united

UNITED NATIONS - It took a while for the United Nations to acknowledge errors by its Nobel-prize winning climate panel and order an independent review. But the study will not tackle past mistakes and probably will not change the minds of skeptics or Americans in a Luddite mode — despite overwhelming evidence from an overwhelming number of scientists that global warming is largely man-made. After ignoring negative disclosures, a spokesman for the U.N.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton dished up a bit of American politics for her audience at a town hall-style forum. Asked Tuesday how she would feel if former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican, were elected president, Clinton said, “I will not be emigrating.” Then she lamented the seemingly never-ending election cycle in the United States.

Quick, pop quiz: Where does the United States rank on female participation in government? In the top ten? In the top 20? In the top 50? Answer: America ranks somewhere around #71 worldwide, below Pakistan and Cuba, when it comes to the share of women in political office (in the US Congress, it’s less than 17 percent). That statistic tells just part of the story. At one time, Margaret Thatcher seemed to be the rare example of a female head of state, the isolated exception to the worldwide rule of male-dominated law.

By Alison Hamm, Media Consortium Blogger Over 100,000 people are believed dead after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday afternoon. The quake buried countless buildings, from shantytowns to the presidential palace. All hospitals in Port-au-Prince have been leveled or abandoned. The United Nations headquarters and the city’s main prison have collapsed as well. Thousands of residents are homeless and without food, water, or electricity. On the ground in Port-au-Prince Haiti is in a state of chaos, as Kayla Coleman reports for Care2.

Political pundits are like astrologers and psychics: They get away with making outlandish predictions and are remembered when lightning strikes and they guess right, but rarely are they called to account for a litany of missed calls that would put weather forecasters and stock market analysts to shame. We were told to be nervous about Barack Obama, but after one year in office, it should be clear to all but President Obama’s most partisan critics that he has been good for Israel.

The failure of world leaders in Copenhagen to come to terms with the climate crisis is provoking anger and disappointment. My colleague at YES! Magazine , Brooke Jarvis, reports on the climate deal and some early responses: Even those who brokered it acknowledge that the deal on the table at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is too weak to stop catastrophic climate change.

[ First, a cheap plug for my blog Senate Guru . ] The man who beat non-Democrat Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut urges you to stand with the man who will beat non-Democrat Arlen Specter in the 2010 Democratic Senate primary in Pennsylvania. Also, courtesy of The REAL Arlen Specter : In his 45 years as a Republican, Arlen Specter cast thousands of votes for his party and against Democratic principles. In the last eight years, he voted more than 2,000 times with the Bush Republicans.

Over the weekend, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California vetoed legislation that would have made California the first state in the nation to collect comprehensive data on the physical evidence collected from rape victims that is sitting in police storage facilities. The bill, AB1017, which sailed through both houses of the state legislature, had been hailed by advocates as model legislation and an important first step in reckoning with the huge backlog in the United States.

As news of Iran’s nuclear program made headlines today and nuclear tensions increase, we must remind ourselves that nuclear war is not ‘winnable,’ and that only steps towards zero nuclear weapons will make America safe.

“I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.” It is now official; those looking for the latest GOP conspiracy theory, the latest mighty mental meltdown of the base, eagerly barked out by even the supposed leaders and purported respectable figures of the party, stroked and teased by conservative wings of the press that seem to have no pressing substance to deal with, anymore, compared to these small trinkets of insanity — those looking for that latest race-tinged, conspiracy-riddled drama need look no farther. We have it.