Venezuela turns over alleged drug lord to US (AP)

CARACAS, Venezuela ? Venezuela handed a top Colombian drug trafficking suspect to U.S. authorities on Thursday, deporting him to face charges of shipping tons of cocaine to the United States.

The U.S. had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Maximiliano Bonilla Orozco, known as "Valenciano," who was also on Colombia's most-wanted list. Bonilla was captured in Venezuela last month.

He was turned over to U.S. authorities at Caracas' international airport. U.S. counter-drug officials, their faces covered with masks, led the handcuffed Bonilla aboard a plane.

The U.S. State Department had listed Bonilla among its eight most-wanted Colombian drug traffickers after leftist rebels. U.S. officials say Bonilla sent tons of cocaine to the United States through Central America and Mexico, dealing extensively with Mexico's Zetas drug cartel.

Venezuela also deported a second Colombian suspect, Gildardo Garcia Cardona, to Colombia on Thursday. Garcia, an alleged member of the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, was captured in Venezuela in October.

Garcia is charged with drug trafficking, and Colombian officials had issued an order for his arrest through Interpol, Venezuelan Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said.

When Bonilla was captured in the central city of Maracay, both Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called it an example of improved counter-drug cooperation.

Santos said Colombian authorities had provided intelligence to Venezuelan authorities, who tracked down Bonilla.

Bonilla, 39, allegedly headed a Medellin-based criminal organization dating back to the 1980s that once recruited hit men for the late cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Wanted on a 2008 federal indictment from New York's eastern district for drug trafficking, Bonilla received cocaine from various sources in Colombia, including the country's rebels, Colombian and U.S. officials say.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/latam/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111215/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_venezuela_us_drugs

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Lawmakers kill cell phone robo-call bill

By msnbc.com staff and news reports

Rep. Lee Terry got the hint. The robo-calls bill is dead.

The bill sponsored by Terry, R-Neb., (H.R. 3035) would have allowed ?robo-calls? to your cell phone?? even if you didn?t give a company permission to contact you at that number.?

Consumer groups made a lot of noise in the hope that?Congress would kill the bill. They call it a dangerous proposal that could lead to more nuisance calls.

Supporters of the ?Mobile Informational Call Act of 2011? include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Air Transport Association, as well as groups that represent bankers, mortgage lenders, college loan programs and debt collectors.?

On Wednesday, Terry and bill co-sponsor Rep. Ed Towns, D-N.Y., sent a letter to the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee asking that the legislation not be advanced.

Last week, attorneys general in 48 of the 50 states sent their own letter to Congress opposing the legislation.

In a blog post published Tuesday, Delicia Reynolds,?legislative director for?the National Association of Consumer Advocates, warned that the legislation would "open up cell phones to unwanted and nuisance calls.? A poll on msnbc.com found that out of 60,000 votes cast, 99.5 percent opposed the bill.

"We swung and missed," Charles Isom, communications director for Rep. Terry, told msnbc.com. "There was no clear way forward with this bill."

Here is the letter sent to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you and Chairman Walden, for allowing the hearing to occur on the merits of HR 3035. The hearing really helped to bring to our attention the issue of out of date telecommunications policy and how we need to begin to modernize current law.?

However, what we have learned is there is no hope for this legislation. We have heard from our constituents. They are concerned about what they believe will happen should this legislation become law. We have convened meetings with numerous consumer groups, as well as other organizations who have an interest in the legislation, but we have been unable to reach any kind of consensus on language that bans unwanted cell phone calls, while allowing calls that are consented to.

In an attempt to thread the needle and address the issues that have been brought before us, it is clear that this bill cannot be improved in a manner that will address the concerns of those involved. Therefore, we ask that HR 3035 not be advanced by the committee.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Lee Terry
Edolphus "Ed" Towns

Msnbc.com's Al Olson and Herb Weisbaum and Nebraska's ETV Newswatch 7 contributed to this report.

?

Source: http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/14/9451537-cell-phone-robo-call-bill-killed

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Raising $100 billion for climate fund in dispute (AP)

DURBAN, South Africa ? U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says raising billions of dollars to fight climate change is a necessity, not a luxury, even in financially hard times.

Mobilizing $100 billion a year, much of it to be channeled through a new Green Climate Fund, is a central issue at the 194-nation U.N. climate conference being held in South Africa's coastal city of Durban.

Ban said Wednesday that while many countries are tightening budgets, contributing money to fight climate change is "an imperative. We have to do it."

The United States has blocked suggestions of a levy on international shipping and aviation. It opposes suggestions by a high-ranking panel to impose a tax of $25 for every ton of carbon emissions.

U.S. lead negotiator Todd Stern said Wednesday that most of the money for green projects should come from private investments.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/environment/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111207/ap_on_re_af/af_climate_conference

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Syria says it's still open to Arab observer plan (San Jose Mercury News)

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Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/169800521?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Shipping cash may help fund climate: draft (Reuters)

DURBAN, South Africa (Reuters) ? Cash raised by the shipping industry's efforts to cut carbon emissions might be directed to developing countries to help them tackle climate change, a draft document seen by Reuters showed at United Nations climate talks on Tuesday.

The text proposes that money raised by "specific actions" to reduce emissions from maritime bunker fuels, which may be designed and implemented by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), could be distributed to developing countries and used to finance climate adaptation through a Green Climate Fund.

Negotiators will discuss the proposal later on Tuesday.

Several delegates at a U.N. climate summit in Durban doubted there would be agreement on the proposal. They said any final deal at the end of the week would be worded vaguely.

