God, life and family get little if any mention in statements or manifestos. The motto of the Tea Party Patriots, a large coalition of groups, is “fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets.” The Independence Caucus questionnaire, which many Tea Party groups use to evaluate candidates, poses 80 questions, most on the proper role of government, tax policy and the federal budgeting process, and virtually none on social issues.

Tea Party leaders argue that the country can ill afford the discussion about social issues when it is passing on enormous debts to future generations.

“We should be creating the biggest tent possible around the economic conservative issue,” said Ryan Hecker, the organizer behind the Contract From America. “I think social issues may matter to particular individuals, but at the end of the day, the movement should be agnostic about it. This is a movement that rose largely because of the Republican Party failing to deliver on being representative of the economic conservative ideology. To include social issues would be beside the point.”

Armed with generous incentives from the Spanish government to jump-start a national solar energy industry, the city set out to replace its failing coal economy by attracting solar companies. Farmers sold land for solar plants. Boutiques opened. And people from all over the world, seeing business opportunities, moved to the city.

But as low-quality, poorly designed solar plants sprang up on Spain’s plateaus, Spanish officials came to realize that they would have to subsidize many of them indefinitely, and that the industry they had created might never produce efficient green energy on its own.

In September the government abruptly changed course, cutting payments and capping solar construction. Puertollano’s brief boom turned bust. Factories and stores shut, thousands of workers lost jobs, foreign companies and banks abandoned contracts that had already been negotiated.

The price of the precious metal rose 277 per cent during the past decade, with investors particularly attracted to gold during the recession as they sought a safe haven for their money.

Overall, gold, silver and platinum increased in value by 242 per cent between December 1999 and December 2009, the equivalent of an average annual return of 13.1 per cent.

It means precious metals outpaced inflation which has increased by 30 per cent during the decade or by an average 2.7 per cent a year.

Gold saw the biggest rise over the decade at 277 per cent, followed by platinum at 230 per cent and silver at 227 per cent.

In a long op-ed piece for The New York Times the other day, Gore cranked up the doomsday rhetoric. Human beings, he warned, “face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.’’ His 1,900-word essay made no mention of his financial interest in promoting such measures.

On the other hand, it is quite clear that the economic and agricultural activity responsible for that anthropogenic CO2 has been enormously beneficial to myriads of men, women, and children. In just the last two decades, life expectancy in developing nations has climbed appreciably and infant mortality has fallen. Hundreds of millions of Indian and Chinese citizens have been lifted out of poverty. Whatever else might be said about carbon dioxide, it has helped make possible a dramatic increase in the quality of many human lives.

To climate alarmists like Gore, everything proves their point. For years they argued that global warming would mean a decline in snow cover and shorter ski seasons. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’’ one climate scientist lamented to reporters in 2000. The IPCC itself was clear that climate change was resulting in more rain and less snow.

Alongside austerity measures such as cuts to public sector pay and a freeze on state pensions, why not sell a few uninhabited islands or ancient artefacts, asked Josef Schlarmann, a senior member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and Frank Schaeffler, a finance policy expert in the Free Democrats.

The Acropolis and the Parthenon could also fall under the hammer, along with temptingly idyllic Aegean islands still under state ownership, in a rush to keep bankruptcy at bay.

Spanish National Court Judge Eloy Velasco alleged Monday that the Venezuelan government had collaborated with Basque separatist group ETA and Colombia’s main guerrilla group in a plot against leaders living in or traveling to Spain that began in late 2003.

The allegations were part of an indictment that ordered 12 alleged members of ETA and of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to stand trial on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism, according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

« There is evidence…showing the cooperation of the Venezuelan government in the illegal collaboration between FARC and ETA, » according to the indictment.

The Israel of today and the South Africa of yesterday have almost nothing in common. In South Africa, the minority white population harshly ruled the majority black population. Nonwhites were denied civil rights, and in 1958, they were even deprived of citizenship. In contrast, Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of the country, have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews. Arabs sit in the Knesset and serve in the military, although most are exempt from the draft. Whatever this is — and it looks suspiciously like a liberal democracy — it cannot be apartheid.

Without record levels of welfare, unemployment and other government benefits as well as tax cuts last year, the income of U.S. households would have plunged by an astonishing $723 billion — more than four times the record $167 billion drop reported last month by the Commerce Department.

Moreover, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes.

The figures show the devastating results of the massive job losses last year and indicate that the economic recovery that began last summer is tenuous and has a long way to go before many Americans resume life as normal, analysts said.

The benchmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that a worldwide increase in hurricane-force storms since 1970 was probably linked to global warming. The IPCC added that humanity could expect a big increase in such storms over the 21st century unless greenhouse gas emissions were controlled.

The warning helped turn hurricanes into one of the most iconic threats of global warming, with politicians including Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, and Al Gore citing them as a growing threat to humanity.

However, the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture. It suggests that the rise in hurricane frequency since 1995 was just part of a natural cycle, and that several similar previous increases have been recorded, each followed by a decline.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a 42-year-old plumber and bricklayer, stopped eating solid food Dec. 3 to protest what he described as repeated beatings by guards and many other abuses at his Kilo 7 prison in the eastern province of Camagüey.

Active in several dissident organizations, he had been arrested in 2003 amid a government crackdown that sentenced 75 government critics to lengthy prison terms, and Amnesty International declared him a « prisoner of conscience. »

Initially charged with contempt, public disorder and « disobedience » and sentenced to three years, he was convicted of other acts of defiance while in prison, and by the time of his death faced a total of 36 years in prison.

