Quinn Gillespie & Associates (QGA), a top Washington, D.C. lobbying and communications firm, celebrated its 10-year anniversary Tuesday night with the city’s biggest event of the holiday season. Over 700 guests — congressmen, senators, White House staff, corporate executives, clients, members of the media — talked politics and more on the rooftop of the new W Hotel.

Members of Congress seemed relaxed and cheerful, including the powerful House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.).

On the winter-decorated, blue-lighted balcony, QGA Chairman Jack Quinn shook hands and back-slapped like the mayor of a small town. Wife Susanna Quinn introduced guests to one another, while they sipped drinks and looked out over the White House and Lincoln Memorial, glowing in the rainy night.

The party-crashing scandal at last month’s state dinner seemingly has not affected the culture of Washington partyers, as more than 350 people who were not invited RSVP’d to the event.

The firm had a “crashers” list for greeters to check. Most of the people on the list are low-level Capitol Hill staffers. Many guests were hoping that Michaela and Tareq Salahi would make an appearance with Bravo cameras in tow, but the now-infamous couple were no-shows.

On hand were former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.). Key Hill staffers included Stacy Kerr, special assistant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with husband C.R. Wooters, director of member services for Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.); and Stacey Bernards, senior adviser to Hoyer.

Pols around town mixed in a holiday-spirit bipartisan way, including Sarah Feinberg, senior adviser to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel; lobbyist Chet Lott (with his father, Sen. Lott); Visa′s Kristin Solheim; and Elmendorf Strategies lobbyist Shanti Stanton.

Business executives were out in force too: Google Voice’s Craig Walker and Google executive Wesley Chan; Jamie and Dave Dorros Paul Dougherty; Winston Lord; the Patton Group’s Jayne Sandman and Barbara Martin. Also enjoying the festivities were stylist Christopher Johnson; Johnny Wright, stylist to First Lady Michelle Obama; Sharon Bradley George Salon’s Carl Ray and Rick Raines.

The media were heavily represented: Fox News’ Brit Hume (as the date of his daughter Virginia Hume, who works at QGA) and Bret Baier, with wife Amy; the Washington Post’s Amy Argetsinger Politico’s Jim VandeHei and Kiki Ryan; the Washington Times’ John McCaslin; Washington Life′s John Arundel and Tony Powell; CNN’s Ed Henry; CBS’s Christine Delargy; the Washington Examiner’s Tara Palmeri; FishbowDC’s Matt Dornic; MIX 107.3’s Tommy McFly; and UrbanDaddy’s Jeff Dufour.

QGA was founded by Democrat Jack Quinn, a former Clinton White House counsel, and Republican Ed Gillespie, who left the firm to be a senior adviser to President Bush. QGA has stayed on the top-10 lobbying list over the years, withstanding the political turnover from a Republican White House and Congress to the Democratic takeover on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration.

Click play below for a slideshow of photos from the event:

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The major U.N. summit on climate change opened Monday in Copenhagen, but the big environmental news was made across the Atlantic in Washington. In an afternoon press conference, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the agency had finalized its finding that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health and welfare.

The ruling allows the EPA to begin regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, factories and major industrial polluters, although the precise details of that regulation have yet to be worked out. “The threat is real,” said Jackson. “If we don’t act to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the planet we will leave to the future will be very different than the one we know today.” (See TIME’s special report on the environment.)

Jackson’s announcement was the final step in a response that has been nearly three years in the making — since April 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the authority to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases, if they are indeed a threat to human health and welfare. At the time, the court directed the agency to review the latest science on climate change in order to make a determination.

Under former President George W. Bush, the EPA largely punted on the question, even burying analysis from its own scientists in the waning months of that Administration. When President Barack Obama took office, he directed the new EPA to kick-start the regulation process — nearly 11 months and 380,000 public comments later, the agency is now poised to regulate CO₂ as a pollutant. “This cements 2009’s place in history as the year the U.S. government began seriously addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution,” said Jackson.

Although the announcement had been in the pipeline for a while, the timing was appropriate, with Copenhagen getting under way. The EPA ruling is a signal to other countries that the U.S. is prepared to contribute to a climate treaty, and it is a useful tool for Obama, who will participate in the Copenhagen summit on Dec. 18, its final day. “In light of the EPA endangerment finding, the President’s appearance in Copenhagen will carry even more weight, because it shows that America is taking this issue very seriously and is moving forward,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, in a statement.

