In a blow to the auto industry, US Judge William K. Sessions III ruled Sept. 12 that the state of Vermont can set limits on car emissions that contribute to global warming, rejecting arguments that only the federal government can regulate the industry. The EPA has so far refused to demand a curb in emissions linked to global warming. In 2002, California passed a law requiring automakers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 22% by 2012, and 30% by 2016. Vermont followed suit with its own such law in 2005, as have a handful of other states. Automakers took the individual states to court, arguing that the laws usurpsed federal authority. But Sessions wrote: "The regulation does not impermissibly intrude upon the foreign affairs prerogatives of the president and Congress of the United States."

First, the basic facts from the New York Times, Sept. 14:

Sunni Sheik Who Backed U.S. in Iraq Is Killed
BAGHDAD, Sept. 13 — A high-profile Sunni Arab sheik who collaborated with the American military in the fight against jihadist militants in western Iraq was killed in a bomb attack on Thursday near his desert compound. The attack appeared to be a precisely planned assassination meant to undermine one of the Bush administration’s trumpeted achievements in the war.

Some very insightful words from Paul Krugman in the Sept. 14 New York Times on the Kurdish Regional Government's unilateral oil deals. Fortunately, Ed Strong's Best That's Left blog rescues the column from the Times' elitist pay-per-view policy. Relevant passages:

Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

And now for some bad news. From the Italian news agency AGI, Sept. 12:

A cholera epidemic has affected at least 7,000 people in the northern provinces of Iraq and may reach Baghdad in the next few weeks. The accomplices were the terrible conditions of the water system and Iraqi infrastructures due to the war. The alert was raised by the World Health Organization (WHO) and has been confirmed by Baghdad authorities. The most affected areas are those of Kirkuk and Suleimaniya, where at least 10 people have died in the last month. However, according to the president of the Iraqi Red Crescent, Said Hakki, the "vibro cholerae" bacterium may have reared its head also in Erbil and Nineweh. Hakki's foremost concern is that of the latest contagion case, a young woman in a village between Kirkuk and Diyala, about 50 km from the capital. 'Baghdad is close,' he said. 'Cholera can spread through water like fire in a barn.' According to the WHO, grave cholera epidemics such as that which has appeared in northern Iraq "are usually caused by contaminated drinking water".

Hundreds of Iraqis staged a protest against the building of a dividing wall being built by US forces between a Shi'ite and Sunni district of Baghdad Sept. 12. Residents of the Shula and Ghazaliya neighborhoods waved Iraqi flags and chanted slogans rejecting both the proposed separation and the US occupation. Carrying banners reading "No to the dividing wall" and "The wall is US terrorism," the protesters issued a statement demanding that Iraqi authorities intervene. "The wall is in accordance with al-Qaeda's plans," the statement said, adding that it would "separate family from family."

Part of a statement from al-Awda and other groups, online at NYC Indymedia, Sept. 13:

We believe that it is critical, necessary and essential that the building of the antiwar movement in the United States take place in a manner that emphasizes political unity and political clarity - political unity that links communities and movements in common struggle against US imperialism and political clarity that defines that struggle and its component parts, placing the struggle of the Iraqi and Palestinian people for national liberation at the center of our demands, just as it is in the center of the crosshairs of imperialism and in the center of resistance; as well as the struggles of the people of the Philippines, Colombia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba, the Sudan, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia and everywhere else in the world where imperialism is waging war and occupation and people are resisting, organizing and building. Similarly, the struggles of Black, Chicano, Latino, Asian, Arab, Native and other oppressed nations and communities within the US must be central to our work as an antiwar movement that has real meaning for those most directly affected here; for example, the struggle of Katrina victims to rebuild their communities in the face of racism and oppression, and the struggle of undocumented and other immigrants for full equality, legalization, and workers' rights.

The anarchist blog Three-Way Fight wants to know (despite leaving the question marks off their questions):

Why does the media - CNN, MSNBC, FOX, BBC, Harretz, etc - spend today going over and over again, with lots of video footage, of the bust of a supposed neo-Nazi group in Israel that beat up people and vandalized synagogues. [Sic] The group, made up of Russian emigres who had at least some direct relative who had been of Jewish religious/cultural descent, were videoed attacking people and sieg heiling in front of a German flag.

The Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) claimed responsibility for Sept. 10 attacks on Pemex oil pipelines in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz. Authorities say an inscription in red on a section of pipeline read: "They were taken alive, we want them alive—EPR-PDPR." This seems to be a reference to recently "disappeared" militants associated with the Popular Democratic Revolutionary Party (PDPR), the EPR's political wing.