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In Congress, the polluting industry’s lobbyists are taking aim at federal climate regulations. In California, climate regs are facing a court challenge from a different source.
On January 24, 2011, a San Francisco Superior Court judge issued a tentative ruling that could block the implementation of the AB32 Scoping Plan, the document that details how the state of California will implement the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.
Who took the state to court over their efforts to protect the climate this time? Not the oil companies, coal-dependent utilities, or anti-government Tea Partiers. No, this time it was environmental justice (EJ) interests represented by the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment and Communities for a Better Environment, and including West County Toxics Coalition, as well as several well-known EJ activists, many of whom served on a state environmental justice advisory committee. The case is called Association of Irritated Residents, et

What is the real agenda of the budget-cutters? Are they really trying to bring the country back from the edge of financial ruin? Or did they bring about the appearance of a borrowing crisis to create a public panic that enables them to impose “solutions” that change the very nature of our country — while doing little about the borrowing?
In the news this week, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker “ginned up” a budget crisis, then introduced legislation that removes collective bargaining rights from public employees, and over time effectively destroys their unions. Similar measures have been introduced by Republican governors or legislatures in several other states.
This legislative attack on public employees follows more than a year of “preparing the ground” with a coordinated campaign from conservative organizations to convince the public that public employees are overpaid and that their pensions are “bankrupting” state governments — not the effects of the recession.
In the news soon, the coming strategic “shutdown” of the federal government by Republicans. After decades of forcing through tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, again and again — most recently just a few weeks ago — Republicans and corporate conservatives are engaged in a national campaign promoting the belief that there is a “deficit crisis.” Their solutions involve gutting the things government does for We, the People like consumer, health, safety, labor and financial, retirement and income protections, while keeping things the government does for corporations and the wealthy “off the table.”
We see variations of the same formula over and

(Follow my colleague Ben Murphy this week and next as he works his way around the corridors of the UN during the Arms Trade Treaty negotiations)
Once again, I’m joining a group of campaigners from around the world for a one-week session of the negotiations towards an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) at the UN in New York (the so-called PrepCom).
With this short timeframe in mind, NGOs and a number of States are pushing hard for the discussion to move into a new phase — away from generalized statements and into the concrete drafting and debate of actual treaty text, clearer definition of terms, and clarification around particular elements of the treaty.
So what is it all about?
The last few decades have seen the signing of a number of international agreements regulating the trade in many types of weapons — chemical, biological, nuclear — and most recently, banning specific types of weapons such as landmines and cluster munitions. However, there is still no truly international, legally binding instrument that regulates the ways that states trade the whole range of conventional weapons — broadly speaking, everything else — with each

In a recent opinion piece on The Huffington Post, science fiction author Michael Stackpole wrote about my company BookBrewer, an eBook self-publishing service that launched last Fall. This post included numerous inaccuracies and uninformed statements that make BookBrewer sound like a bad deal for self-published authors, when in fact BookBrewer now offers the best prices and royalties anywhere.
As the founder and CEO of BookBrewer, I would like to set the record straight on a number of key points.
1) BookBrewer is its Own Company and is Not Owned by Borders
Stackpole seems to think that BookBrewer is a Borders-owned product, when in fact it is a partner of Borders that is owned by startup company FeedBrewer, Inc. This is clearly outlined in the Terms of Use on every page of the site. In addition, BookBrewer has its own independent Web site at

U.S. officials have admitted an American detained in Pakistan for the murder of two men was a CIA agent and a former employee of the private security firm Blackwater, now called Xe Services. Up until Monday, the Obama administration had insisted Raymond Davis was a diplomat who had acted in self-defense. The arrest of Davis has soured relations between the United States and Pakistan and revealed a web of covert

As the fashion flock moves to Milan for the fall/winter 2011 collections, Tod’s chairman Diego Della Valle, fondly called the Italian Ralph Lauren, talks about his life-long pursuit of Italian excellence, the reason why he bought shares at Saks and his part in keeping the Kennedy legacy alive.
Blue Carreon: Did you always set out to be in the fashion industry? What were your ambitions when you were a boy?
Diego della Valle: Not really. I worked in the family business, which was my father’s shoe making company that he had inherited from his father, and that led me to become interested in what could be achieved by a great Italian brand. That became my ambition as a young man. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a footballer and racing driver, like all

Each artist connects to different types of time in very different ways. The cycle of nature and the time of the world are independent from us: the time of nature, that does not need human beings to exist — it just goes through us, through things; the cultural time is a creation of another temporality to break the irreversible process of time. Finally, we have the time of inner awareness: which is the starting point of all the temporalities. This time only needs oneself to exist.
Time is both tension and scansion, rhythm and flux, continuity and discontinuity, and also repetition: All of which is translated in the artists’

