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President Obama called on fellow world leaders Thursday to back up his efforts to help forge peace in the Middle East, and he challenged Iran to meet its international obligations to negotiate the terms of its nuclear program.

“The door remains open to diplomacy should Iran decide to walk through it,” Obama told leaders in his second annual address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. “But the Iranian government must demonstrate a clear and credible commitment and confirm to the world the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.”

So far, efforts to engage Iran have failed, leading to the toughest set of sanctions ever against the country. “Iran must be held accountable,” Obama said.

In his own speech before the assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took to the podium to propagandize about capitalism and the 9/11 attacks. A host of diplomats walked out of the room when he said the United States either orchestrated the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 in order to boost the economy or at least supported the attacks as a way to strengthen Israel.

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Israel’s seats in the chamber already were empty. The diplomats were absent all day, observing the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

Outside the U.N. complex, Iranian-American protesters carried signs denouncing Ahmadinejad, the adultery stonings imposed in Iran and the exile of those who support democracy.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican who was in office on 9/11, told the crowd that “your goals are our goals. They are the goals of all democratic people. You want to see freedom of religion … of the press.”

None of the Iranian-American protesters would give their names, expressing concern that their relatives in Iran would be sought out and punished.

“It’s a shameful day for New York, a shameful day for the USA,” said retired Swedish teacher Osborn Hommstramd, who carried two signs, one reading “Iran hangs children” and the other, “Iran stones their women.”

Obama will take his message directly to the Iranian people in an interview today with BBC Persia, the White House announced after his U.N. speech.

Obama will “build on the same message that he’s delivered repeatedly over the last 20 months, including today, which is that we seek a better relationship with the people of Iran,” national security aide Ben Rhodes said.

In addition to pressuring Iran’s leaders, Obama called on Israel to tamp down tensions in the Middle East by extending its moratorium on building new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and to embrace the notion of a Palestinian state. He also called on Arabs to “stop trying to tear Israel down” and reaffirmed U.S. support for Israel.

“It should be clear to all that efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States,” Obama said.

Referring to the willingness of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, to join a fresh round of peace negotiations with Israel, Obama said, “Make no mistake: The courage of a man like President Abbas — who stands up for his people in front of the world — is far greater than those who fire rockets at innocent women and children.”

By usatoday.com

"The door remains open to diplomacy should Iran decide to walk through it," said President Obama during his U.N. address Thursday.

For the last several years, one big theme has dominated talk of the future of Asia: as China rises, its neighbors are being inevitably drawn into its orbit, currying favor with the region’s new hegemonic power.

The presumed loser, of course, is the United States, whose wealth and influence is being spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and whose economic troubles have eroded its standing in a more dynamic Asia.

But rising frictions between China and its neighbors in recent weeks over security issues have handed the United States an opportunity to reassert itself — one the Obama administration has been keen to take advantage of.

Washington is leaping into the middle of heated territorial disputes between China and Southeast Asian nations despite stern Chinese warnings that it mind its own business. The United States is carrying out naval exercises with South Korea in order to help Seoul rebuff threats from North Korea even though China is denouncing those exercises, saying that they intrude on areas where the Chinese military operates.

Meanwhile, China’s increasingly tense standoff with Japan over a Chinese fishing trawler captured by Japanese ships in disputed waters is pushing Japan back under the American security umbrella.

The arena for these struggles is shifting this week to a summit meeting of world leaders at the United Nations. Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, has refused to meet with his Japanese counterpart, Naoto Kan, and on Tuesday he threatened Japan with “further action” if it did not unconditionally release the fishing captain.

On Friday, President Obama is expected to meet with Southeast Asian leaders and promise that the United States is willing to help them peacefully settle South China Sea territorial disputes with China.

“The U.S. has been smart,” said Carlyle A. Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy who studies security issues in Asia. “It has done well by coming to the assistance of countries in the region.”

“All across the board, China is seeing the atmospherics change tremendously,” he added. “The idea of the China threat, thanks to its own efforts, is being revived.”

Asserting Chinese sovereignty over borderlands in contention — everywhere from Tibet to Taiwan to the South China Sea — has long been the top priority for Chinese nationalists, an obsession that overrides all other concerns. But this complicates China’s attempts to present the country’s rise as a boon for the whole region and creates wedges between China and its neighbors.

