Well, it certainly is comforting to know that global warming is just a myth.

Rise in Gases Unmatched
By Andrew C. Revkin

New York Times Service

Shafts of ancient ice pulled from Antarctica's frozen depths show that for at least 650,000 years three important heat-trapping greenhouse gases never reached recent atmospheric levels caused by human activities, scientists are reporting today. The measured gases were carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Concentrations have risen over the last several centuries at a pace far beyond that seen before humans began intensively clearing forests and burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

The class struggle for the future of New Orleans is made clear by this Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) report in Newsday that the volunteers who have established soup kitchens and work brigades to help the poor survive and resist being made exiles from their own city have now been ordered to clear out—due to pressure from the city's old-money elite:

The BBC reports Nov. 24 on the struggle of a woman known as Amna to resist village authorities in Pakistan who married her to a man from a rival clan at the age of 10 to settle a family dispute. "All I remember is that my mother cried a lot," says Amna, now nearly 20, and one of three sisters fighting for their freedom from a tribal tradition in which they have no say.

The three—along with two cousins—were married under vani—a tribal tradition whereby disputes are settled through "marrying" girls from the offending family to men from the supposedly aggrieved clan. The marriages were ordered by a village council (jirga) in Sultanwala, Mianwali district. The custom was officially outlawed by the national government in January, but still flourishes in much of the country.

Two days ago, we noted, coordinated twin suicide attacks left some 70 Shi'ite worshippers dead in Khanaqin, a town within Iraq's normally more tranquil Kurdish autonomous zone. Nov. 23 has seen a suicide attack—this time targetting a police convoy, and killing some 20 (only half of them police)—in Kirkuk, also in north but just outside the Kurdish-controlled zone. The attack came after a drive-by shooting on a liquor store lured police to the scene, in a busy market district. Earlier in the day, a suicide bomber detonated his car at a checkpoint on the south edge of Kirkuk, wounding three Iraqi soldiers.

The front-page synopsis below the headline of the New York Times's coverage of Bush's Nov. 20 meeting with President Hu Jintao in Beijing said it all:

Hu Jintao Cedes Nothing on Political Freedoms —Will Act on Trade

Economic "liberalization" without lifting the dictatorship an inch. Contrary to the lingering illusions of the idiot left, the model for the current Chinese regime appears not to be Mao but Pinochet. Bush, for his part, dumbed down the whole notion of human rights by reducing them to one item on a laundry list of concerns, somewhere just below the "intellectual property rights" of US compact-disk manufacturers:

From the British site Labour Friends of Iraq, Nov. 22:

Grassroots members of George Galloway’s left-wing Respect party have condemned as "unacceptable" the decision of the party leadership to exclude lesbian and gay rights from their manifesto for the general election earlier this year.

Well, after three years in Pentagon custody, José Padilla has finally been indicted. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, announcing the indictment, tried to be as lurid as possible, charging that Padilla was part of a "North American support cell" to send "money, physical assets and new recruits" overseas to engage in acts of terrorism, and that he had traveled abroad himself to become "a violent jihadist." (NYT, Nov. 22) But several paragraphs down in the NY Times' coverage we get the straight dope:

Sen. Joseph Biden's Nov. 21 speech before the Council on Foreign Relations calling for a phased withdrawal of US troops from Iraq over the next two years is clearly intended as a response to Dick Cheney's bellicose tirade before the American Enterprise Institute that same day. Cheney merely demonstrates classical addictive behavior. He just can't stop himself: