Preliminary data released Thursday by federal scientists predict the annual average temperature for 2007 across the contiguous United States at near 54.3 degrees Fahrenheit — making the year the eighth warmest since records were first kept in 1895. Worldwide, the average temperature for the year, expected to be near 58 degrees Fahrenheit, is on pace to be the fifth warmest ever, said the report by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.

"Within the last 30 years, the rate of warming is about three times greater than the rate of warming since 1900," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch at the center. "The annual temperatures continue to be either near-record or at record levels year in and year out."

In the United States, the months of March and August were the second warmest in more than 100 years. Six states — Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Florida — had the warmest August month on record.

In 113 years of record keeping, all but four states — Texas, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont — experienced either above average or significantly above average temperatures from January through November. Wyoming had its second warmest year; Idaho and Utah had the fifth-warmest years on record.

North Carolina had the driest year so far. From midsummer into December, more than three-quarters of the Southeast was in drought, the report said.

The problem in Texas, Lawrimore said, was too much rain that led to flooding and the wettest summer on record. The cloudy and rainy weather for much of the year contributed to the cooler temperatures for the state, he said.

Globally, seven of the eighth warmest years on record have occurred since 2001, and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1997, said the report.

"When you see these numbers, it's screaming out at you, 'This is global warming,'" said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in Canada. "It's the beginning and it's unequivocal."

Weaver said previous warm weather records probably would have been broken this year were it not for some cooling toward the end of the year because of La Nina — a cooling of the mid-Pacific equatorial region.

At a U.N. climate conference on Bali this week, delegates from nearly 190 nations, including the United States, have been trying to hammer out a roadmap for negotiations for a new global warming pact that would take effect in 2012 after the current one expires. Former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore told delegates Thursday that the United States was "principally responsible" for blocking progress toward an agreement on launching negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Gore won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for helping alert the world to the danger of climate change.

As the world warms, scientists fear an increase in disease, killer weather and the extinction of vast numbers of species.

Globally, the greatest warming took place in high altitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere, the NOAA report said. The impact of that can be seen in the large reductions in Arctic sea ice, which is melting so rapidly that some scientists have predicted it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040. The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in September estimated the surface area of the Arctic sea ice nearly 23 percent below the previous record set in 2005.

The National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration will update its data in early January to reflect the last few weeks of December.

National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration: http://www.noaa.gov

With talk of a special prosecutor again in the air and the looming prospect of a Democrat taking over the White House, CIA officials involved in prisoner interrogations and the disputed handling of videotapes of those sessions may seek the only ironclad assurance against any criminal prosecution: a presidential pardon.
Such a pardon could come from President Bush as he prepares to leave office or from a new president early in 2009.

"I think there's a real possibility one of President Bush's last acts very well might be granting immunity to certain CIA employees," a defense attorney who has defended military personnel accused of prisoner abuse, Frank Spinner, said. "I think it depends in part on the election."
A critic of the Bush administration's interrogation policies, Thomas Malinowski of Human Rights Watch, said the pardon issue would put the White House in an awkward position as Mr. Bush's term winds down.

"It's going to be a dilemma for them, a real dilemma," Mr. Malinowski said. "The problem with a pardon is that it makes it seem that you're admitting that crimes were committed. It has been extremely difficult for this administration to do that. I think they want to go down claiming that what they did wasn't torture and it was perfectly legal. To issue pardons would undermine those claims."
One particular challenge for Mr. Bush is that he personally approved use of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, such as the mock execution method known as waterboarding. As a result, some view him as ultimately culpable.

"The person who might be most in need of a pardon is not the run-of-the-mill CIA interrogators, but the president who authorized the treatment," Mr. Malinowski said. "Personally, I don't think it would be right to go after CIA employees who were operating on the belief, based on those Justice Department memos, that what they were doing was legal, without first holding accountable civilian leaders in the administration who authorized them to do those things."
Mr. Malinowski said the ignominy of what is perceived as a self-pardon means the issue of clemency would likely be left to the victor in the 2008 election. "If the next president does it, it will be viewed as more of a healing act," he said.

A Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Biden of Delaware, is already calling for a special prosecutor in connection with recent disclosures that CIA officials ordered the destruction of videotapes of interrogations of at least two prisoners.
At a campaign stop in San Francisco yesterday, a Republican presidential hopeful, Mayor Giuliani, said the Justice Department should investigate how and why the tapes were destroyed. However, in response to a question from The New York Sun, he rebuffed the call for a special prosecutor. "I believe the Justice Department is perfectly capable of answering the question … and then the Justice Department can determine the consequences," he said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Answering questions on another subject yesterday, Mr. Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, said the White House's policy is to "never comment" on any possible pardon
In response to lobbying from the White House, Congress has passed two measures in recent years that contain legal protections for interrogators acting on instructions from higher authority. However, the language in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 does not offer the flat-out immunity of a pardon. In addition, the recent legislation may not offer protection to senior officials or for charges that could stem from the destruction of the videos, such as obstruction of justice.