« There are literally tens of thousands of people who are suffering unnecessarily, » says lead author Nathan Cherny of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel.

Opioid-type drugs are potent painkillers. In fact, the World Health Organization lists two of them, codeine and morphine, as « essential medicines » that should be available worldwide.

Cherny and his colleagues asked cancer pain specialists, including doctors, nurses and social workers from 40 European countries plus Israel, to review access to opioids in their countries.

A renewed sense of gloom has descended as the stock market rally appears to fizzle, the job market remains stagnant, and worries grow that government spending has spun out of control amid political gridlock in Washington, economists said.

A key index of consumer attitudes dropped 10.5 points to a 10-month low of 46.0 in February, the Conference Board reported. That was well off the 55 reading expected by many on Wall Street.

Some economists said severe winter storms might have been a factor in the unexpected drop, noting that in January 1996 bad weather led to a 10.8-point decline as payrolls and hours worked took at hit.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study « strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results ». The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Malmo’s Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country’s Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them.

The future looks so bleak that by one estimate, around 30 Jewish families have already left for Stockholm, England or Israel, and more are preparing to go. With its young people planning new lives elsewhere, the remaining Jewish households, many of whom are made up of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, fear they will soon be gone altogether.

Senior Canadian officials are in the midst of crafting a public response that will be delivered shortly, sources with knowledge of the plan said. An official, and public, declaration is required, they say, due to recent public musings from Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, that the G20 countries were close to a deal on a financial services tax — the so-called « Tobin » tax.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as well as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, want to use their influence as host of the next G20 meeting, in Toronto in June, to kill the proposal. The sources suggested the G20 would not agree to measures or policies unless all leaders sign on.

When he was at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, Mr. Harper used the global stage to denounce « excessive » and « arbitrary » proposals from countries, such as Britain and France, to regulate the financial-services industry in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

A few days later, one of Beck’s producers e-mailed me to say that Beck too liked the book, and did I have any more recommendations? So I sent him a list. Then Beck read those books too.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years. These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

The Garden State was blooming. Then the trend reversed. From 2004-2008, author John Havens found « a large decline in the number of wealthy households entering New Jersey » as well as « a moderate increase in the outflow of wealthy households leaving. » The result: a net decline of $70 billion in household wealth while the « expected giving » became a net outflow of $1.132 billion.

So what happened in 2004? The study doesn’t purport to explain what caused the wealth movements. But the state’s most notable economic policy event that year was an increase in its top income tax rate to 8.97% from 6.37%, on incomes starting at $500,000. That’s a 40% increase.

Chamber Chairman Dennis Bone says it is « crystal clear that the state’s tax policies are resulting in a significant decline in the state’s wealth. » New Jersey’s estate tax, which kicks in at 2.5% on assets of as little as $675,000, goes up to 16% on assets over $10 million.

The promising financial picture for individual Republican candidates suggests that the midterm elections in the Northeast, a Democratic stronghold, may turn out to be far more competitive than expected, forcing Democrats to play defense on what is essentially their home turf.

Independent analysts say there are a dozen Democratic-held districts in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire where the incumbents could face strong challenges , and in many of those districts Republican candidates have amassed sizable sums of money.

The philosophy behind the move is that accidents, as well as congestion, are reduced when motorists show greater individual responsibility, rather than mentally switching off to behave like automata. Common sense and courtesy prevail against the mindlessness of sitting at a red light for no reason other than that the state tells us to. Discretion and give-and-take also work well for pedestrians. Traffic lights are a spur to frustration which can spill over into road rage.

Although UNWRA has long been a biased player in the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is seldom criticized for its incitement of anti-Israeli hatred and violence by Palestinians. It has funded textbooks that deny the right of Israel to exist and paid teachers who call on Palestinian children to push the Jewish state into the sea. It harbours radical Islamists and anti-Semites on its payroll and was even caught in 2004 using its own ambulances to ferry terrorists away from Israeli sites they had just attacked.

He urged people to eat less meat, pay aviation taxes and even ban giving iced water in restaurants. But in order to get his message across, the former railway engineer, who lives in Delhi, created an enormous carbon footprint of his own.

Dr Pachauri has been the chairman of the panel since 2002. Documents available on its website showed that in one 19-month period, he clocked up more than half a million miles in the air as he travelled the world on official business.

Between January 2007 and July 2008, he took more than 120 long-haul flights and 43 short-haul trips, taking in countries such as New Zealand, America and Fiji.

To stimulate its economy, the government has focused on the domestic slice. In an effort to boost internal consumption, it has kept a key interest rate near zero, resulting in exceptionally low mortgages rates. Consumers have responded. Average home prices in Canada have risen 23% from their trough in January 2009.

Some economists who are concerned point out that home prices are rising far faster than other measures of economic health. In a December report, the Bank of Canada warned that household debt—largely mortgages—was 1.42 times disposable income during the second quarter of 2009, a record high.

« This is exactly what happened in the U.S., when affordability had moved way out of whack with prices, » says David Rosenberg, an economist who witnessed America’s housing bubble at Merrill Lynch in New York, and now sees similar trends up north from his post at Toronto-based wealth-management firm Gluskin Sheff.

« There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am all for climate science but not for climate evangelism. I think people misused the IPCC report, » Ramesh told a news channel here.

Stressing that the IPCC’s weakness was that it didn’t do original research and derives assessments from published literature, the minister announced a climate change panel for India.

He said that IPCC has « had goof-ups on the glaciers, on the Amazon, on the snow peaks. » However, he added that the IPCC with a network of 200 scientists worldwide was « a responsible body ».