Melting sea ice in the Arctic will kill thousands of bears in coming years, the US says

A spat over the Ramat Shlomo housing project in East Jerusalem becomes a bigger clash as the secretary of State calls it ‘an insult to the United States.’

A new study, funded by Nasa, has found that the most serious drought in the Amazon for more than a century had little impact on the rainforest's vegetation.

The findings appear to disprove claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even a small reduction in rainfall and could see the trees replaced by tropical grassland.

Adam Green, of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told Ed Schultz yesterday that he counts 51 votes in the senate for the public option, and cites details on senators who have not yet signed the letter, but who have clearly publicly stated that they will vote FOR the public option if they get that bill from the house.

Nancy Pelosi has said the votes aren't there, so she won't include the public option in the House legislation. Read this and try not to be angry.

"I wish to make it clear that there is absolutely no truth in the statement... that the 'Blair government…issued a D-Notice to gag the press from revealing the names of known paedophiles within the British executive'. No 'D Notice' advice has ever been issued in connection either with the Hollie Greig case or the naming of paedophiles, as these issues fall far outside Defence Advisory Notice concerns. "

'The Consummation of Empire' focuses us on Ferguson's core message: At the very peak of their power, affluence and glory, leaders arise, run amok with imperial visions and sabotage themselves, their people and their nation. They have it all.

But more-is-not enough as greed, arrogance and a thirst for power consume them. Back in the early days of the Iraq war, Kevin Phillips, political historian and former Nixon strategist, also captured this inevitable tendency in Wealth and Democracy:

It has taken a perfect storm of snow, scientific doubt and political failure to dent public acceptance of the reality of global warming - but these factors will pass.

A top British law firm helped stricken banking giant Lehman Brothers hide its debts in the run-up to the bank's collapse, a report said yesterday.

Linklaters, one of the City's 'magic circle' law practices, signed off questionable accounting techniques to disguise $50billion (£36billion) debts.

A prostitution ring linked to alleged corruption in the awarding of public works contracts for the G8 summit in Italy involved as many as 350 women, investigating magistrates said yesterday.

The apparent scale of the “sex for favours” affair, which was previously said to involve three or four women, is a further blow to the centre-Right Government of Silvio Berlusconi.

Before being elected as Pope Benedict XVI in April last year, the pontiff was Cardinal Thomas Ratzinger who had, for 24 years, been the head of the powerful Congregation of the Doctrine of The Faith, the department of the Roman Catholic Church charged with promoting Catholic teachings on morals and matters of faith. An arch-Conservative, he was regarded as the 'enforcer' of Pope John Paul II in cracking down on liberal challenges to traditional Catholic teachings.

Republicans now expect Democrats to pass health care through the House with a trick only Capitol Hill could dream up: approving the Senate bill without voting on it.

Democrats will vote on a separate bill that includes language stating that the original Senate bill is “deemed passed.”

So by voting for the first bill — a reconciliation measure to fix certain things in the Senate bill — that will automatically pass the second bill — the original Senate bill — without a separate roll call taking place.

It’s called the “Slaughter Solution” (prepare for a weekend of endless TV gabbing about it).

A study of almost half a million birds, belonging to over 100 species, shows that many are gradually becoming lighter and growing shorter wings.

This shrinkage has occurred within just half a century, with the birds thought to be evolving into a smaller size in response to warmer temperatures.

Utah's House majority leader said late Thursday he paid a woman $150,000 to keep silent about going nude "hot-tubbing" with her when she was minor a quarter century ago.

The `degradable` plastic bags handed out in their millions by Tesco are more harmful than those they have replaced, a Government study has found.

Wall Street was supposed to become the capital of a global carbon trading market worth a trillion dollars a year but now many who thought green trading desks would be the next big thing are fearing the pink slip.

DOES OUR GOVERNMENT RESPECT HUMAN LIFE?

The following list comes from declassified documents, news reports, videos, the National Archives, and from the final report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/radiation/

THE new swine flu vaccine ­contains a deadly brain toxin linked to autism, Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis.

Mercury, a vaccine preservative, was withdrawn from childhood jabs five years ago after evidence linked it to brain damage.

However, the Sunday Express has discovered the pandemic ­vaccine, to be rolled out across the country within weeks, contains the heavy metal.

You have an entity that took on too much debt. It cooked its books. It failed to get its fiscal house in order. Its “executives” repeatedly refused to take the necessary steps to rein in risk.

But when the LOGICAL consequences occurred — investors began dumping its debt and equities … and driving up the cost of insuring against default risk — what happened? Did officials listen to the message of the markets, apologize, find religion, and try to right the ship?

