World

>VOA>

Pakistan has dismissed a leaked report allegedly authored by the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan that accuses Pakistan of secretly assisting the Taliban.

>VOA> Violence in Syria continued Friday, bringing to more than 50 the number of people killed there over the past two days, as a resolution to curb the bloodshed appeared to be stalled in the United Nations.

>VOA> Thousands of Egyptians gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square to mark the first anniversary of the uprising that pushed long-time president Hosni Mubarak from power.

>NY Times> Andrew Jacobs>

There was another winner in the election this weekend that handed President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan a second term in office — the faint but unmistakable clamor for democracy in China.

Viewpoint: Global Warming

[truthout | Rinaldo Brutoco and Madeleine Austin]

Remarkably diverse groups across the US political spectrum are calling for a high and rising price on carbon as part of their deficit-reduction strategies. Extremely conservative to very liberal groups are finding common cause. 

[Truthout | Michael Winship]

A local NPR reporter was talking with Joseph Nicholson, CEO of Red Jacket Orchards in Geneva, New York, up in the neck of the upstate woods where I was born and raised. There’s been a lot more rain than usual, he said. Produce hasn’t been exposed to sufficient "heat units" - in other words, the sun.

[Truthout | David Sirota]

Laugh me off as the idealistic son of a physician (which I am), but I still thought the doctor's ethos of "first do no harm" was a notion we could all agree on. Even in this hyper-polarized Era of the Screaming Red-Faced Partisan, I thought we would witness the recent Fukushima reactor meltdown or footage of Americans setting their tap water on fire and at least agree to stop pursuing energy policies that we know endanger our health and safety -- if not out of altruism, then out of self-interest. 

[truthdig | By Chris Hedges]

Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. [...] Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elites, after clearing their forests and polluting their streams with silt and acids, retreated backward into primitivism.

>VOA>