New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: May 31, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO — Concerned about the national ramifications of same-sex marriages in California, attorneys general from 10 states have asked the California Supreme Court to stay its decision legalizing the marriages, which are set to begin on June 17.
In a letter to the court’s chief justice, Ronald George, the attorneys general — all Republicans — asked that the marriages be put off until after the November election, when California voters are expected to vote on a measure that would ban same-sex marriages.
The attorneys general said that allowing same-sex marriages now could unnecessarily open the door to legal challenges from gay residents of other states who get married in California. Upon returning to their home states, the newlyweds could demand equality in everything from tax-filing status to testimonial privileges in civil suits, the attorneys general said.
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Abu Dhabi, the largest of seven sheikhdoms in the United Arab Emirates, is swimming in oil revenue - and it’s investing some of that money in solar power. That’s more than can be said for Exxon Mobil Corp., which rebuffed a Rockefeller initiative at yesterday’s annual meeting to nudge the company toward renewable energy. A shareholder resolution sponsored by the company’s founding family was easily defeated.
Exxon’s stance is an assertion that today’s primacy of oil will continue for years to come, and that what the oil giant does best is look for oil and gas, not manufacture solar panels. But Abu Dhabi is doing the sort of forward planning that the Rockefellers wish Exxon would consider for tomorrow. Today Masdar, part of the industrial development arm of the Abu Dhabi government, unveiled plans to invest $2 billion in thin-film photovoltaic solar technology. True, this amounts to about a month of Exxon Mobil’s projected capital spending this year. But in the solar world, it’s substantial and noteworthy and probably just the sort of thing the Rockefellers would like Exxon to do.
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Financial Times
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Raphael Minder in Singapore
Published: May 31 2008 03:34 | Last updated: May 31 2008 03:34
Robert Gates, US defence secretary, on Saturday warned that coercive diplomacy over energy resources in Asia could threaten the security and prosperity of the region.
Speaking to Asian defence and security officials in Singapore, Mr Gates stressed that the “foundation of prosperity” in the region had been built on “international norms” that needed to be preserved.
Mr Gates stressed that the US was still very much engaged in Asia despite concerns in the region that its attention had been diverted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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for a contrarian view of the ‘positive’ view that this article states, try reading A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation
Financial Times
By Gillian Tett
Published: May 30 2008 19:24 | Last updated: May 30 2008 19:24
Just over a decade ago, a british banker made a small piece of financial history. At the time, Robert Reoch was working as a trader in JPMorgan’s London office. Like most of his peers, he spent his days on the phone, surrounded by computer screens, trying to cut deals with clients across Europe. But one day an unusual trade crossed Reoch’s desk: one of his clients wanted to buy a contract which would effectively protect him from the chance that any one of three government bonds might turn sour. “It was the first time we had done a transaction like that - I guess you could call it one of the first credit derivatives,” Reoch proudly recalls, noting that the trade was so “cutting edge” that the team only sorted out the legal documentation several weeks later.
Since then, Reoch has left the City dealing floors for the quieter surroundings of a Dorset farmhouse. But his dance with financial innovation continues: he spends part of his time in Mayfair, running a consultancy business that advises clients on how to navigate the “credit derivatives” world that he helped create. This area of finance has exploded at such speed that outstanding trades are now put at more than $60,000bn (or, for comparison, 20 times the aggregate capitalisation of London’s equity market).
But Reoch’s dance has taken a new twist. Before turmoil took hold of the global credit markets last summer, his consultancy spent most of its time advising clients how to get into credit derivatives. Now he is swamped by investors who want to extricate themselves from derivatives-linked messes, or simply to understand the products that came out of the past few years of intense financial innovation. Reoch intends to take another step: to launch a new hedge fund that would take advantage of trading opportunities created by the market turbulence.
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Financial Times
By Krishna Guha in Washington
Published: May 26 2008 23:37 | Last updated: May 26 2008 23:37
The US is still more likely than not to have a recession in spite of the relative stabilisation in the economy in recent weeks, Alan Greenspan has told the Financial Times.
The former chairman of the Federal Reserve said: “I still believe there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of recession.” But, he said, “that probability has receded a little and I think the probability of a severe recession has come down markedly”.
His comments, in an interview with the FT, come as a counter to the increasing optimism in some quarters. In the past six weeks, most economists have scaled back their estimates of the likelihood of a US recession following a better-than-expected jobs report and stronger business activity surveys. Many now think the US will narrowly dodge outright economic contraction.
The former Fed chief also said that it was “too soon to tell” whether the worst of the financial crisis was over, as this would depend on what happened to house prices.
Mr Greenspan estimates that house prices will fall by another 10 per cent from their February levels, for a total peak-to-trough decline of roughly 25 per cent.
If the economy is weak and the market overshoots, house prices could decline by another 5 per cent, he says.
“Such house price declines imply a major contraction in the level of equity in owner-occupied homes, the ultimate collateral for mortgage-backed securities,” he said. Mr Greenspan said it was still not clear whether big financial institutions had taken all the writedowns they would need to take on higher rated tranches of mortgage-backed credit products.
