Ten thousand conferees, activists and journalists from nearly 190 countries are at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali this week and next. If humans are significantly responsible for global warming, the conference will clearly bring about climate change: The Times of London reports that emissions from the two-week conference “will generate the equivalent of 100,000 tonnes of extra CO2. That is similar to the entire annual emissions of the African state of Chad.”

But not to worry, Indonesia has planted millions of trees to soak up those extra greenhouse gases.

Furthermore, Bali has figured out a way to handle all those private jets flown by celebrities like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio. Since the airport only has room to park 15 planes, private jets will have to let off their passengers and then fly on to other airports in Surabaya, Lombok, Jakarta and Makassar.

Claudia Rossett links to photos of the ritzy resort where the meeting is taking place.

Those who fear that climate change is a way for the UN to get its hands on more money weren’t reassured after the first day’s meetings. Headlines from the AP were all about how Climate change victims say aid falls short.”

The needs are real. “Climate refugees” from places like the Carterets, a sandy atoll of a half-dozen islands are leaving for higher ground. The UN has set aside $800,000 to help the 600 families move, but that “doesn’t go a long way,” said their representative, Ursula Rakova: “We still need more money, from people like America.”

Although the wars over Christmas may be muted this year, it still takes a decoder ring to understand some of the fine points.

In Fort Collins, Colorado, a taskforce of civic leaders recommended the city decorate with white lights, bare garlands and secular symbols such as snowflakes. It rejected colored lights and ornamented trees as religious. Now the City Council rejected that advice. Colored lights and ornaments will still be allowed on city trees.

Earlier this fall, voters in Berkeley, Michigan rejected a proposal that would have required the city to erect a nativity scene on public land near city hall. That vote ended a controversy between the ACLU and the city that had gone on for several years. The display will now be erected on church rather than public property.

Seattle’s Seatac Airport won’t feature a Santa Claus, Christmas tree, or menorah. It display will include “handcrafted birch trees surrounded by lights in a pseudo-snowbank.” The decorating decision came after a “Holiday Decorations Advisory Committee” determined “that future decorations could include trees, fabrics and garlands so long as there were no religious ties.”

The Philadephia Inquirer reports that in Chester, Pa. members of Atheists Alliance International plan to erect a tree next to the traditional display that includes “a Chamber of Commerce tree - 32 feet high - meant to attract shoppers, as well as a Christian creche and a Jewish menorah.” The atheist tree, aka “the knowledge tree,” will be decorated with book covers: Why I Am Not A Christian, Why I Am Not a Muslim, Judaism Beyond God, and The Bible. The Bible? A spokesman said, “The reason we advocate reading the Bible…is because so many people become atheists upon completing the entire reading of it.”

In Cranston, R.I., there won’t be a life-sized nativity, menorah, inflatable snowman, or “15 flamingos in Santa Claus hats representing the Church of the Flamingos” as in past years. Instead the new mayor “opted to merely put up 50,000 white lights and a Christmas tree in the foyer of City Hall.

Should African women be able to engage in the practice of female circumcision, or genital mutilation as critics call it? That was the question at the heart of a debate at the American Anthropological Association over the weekend.

The New York Times’ John Tierney described the views of one of the pro genital-cutting African scholars: “She has lamented that her Westernized ‘feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of becoming a woman in accordance with our unique and powerful cultural heritage.’”

Tierney quotes from an essay written by the scholar, Fuambai Ahmadu, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago: “I offer that the bulk of Kono women who uphold these rituals do so because they want to — they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over against men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority and particularly the authority of their mothers and grandmothers.”

In her view, genital cutting is a feminist act.

Amnesty International, the human rights organization that recently ran afoul of pro-lifers for changing its position on abortion calls genital cutting a crime. In a series of ads picturing roses nipped and tucked, Amnesty says “Every year, two million girls suffer the pain of genital mutilation—a clear violation of their human rights. No government should continue to ignore this crime. Help us to stop violence against women.”

Crime or feminist act? Wrong at all times for all cultures? Or okay under some circumstances? Does the Bible forbid it? These are the kinds of hard questions that will increasingly face Christians, countries and cultures as the world becomes a smaller place.