Nothing underscores that better than the escalating diplomatic conflict between China and Japan over the detention of the Chinese fishing captain, Zhan Qixiong, by the Japanese authorities, who say the captain rammed two Japanese vessels around the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. The islands are administered by Japan but claimed by both Japan and China.

The current dispute may strengthen the military alliance between the United States and Japan, as did an incident last April when a Chinese helicopter buzzed a Japanese destroyer. Such confrontations tend to remind Japanese officials, who have suggested that they need to refocus their foreign policy on China instead of America, that they rely on the United States to balance an unpredictable China, analysts say.

“Japan will have no choice but to further go into America’s arms, to further beef up the U.S.-Japan alliance and its military power,” said Huang Jing, a scholar of the Chinese military at the National University of Singapore.

In July, Southeast Asian nations, particularly Vietnam, applauded when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the United States was willing to help mediate a solution to disputes that those nations had with China over the South China Sea, which is rich in oil, natural gas and fish. China insists on dealing with Southeast Asian nations one on one, but Mrs. Clinton said the United States supported multilateral talks. Freedom of navigation in the sea is an American national interest, she said.

President Obama meets on Friday with leaders from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean. The Associated Press reported that the participants would issue a joint statement opposing the “use or threat of force by any claimant attempting to enforce disputed claims in the South China Sea.” The statement is clearly aimed at China, which has seized Vietnamese fishing vessels in recent years and detained their crews.

On Tuesday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, criticized any attempt at mediation by the United States. “We firmly oppose any country having nothing to do with the South China Sea issue getting involved in the dispute,” she said at a news conference in Beijing.

China has also been objecting to American plans to hold military exercises with South Korea in the Yellow Sea, which China claims as its exclusive military operations zone. The United States and South Korea want to send a stern message to North Korea over what Seoul says was the torpedoing last March of a South Korean warship by a North Korean submarine. China’s belligerence only serves to reinforce South Korea’s dependence on the American military.

American officials are increasingly concerned about the modernization of the Chinese Navy and its long-range abilities. In March, a Chinese official told White House officials that the South China Sea was part of China’s “core interest” of sovereignty, similar to Tibet and Taiwan, an American official said in an interview after the visit. American officials also object to China’s telling foreign oil companies in recent years not to work with Vietnam on developing oil fields in the South China Sea.

Some Chinese military leaders and analysts see an American effort to contain China. Feng Zhaokui, a Japan scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in an article on Tuesday in the Global Times, a populist newspaper, that the United States was trying to “nurture a coalition against China.”

In August, Rear Adm. Yang Yi wrote an editorial for the PLA Daily, published by the Chinese Army, in which he said that on the one hand, Washington “wants China to play a role in regional security issues.”

“On the other hand,” he continued, “it is engaging in an increasingly tight encirclement of China and is constantly challenging China’s core interests.”

Asian countries suspicious of Chinese intentions see Washington as a natural ally. In April, the incident involving the Chinese helicopter and Japanese destroyer spooked many in Japan, making them feel vulnerable at a time when Yukio Hatoyama, then the prime minister, had angered Washington with his pledges to relocate a Marine Corps air base away from Okinawa.

His successor, Mr. Kan, has sought to smooth out ties with Washington and has emphasized that the alliance is the cornerstone of Japanese foreign policy.

“Insecurity about China’s presence has served as a wake-up call on the importance of the alliance,” said Fumiaki Kubo, a professor of public policy at the University of Tokyo.

By nytimes.com

Premier Wen Jiabao of China spoke about tensions with Japan during a meeting with representatives of Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans on Tuesday in New York.

China suspended high-level exchanges with Japan on Sunday and promised tough countermeasures after a Japanese court extended the detention of a Chinese captain whose trawler collided with two Japanese coastguard ships.

The spat between Asia’s two largest economies has flared since Japan arrested the captain, accusing him of deliberately striking a patrol ship and obstructing public officers near uninhabited islets in the East China Sea claimed by both sides.

“China demands that Japan immediately release the captain without any preconditions,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement on the ministry’s website (www.mfa.gov.cn), repeating that Beijing viewed the detention as illegal and invalid.

“If Japan acts willfully despite advice to the contrary and insists on making one mistake after another, the Chinese side will take strong countermeasures, and all the consequences should be borne by the Japanese side,” Ma said.

