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In California's farm rich Central Valley, where President Obama meets Friday with farmers and others who are affected by the state's historic drought, Todd Allen nods towards a field of brown, baked dirt passing by the right side of his truck.

"Here's a plot of ground that I'm not going to be able to farm. That's 160 acres," he says.

Allen owns a farm about an hour's drive west of Fresno, where half of the country's produce is grown. Usually Allen's fields contain cantaloupe, cotton, tomato and wheat.

"But now because of the drought I'm going to have leave it fallow," he says.

Fallow. Or unplanted. Allen says he's going to have to do that with 450 of his 600 acres and that it could put him out of business.

The drought is forcing hundreds of thousands of acres in the Central Valley to go unplanted this year.

But many farmers, like Allen, aren't just blaming Mother Nature for that.

"Twenty to thirty percent of our water is gone because of a little fish," he says.

That little fish is the delta smelt. You've probably never heard of it. But in California, it's representative of a decades old clash over water allocation.

There's not a lot of water in California. And there are a lot of people who want it: environmentalists, farmers, city folk.

The delta smelt is one species, caught in the middle of the debate.

"It's a convenient boogeyman," says Adam Keats. "It's a scapegoat."

Keats, who's with the Center for Biological Diversity, says the smelt are a key part of a complex ecosystem. They live in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, where much of the Central Valley's water comes from.

They are als, on the endangered species list.

And that means some of the Delta's water that would go to farmers like Allen is instead, allocated to the fish.

The result is a farmer versus fish controversy that's been going on for years in the state. This year, that political fight has enticed Washington.

"How you can favor a fish over people, is something that people in my part of the world would never understand," said House Speaker John Boehner during a visit to California several weeks ago.

He was there to support a bill — introduced by California's House Republicans — that aims to get farmers more water by rolling back environmental laws like the ones that protect the smelt.

Senate Democrats countered this week, with a bill that would give money for drought relief, and allow more flexibility around those environmental laws without gutting them.

Neither is likely to become law. So why all of the effort?

"Politicians don't want to let a good crisis go to waste," says Tom Holyoke, a professor of water and politics at Fresno State University.

He says that's especially true with mid-term elections coming up. Just turn on the TV, where there are ads like this one from Republican Doug Ose, who's standing in the dried out bottom of Folsom Lake: "We're facing a real water crisis here in Sacramento. Where's our representatives?"

The ads illustrate just how much the drought is going to be a part of campaign season. Ose is trying to unseat a freshman House Democrat who just barely won in 2012.

Democrats are doing the same in vulnerable Republican districts, targeting the GOP legislation that puts farmer's needs first.

"Saying 'we should re-allocate water to my constituents' doesn't require a whole lot of courage and is really an act of opportunism," says Michael Hanneman, an agriculture and resource economics professor at UC Berkeley.

He says that type of grandstanding doesn't accomplish anything.

California Governor Jerry Brown would agree. He and some state lawmakers have been annoyed with Washington's involvement — particularly the Republican sponsored bill. Brown calls it unwelcome and divisive.

The state's key water users have made efforts to reconcile their differences. But Hanneman says lawmakers haven't made the difficult, far-ranging decisions that are needed.

"They have stayed away from it. And they have stayed away from it because it's a situation where there's going to be winners and losers. So they don't want to touch it," he said.

But he says, sooner or later, they're going to have to. Barring a miracle-March, this drought isn't going to go away.

The federal government on Friday issued guidelines for banks seeking to do business with the legal marijuana industry, stopping short of a blanket immunity for them, but strongly indicating that prosecutions for such crimes as money laundering would be unlikely.

NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports that the Department of Justice and Treasury Department on Friday sought to "clarify rules for banks trying to navigate the murky legal waters of the marijuana business. Murky, because pot is legal in a growing number of states, but remains illegal under federal law."

"In the absence of specific federal guidance, most banks had kept marijuana businesses at arms' length, denying them loans, checking or savings accounts. [That] meant, like the street-drug trade, many state-sanctioned pot-sellers were doing cash-only trade," Yuki says.

The banks have feared that federal regulators and law enforcement authorities would punish them for doing business even with state-licensed operations.

The Denver Post reports:

"In a joint statement, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, said the move gives 'greater financial transparency' to an industry that remains illegal in nearly every state."

"It also makes clear that banks would be helping law enforcement with 'information that is particularly valuable' in filing regular reports that offer insights about how marijuana businesses work."

'"Law enforcement will now have greater insight into marijuana business activity generally," FinCEN said in a news release, 'and will be able to focus on activity that presents high-priority concerns.'"

The world's largest solar power plant, made up of thousands of mirrors focusing the sun's energy, has officially started operations in Nevada's Mojave Desert.

The $2.2 billion 400-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, which covers five-square miles near the Nevada-California border and has three 40-story towers, where the light is focused, is a joint project by NRG Energy, Google, and BrightSource Energy. The project received a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee.

The plant, which went online Thursday, is to power 140,000 homes. It was dedicated by U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

The San Jose Mercury News' Siliconbeat blog says:

"Unlike the photovoltaic solar panels that are common on the roofs of homes and commercial buildings, solar thermal technology concentrates the sun's rays to boil water and generate steam. Solar thermal, also known as concentrating solar power, or CSP, is land-intensive, requires access to transmission lines and typically faces several environmental reviews and permitting hurdles before projects can be built in the desert."

Iran's economy may be struggling, but that doesn't mean everyone is suffering.

In a downtown Tehran restaurant, a well-dressed young man who asks to be identified only as Ahmad sits with a friend enjoying a water pipe of flavored tobacco.

Ahmad is a bit vague about what he does – first he says he's in the petrochemical business, then describes himself as an independent trader. He shares the general consensus that President Hassan Rouhani has brought a better atmosphere to the country, but no real economic changes.

Ahmad's own problems, however, might not elicit much sympathy from most Iranians.

"The regulations definitely need to be changed," he says. "Take importing cars to Iran: The tariff is 105 percent on each car. I wanted to import two Mercedes, but you can only think about one."

Income inequality is one problem Rouhani faces, but the Iranian president says better economic times are coming for his country. Iranians are desperate to believe him, but beyond the marginal improvements that come with greater confidence in the new administration, very little has changed on the ground.

Iranians are pinning their hopes on a nuclear agreement and better relations with the outside world — achievements seen as difficult at best.

Another major problem that Rouhani faces in lifting Iran's economy is the opposition of entrenched interests who profit from Iran's isolation. For instance, the powerful Revolutionary Guard is a major economic player.

One graduate student who gives only his first name, Arman, says things hit a low point under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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