Diplomacy brings two major achievements to bring calm to the Middle East – Scientific opinion is in, Global warming is here and it’s our own dang fault – The response to the Nairobi Mall Attack might have been mishandled because of bureaucratic turf wars.

The United Nations Security Council has unanimously adopting a resolution to rid Syria of its chemical weapons by mid-2014.  The deal, crafted by the US and Russia, does not threaten automatic punitive action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government if it does not comply, but it is a significant move forward after 2-1/2 years of inaction as the Syrian civil war dragged on.

US President Barack Obama and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani spoke by telephone on Friday.  It’s the first time leaders of each country have spoken in more than three decades, and a sign the two might be getting serious about using diplomacy instead of cowboy threats o deal with Iran’s nuclear program.  The 15-minute conversation took place before Rouhani flew home from the UN general Assembly.  Each leader bid farewell in the other’s language. 

Scientists say Global Warming is real, there will be more wild weather and rising seas as a result, and they’re 95 percent certain humans are to blame.  The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that since the 1950s, many of the observed changes in the climate system are “unprecedented over decades to millennia”, and that the past three decades are warmer than any time in the past 1,400 years.

A separate report on Global Warming says tropical tree are “moving” up mountainside where cooler temperature prevail – the seeds are taking root in areas where the temperatures more like the world prior to the past thirty years of rising temperatures.  The study in Global Change Biology took place in Costa Rica, warns that the trees already in the higher elevations are dying off faster than they are being replaced by their new neighbors from the lowlands.

At least 25 people were killed in a building collapse in Mumbai.  The apartment building came down in the early morning hours on Friday, and rescuers have been busy pulling people out of the rubble.  At least two small children are among the rescued.  The building reportedly contained 24 one-room apartments, some apparently overcrowded.

Militants are getting in the way of Pakistan’s rescue and relief effort in the southern earthquake zone, and the government is asking them to knock it off for a while.  As a result, aid is trickling in.  Death toll estimates from Tuesday’s earthquake range from 300 to 515 lives lost in sparsely populated Balochistan, where western aid agencies are discouraged from working.  Thousands of soldiers are already in the area because of fighting with Baloch separatist rebels.

At least eight people have been arrested in Kenya in the aftermath of the attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi by Islamist terrorists.  A parliamentary panel wants security chiefs to testify about reports the nation’s intelligence chief tried to warn police of a possible plot to attack the mall, but police ignored him.  There’s also growing unease over what is perceived as turf wars between different security agencies during and after the siege.

The authorities in Argentina have approved an official gender change for a six-year-old child.  The child was born a boy, but the parents say she identified as a girl from the first words to come lout of her mouth.  Officials at first refused to change on official documents.  But the national childhood protection agency found that denying the child's change of gender would be a violation of her rights, according to the United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child, the documents will be changed.