Morning News Roundup (14 September)

Jesus!

• President Bush said Tuesday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil."
  [...]
  The First Great Awakening refers to a wave of Christian fervor in the American colonies from about 1730 to 1760, while the Second Great Awakening is generally believed to have occurred from 1800 to 1830.
  [...]
  Bush has been careful discussing the battle with terrorists in religious terms since he had to apologize for using the word "crusade" in 2001. He often stresses that the war is not against Islam but against those who corrupt it. In his comments yesterday, aides said Bush was not casting the war as a religious struggle but was describing American cultural changes in a time of war. [WaPo]
  
  
• Dan Froomkin in his WaPo White House Briefing column takes us back to an opinion piece from April 2005 by National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart:

  He wrote that Bush "has brought religion into politics in a way unknown to recent memory. And he has owed both of his electoral victories to his Evangelical Christian base. This indispensable base has profoundly affected his policies, foreign and domestic.
  
  "The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative."
  
  Hart wrote that the "Third Awakening of Evangelicalism believes all sorts of bizarre things, such as the imminent end of the world, the second coming of Christ, the sudden elevation of the just to heaven and the final struggle of Good versus Evil in Jerusalem: Armageddon. We thus have the immense popularity of the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins."
  
  Concentrating mostly on the public health-related effects of Bush's Evangelicalism, Hart wrote that it "has real and often dangerous effects on the world in which the rest of us . . . live."

• Evangelical aid agency Tearfund is urging church-goers to watch Al Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ which goes on selected nationwide release from this Friday, September 15, in the UK. Andy Atkins, Tearfund’s Advocacy Director, said: “As Christians, we can no longer ignore the implications of human-induced climate change. ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is a powerful and challenging film which highlights the climate chaos that is increasingly undermining the livelihoods and security of the poor people Tearfund works with." [Ekklesia via my Hugg]

BushCo's Wars

• Officials of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency “angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran’s capabilities, calling parts of the document ‘outrageous and dishonest‘ and offering evidence to refute its central claims.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• Don't forget about Poland: Poland is to send another 900 troops to bolster the Nato peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. The US and UK yesterday urged Nato nations to send more troops to Afghanistan to help fight the Taliban insurgency after a Nato commander called for reinforcements last week. Poland already has a 100-strong contingent in the country. [The Guardian]

Climate Crisis

• There's a battle going on in Northfield, MN between my alma mater St. Olaf and the dreaded Carleton College (the rivalry going so deep that Carleton is even mentioned in the St. Olaf fight song), but it's not over football. From Treehugger:
  

  Northfield now boasts two tall windmills, each claimed by its respective College in the newest extension of a long-fought but good-natured competition between the schools. [...] Carleton fired the opening round in the windmill battle, claiming the nation's first utility grade windmill owned by a college, which started producing power (1.65MW) in September 2004. Perhaps in a subtle rebuttal, St. Olaf reminds that water for the original "Old Main" was pumped by windmill, pictured above. In September of 2006, St. Olaf will join Carleton in producing 1.65MW from a turbine installed and owned by the Black & Golds.
  
  There are differences. The St. Olaf turbine will directly supply the students' needs on campus, while the Carleton windmill feeds power back to the energy utility, Xcel. St. Olaf was in a good position to draw the windpower directly into the campus loop due to a decision made a few years ago to install a generator system capable of supplying all of the college's needs from diesel generators on site.
  [...]
  In September 2006, a St. Olaf's windmill will join Carleton's and together they will produce power equivalent to about 4% of the community's total usage, 30-40% of the needs of the colleges themselves.

  Treehugger also notes a blog devoted to the St. Olaf wind turbine, which includes some nifty time-lapse video of the construction. Um ya ya!!!!!
  
  
• 74.5 degrees: The average temperature in the continental U.S. this summer, according to the National Climatic Data Center. “It was the second-hottest summer temperature the government has recorded since it started keeping track in 1895.” [ThinkProgress' ThinkFast]
  
  
• The vast expanses of ice floating in the Arctic Sea are shrinking in winter as well as summer, most likely a result of global warming, NASA scientists said today. "This is the strongest evidence yet of global warming in the Arctic,'' said Josefino Comiso, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. [SFChronic]

Big Blue Marble

• Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for sanctions to be imposed on Sudan unless it agrees to UN peacekeepers in Darfur. "The world can't keep saying 'Never again'," he told the BBC. [BBC]
  
  
• GRAI Commanders from the only rebel group that signed a peace accord in May for Sudan's Darfur region are prepared to resume fighting if African Union peacekeeping troops leave as scheduled at month's end and are not replaced by a United Nations force. [WaPo]

Misc.

• "This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world. It's as big a threat as global warming and bird flu." This warning came from Paul Zimmet during his opening address at the 10th International Congress on Obesity in Sydney on Sunday, according to a report by the Associated Press.
  
  Zimmet, an expert on diabetes at Monash University in Australia, said that overweight people now outnumber the undernourished. The World Health Organization's estimates agree: globally, there are one billion overweight adults, and 300 million of them are obese; in contrast, about 800 million do not have enough to eat. [New Scientist via Boing Boing]
  
  
• After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Gary Weddle followed the news so closely he forgot to shave. After a week he decided not to shave until Osama bin Laden was caught or killed. Nor has Weddle, 46, who expected the al Qaeda leader to be caught within a month or so, trimmed his facial hair in the succeeding five years as he went from substitute teacher to science instructor at Ephrata Middle School. At the start of each school year he gives students a brief explanation of his beard, which stretches more than a foot and has started turning gray. [Ed. note: I'm guessing the beard's gonna keep on growing for awhile] [CNN]

And one more thing... Tim Grieve over at Salon's War Room offers this remembrance of Texas Governor Ann Richards, who passed away on Wednesday:

We'll remember Richards for a brief interview we did with her a few years ago -- she grew bored of our questions, told us we'd gotten enough out of her and all but hung up on us -- but we'll remember her more for the speech she gave almost two decades ago in Atlanta. They'll be quoting the punch line a lot today, the one about George H.W. Bush having been born with a "silver foot in his mouth." We'll be thinking about what she said just before that: "We're not going to have the America that we want until we elect leaders who are gonna tell the truth."

[ posted with ecto ]