Jeffrey Sachs: How Obama Could Bring 'Change' to Energy Policy Stalemate

All signs suggest that the planet is still hurtling headlong toward climatic disaster. The United States’ National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has issued its “State of the Climate Report” covering January-May. The first five months of this year were the warmest on record going back to 1880. May was the warmest month ever. Intense heat waves are currently hitting many parts of the world. Yet still we fail to act.

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Obama Seeks to Expand US Arms Exports

The United States is currently the world biggest weapons supplier - holding 30 per cent of the market - but the Obama administration has begun modifying export control regulations in hopes of enlarging the U.S. market share, according to U.S. officials.

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Tom Hayden: Despite WikiLeaks Revelations, Congress Votes for War Funding

Never was the case so weak for throwing another $33 billion into the Afghanistan sinkhole, but that's what a defensive US Congress did anyway on Tuesday evening. The vote was 308-114, with Republicans supplying most of the prowar votes.

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EPA Employees Blow the Whistle on Flawed Climate Bills

The major bills before Congress to regulate greenhouse gases to combat global climate change suffer from "multiple unfixable flaws" that undermine their effectiveness, according to a detailed congressional disclosure by two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees, posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

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James Gundun: America's Undeclared War on Pakistan: Clinton's Paradoxistan

It was a relatively flawless performance. With Washington stuck in its Afghan review and Pakistan’s cities under bombardment, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton touched down in a hostile Pakistan in October 2009 on a self-proclaimed propaganda mission.

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Bill McKibben: The World's Biggest Environmental Crisis Flows on

It’s disgusting that it took that long to stitch it up, but there’s every sign that after the first few weeks everyone was working it, stat. BP tried “junk shot” and “top kill,” skimming ships and low risers; the feds went with daily briefings, multiple Cabinet secretaries, retired admirals. Some 17,500 National Guardsmen, 1,900 ships. Twenty billion dollars.

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Robert Scheer: There’s Just No Pleasing Some Robber Barons

The flight from reason that now marks American public discourse came home for me last Friday when I found myself on public radio debating whether Barack Obama is anti-business. The "news hook" for KCRW's "Left, Right & Center" show, which I have co-hosted for 15 years, was an absurd spate of charges from Obama's former big-business allies that he had become their enemy. If only it were so.

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Chris Hedges: Obama’s Health Care Bill Is Enough to Make You Sick

A close reading of the new health care legislation, which will conveniently take effect in 2014 after the next presidential election, is deeply depressing. The legislation not only mocks the lofty promises made by President Barack Obama, exposing most as lies, but sadly reconfirms that our nation is hostage to unchecked corporate greed and abuse.

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Chris Mardsen: Obama endorses Netanyahu as "man of peace"

President Barack Obama on Tuesday praised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a man who "wants peace" and is "willing to take risks for peace." He did so following a White House meeting five weeks after the May 31 raid on the Mavi Marmara Gaza aid convoy, in which Israeli forces murdered eight Turkish activists and a dual Turkish-US national.

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Stephen Zunes: Israel's Dubious Investigation of Flotilla Attack

Few decisions of the Obama administration have outraged the peace and human rights community as much as its successful efforts to block an international inquiry into May's Israeli aid flotilla attack. Instead, supported by leading Republican and Democratic members of Congress, the Obama administration has thrown its weight behind an investigative committee handpicked by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to examine the incident.

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