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Wired Magazine
By Matthew Power
04.21.08
That the news is familiar makes it no less alarming: 1.1 billion people, about one-sixth of the world’s population, lack access to safe drinking water. Aquifers under Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok, and dozens of other rapidly growing urban areas are drying up. The rivers Ganges, Jordan, Nile, and Yangtze — all dwindle to a trickle for much of the year. In the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea has shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a salt-crusted waste.
Water has been a serious issue in the developing world for so long that dire reports of shortages in Cairo or Karachi barely register. But the scarcity of freshwater is no longer a problem restricted to poor countries. Shortages are reaching crisis proportions in even the most highly developed regions, and they’re quickly becoming commonplace in our own backyard, from the bleached-white bathtub ring around the Southwest’s half-empty Lake Mead to the parched state of Georgia, where the governor prays for rain. Crops are collapsing, groundwater is disappearing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. Call it peak water, the point at which the renewable supply is forever outstripped by unquenchable demand.
This is not to say the world is running out of water. The same amount exists on Earth today as millions of years ago — roughly 360 quintillion gallons. It evaporates, coalesces in clouds, falls as rain, seeps into the earth, and emerges in springs to feed rivers and lakes, an endless hydrologic cycle ordained by immutable laws of chemistry. But 97 percent of it is in the oceans, where it’s useless unless the salt can be removed — a process that consumes enormous quantities of energy. Water fit for drinking, irrigation, husbandry, and other human uses can’t always be found where people need it, and it’s heavy and expensive to transport. Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world’s freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries.
Freshwater is the ultimate renewable resource, but humanity is extracting and polluting it faster than it can be replenished. Rampant economic growth — more homes, more businesses, more water-intensive products and processes, a rising standard of living — has simply outstripped the ready supply, especially in historically dry regions. Compounding the problem, the hydrologic cycle is growing less predictable as climate change alters established temperature patterns around the globe.
One barrier to better management of water resources is simply lack of data — where the water is, where it’s going, how much is being used and for what purposes, how much might be saved by doing things differently. In this way, the water problem is largely an information problem. The information we can assemble has a huge bearing on how we cope with a world at peak water.
That data already shows the era of easy water is ending. Even economically advanced regions face unavoidable pressures — on their industrial output, the quality of life in their cities, their food supply. Wired visited three such areas: the American Southwest, southeastern England, and southeastern Australia. The difficulties these places face today are harbingers of the dawning era of peak water, and their struggles to find solutions offer a glimpse of the challenge ahead.
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Sen. John McCain walked through the wilderness that surrounds Chester Morse Lake with state and local officials North Bend, Wash., May 13, 2008, to call attention to his climate change angenda.
McCain to Miss Climate Vote
The Trail
Washington Post
By Juliet Eilperin
LOS ANGELES — While Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has made action on climate change a central theme in his campaign, he won’t be on hand to vote next week when the Senate considers a landmark bill imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse gases.
In a press conference late Wednesday afternoon, McCain said he did not support the bill sponsored by two of his closest allies, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) because it doesn’t offer enough aid to the nuclear industry, and he would not come to the floor to vote on it.
“I have not been there for a number of votes. The same thing happened in the campaign of 2000,” he said. “The people of Arizona understand I’m running for president.”
While he backs the idea of a mandatory limit on greenhouse gases, he added, he’s “been disappointed so far there has not been a robust” provision in the bill for greenhouse gases.
It is unclear whether either Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) or Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) will come back for the vote as well, since the Democratic primary reaches its conclusion next week.
Environmentalists said they were disappointed with the fact that some of the presidential candidates would miss next week’s vote.
“If you don’t come back to vote on the bill, you can’t say that you’re all that serious about taking action on climate change,” said Lexi Shultz, deputy director of the climate program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Politico
By MIKE ALLEN | 5/27/08
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.
Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):
• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
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New York Times
May 30, 2008
By JOHN HOLUSHA
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan continued to press his case Thursday that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, and responded to a growing chorus of criticism from other former administration officials.
Appearing on NBC’s Today show, Mr. McClellan said that the administration ignored evidence that contradicted its position on Iraq, and he sharply criticized some of Mr. Bush’s closest advisers.
He said Vice President Dick Cheney “was given a lot of deference by the president,” and said “in a number of ways, he has not served the president well.” He said Mr. Cheney was known as “the magic man” in the White House for his ability to get things done.
Mr. McClellan said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not challenge the president or other top officials when she should have. “Too often she was too accommodating” to the president’s views, he said. She was also too deferential to Mr. Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
He described Mr. Bush as “a gut player,” and said that the president was strongly inclined toward war with Iraq after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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Financial Times
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: May 28 2008 22:20 | Last updated: May 29 2008 06:59
The west needs a more comprehensive strategy to counter al-Qaeda propaganda and the US should stop using the term “war on terror”, according to a top intelligence official.
Charles Allen, the senior intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, says the phrase is counter-productive because it creates “animus” in Islamic countries.
“[It] has nothing to do with political correctness,” Mr Allen said in an interview. “It is interpreted in the Muslim world as a war on Islam and we don’t need this.”
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