Japan’s decision has “seriously damaged Sino-Japan bilateral exchanges,” Chinese state television added, reading out a separate response from the Foreign Ministry.

China has suspended ministerial and provincial-level bilateral exchanges with Japan, halted talks on increasing flights between the two countries and postponed a meeting about coal with Japan, the report said.

Xinhua news agency added that Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Guangya had made “solemn representations” to the Japanese ambassador, Uichiro Niwa, and expressed “strong indignation” over the captain’s detention.

Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that the trawler captain’s detention, which had been due to expire on Sunday, had been extended until September 29.

The Japanese court could not be reached for comment.

Sino-Japanese ties have long been plagued by feuds over wartime history and rivalry over territory, resources and military intentions, although they had improved after a chill in 2001-2006, as deep economic ties raise the risk from rows.

GAS FIELD FEUD

Japan urged calm and said the captain’s case would be dealt with appropriately according to its domestic laws.

“Regarding individual issues, what is needed is to respond calmly without becoming emotional,” said Noriyuki Shikata, a spokesman for the Japanese prime minister’s office.

“Japan’s basic stance is that we should seek to create cooperative Sino-Japanese ties based on strategic, mutually beneficial relations,” he told Reuters by telephone.

Takeshi Matsunaga, assistant press secretary for Japan’s foreign ministry, said the unilateral steps that China has taken are “regrettable.”

The Chinese captain, Zhan Qixiong, has remained in custody after a Japanese court approved for the first time on September 10 an extension of his detention. Prosecutors can hold him for up to a total of 20 days while deciding whether to take legal action.

The latest feud over the uninhabited isles — called the Diaoyu islands in China and the Senkaku islands in Japan — has stirred mutual distrust over sovereignty and control of potentially valuable oil and gas reserves.

China has repeatedly demanded Japan free the captain and has shown its anger by cancelling planned talks with Japan over natural gas reserves.

On Saturday, about a hundred protesters in several Chinese cities demanded Japan free the boat captain. Police presence was still heavy at the Japanese embassy in Beijing on Sunday but there were no signs of protests.

The Nikkei business daily reported earlier on Sunday that Japan may start drilling near a gas field in disputed waters of the East China Sea if China does the same.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his foreign minister said Tokyo will take “countervailing steps” if China starts drilling at the Chunxiao gas field to which Beijing recently sent equipment, Nikkei said, adding that Tokyo had looked into possibly taking the case to the international maritime court.

The two countries are at odds over China’s exploration for natural gas in the East China Sea, while Beijing is also involved in territorial feuds with southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea over an area rich in energy and key to shipping.

The Sino-Japanese row centers on where the boundary between the two sides’ exclusive maritime economic zones falls. In 2008, the two countries agreed in principle to solve the feud by jointly developing gas fields.

Estimated net known reserves in the disputed fields are a modest 92 million barrels of oil equivalent, but both sides have pursued the issue because there may be larger hidden reserves.

By Ben Blanchard and Linda Sieg

A Chinese fishing boat is inspected by Japan Coast Guard crew members after it collided with two Japanese coast guard vessels near the disputed islands in the East China Sea, known as the Senkaku isles in Japan and Diaoyu in China, September 7, 2010. Japanese authorities say the Chinese vessel was fishing illegally in their waters and that the collision appeared to have happened while Japanese Coast Guards were chasing the vessel out.

Afghanistan has up to $1trillion (£690bn) worth of untapped mineral resources which could revolutionise the country’s economy and perhaps even the war, American officials have said.

The country has long been known to harbour huge deposits of copper and iron, but the scale of resources is now believed to be far larger than previously thought.
Huge seams of cobalt, gold and iron could turn Afghanistan into a world centre for mining, US officials hope.

Afghan officials believe the mining sector will eventually become the backbone of the now tiny Afghan economy and provide hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The economy is currently dominated by aid money and drug smuggling, raising fears the coalition’s investments in building the Afghan army and state are ultimately unsustainable.

A thriving mining economy offers the chance of much-needed funding to the Afghan state, but would also need years to build up the infrastructure needed.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen David Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, told the New York Times. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was mapped by the Soviets during the 1980s, but was never exploited.
After discovering the Soviet data, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys in 2006, using gravity and magnetic measuring instruments mounted in an old Navy aircraft.

