Obama snubbed at Copenhagen Climate Summit

If all you have to do is sit down and talk with your adversaries, what do you do when their the ones who won't seriously talk?

At an emergency meeting convened at the Bella Center this morning, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown assembled 26 heads of state in an attempt to revive a deal. But China's Premier Wen Jiabao did not attend and was replaced by vice foreign minister He Yafei.

This afternoon, the US president and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton called another meeting with China, but were snubbed again when only three low-level Chinese delegates arrived.

According to a high level source, the US president clearly regarded Premier Wen’s absence as a major diplomatic insult, and snapped: “It would be nice to negotiate with somebody who can make political decisions.”

The leaders are currently negotiating on a draft text which say the world should aim to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 from 1990 levels, according to a new draft text at a UN climate summit that makes concessions to developing nations and small island states. . . .

Of course, now Venezuela's Chavez calls Obama the devil.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he "still" smelled sulfur after President Obama made a keynote speech at the Copenhagen climate conference Friday, accusing the American president of carrying the same satanic scent that Chavez believes followed Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush.

Chavez, who was not included on the original list of speakers for the final day of the summit, ended the proceedings with bitter references to the Peace Prize-winning Obama as the "Nobel Prize of War." . . .

Castro previously nice words for Obama were replaced with this:

Veteran Cuban leader Fidel Castro on Friday dismissed US President Barack Obama's trip to UN climate change talks in Copenhagen as a "show," and complained that the world's poor will shoulder the burden of any summit agreement. . . .