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Fuel price protests threaten to spread around Europe in the run-up to the weekend following earlier action in the UK, France and Bulgaria, with EU leaders uncertain how to respond to the unfolding crisis.

While the three remaining presidential candidates have touted climate change as a central theme in their campaigns, all of them may miss next week's critical vote when the Senate considers a landmark bill imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse gases.

Members of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition remain "miles apart" on a plan to link car taxes to emissions and are unlikely to introduce the change in 2009 as planned, Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said.

Environmentalism, says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, is the new communism, a system of elite command-and-control that kills prosperity and should similarly be condemned to the ash heap of history.

It is well-established that the ancient Mayan, Aztec, Incan, and Toltec peoples offered human sacrifices, probably in the belief that such rituals would placate the gods who were in charge of nature; for instance, to help bring life-giving rains to their crops.

Representative Edward J. Markey, the chairman of the special House committee on global warming, today unveiled sweeping legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions and raise billions of dollars to create alternative sources of energy

Seven eastern European Union countries led by Hungary are calling for an overhaul of the bloc's efforts to curb carbon dioxide so as to take account of their historical reductions before they joined the EU.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Tuesday he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming, as he presented the English version of his latest book that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms. "I many times tried to talk to have a public exchange of views with him, and he's not too much willing to make such a conversation," Klaus said. "So I'm ready to do it."