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The financial crisis is having a huge negative impact on many public sector services, including libraries. From Publishers Lunch (subscription required):

As municipalities across the country face large gaps in their budget, Philadelphia is taking "drastic new steps" to face the "economic storm" that include closing 11 of the 54 branch libraries that comprise the Free Library of Philadelphia. Three other branches will have Sunday hours eliminated. Mayor Michael Nutter said the branches were chosen "after careful review of building
conditions, utilization and distance to other libraries in the Free Library system." Cutting 220 jobs throughout the city government, approximately one third of those layoffs will come from the library staff.

Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation’s banks — in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.

As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.

The Treasury Department’s surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.

John McCain and Sarah Palin have been complaining that there's too much "gotcha journalism" going around.

If only.

When they say "gotcha journalism," what they're really trying to do, of course, is to demonize journalism itself -- to de-legitimize asking tough questions, and following up with more tough questions when the answers are mealy-mouth evasions, and holding politicians accountable when they inadvertently emit a truth.

Yes, reporters for business publications like The Wall Street Journal have also kept their eye on the ball, but the real need was and is for mass media to serve as storytellers for general audiences, as Paul Reveres to warn ordinary citizens when the redcoat-wearing masters of the universe are coming. If the kind of gotcha journalism that so irritates John McCain and Sarah Palin were more woven into the fabric of our civic life, we might not be in the mess now consuming us.

The benign explanations for this failure of journalism are the inherent complexity of the financial story, and the imperative of media conglomerates to maximize profit, which means cultivating and satisfying the audience's appetite for entertainment.

But there's also a less benign explanation for the media's negligence, and it's captured by something President Andrew Jackson said nearly two centuries ago: "If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning."

"If the people only understood": that's the news media. "A revolution before morning": that's the opposite of sucking it up for a $700 billion bailout.

In a new report issued on Monday, the United Nations Environment Program said that the most recent evidence from mountain glaciers showed they were melting faster than before, or 1.6 times the average of the 1990s and three times the loss rate of the 1980s. The agency warned that the trend was likely to continue because 2006 was one of the warmest years on record in many parts of the world.

Also Monday, there were new concerns about climate change from low- lying parts of the world. Indonesia could lose about 2,000 islands by 2030 because of warming, Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar said.

Over the past year, international concern over what to do about global warming has grown along with concrete signs of climate change in developing regions like Africa, where water is running low, and in developed regions, like Europe, where there was a marked lack of snow at Alpine ski resorts in early January.

Even so, political leaders are groping for ways to tackle the problem. Europe has adopted a program that caps the amount of emissions from industrial producers.

But the world's largest emitter, the United States, is still debating whether to adopt a similar policy and developing countries like China are resisting caps on the grounds that the industrialized world contributed about 75 percent of the current volume of greenhouse gases and should make the deepest cuts.

That situation has hampered the chances of an effective solution, which experts say will require all countries to cut emissions or become more energy efficient.