Heck no! They blamed the messenger.

Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that climate change and its rising sea levels and melting glaciers could bring, a geologist says.

Reports that Lehman was effectively ‘cooking its books’ prior to its ultimate demise are not a surprise.

Reports that Dick Fuld, then CEO of Lehman, was not aware of the nature of this cooking are both ridiculous and pathetic.

The lifeblood of every financial institution on Wall Street is access to financing for its operations. That financing very often comes in the form of repurchase agreements (repo financing), in which the institution borrows funds while pledging assets. These short term loans, often overnight loans, are unwound at a preset date and preset prices. The rates borrowers have to pay for funds borrowed depend on the credit quality of the borrower itself and the quality of the assets pledged.

The state's highest court on Thursday dealt the Friends of Lincoln Lakes a major legal defeat by reaffirming state approval of a $130 million industrial wind site intended for northern Penobscot County.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s unanimous ruling also upheld the constitutionality of a state law fast-tracking the permit process for Maine wind sites.

Rep. David Dreier (R., Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee, said the Slaughter Rule is evidence that Democrats cannot pass their bill "while playing by the rules."

“With the Slaughter Solution, House Democrats have exposed themselves as willing to abandon the most fundamental element of legislating – a transparent, up-or-down vote— in order to achieve a unpopular partisan objective. This is highly disturbing and in some ways, dangerous. The American people do not want this health care bill and they certainly don’t want the democratic process turned on its head in an effort to pass it over their objections.”

Would House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow House Democratic leaders try to cram the Senate version of Obamacare through the House without actually having a recorded vote on the bill?

Not only is the answer yes, they would, they have figured out a way to do it,

Cocaine users were last night accused of helping to make global warming worse.

MPs on the home affairs select committee said the drug was devastating Colombian rainforests because trees are knocked down to grow coca plants.

In bits and pieces, in Danish and English, from three universities in two hemispheres and the CDC in Atlanta, a picture has begun forming in the past few days that is already startling in its outline: Paul Thorsen, one of the key scientists involved in CDC-backed studies exonerating vaccines as a cause of autism, is under investigation for collecting millions of dollars in bogus “grant” money, misrepresenting himself to his employers and the world and possibly forging the documents that enabled the scam.

Billions of dollars are being spent on "fixing" the climate issue, but how much is invested in data collected to identify the problem?

There has clearly been a warming trend over the last century, but by how many degrees? A new report published by meteorologist Anthony Watts draws into question the reliability of temperature data collected at over 1,200 sites across the country.

Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.

These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.

82% of the American public wants tougher regulation of Wall Street.

Most top independent financial experts say that we need to break up the big banks and otherwise rein in the financial giants in order to save the economy.

But Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and Congress like things just the way they are

Gallup's annual update on Americans' attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.

News has just reached me that the great Professor Ian Plimer, scourge of climate-fear-promoters everywhere, has been suddenly disinvited by the Royal Society of Artists (RSA) from a lecture he was due to give in May before an audience including the Duke of Edinburgh.

Moves aims to restore public confidence in science of global warming after mistake over melting rates of glaciers.

I estimate that as much as 50,000 tonnes of gold have been sold that do not exist. That is equivalent of all the gold reserves in the world that are yet to be mined -- or, put another way, 25 years of gold production.

That is the granddaddy of all short positions.

The fractional reserve operation of the LBMA is likely to be the next Madoff scandal, except multiplied by 100 -- a $5 trillion fraud as opposed to a $50 billion fraud.

The year is 2010 and to anyone not in denial, the industrialized nations have entered the greatest calamity the world has ever known:

* 35 Million Americans on Food Stamps: 12 Percent of U.S. Population on Food Stamps Highest Since Records Kept in 1969, and that’s before the Obama administration announced a planned three-year budget freeze on government discretionary spending. (My Budget 360)
* 18 Million empty houses in the United States and 39 million Americans who are no longer working or looking for work, and that’s before Federal Reserve finishes rewriting the rules of American “capitalism” as US Housing, the Automobile Industry and the American Dream are dismantled. (The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M., David E. Sanger)

Some New York City chefs and restaurant owners are taking aim at a bill introduced in the New York Legislature that, if passed, would ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.

But as Joanne Nova, an Australian climate blogger (www.joannenova.com.au) and author of The Skeptics Handbook recently noted, it pales beside the $79 billion the U.S. government alone has spent on climate research and technology since 1989. (Nova rejects the science of anthropogenic global warming, which doesn’t change her point.)

Given that kind of public mega-money invested in climate science and technology in just one country, it makes you wonder about some things.

