Morning News Roundup (03 May)

• A suicide bomber has killed at least 15 people in the Iraqi city of Falluja by blowing himself up in a crowd of men waiting to join the police. The deaths are among dozens in the last 24 hours as insurgency and sectarian unrest grips the troubled country.
  
  The bullet-riddled bodies of 14 men were recovered together in the Shaab district of the Iraqi capital Baghdad. Four Shia students were pulled from a minibus and shot dead overnight. About 20 other corpses were found in Baghdad. [BBC]
  
  
• Building on a winter campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations and the knowledge that American troops are leaving, the Taliban appear to be moving their insurgency into a new phase, flooding the rural areas of southern Afghanistan with weapons and men.
  
  The arrival of large numbers of Taliban in the villages, flush with money and weapons, has dealt a blow to public confidence in the Afghan government, already undermined by lack of tangible progress and frustration with corrupt and ineffective leaders. [NYTimes]
  
  
• Iraq and Afghanistan rank among the world’s 10 weakest states, according to a new index released by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine. [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• This is big--now the global warming skeptics have lost one of their biggest pieces of ammunition (from the WaPo):
  

  A government study released yesterday undermines one of the key arguments of climate change skeptics, concluding there is no statistically significant conflict between measures of global warming on the earth's surface and in the atmosphere.
  
  For years some global warming critics had pointed to the fact that satellite measurements had recorded very little warming in the lower atmosphere, while surface temperature readings indicated that the earth is heating up. Now the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, an interagency body, has concluded the two data sets match.
  [...]
  The report also concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions, noting in the official news release, "the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, nor by the effects of short-lived atmospheric constituents such as aerosols and tropospheric ozone alone."

• Global warming is melting glaciers in China's Tibetan region at a rate of 7.0 percent annually, triggering drought, desertification and sandstorms in other regions. "The melting glacier will ultimately trigger more droughts, expand desertification and increase sandstorms," the report quoted Dong Guangrong, a specialist at the China Academy of Sciences, as saying. Northern China, including Beijing, has suffered from 13 dust storms this year which have been attributed to desertification in China's northwestern regions, including Qinghai province. [AFP via TerraDaily]
  
  
• The AP (via the WaPo) reports that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell won the GOP nomination for governor Tuesday after campaigning as the best candidate to deliver his party from a year of political scandals and infighting. Blackwell's prominence as a leading black voice in the GOP could be pivotal to Republicans.
  
  David Edwards over at Veredictum notes the latest PBS Now episode on the mix of religion in Ohio politics. The PBS site has a schload of stuff, and Veredictum has the video as well.
  

  [It] maps out how the Republican National Committee and Republican operatives are using "patriot pastors", mega-churches, polarizing rhetoric and tax exemptions to create an illegal and unfair advantage against their competitors.
  
  Due to complaints from more established liberal churches, the Internal Revenue Service is now investigating the illegal activities being conducted by the Republicans who have hijacked the beliefs of many Christian's for corrupt political purposes. The IRS has promised to step up its' prosecution of these abuses.

• Arlen Specter, the Repbulican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing the White House of a ''very blatant encroachment" on congressional authority, said yesterday he will hold an oversight hearing into President Bush's assertion that he has the power to bypass more than 750 laws enacted over the past five years. [Boston Globe]
  
  
• Critical Darfur peace talks have been extended, as high-powered diplomats from the United States and Britain worked to place pressure on the Khartoum government and warring rebels. [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast; more at the WaPo]
  
  
• Congressional Republicans agreed to a $70 billion package of tax cuts that, if enacted, would hand President George W. Bush a political victory to tout before the November mid-term elections. The agreement in principle reached yesterday would extend low tax rates on dividends and most capital gains until 2010 and prevent a $31 billion tax increase for more than 15 million U.S. households from the alternative minimum tax this year. [Bloomberg]
  
  
• Cutting gasoline taxes is not a good way for the country to deal with soaring energy prices. "One of the things we worry about when we cut the tax on gasoline is that it basically stimulates additional use," said Edward Lazear, chairman of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers. "Over a longer period of time, it would be a significant problem ... because what it would do is it would encourage us to use more oil, not less and that is the way we got to the situation right now," he explained. [USAToday]
  
  
• Mexican President Vicente Fox will sign a bill that would legalize the use of nearly every drug and narcotic sold by the same Mexican cartels he's vowed to fight during his five years in office. And the per-person amounts approved for possession by anyone 18 or older could easily turn any college party into an all-nighter: half a gram of coke, a couple of Ecstasy pills, several doses of LSD, a few marijuana joints, a spoonful of heroin, 5 grams of opium and more than 2 pounds of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus. [LATimes]
  
  
• Manchester United striker and England national team hopeful Wayne Rooney has "more than one fracture" and maybe needs a "miracle" to be fit for the World Cup, according to England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson. [BBC]