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Al Jazeera English - News - Un Middle East Policy 'Failing' A former UN envoy to the Middle East has condemned its policy in the region for focusing to closely on the interests of the US and Israel, according to a leaked document. Alvaro de Soto, who quit in May, suggested that the UN should withdraw from the Quartet of Middle East negotiators calling it a "sideshow". In a 53-page statement sent to senior UN officials, the Peruvian diplomat described the Quartet of the US, Russia, the European Union and UN as "pretty much a group of friends of the US".

AlterNet: Blogs: Video#54007#54007 Inside "Sicko" Part II: Michael Moore Speaks Out

AlterNet: Health & Wellness: MS Sufferer Montel Williams Makes the Case for Medical Pot : "Talk show host Montel Williams suffers from multiple sclerosis. Read his impassioned and informed letter asking the governor of Connecticut to legalize medical marijuana. "

AlterNet: WorkPlace: The Rich Are Making the Poor Poorer But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. As the Times puts it: "It's as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent." Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like "pretty thin gruel."