SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- As summer approaches, California is preparing to enter its fourth year of a record-breaking and potentially devastating drought. Concerns voiced by state lawmakers and emergency management officials about the crisis led Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency. But this week, despite lackluster conservation efforts and voluntary rationing, some of Southern California’s largest cities managed to exceed the state’s cutback goals. “California still leads the nation in unemployment,” one assemblyperson noted. “Our long-term jobless have been forced to eliminate a lot of luxuries and extraneous bills from their lives to stave off poverty. The silver lining is that their inability to keep the water on is working wonders for our attempts to lower consumption and usage levels.”

"Millions will perish if we can't produce enough bacon to mask the disgusting flavor and rubbery texture of the common British diet." -- PM David Cameron

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- With a global drought driving up feed costs, U.K. pig farmers are struggling to stave off the sharp decline in sow herds, which is threatening a worldwide pork shortage in the coming year. Insufficient rainfall across the United States and Eastern Europe has led to severely arid conditions with international repercussions. As a result, global food prices are soaring to record levels, forcing farmers to reduce the size of their herds. In Poland, the swine population has already dwindled by 9.6 percent. In Germany, by 1.3 percent. The National Pig Association in Britain called the looming shortage "unavoidable," with the drought continuing to blaze through corn, wheat and soybean crops. And the trend, the association says, is being mirrored across the world. While the news for pork-loving foodies is bleak, to millions of Britons it's dire. "Without bacon, at least two-thirds of England's population will die of starvation within the next three years," a statement from Britain's Department of Health warned.

Photo courtesy of GETTY

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Determining the origins of Earth’s oceans have puzzled scientists for ages. Because of the intense heat present after the planet’s creation, water would quickly have evaporated, making life unsustainable. For that reason, scientists generally placed the emergence of oceans around eight million years later. The question of where the water came from, however, remained a mystery. But astronomers now claim to have located a comet with the same chemical composition as the Earth’s oceans, proving that celestial bodies were a major source of water for early Earth. “It means it is not true any more that a maximum of 10 percent of water could have come from comets,” the lead astronomer in the study explained. “Now, in principle, all the water could have come from comets.”

Interestingly, the news captured the attention of presidential candidate Rick Perry, who said the findings demonstrated a clear link between the “very little we know about science” and the “preponderance of what we know to be true about Genesis. If we want to fix the world’s problems through science, let’s do it the way God did.”