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Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch resigned from her leadership post the day after fellow Republicans confronted her about allegations that she had an "inappropriate relationship" with a staff member. "We're here today with a lot of humility and some sadness and even shock," interim Senate Majority Leader Geoff Michel said Friday at a hastily called Capitol news conference. Koch, the state's first female majority leader, was widely considered a hard-working and savvy campaigner who helped Republicans win control of the Senate last year for the first time in four decades. Her sudden resignation stunned Republicans, ending one of the...

Over the years, Sen. John McCain has been known to change his views every now and then. Environmentalists hope this is one of those times. Now that McCain has dispatched a conservative primary challenger and Arizona appears set to send him back to the Senate, climate advocates are optimistic they will soon regain one of their biggest champions. ... Multiple sources said McCain reassured them in private that he still believed in the climate issue... ...

Actually, this review is too late for the many people who have already endured economic collapse. As any of those folks can tell the rest of us, we do not want to receive the lesson after the exam. ... Global climate change threatens our species with extinction by mid-century is we do not terminate the industrial economy soon. Increasingly dire forecasts from extremely conservative sources keep stacking up. Governments refuse to act because they know growth of the industrial economy depends (almost solely) on consumption of fossil fuels. Global climate change and energy decline are similar in this respect: neither...

Now here's a bright idea. Xcel Energy is giving away compact fluorescent light bulbs to every person attending Wednesday's Minnesota Twins home game, and four of those bulbs come with free tickets to future home games this season. The energy-efficient bulbs will be given out in recognition of Earth Day, on Thursday. They will be distributed after the night game against the Cleveland Indians, lest they go airborne in still-pristine Target Field.

About 50 protesters gathered outside the Minneapolis offices of U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Tuesday, demanding that she vote against a $33 billion supplemental appropriation for the war in Afghanistan.

Climate scientists are on the defensive, knocked off balance by a re-energized community of global-warming deniers who, by dominating the media agenda, are sowing doubts about the fundamental science. Most researchers find themselves completely out of their league in this kind of battle because it's only superficially about the science. The real goal is to stoke the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like, all of which feed off of contrarian story lines and seldom make the time to assess facts and weigh evidence. Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant. Worse, the onslaught seems...

The vast archive of memorabilia will go under the hammer at Bonhams in Knightsbridge. As well as two Daleks, other items up for sale include several Cybermen, a sea devil and the costume for the Magma Creature, which featured in Peter Davidson's last show in 1984. The Daleks are expected to fetch up to £3,000 each when the sale gets under way on February 24.

A 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth’s surface has had a big impact on global warming, say researchers in a study published online January 28 in the journal Science. The findings might help explain why global surface temperatures have not risen as fast in the last ten years as they did in the 1980s and 1990s. Observations from satellites and balloons show that stratospheric water vapor has had its ups and downs lately, increasing in the 1980s and 1990s, and then dropping after 2000. The authors show that these changes occurred precisely in a narrow altitude...

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that...

<p>When people talk about racing and politics, it's usually related to a track official's interpretation of an on-track incident. DFL gubernatorial candidate Roger Moe, however, has added another dimension to racing and politics.</p> <p>The Moe campaign leased a stock car and hauler from LaFavre Racing and will appear with it in some 75 parades around the state in the next couple of months. The car will be a part of Moe's State Fair booth, and there is a possibility the Moe campaign will field a team for the ASA Labor Day race at the Fair.</p>

Human sexual behaviour Playing away May 2nd 2002 From The Economist print edition Women are most attracted by infidelity when most susceptible to impregnation IT IS easy to understand why men are unfaithful. A man's reproductive output, like that of a male of any species, is limited mainly by the number of females he can impregnate. For women, the explanation of infidelity is more subtle. Women need (in evolutionary terms, as well as in everyday life) quality in partners, rather than quantity. And however admirable their main squeeze might be, it is unlikely that his genes are unbeatable. They...

Wednesday, Mar 20, 2002 Last week U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney toured the Middle East to garner Arab support for America's war on terrorism, and American envoy Anthony Zinni flew back to the region in a desperate attempt to halt the rising bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians. But many Arabs see America's priorities as the opposite of reality: it is Israel, not Iraq, that poses the greatest threat. Arabs regard the Palestinian problem as a cause of Islamic terrorism, and fear that terrorism will increase unless the conflict with Israel is settled fairly. That conviction was strongly reflected in the...

Making himself relevant Dec 17th 2001 From The Economist Global AgendaIn an effort to reassert his authority, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, has made a televised call for a complete halt to all attacks on Israelis ReutersAppealing BACK pressed firmly to the wall Yasser Arafat on December 16th at last met one of the demands the world has been making of him. “I today reiterate [a call for] the complete and immediate cessation of all military activities, especially suicide attacks which we have condemned and always condemned,” he said in a televised address to his people marking the end of ...

Energy and geopolitics Addicted to oil Dec 13th 2001 From The Economist print editionAmerica's energy policy was wrong before September 11th. Now it is even more so IF SEPTEMBER 11th really did change the world then one thing it changed, you might suppose, is how the West, and in particular the United States, should think about energy. America's dependence on oil imports from the Middle East has led it to see the stability of the region as a vital security interest. In defending this interest over the years, its military and political entanglements have grown more costly and more ...

We need to be protesting against the liberal vote theives where it hurts, at their homes. We must organize and have protesters outside the liberal leaders and their lawyer lapdogs homes. How long would Daley stay in Florida fabricating votes if there were protesters outside his Chihome? How about the Sen. Joe-Bob Liarman's? Here in Minnesota, we need to protest outside Sen. Wellstone's home. Make it personal. Make our message clear!

As all of us are gearing up for the upcoming Y2K elections, there is one conservative issue that seems to have been misplaced. That issue is States Rights and the devolution of power from the State governments to the Federal government. I honor (or dishonor) this event with the suggestion we rename the United States of America. We should simple call our country the United of America, since the concept of States has virtually disappeared from our Republic. In a recent FreeRepublic thread CLINTON and MARTIAL LAW the powers of the imperial president were discussed. One of the key points ...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The newly released FBI surveillance tapes of the siege at Waco have handed new ammunition to the militia groups who believed the assault was a government conspiracy to wipe out a nonconformist sect. "It's a propaganda victory, if you will," said Devin Burghart of the Center for New Community. "They're able to say, 'Look, we were right all along about the situation.' And it fuels their conspiracies about the federal government." Militia Web sites reflect that. On the Web site of the Militia of Montana: "What do you want to bet the tactical uplink was being ...