After five months of political chaos in Honduras, repeated attempts to reach a negotiated agreement for restoration of constitutional order have failed due to the defiant recalcitrance of the Roberto Micheletti coup regime and the complicity of the State Department. Given this impasse and the deepening human rights crisis, it is widely recognized that conditions for holding free, fair and transparent elections on November 29, just days from now, do not exist. Recognizing this dilemma, in late October the United States rushed a high-level State Department delegation to Honduras, bringing Micheletti back to the table and brokering the October 30 "National Reconciliation Agreement" requiring the reinstatement of President Manuel Zelaya by November 5. However, in a move paralleling the behavior of the Micheletti regime, a few days later, State Department officials reversed their position, stating that the elections would be recognized by the United States with or without restitution of President Zelaya, effectively breaking the accord.

In the cradle of civilization, young women have become terrified about having children. This is the news I take with me into Thanksgiving and the season of gratitude and family togetherness: that doctors in Fallujah, the Iraqi city we devastated in two military assaults in 2004, have begun documenting a startling rise in birth defects — about 15 times the pre-invasion occurrence of early-life cancers and brain and nervous-system abnormalities.

The economy grew at a 2.8 percent pace last quarter, as the recovery got off to a slower start than first thought. The government’s new reading on gross domestic product was not as energetic as the 3.5 percent growth rate for the July-September period estimated just a month ago. The main factors behind the downgrade: consumers did not spend as much, commercial construction was weaker and the nation’s trade deficit was more of a drag on growth.

Humanity would need five Earths to produce the resources needed if everyone lived as profligately as Americans, according to a report issued Tuesday. Today, 80 percent of countries use more biocapacity than is available within their borders. They import resources from abroad, deplete their own stocks and fill "waste sinks," such as the atmosphere and ocean, with carbon dioxide.

The CEOs of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the two investment banks that collapsed during last year's financial meltdown, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation even as the company's shareholders lost everything, says a new report from Harvard Law School. "The people who invested in these companies should feel betrayed," Nell Minow, a compensation expert at the Corporate Library, told NBC's Lisa Myers. "The whole idea of capitalism is that the people provide the capital and the executives take care of it for us. In this case, the people provided the capital, and the executives took it."

Business began the conspiracy of silence on the Trade War that rages in globalization

Of all the towns that have been subjected to drilling for natural gas in Pennsylvania since the opening up of the Marcellus Shale, none have suffered more than Dimock. -- In just over a year several drinking water wells have been contaminated (one of which exploded on New Years Day, ripping through an 8 foot slab of concrete), numerous spills have dumped highly toxic wastewater, diesel fuel, and fracking fluid into local streams and rivers, and residents have been exposed to dangerously high levels of methane gas and heavy metals. - The series of infractions on the part of Cabot Oil and Gas, a Houston based energy company that has large holdings in Dimock, resulted in a $120,000 fine from Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) earlier this month. But the cost to residents has been far greater. --- Of all the towns that have been subjected to drilling for natural gas in Pennsylvania since the opening up of the Marcellus Shale, none have suffered more than Dimock. -- In just over a year several drinking water wells have been contaminated (one of which exploded on New Years Day, ripping through an 8 foot slab of concrete), numerous spills have dumped highly toxic wastewater, diesel fuel, and fracking fluid into local streams and rivers, and residents have been exposed to dangerously high levels of methane gas and heavy metals. - The series of infractions on the part of Cabot Oil and Gas, a Houston based energy company that has large holdings in Dimock, resulted in a $120,000 fine from Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) earlier this month. But the cost to residents has been far greater. --- On Friday of last week 15 families in Dimock announced that they were suing Cabot for poisoning their water and the likelihood that exposure to toxic chemicals has led to personal injury, including neurological and gastro-intestinal complications. - Among the plaintiffs is a Cabot employee and Dimock resident who has knowledge of company practices and violations that have not yet been reported. --- According to Leslie Lewis, an attorney with one of the firms representing the families, the charges against Cabot are far reaching and reveal a profound degree of negligence and fraudulent conduct. "To me they just seem like a rogue operation," she says. "Anything goes."

If any senator threatens to kill the healthcare bill unless the public option is removed, whatever that senator was given for voting to consider the healthcare bill should be removed from the bill. Meanwhile, the proposal to repeal the antitrust exemption for the insurance industry, with strong Democratic and some Republican support, should be passed as separate legislation.

A new detailed map of Mars shows what was likely a vast ocean in the north and valleys around the equator, suggesting that the planet once had a humid, rainy climate, according to research published Monday. -- The computer-generated map, based on topographic data from NASA satellites, also shows that the network of valleys on the red planet is at least twice as extensive as previously estimated. "The relatively high values over extended regions indicate the valleys originated by means of precipitation-fed runoff erosion -- the same process that is responsible for formation of the bulk of valleys on our planet," said Wei Luo, geography professor at Northern Illinois University who co-authored the report.

Here's a question to ponder the next time you're taking off your shoes at airport security: Can you spot terrorists by the look on their faces? For the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the answer is yes. For the past few years, airports across the country have been using what many call "behavioral surveillance" to weed out potential hijackers among us, by covertly examining travelers' facial expressions and body language as they go through security. Unlike those airport employees who herd us along as we remove our shoes and relinquish all liquids over three ounces (with dubious results), this new program, named "Screening Passengers by Observational Techniques," or "SPOT," is carried out by TSA employees who have been trained to monitor travelers' faces and movements. As Americans head out of town this holiday season, more than 3,000 "Behavior Detection Officers" will be at 161 airports nationwide, watching our every move.

Jobs that not only help save the planet but usher individuals and neighborhoods out of poverty - talk about a silver bullet. - If the promise of green jobs sounds too good to be true, the simplicity of the logic is difficult to resist: Train and hire people who are economically marginalized in work that is critical but has been neglected. -- Instead of poor people getting stuck at the back of the line, they step to the front of the new technology.

Tony Blair's government knew that prominent members of the Bush administration wanted to topple Saddam Hussein years before the invasion but initially distanced itself from the prospect knowing it would be unlawful, it was disclosed at the Iraq inquiry today. British intelligence also dismissed claims by elements in the US administration that the Iraqi leader was linked to Osama bin Laden, it heard. Evidence given at the opening day of the inquiry, chaired by the former top civil servant Sir John Chilcot, painted a picture of a Whitehall slowly realising the significance of George Bush's election in November 2000 on US policy towards Iraq. Even before the Bush administration came to power an article written by his then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, warned that "nothing will change" in Iraq until Saddam was gone, Sir Peter Ricketts, a former chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC) and now the Foreign Office's top official, told the inquiry.

It is not too late for President Barack Obama to follow the example of Harry Truman, who fired Gen. Douglas McArthur in 1951 for insubordination. Then, as now, the stakes were high. Then it was Korea; now it is Afghanistan. No more slaps on the wrist for Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In my view, Commander-in-Chief Obama should fire him for cause.---Today, General McChrystal is conducting a subtler but equally insubordinate campaign for wider war in Afghanistan, with the backing of CENTCOM commander David Petraeus. It is now even clearer in retrospect that the president should not have appointed McChrystal in the first place, given what was already known of his role in covering up the killing of football star Pat Tillman and condoning torture practices by troops under McChrystal's earlier command in Iraq.

Whether Obama has adopted every last radical Bush/Cheney terrorism policy -- he hasn't -- is not the point. And the question of whether "Obama is as bad as Bush" -- he isn't -- is no more relevant than the excuse that Bush's torture program shouldn't be criticized because at least it never reached the level of Saddam's rape rooms and limb removals. As even Time now recognizes, many of the policies once widely declared by Democrats to be a grave threat to the Constitution are now explicitly adopted by the Obama administration. And it's flatly inconsistent to invoke "the rule of law" to defend Obama's decision to give trials to a few Guantanamo detainees without pointing out that he's violating that very same precept by denying trials to so many.

A new realism has emerged. Climate change is no longer rejected as a bogus theory the economy can ill afford. Instead, it’s a business opportunity. -- Companies hide behind ‘trade associations' to side-step the bad PR they might invite for opposing measures to fight climate change. -- The American Petroleum Institute spent considerable energy last summer stimulating fake ‘grassroots' opposition to ACES. The Act has now been so weakened by concessions to big business that the NGO International Rivers estimates it could allow US companies to avoid actually reducing their emissions until 2026. Now, with the US climate debate bogged down in the Senate, negotiators are rapidly talking down expectations for a strong climate agreement at Copenhagen. Companies hide behind ‘trade associations' to side-step the bad PR they might invite for opposing measures to fight climate change. -- The American Petroleum Institute spent considerable energy last summer stimulating fake ‘grassroots' opposition to ACES. The Act has now been so weakened by concessions to big business that the NGO International Rivers estimates it could allow US companies to avoid actually reducing their emissions until 2026. Now, with the US climate debate bogged down in the Senate, negotiators are rapidly talking down expectations for a strong climate agreement at Copenhagen. This is not the first time that business has had a defining impact on humanity's attempts to get to grips with the enormous challenge of climate change One often-repeated claim is that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent wherever they take place - which is only true up to a point. - It is worth stressing that offsets are not reductions. In practice, ‘offsetting' allows generous subsidies for existing technologies to mop up industrial gases, rather than stimulating the speedy shift toward the low carbon world we desperately need. As of September 2009, three-quarters of the offset credits being traded had nothing to do with CO2 reductions. Instead, they were for large firms, operating in developing countries, making minor technical adjustments to eliminate HFCs (refrigerant gases) and N2O (a by-product of synthetic fibre production). - Corporations and governments in the North then buy these credits to avoid taking action domestically. -- This flawed assumption - that the market can effectively drive the transition to more sustainable models of development - also underlies one of the major new initiatives on the table for agreement at Copenhagen: the proposal to curb deforestation, known as REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).

Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders that led to the country's joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. -- Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday, news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public about the country's involvement in war planning. --- It is nothing less than astonishing that so little news of the British investigation into the origins of the illegal Iraq War is being conveyed to Americans by this country’s corporate media — yet another example demonstrating that American journalism is dead or dying. - It is even more astonishing that neither the Congress nor the president here in America is making any similar effort to put America’s leaders in the dock to tell the truth about their machinations in engineering a war that has cost the US over $1 trillion (perhaps $3 trillion eventually when debt payments and the cost of veterans care is added in), and over 4000 lives, not to mention as many as one million innocent Iraqi lives.

Eventually, either in 2010 or 2011, Democrats will destroy the filibuster for legislation that will slash Social Security and Medicare. They will do it with the support of the White House, and many Democrats in both the house and Senate. And, even if the filibuster is preventing this for now, many Democrats are happy to come up with a means to circumvent the filibuster. They just don't want to go around the filibuster for health care.

Extracting oil from Alberta's tar sands jeopardizes the survival of our species, says Al Gore. -- "Gas from the tar sands gives a Prius the same carbon footprint as a Hummer," the former U.S. vice-president told the Star in an interview prior to a Toronto speaking engagement scheduled for Tuesday evening. -- "I know that doesn't make me popular in Alberta," said the jet-hopping environmental activist, best known for the movie and book An Inconvenient Truth. - "But it's simply a fact. A lot of money is at stake, but a lot of lives and the future of human civilization are also at stake." --- If Gore's warnings are heeded, expect housing prices to fall fast and far in Fort McMurray, the northern Alberta boomtown where single-family dwellings sold for a reported average of $629,582 in October thanks to the Athabasca tar sands megaproject. --- --- If not, then you might as well pack your bags for Armageddon, because that is where Gore believes the planet is headed unless humankind radically shifts from carbon-based fuels. - Time is short, he warns, and political will in the United States and elsewhere is lagging far behind what's needed.

David Obey has stumbled upon a way to further sink the GOP. He warned Obama that if he continued the Afghanistan War, he would institute a ''war surtax'' of 1% for most people and 5% for the wealthiest to pay for it.. He should add a bracket for businesses too. I would formalize it and add that when ever troops are sent into harms way, the tax is triggered and stays in place until the war is over, and the rates could be adjusted annually depending on the actual cost of the war. Then the GOP would have to choose between having a war or being faithful to their "no new taxes" pledge.

Hoggan cites the example of the recent Bonner and Associates/American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) scandal involving forged letters claiming to be from community groups unhappy with climate legislation and sent to members of Congress: "I've seen (Bonner and Associates) contracts where they're charging $1,800 a picket, $75 a letter. A grass roots organization doesn't do that; the people holding the pickets want to be there. The reason the $1,800-a-picket strategy works is because of lazy journalism. If journalists don't bother to ask who's paying you or to find out where the trail of money leads, they don't get the full story. And a lot of journalists don't bother.