The data was so promising, the geologists returned the following year using an old British bomber equipped with instruments to build a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface.

Geologists are now finishing field studies in the hope they can start tender processes to attract bids from international mining firms.

Jack Medlin, a geologist in the United States Geological Survey’s international affairs programme, told the newspaper: “On the ground, it’s very, very, promising. Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”
First analysis of a location in Ghazni province showed it had potentially the world’s largest deposits of lithium, which is used in laptop batteries.

Early attempts to harness Afghanistan’s mineral wealth have been hampered by corruption and poor security.

In 2008, the Chinese state-owned firm MCC signed the contract for one of the world’s richest unexploited copper deposits at Aynak, 30 miles south of Kabul after paying a premium of £484 million.

World Bank estimates suggest the Aynak mine alone could yield 100,000 tons a year, bring the Afghan government £240 million a year in taxes and create another 20,000 jobs.

Muhammad Ibrahim Adel, minister for mines at the time, was later accused of taking a £20 bribe to award the contract. He denied the accusation, but lost his job.

Early progress at the mine has been hampered by poor security and the ground breaking ceremony last July was conducted as helicopter gunships swooped overhead.

A tender last year for the 1.8 billion ton Hajigak iron ore deposit west of Kabul, which is estimated to be 62 per cent pure, and “world class” attracted five Indian firms, but stalled last year and has yet to restart.

By Ben Farmer

NATO soldiers visit a coal mining camp, in Herat, Afghanistan Photo: EPA

Petty squabbles earlier hindered the climate change battle.

Tackling climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing South Asia. Regional leaders are meeting in Bhutan this week, but are they any nearer agreeing to an action plan? The BBC’s Navin Singh Khadka reports.

The issue of climate change is the main item on the agenda of the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summit under way in the Bhutanese capital Thimpu.

But given the poor track record of co-operation achieved by the regional grouping over other sensitive issues in the past, will the thorny issue of climate change become bogged down in rhetoric and recriminations?

Experts say the vulnerability of the region to climate change means that there is an urgent need for concrete action.

Words not action

“South Asian countries have started to face the effects of climate change and are particularly at risk,” says the United Nations Environment Programme’s (Unep) 2009 outlook.

“Intense floods, droughts and cyclones have impacted on the economic performances of South Asian countries and the lives of millions of poor, it also puts at risk infrastructure, agriculture, human health, water resources and the environment,” it says.

This is not the first time that Saarc summit has discussed the issue.

The declaration of the 14th summit in Delhi in 2007, for instance, said leaders had agreed “to commission a team of regional experts to identify collective actions in sharing of knowledge on the consequences of climate change”.

A year later, the 15th Saarc summit adopted the Dhaka Declaration on climate change.

But, experts say, hardly any of these words have been matched by actions.

In its climate change national action plan launched two years ago, India - the main regional player - stressed the need for co-operation.

“We will need to exchange information with South Asian countries and countries sharing the Himalayan ecology,” the plan read.

“Co-operation with neighbouring countries will be sought to make a comprehensive network for observation and monitoring of the Himalayan environment, to assess fresh water resources and the health of the ecosystem.”

There have been no serious follow-up since this bold pronouncement was made.

Drought

With regional co-operation confined to academic papers, key issues like regional flood forecasting are just not happening.

“Some countries in the region are not willing to share water-related data because they regard it as confidential,” says Mats Eriksson, a senior hydrologist with the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development which has spent years trying to bring together South Asian countries for flood forecasting at a regional level.

But as millions of people in South Asia suffer from floods every monsoon, there is a worrying and growing uncertainty over the uneven distribution of monsoon rainfall in the region.

In recent years, some places have experienced heavy rainfall while others have seen far smaller amounts - and have even been hit by drought.

“Climate change could influence monsoon dynamics and cause lower summer precipitation, a delay to the start of the monsoon season and longer breaks between the rainy periods,” a study by Purdue University in the US found recently.

While everyone now seems to be well informed as to the extent of the problem, questions remain over Saarc’s response to it. But not everyone is pessimistic.

“This is the first time you have a Saarc summit where the leaders of countries in the region are getting together on a very specific subject and I am optimistic,” said the chairman of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, who also heads the Energy Research Institute in Delhi.

Ainun Nishat, climate chief for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Bangladesh, is also positive.

