"It's a tragedy. She is desperate as she nears her 25th week of pregnancy," Beatriz's lawyer Angelica Rivas told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Wednesday. "She trusts her doctors who say she needs to have an abortion."

Beatriz's doctors are not the only ones who have advocated for the lifesaving procedure. As Salon has previously reported, the young woman, who has been hospitalized for weeks due to life-threatening complications related to her lupus, hypertension and kidney function and whose anencephalic fetus has been pronounced nonviable by her doctors, has the support of El Salvador's Ministry of Health and President Mauricio Funes. In a statement last week, Funes said that Beatriz, who is already a mother to a young son, should be able to decide her own fate.

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Gruenhagen was speaking on the House floor, and cited "facts from CPAC" showing that "in the last 16 years, there's been no global warming." He continued: "So members, I'd recommend that you keep breathing, OK? Because, you know, man-made global warming believes that exhaling causes global warming. I mean, the more you study it the more utter nonsense you see it is."

Watch, via The Uptake:

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly attributed the video to the Minnesota City Pages.

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Today, however, the boundaries between rational political discourse and raving madness have been erased. The extremist peddlers of nightmare scenarios who were once thought to be charmingly eccentric at 1am are now advising elected representatives of the people to initiate investigations and draft bills addressing these non-existent threats. Here are just a few of the urban legends that are circulating in the halls of state and federal legislative bodies courtesy of the whack job broadcasting set.

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Inside Syria, the regime’s forces have started an ethnic cleansing campaign in the west intended to clear Sunnis from areas its Alawite supporters want to secure for themselves. The regime has also successfully pushed south toward the Jordanian border. In much of the rest of the country, there is lots of fighting but only marginal changes in the confrontation lines, which run through many urban areas, or between the urban centers and the countryside. Almost 7 million Syrians are now thought to need humanitarian assistance. The number could rise dramatically during the rest of the year.

Secretary Kerry’s visit to Moscow this week revived, once again, hopes for a negotiated settlement. He and the Russians agreed to try to convene a conference, even before the end of the month, that would include both the Syrian opposition and the Assad regime. The prospect of this conference will relieve President Obama of any need for a quick decision on unilateral action in Syria, since it would hardly be appropriate to preempt the conference. That is likely what both the Russians and the Americans wanted: more time.

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The ruling bolsters recent claims made by U.N. human rights expert Ben Emmerson Q.C., following a visit to Pakistan, that authorities in the country gave no consent, tacit or otherwise, for the CIA strikes to be carried out in its tribal regions. However, reporting by Mark Mazzetti suggests that a secret deal, forged between the CIA and the Pakistani military, gave the go-ahead for U.S. drone strikes in return for the initial targeting of an enemy of the Pakistani state (not an al-Qaida operative).

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These kind of stories will continue for one big, if unstated, reason: robotic warfare seems to hold the promise of making many things easier, cheaper and less risky, at least for the countries that operate the drones. But the operative word is "seems," for drones involve a problematic illusion that distorts our perception of the risks we face.

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In a statement signed by El Hadji Malick Sow, chair of the UN working group on arbitrary detention; Juan E Méndez, UN special rapporteur on torture; Ben Emmerson, UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights, and Anand Grover, UN special rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health and supported by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the force-feeding is roundly decried:

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Al Gerhart, the co-founder of the Sooner Tea Party, was on Tuesday charged with blackmail and violating the Oklahoma Computer Crimes Act, both felonies. Gerhart admitted last week to sending the email to state senator Cliff Branan, though he denies he did anything wrong. The charges came after Branan turned the email over to state officials.

From the Oklahoman:

Misspelling one word, Gerhart wrote: “Branan, Get that bill heard or I will make sure you regret not doing it. I will make you the laughing stock of the Senate if I don't hear that this bill will be heard and passed. We will dig into your past, yoru family, your associates and once we start on you there will be no end to it. This is a promise.”

Gerhart admitted at a news conference at the Capitol last week that he sent the email.

“Political pain and embarrassment will be necessary if the citizens expect to regain control of this Senate down here from the state chamber of commerce and special interests,” he said. “The time for ‘nice' behavior is over with.”

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Republican state Sen. Cliff Branan asked the OSBI to investigate an email he received from Al Gerhart, the co-founder of the Sooner Tea Party, that strongly urged Branan to back legislation that would prevent the U.N.'s Agenda 21 from being implemented in the state.

Agenda 21 is a non-binding U.N. agreement aimed at promoting sustainable development, though right-wing conspiracy theorists believe it is "a really nice way of saying ‘centralized control over all of human life on planet Earth,’” as Glenn Beck has put it.

A number of states have considered and advanced legislation to block Agenda 21, and an Oklahoma state senator introduced a bill in December to do the same. The bill is now heading to the Senate Energy and Environment Committee, which Branan chairs.

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Helen Clark, the head of the United Nations Development Program, has publicly slammed global strategies to combat drugs, claiming there is increasing evidence that "the war on drugs" has failed. The former prime minister of New Zealand urged Latin American leaders to develop new policies to tackle drugs, which she says should be addressed as a public health problem rather than criminalized. "I've been a health minister in my past and there's no doubt that the health position would be to treat the issue of drugs as primarily a health and social issue rather than a criminalized issue," she told Reuters. "Once you criminalize, you put very big stakes around. Of course, our world has proceeded on the basis that criminalization is the approach. To deal with drugs as a one-dimensional, law-and-order issue is to miss the point." Although she did not directly comment on US involvement in the drug war, her words have been widely interpreted as a criticism of US drug policy, which she later denied. "She was speaking about the negative effects the drug trade has had on development in some Latin American countries in the context of the Human Development Report," said UNDP spokeswoman Christina LoNigro in a statement.

