Guest Post by Oliver Lough: Business As Usual on Climate Change

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Oliver Lough is a research intern at the New America Foundation. Seeing Barack Obama and Hu Jintao deliver their respective climate change spiels at New York yesterday was a bit like watching a couple of boxers circle each other warily at the beginning of a long bout.

Guest Note by Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan: From the UNGA — “SAVING FACE!”

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(Riz Khan anchors the Riz Khan Show on Al Jazeera English. This “Note” is part of a series of posts that personalities from Al Jazeera covering the international events in New York and Pittsburgh will be sharing with readers of The Washington Note). My face saved me. For once I was grateful.

Putting Lipstick on a Middle East Pig

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Word has leaked out that going into his “trilateral” with Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama was flustered and upset with their lack of progress with each other. Obama is — angry — in a somewhat cool-headed Obamaesque way.

Bill Clinton: CEO of the Global Problems Industry

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After a very long security sweep of the Sheraton Hotel & Towers conference space, I finally made my way in to get credentialed for the Clinton Global Initiative, opening this afternoon with a powerhouse panel chaired by the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton.

The Objectives Some Have For Afghanistan Will Cost Americans — Big Time

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Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy My chat tonight on America’s Afghanistan engagement and General McChrystal’s plea for a new strategy or more troops with Keith Olbermann on Countdown. Bottom line — Things are not well in Kabul or 1600 Pennsylvania.

Hillary Clinton Tactfully Pushes McChrystal Back

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She is tactful about it, but in the exchange below between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and The News Hour correspondent Margaret Warner, Clinton suggests that McChrystal is only one of several voices on Afghanistan strategy but that his views are not definitive, and that there are many other decision points.

Guest Post by Parag Khanna: The Spin Cycle of Summitry

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Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers are Redefining Global Competition in the 21st Century. Many Americans will struggle this week to sort out all of the summits that have become the hallmark of the late September news landscape.