Word: dec
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...bring apocalyptic foreboding to the climate-change debate quite like Al Gore. Speaking on the last day of the two-week-long U.N. climate-change summit in Poznan, Poland, which concluded on Dec. 12, the Nobel laureate warned delegates from over 190 countries that the time for idle talk on global warming was over. "We now face a crisis that makes it abundantly clear that increased CO2 emissions anywhere are a threat to the integrity of this planet's climate balance everywhere," he said. "As a result the old divide between the North and South, between developed and developing countries...
...didn't help that on the same day the Poznan talks concluded, the European Union - long the world's carbon-cutting leader - took a step backward. Europe had previously pledged to reduce its carbon emissions 20% by 2020 - the so-called 20-20-20 plan - and in Brussels on Dec. 12, representatives confirmed that goal. But instead of forcing electric utilities to pay for the right to emit greenhouse gases - as a draft plan from earlier in the year had prescribed - the E.U. bowed to complaints from poorer nations in Eastern Europe, allowing utilities in those countries to continue getting...
...million voters left Senator Norm Coleman just 215 votes ahead of Saturday Night Live star Al Franken. Since then, both sides have politely allowed a legally required hand recount to take place, one with very clearly specified rules and no scheduled end date. But the recount ended on Dec. 5, just as Minnesota's secretary of state said it would, and the result didn't differ much from the initial count. "We didn't have to do a lot of overtime," says Cindy Reichert, the elections director of Minneapolis. "We did do some evenings. But we're very organized...
...Dec. 29, Bangladesh voters will cast their ballots in the nation's first general election in seven years. The polls have been a focal point of the country's politics ever since a military intervention in January 2007, which postponed scheduled elections in order to end escalating violence between followers of two rival political parties. In the interim, a caretaker regime of technocrats has set about trying to tackle Bangladesh's wretched record of corruption and reform its volatile electoral politics. Results have been mixed, but the government now looks ready to deliver on its promises for free and credible...
Much of that optimism has to do with the efforts of the well-educated, mild-mannered bureaucrats running the caretaker government for the past 23 months. On Wednesday, the government announced that the state of emergency will be finally lifted on Dec. 17 so that parties can campaign and assemble freely. During its tenure, the government has taken to task the country's crony-state politics, strengthened regulatory bodies like the election and anti-corruption commissions, and documented and photographed the more than 80 million people eligible to vote in elections - a stunning feat in this vastly impoverished nation...