Round up...

Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa --Monthly Review

Book says CIA tried to provoke Saddam to war --The Guardian

"More than a year before the invasion of Iraq the CIA devised a plan, codenamed Anabasis, to use Iraqi exile fighters to seize an air base and declare a revolt against Saddam Hussein in the hope that his response would create a pretext for war, according to a book published tomorrow.

...the CIA-backed fighters carried out sabotage operations and assassinations of Ba'athist officials in the run-up to the war, the book, called Hubris, reports.

...Planning on Anabasis, which cost $400m (£210m), started at the end of 2001 and was approved by President Bush in February 2002.

...According to the book, the CIA flew 80 former Iraqi soldiers into the US in the summer of 2002, and trained them at an energy department nuclear test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. ..."

Sunnis enraged as Iraq prepares to divide itself into regions --The Telegraph

Scientists See New Global Warming Threat --AP

"New research is raising concerns that global warming may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb trapped in once-frozen permafrost.

...Scientists are fretting about a global warming vicious cycle that had not been part of their already gloomy climate forecasts: Warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that had been continuously frozen for thousands of years.

Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost, and so on.

...Another study earlier this summer in the journal Science found that the amount of carbon trapped in this type of permafrost - called yedoma - is much more prevalent than originally thought and may be 100 times the amount of carbon released into the air each year by the burning of fossil fuels. ..."

Pakistan's Denies Bin Laden Gets a Pass --ABC (The Blotter)