Back around this time in 1983, the Houston Rockets were the worst team in the NBA, just playing out the string, waiting for the draft. Later that year they would choose the best college player of his day, Center Ralph Sampson with their first round pick, and the next year they would pick number one again and get Hall of Fame center Hakeem Olajuwon, but nobody knew any of that then.
The team’s woes had also been compounded that year by the sudden retirement of their best player, 27 year-old forward Robert Reid who left the NBA to become a minister (he would later stage a comeback), all of which moved their coach of the time, Del Harris, to say, “everyone on this team belongs in the League, just not all on the same team.”
Call it Harris’ Law and it’s true of most losing teams in most professional sports but especially in the NBA where the League’s salary cap, which in theory promotes parity, in practice makes it difficult to make the trades that build a losing team into a winner.
The result is an over reliance on free agency, the draft and prayer, even as some players get paid millions not to show up, and other players who could help somebody languish on their own team’s bench.
And it’s why the spectacle around Carmelo Anthony this month or where LeBron James was going last summer is a snapshot of everything wrong with the League, but I don’t want to go there right now; we’d never get to the playoffs.
No, I just want to see the two teams I’ve been watching all season, the Philadelphia 76ers and the Golden Gate Warriors get a little bit better.
Right now the Warriors are not a good team but they are one of the most entertaining teams in the League to watch, owing mostly to the guard play of Monta Ellis and Stephen

Why the Truth Isn’t Our Goal in an Interview
Sok and Sinay
Ouch Sok is a lovely man. Thirty-seven years old, dark skin, a few scars, that gaunt look common in people recovering from AIDS.
When we first meet Sok, he has a shy smile but his eyes are bright and eager. Now on antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) after being dangerously ill with TB and high fevers, Sok attended an AIDS counseling group set up by SCC, our partner organization in Cambodia.
Chhoom Sinay, age 26, is fair-skinned, quiet spoken, and has large, brown eyes that revert to sadness when no one is

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Libya protests: Obama condemns 'outrageous' crackdown

There is a point in Devotion when, after watching at least twenty sweaty minutes of aerobic sprints and clumsily struck tableaux, you are praying for Jim Fletcher. Fletcher, one of the two non-dancers cast in the male roles of choreographer Sarah Michelson’s latest work, is not only not a dancer but also not in particularly stellar shape, and his shirtless torso, the more liquid parts set a-jiggle by the extreme demands of Michelson’s choreography and a harsh light pendulum swinging overhead, stand in stark contrast to the prodigious technique of the female cast members. Fletcher, one might say, is the closest thing to comic relief in the almost two hours of heady, uninterrupted choreography.
Sitting in a 300-person audience with Marina Abramovic and members of the Wooster Group, one gets the sense that Michelson, for those that don’t know her work, is an artist’s artist. Devotion, her collaboration with New York City Players’ Creative Director Rich Maxwell, just finished a sold-out run at The Kitchen in NYC last month and two performances at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis this past week, and it will go on later this year to runs in San Francisco and Los

Working on my back deck with a friend in 2010
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Last summer, while replacing some of the planks on my back
deck, I distractedly turned on my cordless circular saw and upon feeling the end of my work glove starting to twist, looked down to see I was just about to saw off a couple of fingers. I had a lot to say at the time, none of which I’ll repeat here. But from the safe distance of time, I will now calmly describe the episode as they do in aviation as a “near miss.”
I was reminded of my folly this week in Geneva, while reading one news story lauding a decrease in air accidents and another suggesting an increase in cockpit automation errors may be cause for alarm.
I’m thinking that this is a healthy sign. Certainly avoiding airplane crashes is desirable, but to maintain and improve on aviation’s enviable level of safety, it’s not only accidents that need attention but the glove twisting, “oh s–t” inducing, stomach churning, mostly unreported and often unknowable near-misses.
I’ve written about the theory behind my philosophy in my last blog post about the miracle landing of Qantas Flight 32 in Singapore last

Army veteran Waldemar Alameda, 40, served our country with distinction in multiple tours of Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Following 17 years of service to his country, Alameda became permanently disabled by an IED explosion while serving as a staff sergeant in Tikrit, Iraq in 2007. He was about two miles from his destination, Camp Speicher — when he saw a hole in the road. He crept forward three feet from an artillery rigged with