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You may have read the headline-grabbing news that in advance of its conference on drug policy this week, the U.N. issued a report urging the United States government to block Colorado and Washington state from moving forward with voter-approved laws that allow adult citizens to use marijuana as a less harmful alternative to alcohol. What you may not have heard is that on the very same day the U.N. released that report, U.S. ambassador Joseph Torsella slammed his U.N. colleagues for drinking too much on the job. Apparently, binging at the U.N. is so commonplace and excessive that it is hindering the organization from conducting its most basic work.

As hypocrisy humor goes, this is pretty funny. An international body immersed in one drug (alcohol) yet telling governments to outlaw an objectively less harmful drug (marijuana) is biting comedy. It hilariously exemplifies the double standards and contradictions that still define many global leaders' views of drugs.

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In the wake of fresh U.N. sanctions leveled at North Korea on Thursday for its latest nuclear test, the question is: Will this time be different?

Since 2006, North Korea has launched long-range rockets, tested a variety of missiles and conducted three underground nuclear explosions, the most recent on Feb. 12. Through it all, Pyongyang was undeterred by a raft of sanctions — both multilateral penalties from the United Nations and national sanctions from Washington, Tokyo and others — meant to punish the government and sidetrack its nuclear ambitions.

A problem with the approach, analysts said, is that outsiders routinely underestimate North Korea's knack for survival. The sanctions are intended to make life more difficult for a country that has crushing poverty, once suffered through a devastating famine and lost its Soviet backers long ago, but Pyongyang often manages to find some advantage.

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The vote on whether to increase sanctions against Pyongyang was prompted by the hermit kingdom's nuclear test last month. The UN decision came hours after North Korea had ramped up its rhetoric yet again, threatening a "preemptive" nuclear strike against the United States.

The Associated Press quoted a spokesman for North Korea's foreign ministry as saying that Pyonyang would "exercise the right to a pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the headquarters of the aggressors." According to the AP, the spokesman also alleged that Washington is gearing up to start a nuclear war against North Korea.

The country's foreign ministry warned earlier this week that a second Korean war is "unavoidable" now that both the United States and South Korea are refusing Pyongyang's demands to cancel large-scale joint military exercises.

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An unidentified spokesman for Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said the North will exercise its right for "pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the headquarters of the aggressors" because Washington is pushing to start a nuclear war against the North.

Such inflammatory rhetoric is common from North Korea. But it has been coming regularly in recent days. North Korea is angry over the possible sanctions and over upcoming U.S.-South Korean military drills.

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In the last decade, I didn’t travel to distant refugee camps in Pakistan or destroyed villages in Afghanistan, nor did I spend time in besieged cities like Iraq’s Fallujah or Libya’s Misrata. I stayed in Great Britain. There, my government, in close conjunction with Washington, was pursuing its own version of what, whether anyone cared to say it or not, was essentially a war against Islam. Somehow, by a series of chance events, I found myself inside it, spending time with families transformed into enemies.

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In a blog post on Friday, the site's owners wrote that after hearing Paul say on a radio show that he wished he owned the domain name, they offered to sell him RonPaul.com and their 170,000 supporter mailing list for $250,000, with RonPaul.org included as a "free gift."

"Instead of responding to our offer, making a counter offer, or even accepting our FREE gift of RonPaul.org, Ron Paul went to the United Nations and is trying to use its legal process related to domain name disputes to actively deport us from our domain names without compensation," the blog post said.

The post continued with a message of disappointment:

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The U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, said Friday that it "is clear that it is unlawful to execute someone who was under 18 years old when they allegedly committed a crime."

On Wednesday, the Saudi Interior Ministry said Rizana Nafeek was given a death sentence and executed, despite appeals by the Sri Lanka government for a reprieve. The domestic worker had denied strangling the 4-month-old boy, who died when she was 17 years old.

Groups such as Human Rights Watch strongly condemned the execution. Heyns also said that "beheading is a particularly cruel form of execution."

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Human rights activists in Syria had put the death toll at around 45,000 according to the AP. In 2012 alone, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, 36,332 civilians were killed. The network specifically decried the Assad regimes record for killing civilians women and children:

The proportion of women and children to the total number of victims is 5.2 which is a conclusive  evidence that the Syrian government is deliberately targeting civilians as the internationally recognized ratio in the case of regular warfare is 2%. The Syrian government has killed more than double that percentage and in some months the percentage was more than three times that benchmark.

Last week the U.N.-Arab League envoy warned that 2013 could see over 100,000 more deaths in Syria if the civil war does not come to an end.

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Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.-Arab League envoy for the Syrian crisis, told reporters in Cairo that if the crisis continues Syria will not be divided into states "like what happened in Yugoslavia" but will face "Somalization, which means warlords, and the Syrian people will be persecuted by those who control their fate."

Syrian rebels are fighting a 21-month-old revolt against President Bashar Assad's regime. Activists say more than 40,000 people have been killed in the crisis, which began with pro-democracy protests but has morphed into a civil war.

Since starting his job in September, Brahimi has sought to advance an international plan, reached in Geneva six months ago, that calls for an open-ended cease-fire between rebels and government troops and the formation of a transitional government to run the country until elections can be held.

Over the past week Brahimi went to Damascus where he met Assad then flew to Moscow, one of Syria's closest international allies, where he discussed ways of ending the country's crisis.

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