The passage of time could relieve some interrogators of legal jeopardy. The statute of limitations for most federal crimes is five years, except in cases where death resulted. That means harsh interrogations from 2002 and 2003 will likely be beyond the reach of the law by 2009, when a new president is sworn in. However, some harsh practices, such as waterboarding, reportedly continued until 2005, leaving those involved in the legal crosshairs until 2010.
One question White House lawyers would have to wrestle with is how to word such a pardon, since the identities of individual interrogators are usually a closely guarded secret. Pardons, on the other hand, are usually public, though President Truman issued some without public notice.

One possibility is a blanket pardon that would cover all military, CIA personnel, and contractors involved in prisoner interrogation, as well as those who made decisions about the disputed videos. It is not necessary to name recipients of a pardon. President Ford issued a conditional amnesty to Vietnam-era draft dodgers and President Carter later granted unconditional clemency.
However, a blanket pardon could upend convictions already obtained in cases of prisoner abuse. It's also possible that some defendants engaged in conduct that had little or nothing to do with interrogation might try to claim that the rough treatment was intended to seek information.

A former congressman who served as a CIA officer, Robert Simmons, said he has concerns about a pardon because it could suggest guilt, but he wants some peace of mind for those who acted on what they thought were legally vetted orders. "Who wants to volunteer to do this kind of work if you're going to end up in jail or with all of your life savings taken away?" he asked. "If you don't build in some protections for people involved in very difficult dangerous work, you're not going to get anybody to do the work and you're going to end up with a 9/11."

Dear Sir/Madam,

Four years after the illegal US-UK-Australian invasion of Iraq, how many Iraqis have died post-invasion?

Post-invasion Occupied Iraqi excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) now total ONE MILLION as of March 2007, after 4 years of war and as estimated from data from the top US medical epidemiology group in the World’s top Public Health School (the Nobel Laureate-containing Bloomberg School of Public Health) at the top US Johns Hopkins University, published peer-reviewed in the top UK medical journal The Lancet and endorsed by 27 top Australian medical experts.

Consonant with post-invasion excess deaths in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories totalling 1.0 million and 2.4 million, respectively, the post-invasion under-5 year old infant deaths total 0.5 million and 1.9 million, respectively; the number of refugees total 3.8 million and 3.8 million, respectively; and, according to WHO, the annual per capita medical expenditures permitted by the Occupiers are $64 and $23, respectively, as compared to $2,874 (Australia), $2,389 (UK) and $5,711 (US).

The accrual cost (i.e. the long-term committed cost) of the Bush Iraq and Afghan Wars is now $2.5 TRILLION, this estimate coming from 2001 Economics Nobel Laureate and former Chief Economist of the World Bank US Professor Stiglitz (Columbia) and Professor Linda Bilmes (Harvard), who also estimate a cost of $6.5 million for each US soldier killed. Assuming the “all men are created equal” this leads to a Reparations Bill of $ 6.5 million x 3.4 million = $22 trillion.

These horrendous outcomes indicate gross violation by the US Alliance of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (notably Articles 38, 55 and 56), UN Genocide Convention (specifically Article 2) as well as of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Rights of the Child Convention. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. We are inescapably obliged to inform everyone about horrendous abuses of humanity.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Gideon Polya

President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Friday suspending Russia's participation in a key post-Cold War arms treaty, a move which could allow it to deploy more forces close to western Europe.

Putin's moratorium on the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty follows months of increasingly aggressive rhetoric directed against the West ahead of a parliamentary election on Sunday and a presidential vote next March.

"President Putin signed the federal law on suspending the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty," the Kremlin said in a short statement. The bill was passed by parliament this month and needed the president's signature to become law.

The United States, the European Union and NATO had urged Putin not to suspend the treaty, seen as a cornerstone of European security.

But Putin, who has sought to restore the Kremlin's clout after the chaos which accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, countered that NATO members had not ratified an amended version of the pact and had flexed their muscles near Russia's borders.

The suspension, which will come into effect from Dec 12-13, would allow Moscow to boost military forces on its western and southern borders, although Russian generals have said that will not happen immediately.

Polls show that talking tough about Russia standing up to foreigners strikes a chord with millions of Russians who yearn for the Soviet Union's once mighty superpower status.

Putin has also been sparring with the United States and European Union over plans for a missile defense shield in Europe and proposed independence for Serbia's Kosovo province.

Signed in 1990 and updated in 1999, the CFE treaty limits the number of battle tanks, heavy artillery, combat aircraft and attack helicopters deployed and stored between the Atlantic and Russia's Ural mountains.

It was originally negotiated among the then-22 member states of NATO and the Warsaw Pact and Russia says it is outdated.

Moscow argues it has been used by an enlarged NATO to limit Russian military movements while NATO builds up forces close to Russia in contravention of earlier agreements.

Western partners have refused to ratify an amended version of the pact until Russia pulls its forces out of Georgia and Moldova as it promised in 1999 when the treaty was reviewed.

Moscow's key problem with the treaty are flank limits which prevent Russia from moving tanks and artillery around its own territory, Russia's top generals say.

NATO has said it would be worrying to see large amounts of equipment limited by the treaty suddenly moving around.

But Russia's top general, Yuri Baluyevsky, said this month said there would be no immediate movement of forces after the moratorium came into effect.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Philippa Fletcher)