatekeepers and deep state stenographers in an attempt to try and rescue many of their legacy narratives, all of which have since collapsed after most western and Gulf-backed terrorists have fled their strongholds - while leaving volumes of damning evidence behind in the process.

With that in mind, we thought it poignant then to re-air this timeless exhibit - a breathtaking display of US propaganda gone array, where Yahoo! News reporter Michael Isikoff become mired in his own web of disinformation and official conspiracy theories, as he tries to deliver a series of canned talking points (straight off of the CNN and CIA briefing sheet) in yet another vain attempt to defame and demonize Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the Presidential Palace in Damascus. In this embarrassing exchange, Isikoff tries on a series of contrived 'reports' concocted by Amnesty International and the FBI, and even alludes to the widely discredited 'Caesar Photos' hoax, amid a sustained barrage of 'human rights' virtue signalling, all while accusing Assad of numerous "war crimes."

As interviews go, this was certainly one of the low water marks in US media history. Watch: