War is Hell might be closer to reality given the staggering suicide figures. As many as 14 soldiers are believed to have killed themselves in September, three fewer than the month before, the Defense Department announced Thursday.

"Policymakers who agreed to a two-degree C goal at the G20 summit easily fool themselves about what emission cuts are needed," Schellnhuber said. Even with a two-degree rise, most of the world's coral reefs will be lost, large portions of the ocean will become dead zones, mountain glaciers will largely vanish and many other ecosystems will be at risk, Schellnhuber warned. And there is the risk of reaching a tipping point where the warming rapidly accelerates. The planet has already warmed 0.74 C over the past century and the warming is now increasing at a rate of 0.16 C per decade, according the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report. With 2008 emissions at the very top end of the IPCC's worst case estimates, it is time to look at what that may mean for the planet, said Richard Betts of the Climate Impacts research team at the Met Office Hadley Centre in London.

The Washington Post is running scared these days with its editorial writers having great difficulty coming to terms with the possibility of improved US relations with Russia and Iran. They also can't understand why the Obama administration might decide that additional US military forces in Afghanistan will not solve the political and military problems there. There have been several editorials and op-eds this week that distort developments in each of these situations and predict failure for President Barack Obama. The fact that a "reset" button is needed and may offer the promise of success in our relations with Russia, Iran and even Afghanistan appears to be anathema to the Post. These policy changes, moreover, presumably led to today's news that President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to gain international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," which must have these writers apoplectic. Only yesterday, Post op-ed writer David Ignatius termed the prospect of any change of policy in Afghanistan as "lawless," and today Post op-ed writer Charles Krauthammer compared the president to a young Hamlet, who "frets, demurs, agonizes." [Note: No one really tells it like it is, incl. WAPO. That to fight more wars means more manpower that the US govt just does not have.]

As the war in Afghanistan entered its ninth year, the Labor Department recently released new figures [1] for the number of civilian contract workers who have died in war zones since 9/11. Although acknowledged as incomplete, the figures show that at least 1,688 civilians have died and more than 37,000 have reported injuries while working for U.S. contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.More than 5,200 soldiers have died in the two war zones, meaning that one civilian contractor has died for every three soldiers — a ratio that reflects the unprecedented degree to which the Pentagon has outsourced the work of war. Civilian contractors make up [2] about half the total U.S. forces in the war zones and they have been deployed on the front lines far more than any previous U.S. conflict [3].Despite the importance of civilian contractors to its mission, the Defense Department hasn’t been measuring their sacrifice. A little-noticed report [4] from the Government Accountability Office last week noted that the Pentagon has yet to implement a Congressional requirement to track contractor fatalities.

The House of Representatives today voted to expand the definition of hate-crimes legislation to include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability. This legislation was the culmination of years of attempts to curtail the type of crimes such as the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming who was murdered in 1998. It comes as Human Rights groups prepare to march upon Washington this weekend which will be culminated by a speech to the Human Rights Campaign by President Obama.

I respect people's right to disagree with my own. One thing, though, I hope we should be able to agree on is the idea that we can disagree on this without being called right-wing sympathizers or worse, terrorists. By that I mean, you can be a genuine progressive interested in peace and think this award is a travesty on progressive grounds, and also not think that the Rush Limbaugh/GOP attacks about this award from the right are valid at all. Likewise, you can think this award is a travesty and simultaneously hope that one day President Obama truly ends up building a record deserving of such an award...So the fact that the Democratic National Committee is calling everyone who opposes the Nobel committee's decision a terrorist is, in a word, disgusting. I know the DNC is responding to Republicans (whose basis for opposing the Nobel prize to Obama I disagree with), but by saying all critics of the Nobel award and of Obama's record (or lack thereof) are terrorists by virtue of their opposition is just sick and wrong.

JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse lobbied New Dem Reps. Mike McMahon (D-N.Y.) and Melissa Bean (D-Ill.) "to expand the ways the legislation allows dealers and major investors to trade the contracts," according to Bloomberg. The result of the banks' lobbying effort seems to be draft legislation that could actually exempt most financial firms from a wide swath of derivatives regulations. The discussion draft put forth by House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Bloomberg reported Thursday, would not regulate derivatives used by financial companies for the rather ambiguous purpose of "risk management." Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, "I congratulate my fellow New Dem Members, 15 of whom serve on the Financial Services Committee, for their work with Chairman Frank to reform our financial system to provide greater protections for American consumers and businesses while ensuring continued access to valuable tools to manage risk."

There is a further irony in offering a peace prize to a president whose principal preoccupation at the moment is when and how to expand the war in Afghanistan. The spectacle of Mr Obama mounting the podium in Oslo to accept a prize that once went to Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Theresa would be all the more absurd if it follows a White House decision to send up to 40,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. However just such a war may be deemed in Western eyes, Muslims would not be the only group to complain that peace is hardly compatible with an escalation in hostilities. Mr Obama’s prize is more likely, however, to be compared with the most contentious prize of all: the 1973 prize to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for their negotiations to end the Vietnam war. Dr Kissinger was branded a warmonger for his support for the bombing campaign in Cambodia; and the Vietnamese negotiator was subsequently seen as a liar whose government never intended to honour a peace deal but was waiting for the moment to attack South Vietnam. Mr Obama becomes the third sitting US President to receive the prize. The committee said today that he had “captured the world’s attention”. It is certainly true that his energy and aspirations have dazzled many of his supporters. Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished.

"Georgia Supreme Court Rules Unauditable, Unverifiable Elections Are Just Fine." Though they give me the credit, it was Rady Ananda's story here last week which expertly covered Diebold's wholly unverifiable touch-screen voting machines receiving the thumbs up for use across the entire state of Georgia, where they've been using them since 2002.

Once upon a time most respectable dailies would probably have fired a reporter on the spot for this kind of mistake, which is, in journalism terms, tantamount to a soldier letting an enemy take over his post for a couple of minutes while he wanders off into the bushes to relieve himself.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So, Jeremy, tell us about your take on what Congress is not doing about people who are supposedly ripping off government or involved in scandal. JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Well, I think that what we saw was a political act of cowardice when all but seventy-five Democrats voted in the House to defund ACORN. Really, ACORN’s funding base is not at all dependent on federal money, so this was more of a symbolic vote, in a legislative sense, but in a broader sense it really constitutes a sort of witch hunt against ACORN. ACORN is an organization that certainly has problems and is worthy of investigations. In fact, the CEO of ACORN, Bertha Lewis, was praised by Michael Steele, the chair of the RNC, in September, for what she’s doing to try to address some of the problems and issues that have come up in ACORN’s history...

You can date the end of dollar hegemony from China's decision last month to sell its first batch of sovereign bonds in Chinese yuan to foreigners. "It's the tolling of the bell," said Michael Power from Investec Asset Management. "We are only beginning to grasp the enormity and historical significance of what has happened." It is this shift in China and other parts of rising Asia and Latin America that threatens dollar domination, not the pricing of oil contracts.

The diversity of the crowd truly demonstrated the extent of climate impacts throughout the world, and the amazing ways that people are already responding to the challenge of climate change. We marched in solidarity with members of the 350.org group from Nepal while they flew beautiful kites, we walked alongside fisher-folk from the Philippines, we chanted with famers from the North of Thailand who carried signs depicting the impact of increased rain on their crops, and we wheeled an hourglass with the world painted on it through the crowds. The rally ended with musical performances and speeches right outside of the UN conference centre where the climate negotiations are taking place.

Real solutions will only be achieved and sustained when manufacturing industries reinsert themselves back onto American soil.

The Obama administration's efforts to force the modifications of distressed mortgages, while laudable, is likely to fall far short because the foreclosure crisis has grown and threatens to dwarf government efforts to relieve it, a special congressional watchdog panel warned in a report released Friday. The Congressional Oversight Panel, created to monitor how taxpayer bailout dollars are being spent, warned that the administration's Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, announced in February, seems sure to prove ineffective. "Foreclosures continue every day as Treasury ramps up the program, with foreclosure starts outpacing new HAMP trial modifications at a rate of more than 2 to 1," the report said.

Healthcare, global warming, Wall Street, jobs -- none of the government's proposed solutions add up to much

A House intelligence committee meeting was abruptly terminated when Justice Department officials refused to be sworn in before briefing the lawmakers.

a growing voice of criticism here in Washington is Democrats who feel the president has failed to deliver on a large number of the campaign promises he made during the run-up to the November election. This sentiment of disappointment and frustration with Obama's lack of progress on his agenda - topped by his seeming inability to build a consensus in his own party on healthcare reform, concern that he may be in the process of committing the U.S. to an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, and inaction on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and repealing the ban on gays in the military - was put on striking display on Saturday night when NBC's Saturday Night Live (SNL) led off with a satirical skit portraying Obama listing his two major accomplishments since taking office as "Jack and Squat".

Imagine that, after the next Katrina, Pakistani military helicopters based on a Pakistani aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Mexico are preparing to deliver supplies to New Orleans. Of course, you also have to imagine, minimally, that the Pakistanis are in the process of building a three-quarters of a billion dollar fortress of an embassy in Washington D.C. (to be guarded by armed Pakistani private contractors), that Pakistani drones are regularly cruising the Sierra Nevada mountains, launching missiles at residences in small towns below, that the Pakistanis are offering billions of dollars in desperately needed aid to a hamstrung American government and military in return for not complaining too much about whatever they might want to do in the United States, that top Pakistani military and civilian officials are constantly shuttling through Washington demanding "cooperation," and finally that Pakistani reporters covering all this regularly point to an "extreme American sensitivity about national sovereignty," as illustrated by a bizarre unwillingness to accept Pakistani aid delivered in Pakistani military helicopters. Then again, you know those Americans: combustible as spoiled kids.

A recent four-state investigation, paid for New York City, found that illegal gun sales occur blatantly and frequently at gun shows. Mayor Bloomberg is using this investigation in hopes of restricting the high flow of illegal weapons used in crimes occurring in NYC. The full report on the investigation is available at: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/Gun_Show_Undercover_Report.pdf