The New York Times reports today: “In a speech in Lanham, Md., Mr. Obama announced government approval of an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to help the Southern Company build two reactors in Burke County, Georgia, near Augusta.” ROBERT ALVAREZ A former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy and now a senior scholar…

ROBERT NAIMAN Naiman is policy director of Just Foreign Policy. He just wrote the piece “U.S. Poised to Commit War Crimes in Marjah,” which states: “The United States and NATO are poised to launch a major assault in the Marjah district in southern Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians are in imminent peril. Will…

DAVE ZIRIN Sportswriter Zirin’s latest book is “A People’s History of Sports in the United States.” He just wrote the piece “When Snow Melts: Vancouver’s Olympic Crackdown,” which states: “News Flash: Winter Olympic officials in tropical Vancouver have been forced to import snow — on the public dime — to make sure that the 2010…

MICHAEL DORSEY Professor of global environmental policy at Dartmouth College, Dorsey said today: “We live on a planet. … While snow falls in footloads in D.C., on the other side of the planet, Rio was hotter than Sahara; and 32 elderly people died silently in their apartments.” DAPHNE WYSHAM Wysham is a fellow of the…

JEFF PATERSON SARAH LAZARE Paterson is project director of Courage to Resist; Lazare is an organizer with the group. She just wrote the piece “Soldier Faces Iraq Court-Martial for Writing Angry Hip Hop Song About Stop-Loss,” which states: “Any day now, Marc Hall — a Fort Stewart soldier and Hip Hop artist — will be…

MELINDA ST. LOUIS Melinda St. Louis is deputy director of the Jubilee USA Network, an alliance of more than 75 religious denominations, human rights organizations and development agencies. She said today: “This weekend the G-7 finance ministers [who are meeting in Canada] must respond to the mounting global consensus to drop Haiti’s debt. It’s time…

Newsweek recently told readers that “an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the ‘torture’ memos of professional-misconduct allegations.” MARJORIE COHN Cohn is immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. She…

ANAND GOPAL Based in Afghanistan, Gopal has just published the results of an investigation in TomDispatch.com and The Nation magazine, “America’s Secret Afghan Prisons.” He writes: “Sometime in the last few years, Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan’s rugged heartland began to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment…

Reuters reports: “President Barack Obama on Monday asked Congress to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2011, including a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon’s base budget and $159 billion to fund U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” JO COMERFORD Comerford is executive director of the National Priorities…

The Senate voted yesterday to approve a second term for Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman. ROBERT AUERBACH Professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, Auerbach is author of the book Deception and Abuse at the Fed. His recent articles include “Stop the Federal Reserve From Shredding Its Records.” Auerbach said…