In international finance circles, Michael Mussa is a legendary figure who used to work at the thin air levels at the International Monetary Fund.

Barack Obama‘s policy shop is kicking out some good stuff. I find this proposal reported by Bloomberg of his to help American automobile manufacturers offset retiree health care costs for gains in cutting carbon emissions intriguing.

One of the unwritten but hard as concrete rules in the governance of the world’s two most important transnational financial institutions is that a European heads the International Monetary Fund and an American heads the World Bank. . .always.

Kevin Kellems, who previously worked as spokesman for Vice President Cheney and then became a senior adviser to Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, has announced he is resigning his position. He is the first to fall in Wolfowitz’s camp after the turmoil triggered by allegations of nepotism and mismanagement by Wolfowitz at the Bank….

Worldwatch researcher Michael Renner’s chapter in the 2005 edition of State of the World is probably the best summary of the intersection between environment and security out there. He also co-authored a great chapter on disaster management as a peacebuilding opportunity with my good friend Zoe Chafe in last year’s State of the World.

I agree with Scott Paul that John Bolton’s co-mingling during his Bradley Prize acceptance speech of Senator Chris Dodd and and former Senator Lincoln Chafee with prominent citizens of Pyongyang, Havana, Damascus and Tehran was at first glance disconcerting.

…or cry, I’m not sure which. Why did it occur to me to post this today? Well, it turns out John Bolton won a Bradley Prize yesterday. His acceptance speech was a brief rant on the importance of fighting liberal government bureaucracies as a conservative political appointee.

Today at 12:30 pm EST, I will be moderating a meeting with my colleague Daniel Levy — Director of the New America Foundation’s Middle East Policy Initiative and a Senior Fellow at both the New America Foundation and Century Foundation — titled “The Report into Israel’s Lebanon War: Strategic and Political Implications”.

SustainUS, the U.S. youth network for sustainable development, sends delegations of young people to U.N. sustainable development meetings every year to meet with governments and discover the connections between global challenges and the problems they face in their communities every day.

Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who criticized Vladimir Putin’s goverment – and specifically, its prosecution of the war in Chechnya – was posthumously awarded the U.N. World Press Freedom Prize. Posthumously, of course, because she was shot last October, presumably for some completely unrelated reason. As I’ve written here before, this is no isolated incident.