“I believe frequent contact between the leaders is essentially the first step that will lead to some concrete action because they always want to show progress.”

But recent international climate negotiations, such as last year’s Copenhagen summit, have shown that the countries in the region have different interests.

India’s fast-growing economy, for instance, wants a global climate treaty that requires rich nations - and not rapidly developing countries - to cut carbon emissions.

It also wants global temperature rises to be limited to 2C from pre-industrial levels.

Bitter disputes

Whereas least developed countries in the region that are most vulnerable to climate change are lobbying for an international treaty irrespective of who has to reduce carbon emissions.

They want global warming to be limited to 1.5C from pre-industrial levels.

“I therefore do not expect Saarc countries to take common action in terms of dealing with climate change,” says noted Indian environment activist Sunita Narain.

“I expect governments of the region to use Saarc as a meeting point in which they can put forward their respective actions against climate change.”

But is that possible when major region players like India and Pakistan, for example, are engaged in bitter disputes?

One of the latest disputes between the South Asian nuclear rivals is that of sharing of water resources which, experts fear, will get worse as the climate change problem itself remains unaddressed.

The climate change issue urgently demands a meeting of minds.

For farmer Brian Thomas, getting to town for errands is no simple matter these days as floodwaters cover fields and sections of country roads in the rural areas near Fargo, N.D.

He wades through shallow rapids cascading across his driveway, then drives a mud-spattered pickup on a narrow dirt road until so much water blocks his path that he must hop into a motorboat and putt-putt over a cornfield resembling a sprawling lake. Finally, about four miles from home, he gets into his waiting car and drives to the nearest town.

“It’s kind of a hassle,” Thomas, 52, said Thursday as he jerked the rope to restart the boat motor.

As the cities of Moorhead, Minn., and next-door Fargo nervously wait for the Red River to crest on Sunday at 20 feet above the flood stage, some of the region’s farmland is already under water after smaller rivers, swollen with melting snow, overflowed. Even fields that aren’t buried in water are so saturated that they look like vast expanses of squishy black mud.

At this point it’s mostly an inconvenience, growers say. Spring planting is a month or more away for crops such as corn, soybeans and sugar beets. If the rain holds off and unusually warm temperatures don’t melt the remaining snowpack too rapidly over the next few weeks, the waters could recede, enabling a decent or even good growing season.

But a worst-case scenario — heavy spring rains and prolonged flooding well into April — could spell trouble for this year’s crops, while also causing problems for livestock producers during the crucial calving season.

“It’s definitely not going to help us any to have this flood, but I can’t say definitely that it’s going to hurt us either, because it depends on the weather from here on out,” said Andrew Swenson, an extension farm management specialist at North Dakota State University.

The region’s fertile soils yield an abundance of grain and beets. About 500,000 acres in Cass County — which includes Fargo — are planted in soybeans, more than in any other county in the nation.

Farmers prefer to get their corn and sugar beets in the ground by late April but can hold off until early May, when soybeans usually are planted, Swenson said.

Flooding in 2009 rendered almost 1.9 million acres unsuitable for planting in North Dakota, said Doug Hagel, regional director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency in Billings, Mont. The floods then gave way to a cool summer and rainy fall, leaving the ground unusually moist even before this winter’s snows began. In some places, up to 25 percent of last year’s corn couldn’t be harvested because of soaked fields.

“We may be looking at the same scenario this year and maybe magnified, because it was already so wet,” said Doug Goehring, North Dakota’s agriculture commissioner. Hard money training.

On Christmas Day, a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit tried to blow up the plane with plastic explosives in his underwear. He failed, yet the very attempt shook the U.S. government, set federal agencies against each other and triggered months of political second-guessing.

In fact, short of mass casualties, the attack allegedly attempted by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had exactly the kind of reaction that al-Qaida is after. And, it appears, that lesson is resonating with the terror network’s leadership.

For the first time, the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and has prided itself on its ideological purism seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and arguably more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be: Big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as good.

U.S. officials and counterterrorism experts say the airline attack and last November’s shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, prove that simple, well-played smaller attacks against the United States can be just as devastating to the democratic giant as complex and riskier ones.

In a recent Internet posting, U.S.-born al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn made a public pitch for such smaller, single acts of jihad.

“Even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into bankruptcy,” Gadahn said in a video released and translated by U.S.-based Site Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamic militant message traffic.