The New York Times reports that “trackers” are putting online hours of raw video of Republican candidates. The video will be constantly updated and available here for activists and wannabe political attack dogs to paw through, hoping for a George Allen-type macaca moment. It already has about 80 videos of Giuliani, Romney, McCain and Thompson, including press availabilities, photo ops, coffee-shop visits, and formal speeches.

The Times acknowledges a downside to the tracker trend: “Trackers are part of the reason most candidates are so guarded when they appear in public. You never know who might be watching and what they will do with their video.”

The political price we pay in having wooden, scripted candidates is nothing compared to the cultural and spiritual price of this “gotcha” dynamic, played out in all spheres of life. Washington and Lee professor Edward Wasserman wrote in the Miami Herald about journalists who get fired for relatively minor ethics violations. “What’s with the vindictiveness, the self-righteousness, the callousness with which media bosses respond to even marginal instances of misconduct?” he asks. He cites a passage from Aristotle about hubris. “We usually understand hubris as overweening pride. But to Aristotle it consisted of inflicting shame or degradation, because ‘men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater.’”

Editors who are outraged about “plagiarism” may be blasé about bias shown to evangelicals or pro-lifers. And for those not convinced by Aristotle, the Bible says, “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.” That doesn’t mean that we can’t judge actions — but we judge them from the position of fallen people, prone to misspeak.

Those looking for gotcha moments might want to become familiar with another Biblical expression: “He who digs a pit will fall into it.”

A little girl with long strawberry blonde hair stares into the camera as the background music warns, “Here it Comes.” As the music speeds up, a barrage of beauty images and messages flash across the screen until the short ad ends with a message: “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”

The clever ad, produced by the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, has been viewed almost a million times on YouTube. But now critics are charging Unilever, maker of Dove, with hypocrisy. Advertising Age says the ad has resulted in “strong and enduring blowback against Unilever from activists, newspaper op-ed writers, bloggers and videographers who see it as hypocritical coming from the same company that markets Axe.”

Axe is a body spray, also made by Unilever, which uses images of sexy women to sell the product to young men—exactly the thing “Onslaught” so cleverly criticizes. One critic, Rye Clifton, posted a video response on YouTube. It mashes up images from the original “Onslaught” ad with images from Axe commercials and ends with the tag line, “Talk to your daughter before Unilever does.”

According to Ad Age, “Onslaught” may have had at least one unintended consequence — “getting the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group to protect children from marketing, to demand Unilever stop running Axe ads.” A spokesman for that group said, “The whole idea of ‘Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does’ certainly motivated us to do a campaign around this… Unilever is the beauty industry. To point fingers at other brands and at the same time be taking advantage of the same horrific marketing other companies are doing is incredibly hypocritical.”

This slender volume is full of wisdom about dealing with grief and comforting someone who is grieving. Neely draws readily from his more than forty years of pastoral and personal experiences to affirm that each person will grieve in his own way, but grieving follows a general path. Understanding that path provides reassurance that recovery will come in time.

Neely reminds the brokenhearted that they will be able to comfort the newly afflicted and he warns the well-meaning that silent companionship can be more comforting than many words in those early days. Part two looks at the ways God prepares us throughout life for suffering: as children when we lose a grandparent or a pet.; and as adults when we suffer infertility or see our aged parents decline. In part three he writes about God’s tender mercies in the midst of grief and the signs of hope in this life that point to our ultimate hope in the next.

Oscar is “a fat sci-fi-reading nerd.” His short life is characterized by a desire for girls, rejection, escape into fantasy and sci-fi novels, and depression. What’s behind his misery is fukú, the curse of the New World, directed at his family because his grandfather and mother had the temerity to resist long-time Dominican dictator Trujillo, thus unleashing “a fukú most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond.”

The story uses fukú to explain the unhappiness that follows this one family from generation to generation. No Savior appears to remove this curse; it is relentless, appearing sometimes like lightning and sometimes over a lifetime. Diaz tells his multi-cultural tale using a mix English, Spanish, and Spanglish, in styles ranging from haut formal to ghetto obscene. His narrator is so often brutishly crude that some sensitive moments are hidden under the noise, perhaps like Oscar’s nerdy, Tolkien-loving soul, is hidden under his weight.

Near the end of Richard Russo’s sprawling new novel Bridge of Sighs, Noonan, a tough adolescent from a dysfunctional family who grows up to be a well-regarded artist, recalls a crucial moment from his senior year in high school.

He enters Ikey Lubin’s, a run-down corner store in Thomaston, a decaying upstate New York town, slowly being poisoned by the tannery chemicals that have turned its river red. Though decrepit, Ikey Lubin’s has become a refuge for the book’s main characters. As Noonan enters the store he realizes that Ikey Lubin’s is a place he could belong. He begins to think about his English teacher, a man “drawn to extremes, both philosophical and dramatic…Small men with small dreams didn’t interest him, even when their dreams demanded enormous faith and endless forbearance. Ikey Lubin’s was a small thing. A small, good thing. You could count on it much like you could count on the Lynches, not for what they didn’t have but for what they did.”

Russo focuses on a small circle of people in a small place. Lou C. Lynch, nicknamed Lucy by unkind children in kindergarten, sits at the novel’s heart, and his recollections of the past, his recounting of town dynamics and events, make up the largest part of the novel. At sixty he’s lived all his life in Thomaston, most of it at Ikey Lubin’s. He married his high school sweetheart and never wanted to leave. In particular he wants to preserve memories of Big Lou, his milkman father, as though by doing so he will make Big Lou’s optimistic worldview—that everything will turn out fine–true. Lucy is a careful chronicler, recording most events in minute detail, but he leaves some thinks out—and the reader understands that Thomaston has its mysteries.

As events in the present undermine his recollections, Lou begins to understand better the father he adored and the mother he resented. “Odd, how I grew up thinking my parents were opposites, my father the optimist, my mother the cynic. In reality, she occupied the middle ground between his willfully blind faith in the basic goodness of his fellow man and Mr. Berg’s [the English teacher] equally blinkered and needy belief in its corruption.”

As the story moves forward we see that most, but not all, the characters walk paths set out for them from birth, without hope in the world. They are like the convicts passing over the bridge in Venice known as the Bridge of Sighs—from which the novel gets its title– headed to prison where all hope is lost. This book is full of hopeless lives, cut short by suicide, war, cancer, alcohol.

But a few characters break free, and the book ends on a note of hope. Lou, who has been so reluctant to leave Thomaston and the ghosts of the past, has changed, and he’s looking forward to upcoming trips: “And in the summer, Italy. This time we’ll go. We will leave this small, good world behind us with the comfort of knowing it’ll be here when we return. But. We will go.”

Bill Sammon has had extraordinary access to the president, interviewing him more frequently than any other reporter. What makes that interesting for Christians is that Sammon actually treats with understanding the evangelical aspects of the president’s character often scorned in the mainstream press. Sammon uses the term evangelical to describe not only the president’s faith, but also his advocacy for democracy and justice for the poor and oppressed.

In The Evangelical President, Sammon describes, starting in the first chapter with his own experience on Bill Maher’s program, the disdain—hatred, even—directed at the president by liberals in Washington, the press, and Hollywood. Second, Sammon quotes the president and key members of his administration at length at key moments during the past two years. In these interviews the president’s commitment to democracy and disdain for polls becomes clear.

Yes, some of it is overly familiar—do we really need a replay of Senator Allen’s macaca moment? It glosses over intra-administration policy disputes. But those wanting a sympathetic overview of the past two years will appreciate Sammon’s work. By the end of it readers will better understand the beliefs that have driven and sustained the president, and the forces that have driven his approval ratings to such low levels.

Last fall writer Josh Green wrote an unflattering article about Hillary Clinton in the Atlantic Monthly. This spring GQ spiked an article about Sen. Clinton Green was writing for that magazine. Coincidence? Not according to Ben Smith at Politico. He writes, “Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity cover boy Bill Clinton.” Smith goes on to write that Bill Clinton “is a favorite cover figure, because his face is viewed within the magazine industry as one that can move product,” and GQ was planning to feature Mr. Clinton and his trip to Africa in the December magazine.

So what did Green write in his Atlantic article that caused Hillary Clinton’s campaign to resort to publicity blackmail? Just this: “Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes — by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains.

Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say.”