When I came home from a meeting the other day, my daughter’s nanny, Mary Poppins, reported that gym class had gone well, but that some other mothers had inquired about the well-being of my two-year-old’s ceremonial fifth limb — her Barney doll.
My heart sank like a cannonball into my stomach. “Oh, God. Please don’t tell me Barney has gone missing,” I moaned, envisioning the sleepless nights ahead and kicking myself for not trying to find a team of replacement lookalikes during better, Barney-filled days.
To the sound of “The Way We Were,” I started playing a mental reel of all the good days we’d had with Barney, like how he’d been gleefully serenaded by everyone in music class, bounced merrily on the trampoline in gym, stubbornly insisted on occupying his own seat on airplanes, and hungrily shared meals and drinks with us just like a member of the family (if not a wee bit more important than all of us combined).
“No,” Mary Poppins said. “She just didn’t want to bring

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Welcome to budget season FY2012 — and FY2011. Adding to the usual budget chaos in Washington this time of year is not one, but two budgets. President Obama released his FY2012 budget request

Meet Edwin Tuccio, a bison farmer on North Quarter Farm in Riverhead, Long Island. He’s been raising bison for over 30 years, joining a small movement of passionate farmers to help bring the breed back to healthy numbers across the country. Right now, it’s good to be a bison farmer. There’s a growing demand for the meat, prices have doubled, and there’s a lot more interest in the food community, something Ed attributes to the changing American

The violence in Libya is unconscionable and the international community must unite in opposition to this brute use of force against non-violent protesters.
Yesterday’s speech by embattled Moammar Gadhafi reinforces the fact that he is willing to cling to power through whatever means necessary. Calling himself a ‘martyr’ and deploying machine guns and snipers against civilian protesters are the clearest signs yet of Gadhafi’s unwillingness to accept the Libyan people’s demands and their exercise of basic rights.

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

I didn’t realize how immersed I was in roads, rules and traffic signs until I took a safari in South Australia’s Gawler Ranges.
For five straight days, I saw neither a road, a stop sign, a McDonald’s or another human being — except, of course, for my two traveling companions and Geoff Scholz, the Australian bushman who guided our trek into the heart of Australia’s oldest mountain range.
Unlike an African safari where you’re just as apt to spot a herd of camera-toting tourists in photographer’s vests as you are a herd of wildebeest, a Gawler Range safari guarantees nose to snoot vantage points of kangaroos, wallabies, wallaroos, emus and lizards.
If you’re scratching your head right now, join the

However strange it might sound, there is something in common between visiting a particularly good art exhibition and going to that special restaurant for a great dinner with friends. In both cases, the moment you enter the premises, you are charmed and slightly seduced. By art and by the intelligence and elegance with which it is presented at an exhibition. And by the aroma of heavenly food that makes your nostrils flare as soon as you step into a

When it comes to inventive plots for medical thrillers nobody does it better than Michael Palmer. He proves it again with his latest novel A Heartbeat Away. In this book a virus is let loose at the “State of the Union” address which exposes most of the political leaders in the United States to a possibly horrible death.
The capitol is quickly sealed and the outside world is kept at

Rosalva immigrated to the U.S. 20 years ago, struggled to get by as a babysitter, house cleaner, and community service worker, while raising children. In 2002, Valarie lost her husband to gun violence in Hayward, leaving her as a young single mother to take care of their two children. And Lupe was a single mom, working full time at a low skill job while coping with her son’s diagnosis of

Guys get a bad rap when it comes to romance, but the guys I know who are happily married have a story about how they met their wives. Most of these stories involve a moment when they knew that they needed to spend the rest of their lives with this particular woman in order to be happy.
No, it’s not the pinup we’re after — it’s a rock collection, a kind smile, homemade furniture, enthusiasm for malls, crow’s feet, an affinity for dogs, eating tuna out of a can, love for Weird Al and truth-telling. These are just a few things that guys told me led them to know they’d found the right woman. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to love, but the one thing this project proved is that guys are far more nuanced and complex when it comes to love than we get credit

America’s political odd couples are joining forces once again in Los Angeles. What do I mean by that? Today, I testified at a Joint Congressional Field Hearing on transportation, where business and labor sat side-by-side and, with a unified voice, called on Congress to develop a national, bi-partisan approach to financing transportation and highway projects that creates jobs now.
What’s bringing these groups together? The need for jobs right now and the desire to do it the right way: without adding to the nation’s debt problems.
From the US Chamber of Commerce to the AFL-CIO, from Republican John Mica to Democrat Barbara Boxer, and from our biggest cities to our local Main Streets, over sixty mayors representing people across the country are coming together to support America Fast Forward.
It’s not every day that business and labor advocates agree. On this issue, they do. People of all political stripes recognize that creating jobs and investing in our nation’s transportation infrastructure is a bi-partisan