It’s a message that officials believe has been evolving for the last year and has turned upside down the prevailing wisdom that the next al-Qaida attack against the U.S. must be bigger and bolder than the one on Sept. 11, 2001.

“It’s pretty clear that while al-Qaida would still love to have home runs, they will take singles and doubles if they can get them,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center and a former CIA officer. “And that makes the job of counterterrorism much, much harder.”

Counterterror officials note that al-Qaida leaders monitor the U.S. closely and watched the reverberations of the Abdulmutallab attack. They saw the scramble to boost security, the members of Congress blasting federal agencies for intelligence and screening failures, the political drumbeat against the Obama administration’s national security efforts and the agency leaders who rushed to blame each other. Hard money training.

The Obama administration took a major step Monday toward imposing the first federal limits on climate-changing pollution from cars, power plants and factories, declaring there was compelling scientific evidence that global warming from manmade greenhouse gases endangers Americans’ health.

The announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency was clearly timed to build momentum toward an agreement at the international conference on climate change that opened Monday in Copenhagen, Denmark. It signaled the administration was prepared to push ahead for significant controls in the U.S. if Congress doesn’t act first on its own.

The price could be steep for both industry and consumers. The EPA finding clears the way for rules that eventually could force the sale of more fuel-efficient vehicles and require plants to install costly new equipment — at a cost of billions or even tens of billions of dollars — or shift to other forms of energy.

Energy prices for many Americans probably would rise, too — though Monday’s finding will have no immediate impact since regulations have yet to be written. Supporters of separate legislation in Congress argue they could craft measures that would mitigate some of those costs.

Environmentalists hailed the EPA announcement as a clear indication the United States will take steps to attack climate change even if Congress fails to act. And they welcomed the timing of the declaration, saying it will help the Obama administration convince delegates at the international climate talks that the U.S. is serious about addressing the problem. Obama will address the conference next week.

But business groups said regulating carbon emissions through the EPA under existing clean air law would put new economic burdens on manufacturers, cost jobs and drive up energy prices.

“It will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” declared Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which in recent months has been particularly critical of the EPA’s attempt to address climate change.

The EPA signaled last April that it was inclined to view heat-trapping pollution as a threat to public health and welfare and began to take public comments for formal rulemaking. That marked a reversal from the Bush administration, which had refused to issue the finding, despite a conclusion by EPA scientists that it was warranted.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said Monday, “There are no more excuses for delaying,” adding that the so-called endangerment analysis from global warming had been under consideration at the agency for three years. After the official finding, she said the agency is now “obligated to make reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse pollutants under the Clean Air Act.”

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama “still believes the best way to move forward is through the legislative process” — something Obama has expressed on a number of occasions as he has pressed Congress to shift the nation’s energy priorities away from fossil fuels and to reduce climate-changing pollution.

The EPA said scientific evidence clearly shows that greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people” and that the pollutants — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — should be reduced, if not by Congress then by the agency responsible for enforcing air pollution. Hard money training.

There is no such thing as a dull decade. The arc of history is long—to maul a line by Dr. Martin Luther King—and it bends toward stuff happening. Even the 1970s, generally regarded as the ugly stepdecade of the 20th century, played host to a White House scandal that sprawled on for months, metastasizing into the only presidential resignation in American history. Beat that, 1980s. (OK, no sweat: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union …) Still, there are decades when a few earthquakes shuffle the terrain and jostle the nerves—and then there are decades when the world splits open to the boiling core and remakes itself.

Maybe after a generation or two have passed, the events of the 21st century’s first 10 years will recede in significance. With time, perhaps 9/11 will go back to being just another day in September. It sure seems unlikely from here. Indeed, the 10-year period beginning in 2000 has been marked by a string of colossal events that, in any other decade, would have been the undisputed story of their time. It has been a dazing and bedazzling era, almost biblical in its bookending events: the televised tragedy of 9/11 and the election of America’s first black president—a man whose name meant nothing to anyone outside of politics until just a few years before his ascension to the most powerful office in the world. Just think: Hurricane Katrina—a catastrophe so vast it nearly wiped off the map an entire American city—rates a distant, even debatable, third among this decade’s biggest headlines. The Boston Red Sox, trailed around by the Curse of Babe Ruth since 1919, finally won the World Series—twice!—but they, too, must get in line behind two ongoing wars, a global financial collapse, a cataclysmic tsunami, torture, Bernie Madoff, and on and on.

