Bulgaria, a Russian ally, is left cold and angry - International Herald Tribune

SOFIA: Maria Pavlova, 70, a retired nurse and widow, has been shivering in her cramped apartment for a good part of the past week, standing over the small electric oven in her kitchen to warm her arthritic bones.

With a monthly pension equivalent to about $74, she cannot afford an electric heater. She despairs at the prospect of facing another cold shower.

"This is a war without weapons in which Russia has used its control of energy supply to flex its muscles in front of the world," she said, pointing to an indoor thermometer showing a temperature of 6 degrees Celsius (43 Fahrenheit). "I am cold and angry. We have always been dependent on Russia, and this crisis shows that the situation hasn't changed. Instead of bombs or missiles, they want us to freeze to death."
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"The situation is reminiscent of the siege of Stalingrad," Vlado Todorov Panayotov, a Bulgarian member of the European Parliament, said at an emergency hearing Thursday in Brussels, referring to the misery endured in World War II when the Nazis tried to take the Russian city now known as Volgograd.

Bulgarians said they felt betrayed by their own government for making them defenseless victims of Russia's pipeline politics, by the EU for its impotence in rescuing them from the cold, and by the Kremlin for forcing Bulgaria to suffer because of a faraway geopolitical spat.

At a Sofia maternity ward where mothers cradled their newborns in front of space heaters, Amelia Mladenova, 24, said it was hard to believe that a disagreement over energy prices was putting the lives of children at risk.
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In Bulgaria, the halt in gas supplies also sent shudders through an economy already reeling from the global financial crisis.

Washington Times - Obama climate czar has socialist ties

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world's social democratic political parties such as Britain's Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.
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Mrs. Browner ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton. Until she was tapped for the Obama administration, she was on the board of directors for the National Audubon Society, the League of Conservation Voters, the Center for American Progress and former Vice President Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.

Her name has been removed from the Gore organization's Web site list of directors, and the Audubon Society issued a press release about her departure from that organization.