"I don't expect any clear outcome but if something stays in the text, it would be a big step in a small way," said Bas Eickhout, European Member of Parliament.

"Everything boils down to where is the money? I think that the entire financial decision is going to be a big deal in Rio," he added, referring to a U.N. conference on sustainable development in June next year.

Nearly 200 countries are meeting in Durban until December 9 at a United Nations summit to try to hammer out a new global climate treaty.

The United Nations hopes delegates attending the global climate talks will agree on the design of the Green Climate Fund, which aims to channel up to $100 billion a year by 2020 to countries most at risk from the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels and temperatures and crop failure.

Concrete progress on funding would help revive the flagging talks, hampered by rifts between countries on the form of a new global pact.

VAGUE

This is the first time a concrete source of funding has been raised in a U.N. text, but Tuesday's draft did not define whether revenues would be raised by a levy.

Last month, campaign groups Oxfam and WWF urged a carbon price of $25 per metric ton should be applied to shipping fuel (known as bunker fuel) to help cut emissions and generate $25 billion a year by 2020.

They suggested the revenues raised should be used to compensate developing countries for slightly higher import costs resulting from a carbon price, and to provide more than $10 billion per year for the Green Climate Fund.

"The text is vague on the details of implementation .. If it's a levy, it could be collected directly from ships, or it could be collected from bunker fuel suppliers," said Tim Gore, policy advisor at Oxfam.

"If it's an emissions trading scheme, there could be a common auctioning platform, or each country could auction (carbon) allowances. All such details would be resolved subsequently in the IMO, if this text were agreed," he added.

International shipping accounts for around 3.3 percent of the world's man-made carbon dioxide emissions and could grow by 150 to 250 percent by 2050 if regulation is not in place.

The IMO has made little progress in implementing market-based mechanisms to control the sector's emissions, even though the EU Commission has threatened to include it in its carbon market.

In July, the IMO managed to agree on energy efficiency design standards for new ships to cut emissions, but developing countries can delay implementation by using a waiver.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Allan, Barbara Lewis and Michael Szabo; Editing by William Hardy)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111206/wl_nm/us_climate_maritime

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UN official to AP: pledges to cut CO2 will go on (AP)

DURBAN, South Africa ? The top U.N. climate official said Saturday she is confident industrial countries will renew their pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions after their current commitments expire next year.

Further commitments under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an unshakable demand by poor countries, would avert a feared derailment of U.N. negotiations, but would mark little advancement toward the goal of a rapid and steep drop in worldwide carbon emissions blamed for climate change.

The protocol's future has been in doubt because rich countries have conditioned its continuation on an agreement by nations such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa to also accept binding emissions targets for themselves in the future.

"Countries are here these two weeks exactly talking about how they are going to go into a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol," U.N. official Christiana Figueres told The Associated Press.

"The discussion this week is not about the 'if,' it's about the 'how.' That doesn't mean that we are out of the thick of it," she said. Delegates are discussing participation, the legal form of the rules and all of the conditions that will define the second commitment period, she said.

Figueres, who is executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, spoke to AP to mark the halfway point of the two-week meeting in South Africa's eastern city of Durban.

Conference chairmen were also compiling the first draft of an agreement that will be given to government ministers arriving next week for the final four days of talks. Among them are 12 heads of state or government and ministers from more than 130 nations.

Outside the conference hall, several thousand activists, South African village women, and trade union members paraded through this port city for a march billed as a "global day of protest."

"It's all about our future. It's calling for a sustainable future. We've got to act and we've actually got to act urgently, so that we put this planet back onto a sustainable path," said Bishop Jeff Davies, Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute. "At the moment, we are destroying our very life support systems."

Figueres said that talks were in "good shape" in preparation for the more senior delegates.

One reason for an uptick in optimism may be a signal from China that it will in the future set absolute caps on its emissions, perhaps as early as 2020. Until now, China has spoken of emissions controls purely in terms of energy intensity, or the amount of energy it uses per unit of economic production.

The signal from Beijing came from Xu Huaqing, a senior researcher for China's Energy Research Institute, who was quoted Friday in the semiofficial China Daily. His remarks were confirmed privately by one of China's top climate negotiators, Su Wei, on the sidelines of the talks in South Africa.

China is the world's largest emitter of heat-trapping greenhouse gas and a main foil of industrial countries in the U.N. negotiations. Virtually every statement, even semiofficial comments, is parsed by delegates seeking departures from its public positions.

"It's part and parcel of a growing realization that all countries can contribute to the solution, that every one of them has to do it, of course, according to their respective capabilities," Figures said.

The 27 members of the European Union provide the bulk of those countries falling under Kyoto's targets. In return for signing up to another round of pledges, the EU wants all major polluters to agree to a legally binding regime for everyone to be negotiated by 2015.

The United States refused to join the Kyoto regime, which it said unfairly exempted major developing countries from any emissions constraints.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/environment/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111203/ap_on_sc/af_climate_conference

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'Dark Knight Rises' Actress Offered 'Arthur & Lancelot'

Depending upon whether you're a bigger fan of film or television, Marion Cotillard could be the biggest name actor to come to Warner Bros' upcoming "Arthur & Lancelot."
The Academy Award-winning actress has been offered the role of Arthur's sorceress half-sister Morgana, according to Vulture. They're saying that she is now officially in the Warner [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2011/12/02/dark-knight-rises-actress-offered-arthur-lancelot/

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