The one thing this decade hasn’t had, oddly, is a name. We could never seem to agree on one. Is it the Aughties? The Double-Zeroes? The Oh-Ohs? The 2K’s? The Zeds? It shouldn’t matter, except that it’s hard to wrap your arms around something when you don’t even know what to call it. “The ‘50s,” “the ‘60s”—for Americans, the terms conjure a specific, albeit oversimplified, portrait of those eras in America. But perhaps it’s fitting that this decade should remain stubbornly absent a name. It’s been too big, too vast, too cataclysmic, too transformative for just one.

And in any case, a decade is just an empty unit of time, arbitrarily walling off of events that exist both within and beyond them. They are mostly useful as a means to an end: when we get to the close of one decade, we use it as an excuse to indulge in two beloved pastimes, looking backward and making lists. As 2010 draws closer, Newsweek.com will be doing plenty of both. “NEWSWEEK 20/10” will commemorate the end of the decade by unveiling 20 top-10 lists over the next four weeks, each one surveying the past decade from a fresh perspective and featuring guest essays by some of the biggest names of the world, many of whom made the news they’ll be writing about. Additionally, thanks to a first-of-its-kind partnership with Facebook, NEWSWEEK is proud to offer readers the ability to reorder every one of the lists in “Newsweek 20/10.” It’s your chance to play along and tell us what we got wrong.

Along with our package of 20 lists, NEWSWEEK’s leading writers—a group that includes Fareed Zakaria on global affairs, Howard Fineman on U.S. politics, Daniel Gross on the economy, Sharon Begley on science, and Daniel Lyons on technology—will take turns over the coming days sharing “One Big Thought About the Decade.” We’ll also unveil a giant, decade-spanning slideshow, “120 Pictures, 120 Months,” in which our photography editors have chosen one picture to represent every month of the decade. (OK, technically, there are only 118 pictures because we haven’t gotten through the last two months of the decade yet. Once we get far enough into December, we promise to add in the 119th and 120th photographs in our series and complete the journey.) Finally, in the last week of November, we’ll wrap things up with a game of alternative history called “The Gore Decade,” in which a series of writers imagine what the last 10 years would’ve looked like if Al Gore had won the coin-flip election of 2000—essentially, a retrospective of the decade that didn’t happen. Hard money training

Ethiopia said Thursday it needs emergency food aid for 6.2 million people, an appeal that comes 25 years after a devastating famine compounded by communist policies killed 1 million and prompted one of the largest charity campaigns in history.

The crisis stems from a prolonged drought that has hit much of the Horn of Africa, including Kenya and Somalia.

Drought is especially disastrous in Ethiopia because more than 80 percent of people live off the land. Agriculture drives the economy, accounting for half of all domestic production and most exports.

Mitiku Kassa, Ethiopia’s state minister for agriculture and rural development, appealed to donors Thursday for more than $121 million. In January, he had said that 4.9 million of Ethiopia’s 85 million people needed emergency food aid.

Ethiopia has long struggled with cyclical droughts, which are compounded by the country’s dependence on rain-fed agriculture and archaic farming practices.

In 1984, Ethiopia’s famine drew international attention as news reports showed emaciated children and adults with limbs as thin as sticks. The crisis launched one of the biggest global charity campaigns in history, including the concert Live Aid.

This year’s drought appears to be slightly less severe than the one last year, which was exacerbated by high food prices. A year ago, Mitiku appealed for aid to feed 6.4 million people affected by drought.

But many humanitarian groups have said in recent years that they believe the number of people affected by hunger is higher than government estimates.

Because of Ethiopia’s large size and poor infrastructure, independent observers have difficulty collecting data. The worst-affected areas in the country’s east are the site of a fierce insurgency and are off-limits to journalists. Aid groups say their movements in these areas are limited by military restrictions.

In a report marking 25 years since Ethiopia’s famine, the aid group Oxfam said countries must focus on preparing communities to prevent and deal with drought and other disasters before they strike, rather than relying on importing aid.

According to the U.N., nearly two-thirds of Africa’s agricultural land has been degraded by erosion and misused pesticides. In Ethiopia, where bad farming practices have led to massive erosion, 85 percent of land is damaged. Hard money training