Sept. 24, 2009

Obama in the spotlight:

U.S. President Barack Obama is at the center of diplomatic attention Thursday with a turn at the U.N. Security Council and the start of the Group of 20 summit.

Obama in the morning serves as chairman of the Security Council where he will push his efforts to attain a nuclear weapons-free world. The council is predicted to unanimously approve a U.S. resolution regarding proliferation.

The president heads to Pittsburgh later in the day as the G20 gathers for a series of meetings. The global economy, especially how it relates to the environment, is expected to be the topic du jour.

Obama is said to be looking for a commitment from his fellow leaders to cut into subsidies that lead companies to use fossil fuels, rather than renewable energy sources. Those subsidies total billions of dollars a year.

In his address Wednesday to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama touched on the issues above but also said the United States cannot address the problems of the world by itself and needs help from other countries.

U.N. highlights:

Even after he left the podium, U.S. President Barack Obama was a focal point of the U.N. General Assembly.

Cuba's former leader Fidel Castro positively singled out the American president's words on climate control and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi referred to him as "my son," but Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn't even mention Obama and the U.S. delegation still walked out.

Gadhafi's appearance was his first at the General Assembly, despite having been in power since 1969. And he made up for lost time, taking his audience on a rambling discourse that took more than 90 minutes The leaders usually take 15-20 minutes.

Gadhafi called the Security Council the "terror council" -- but asked that Africa be given a permanent seat on the body -- and decried the United Nations' failure at stopping wars. He suggested $7.77 trillion in reparations be paid to African countries, suggested swine flu was a weapons program that got out of control and implicated Israel in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. "Wide-ranging" doesn't do the speech justice.

Ahmadinejad's speech would be expected to be one of the most anticipated but most of the room was empty when he started and more of the audience left after they sensed insults in his references to Zionism and capitalism. He didn't address the pressing issue of his own country's nuclear program.

He did, however, speak of that in meetings with the editors of The Washington Post. He said his nuclear scientists would be allowed to talk with foreign experts about the program. Ahmadinejad also said Tehran would ask the United States for nuclear materials to be used for medical purposes, and the response to that would be indicative of U.S. moves toward building trust between the countries.

Water on the moon:

India's lunar probe uncovered the strongest evidence yet of the presence of water on the moon.

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers said data from the Indian spacecraft indicated water may be being formed hear the lunar surface. This doesn't equate to lakes of water on the moon but amounts on the molecular level.

Still, with it costing tens of thousands of dollars to take even a small amount of water to the moon, if humans ever set up permanent lunar colonies, technology could be developed to pull those amounts of water into useable quantities.

The finding is considered vital for planning extraterrestrial missions and takes a lot of the sting out of the loss of the Indian probe. The spacecraft was to orbit the moon for about two years but controllers last month lost contact with it after it had been sending data for about 10 months.

Guinness Day:

Guinness, the company responsible for those world record books, Thursday celebrates its even more famous product -- stout.

It was Aug. 24, 1759, when Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on a brewery in Dublin. Thursday marks 250 years since that signing.

To mark the day, Guinness at 5:59 p.m. GMT (17:59 Guinness Mean Time, as the company puts it; 12:59 p.m. EDT), officials at the Irish brewery plan to raise a toast to Arthur Guinness. The company Web site says the gesture will be done in at least 150 countries at the same time.