With Elections Near, Australia’s Rudd Backs Off Ambitious Carbon Trading Plan

In the last three years, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has often used his podium to talk to the nation about climate change. He has called it “the great moral and economic issue challenge of our time,” comparing global warming skeptics to gamblers who “happily play with our children’s future.” It’s not random that Australia’s leader has been vocal on the issue: Despite being one of the more sparsely populated nations, Australia’s 22 million inhabitants emit the third largest amount of carbon dioxide per capita in the world

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How Should We Teach Our Kids about SEX?

SOME INGREDIENTS IN THE STEAMING HORmonal stew that is American adolescence: For Prom Night last week, senior class officers at Benicia High School in California assembled some party favors — a gift-wrapped condom, a Planned Parenthood pamphlet advocating abstinence and a piece of candy. “We know Prom Night is a big night for a lot of people, sexually,” senior Lisa Puryear told the San Jose Mercury News.

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The Responsibility Revolution

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” FDR said in 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression. “We know now that it is bad economics.” We learned this all over again after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the shame of subprime mortgages and the brazen Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff.

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Reward offered in killing of Oklahoma pastor

Investigators have offered a $10,000 reward in the killing of a pastor at an Oklahoma church, a crime the local prosecutor described as "horrific." The reward comes as police try to unravel the mystery of who killed Carol Daniels, a 61-year-old pastor from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She traveled many Sundays to Anadarko, Oklahoma, about 50 miles southwest of her home, to Christ Holy Sanctified Church “in case people came in to worship,” her son, Alvin Daniels, told CNN. Investigators found her body inside the church around noon Sunday.

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Arrest threatens Zimbabwe’s new unity government

Zimbabwe’s new unity Cabinet met for the first time Tuesday, bringing together leaders of President Robert Mugabe’s party and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s opposition party. The government met a day after the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, criticized last week’s arrest of a key party leader and what they called the abduction of other party members by Mugabe supporters. Roy Bennett — treasurer of the MDC and Zimbabwe’s agriculture deputy minister-designate — faces charges of planning terrorism and insurgency

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