Green Party of Tennessee

by Michael McCarthy

The world is heading for the next major climate change conference in Cancun later this year on course for global warming of up to 3.5C in the coming century, a series of scientific analyses suggest. The failure of last December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen means that cuts in carbon emissions pledged by the international community will not be enough to keep the anticipated warming within safe limits.

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by Severin Carrell and Bibi van der Zee

Greenpeace claims to have shut down offshore drilling by a British oil company at a controversial site in the Arctic after four climbers began an occupation of the rig just after dawn.

The environment campaigners said the four protesters evaded a small flotilla of armed Danish navy and police boats which have been guarding the rigs in Baffin Bay off Greenland since the Greenpeace protest ship Esperanza arrived last week.

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by Andrew Clark in Palm Beach, Florida

In the pre-dawn darkness of a steamy night of sub-tropical rain, a queue of anxious, soggy people snakes around the palm trees outside a cavernous Florida convention centre. Some have erected camp beds or makeshift tents. All clutch sheaves of mortgage documents.

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by Martin Chulov in Baghdad

On a pot-holed backstreet in eastern Baghdad, Saad Turki is sweltering under a corrugated tin roof, manning a giant pulley. The grime of yet another merciless summer day has stained his shirt ochre and he is parched from the rigour of a Ramadan fast.

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by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - In an effort to introduce a story of "progress" into media coverage, Gen. David Petraeus's command claimed last week that the Taliban is suffering from reduced morale in Marjah and elsewhere, despite evidence that the population of Marjah still believes the Taliban controls that district.

But the news media ignored the command's handout on the story, which did not quote Petraeus.

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by David Moberg

When President Barack Obama announced that his choice for Secretary of Education was Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, he extolled his basketball buddy as a pragmatic, successful school reformer.

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Statement by ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights

NEW YORK - The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) today filed a lawsuit challenging the government's asserted authority to carry out "targeted killings" of U.S. citizens located far from any armed conflict zone.

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by David J. Lynch

Amid mounting signs that the economic recovery is faltering, one potential remedy seems out of the question: a booster shot of government spending.

The White House says the multiyear $814 billion stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009 boosted employment by 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs and raised the nation's annual economic output by almost $400 billion. A recent study by two prominent economists generally agrees, crediting the pump-priming with averting "what could have been called Great Depression 2.0."

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by Nick Schwellenbach and Lagan Sebert

This piece is a collaboration between the Huffington Post Investigative Fund and the Center for Public Integrity.

When federal investigators discovered that the manager of a Saudi Arabian company paid bribes to win two lucrative subcontracts supplying food to American troops in Iraq, they naturally wanted to know more. Did he act on his own? Had U.S. taxpayers been cheated?

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by Jill Cecil Wiersma

MURFREESBORO - Bassma Fathy stood at the edge of a leveled lot where four construction vehicles used to break ground for an Islamic mosque were vandalized and one was set afire early Saturday morning.

Murfreesboro is the only home Fathy has ever known. She said she grew up with curiosity and questions about her Islamic faith, but this is the first time she has seen hatred.

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by Harriet Sherwood

Dozens of Israeli actors, playwrights and directors have signed a letter refusing to take part in productions by leading theatre companies at a new cultural centre in a West Bank settlement, prompting renewed debate over the legitimacy of artistic boycott.

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by Mike Scott

Harry Schearer is mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore.

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by Melanie Creamer

PORTLAND, Maine - The crowd, estimated at more than 300, gathered at Post Office Park in Portland, where the Maine chapter of Veterans for Peace held a rally to mark the organization's 25th anniversary.

The rally capped the national Veterans for Peace annual convention and business meeting held last week in Portland and themed "Lifting the Fog of War."

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by Katie Allen

European Union countries must drop their biofuels targets or else risk plunging more Africans into hunger and raising carbon emissions, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE).

In a campaign launching today, the charity accuses European companies of land-grabbing throughout Africa to grow biofuel crops that directly compete with food crops. Biofuel companies counter that they consult with local governments, bring investment and jobs, and often produce fuels for the local market.

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The US is set to mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the Gulf coast, killing more than 1,800 people.

US President Barack Obama will visit New Orleans, where sombre ceremonies are planned, including a tolling of the bells at St Louis Cathedral.

Louisiana residents held a symbolic burial for victims on Saturday.

The storm displaced hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom have still not returned.

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A leading prosecutor in Afghanistan says he has been fired for refusing to block corruption investigations into senior government officials.

Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar, a former deputy attorney-general, told The New York Times newspaper that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and his allies had blocked or stalled investigations into more than two dozen officials.

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The warnings regularly given by all manner of experts had been ignored for decades.

If Pakistan's authorities continued to allow the country's timber mafia and a benighted and oppressed peasantry to strip the country's forests at a faster rate than anywhere else in Asia, as is happening, floods of Biblical proportions would be inevitable. They would not be acts of God. They would be man-made catastrophes.

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by Robin McKie, Science editor In a few days' time, officials at the Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum in Greenland will reveal the winners of a new round of licences to drill for oil and gas in its waters. The announcement promises to be explosive.

Among those waiting are most of the world's leading oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell and Norway's StatOil. Watching with equal attention will be the planet's leading green groups, who they have pledged to block every effort to drill in the Arctic.

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NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana - On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the most destructive storms in U.S. history, President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and members of the Cabinet will travel Sunday to New Orleans.

The President will speak at Xavier University to commemorate the more than 1,836 lives lost and the sacrifices that the Gulf Coast has made to recover after Katrina.

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by Jonathan Steele

In Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit, the ruins of the Farouk palace, one of his many mansions, stand bereft and strewn with rubble. It seems only yesterday that I walked through them with the first Iraqi looters in April 2003.

During the night Hellfire missiles from US Cobra helicopters had knocked huge holes in the facade above the Tigris, bringing a triumphant end to the three-week invasion 96 hours after the fall of Baghdad.

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