In a letter to the CFTC's Chairman, Gary Gensler, GATA Chairman William Murphy shares the following bombshell:

"GATA has evidence that there are enormous physical short positions in the gold and silver markets that cannot be covered."

Even as the CFTC is meeting later this month to establish position limits in the gold, silver, and other precious metals' markets, it could be none other than the CFTC's core banks, and Mr. Gensler's former Goldman bosses, that form the very core of the biggest market manipulation collusion syndicate in the history of the commodity markets.

It's a terrifying image transfixing Washington: President Barack Obama's bruising enforcer Rahm Emanuel, naked, in a communal shower, berating a congressman over perceived political cowardice.

The legend of Emanuel, revered as a master of the US capital's dark arts by allies and foes alike, is being further embroidered by a tour-de-force of score settling by resigning Democratic lawmaker Eric Massa.

The head of the International Monetary Fund on Monday proposed a plan for the world's governments to pool together to raise money needed to adapt to climate change, a rare step for an organization that normally does not develop environmental policies.

Eileen Danneman has uncovered document showing that the US Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius has extended the pandemic emergency to 2012 on March 5th, 2010, with little or no attention from the media.

A few years ago I took the time to read every published study that “proved” vaccines don’t cause item. Knowing this “Danish study” was the biggie, I started here.

It’s hard to put into words how dishonest and outrageous a study this is, and I knew after reading it that we were in for a long fight: if scientists will lie this explicitly and call it a study and if Pediatrics will publish something this dishonest, they are playing to win at all costs.

Two groups aimed at fighting global warming are uniting as their founder, former vice president Al Gore, sees massive opposition.

"There has been a very large, organized campaign to try to convince people that it (global warming) is not real, to try to convince people that they shouldn't worry about it," Gore said during an interview on the Norwegian talk show Skavlan to promote his newest book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

“Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting—and seas are rising,” said Al Gore -in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on February 27.

Both parts of Gore’s statement are false.

Never mind that Mr. Gore makes only passing reference to the IPCC’s fraudulent claims that the Himalayan glaciers will all melt by 2035. (“A flawed overestimate,” he explains.)

Never mind that Mr. Gore dismisses the IPCC’s fraudulent claims that the oceans are rising precipitously. (“Partly inaccurate,” he huffs.)

Never mind that Mr. Gore completely ignores the admission by the CRU’s disgraced former director Phil Jones that global temperatures have essentially remained unchanged for the past 15 years.

International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn today called for a huge global warming slush fund to be established as an interim measure before carbon taxes are implemented in the name of preventing weather disasters related to alleged man-made climate change.

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics.

A Danish scientist who was a key researcher in two studies that purport to show that mercury used in vaccines and the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine do not cause autism is believed to have used forged documents to steal $2 million from Aarhus University in Denmark according to reports in the Copenenhagen Post Online and a statement from Aarhus University.

A sharp-eyed viewer has noticed that when I was debating George Monbiot on TV yesterday and I mentioned that his cherished “peer-reviewed science” had been discredited by Climategate he bared his teeth like a cornered cur. Says my body language expert John Lish:

“It was a quite aggressive and defensive gesture which was noticeable when he was attempting to dismiss you (talking about peer review). A definite body-language sign of being rattled. He’s definitely uncomfortable about what’s occurring and others will have spotted that as well.”

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let’s review a few cases.

Here in the former capital of the Old Confederacy, where resistance to the supremacy of federal law has a long and tortuous history, a new battle is being waged over a question that could undercut a key part of President Obama’s health care proposal: whether Washington can require that most Americans have health insurance.

A forlorn polar bear cub is comforted by its mother as they drift miles from shore on a rapidly shrinking ice floe.

The Arctic-dwelling animals have become an iconic cause for green campaigners, who claim dramatic images such as these prove that global warming is destroying the world.

But despite this image being released today, it was actually taken in August last year, when it is normal for coastal ice to naturally break up and melt.

Although as of yesterday he was listed online as a member of a group that questions the validity of government and mainstream media accounts of the 9/11 attacks, state Rep. candidate Jonathan Loya says he is not a conspiracy theorist and joined the group because of his libertarian ideologies.

The climate campaign is a movement unable to hide its decline. Skeptics and critics of climate alarmism have long been called "deniers," with the comparison to Holocaust denial made explicit, but the denier label now more accurately fits the climate campaigners. Their first line of defense was that the acknowledged errors amount to a few isolated and inconsequential points in the report of the IPCC's Working Group II, which studies the effects of global warming, and not the more important report of the IPCC's Working Group I, which is about the science of global warming.

David Cameron's billionaire backer gave £1million to fight 75 marginal seats.. funded from off-shore firm