When a reluctant George H W Bush, Sr, then US president, changed his mind and decided at the eleventh hour to address the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, he sounded defensive in his strong response to charges that the United States was one of the major powers responsible for the some of the world’s worst environmental ills – from greenhouse gases to conspicuous consumption.

‘I didn’t come here to apologise,’ Bush told world leaders in a defiant seven-minute speech, even as the IPS daily conference newspaper Terra Viva led off with the story in an arresting headline: ‘US President Snubs His Nose at Rest of the World.’

Before he left Washington DC for the Earth Summit, Bush had told reporters: ‘The day of the open chequebook is over’ – indicating that the financing scheme for the biodiversity convention will not work.

‘Sometimes leadership means standing alone,’ he said.

In that US presidential election year, Bush was virtually forced to attend the summit under political pressure from his Democratic rival Bill Clinton, who went on to win the presidency and beat Bush at the polls.

At a press conference in Washington DC, Clinton criticised Bush’s stance at the Earth Summit and accused him of ‘delaying world […]

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The crew of China’s most ambitious space mission yet — including its first woman astronaut — boarded a rocket Saturday for their journey to the final frontier.

Shenzhou-9 — China’s fourth manned space mission — was due to launch at 6:37 pm (1037 GMT) from the remote Gobi desert in the nation’s northwest, in a bid to achieve the country’s first manual space docking high above Earth.

The crew were headed by Jing Haipeng, a veteran astronaut who has gone to space twice already. Liu Wang, who has been in the space programme for 14 years, is in charge of manual docking manoeuvres.

Meanwhile Liu Yang, 33, who has created a stir in the media and online for becoming China’s first woman to travel to space, will conduct aerospace medical experiments and other space tests.

At a pre-departure ceremony broadcast on state TV Wu Bangguo, chairman of the National People’s Congress, told them: ‘The country and the people are looking forward to your successful return.’

The mission will last 10 days, during which the crew will perform experiments and the manual space docking — a highly technical procedure that brings two vessels together in high speed orbit.

Successful completion of the rendezvous between the Shenzhou-9 (‘Divine […]

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Several times in the past 10 years scientists have had to rewrite the textbooks on Neanderthals, the latest species of human to go extinct. Once the archetype for primitive, uncivilised behaviour, the species, illuminated through fossil excavations and lately analysis of their genome, has emerged as being not too dissimilar from our own.

Contrary to their dim-witted image Neanderthals have been found to have used tools, to have worn jewellery, and, lastly, to have interbred with our Homo sapiens ancestors to such an extent that 4% of every modern European’s genome is traceable to Neanderthal origins.

Now comes what could be the final nail in the coffin of the ‘unintelligent Neanderthals

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TROMSOE, NORWAY — Europe’s struggling economies should look to tiny Iceland as a model for managing their crises and returning quickly to growth, especially in winning public support for moderate austerity policies, Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir said.

The North Atlantic island has had one major advantage as it recovers from a crash in 2008 which countries locked in the euro zone do not have – a currency of its own.

Nevertheless, Sigurdardottir told Reuters that Iceland’s mix of measured austerity and unorthodox policies – such as private debt forgiveness and defending welfare payments as much as possible – could offer some lessons to euro zone members.

‘We believe and so does the IMF that our case can be a role model for some of the countries in crisis now,’ she said in a rare interview. ‘I’ve met with several leaders over the past years, some from Greece, and many prime ministers have been surprised by our economic turnaround and asked how we did it.’

In 2008 Iceland’s banking sector collapsed, a shock which euro member Ireland also suffered and which Spain is now trying to avoid. The International Monetary Fund and other lenders had to bail out Iceland, which remains outside the EU, and […]

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The mood at the Vatican is apocalyptic. Pope Benedict XVI seems tired, and both unable and unwilling to seize the reins amid fierce infighting and scandal. While Vatican insiders jockey for power and speculate on his successor, Joseph Ratzinger has withdrawn to focus on his still-ambiguous legacy.

Finally, there is clarity. The Holy See has cleared things up and made the document accessible to all: a handout on checking whether apparitions of the Virgin Mary are authentic.

Everything will be much easier from now on. The Roman Catholic Church has taken a step forward.

This ‘breaking news’ from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) reveals the kinds of issues the Vatican is concerned with — and the kind of world in which some there live. It’s a world in which the official Church investigation of Virgin Mary sightings is carefully regulated while cardinals in the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s administrative and judicial apparatus, wield power with absolutely no checks and the pope’s private correspondence turns up in the desk drawers of a butler.

It’s a completely different apparition of the Virgin Mary that has pulled the Vatican and the Catholic Church into a new crisis, whose end and impact can only […]

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