It is not clear what the EPA′s decision will mean practically for major emitters. Jackson said she did not have a timetable for when the agency would publish a detailed plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and both Jackson and Obama have said repeatedly that they would prefer legislative action — in the form of a carbon cap-and-trade bill — over top-down regulation. The House has already passed a bill that would cap U.S. carbon emissions at 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, and the Senate is considering similar legislation. The threat of EPA regulation might be enough to nudge the Senate in the right direction. “We still need to pass a Senate bill because we need a long-term, clear signal about the effort we will undertake to cut carbon,” said Jack Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

For their part, business groups and many conservatives remain even more opposed to the possibility of EPA regulation of greenhouse gases than they do to a cap-and-trade bill. They say CO₂ is far more prevalent than any other pollutant the EPA has ever attempted to regulate under the Clean Air Act and that top-down regulation would lay a heavy burden on U.S. business. “An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” said U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue.

Such a command-and-control regime is a long way off, and may never happen — especially if cap and trade is finally passed. But with the most important environmental summit in history kicking off, the EPA’s news couldn’t come at a better time for greens. “Every positive announcement will improve our chances of staying below the 2°C target,” said Danish Minister Connie Hedegaard, who is presiding over the Copenhagen summit. “But we all know only too well, we are not there yet.”

See pictures of the world’s most polluted places.

See pictures of the effects of global warming.

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The controversy over e-mails stolen from global-warming researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia has become so divisive that there is even disagreement over what to call it.

Skeptics of global warming, who have long considered climate change a fraud, refer to the incident as “Climategate,” with obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up. Advocates of action on warming call it “Swifthack,” a reference to the 2004 character attacks on presidential candidate Senator John Kerry by the group then known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — in other words, an invented scandal propagated by conservatives and the media that does nothing to change the scientific case for climate change. (See TIME’s special report on the environment.)

The truth is that the e-mails, while unseemly, do little to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change. But they do hand a powerful political card to skeptics at the start of perhaps the most important environmental summit in history. Still don’t know what to make of it? If you’re struggling to untangle the details of the e-mail controversy, here are five key things you need to know:

1. How were the e-mails leaked? On Nov. 17, administrators of the website RealClimate, a blog about climate science written by top researchers, discovered that unknown hackers were attempting to upload onto the blog more than 1,000 e-mails apparently sent by and to scientists at University of East Anglia’s CRU. The CRU is one of the most important climate-research centers in the world, and one of a handful of scientific agencies that keep the global temperature records used in most major climate models. Officials at East Anglia soon confirmed that electronic theft had occurred and that the e-mails were genuine. By the end of the week, they were widely available on the Internet. (Facebook users, comment on this story below.)

In early December, the e-mail controversy was still burning up the blogosphere, as international negotiators gathered at the Copenhagen climate summit. The head of the CRU and author of several incriminating e-mails, environmental scientist Phil Jones, has stepped down temporarily from his post while University of East Anglia conducts an independent inquiry into the e-mail controversy. The investigation will be led by Muir Russell, a prominent Scottish academic and civil servant. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania State University (PSU) announced it would conduct its own inquiry into the e-mails, after PSU climatologist Michael Mann also emerged as an author of e-mails that were central to the controversy. (See how global warming is threatening penguins.)

2. What exactly do the e-mails say? The more than 1,000 e-mails dating back some 13 years contain a range of information — everything from the mundanities of climate-data collection to comments on international scientific politics to strongly worded criticisms of research by climate-change doubters. It is mainly the last point that has skeptics crying foul. In one e-mail, sent to Mann from Jones, the topic is a pair of papers that criticize the case for man-made global warming; Jones wrote that he and his colleagues would be sure to keep the papers out of consideration for the forthcoming climate assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is.”

In another e-mail exchange, Mann and Jones discuss ways to pressure an academic journal Climate Research to stop publishing submissions from climate skeptics, with Mann suggesting that they consider encouraging colleagues not to submit papers to the journal until it changes its editorial stance. Jones also wrote repeatedly about rebuffing requests by climate skeptics for raw temperature data from CRU, and seemingly encourages his colleagues to delete e-mails concerning a Freedom of Information request for the data.

In other e-mails, scientists appear to have trouble reconciling recent temperature data with the warming expected from climate models. And overall, the correspondence evinces climate scientists’ outright scorn for global-warming skeptics; in one message, Ben Santer, a researcher from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory offers — presumably in jest — to “beat the crap out of” a leading skeptic.

See a climate-change edition of the Acoustic Weekly News.

Read “Floods and Droughts: How Climate Change Is Impacting Africa.”

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If you are among the thousands of American women who have survived breast cancer, you probably find yourself thinking twice about everything you do — what you eat, how much you exercise — to ensure that you don’t increase your risk of developing another tumor. It’s a natural response to a difficult diagnosis, but it can be challenging, especially when it comes to diet: most breast tumors are driven by the hormone estrogen, but estrogen is frequently found in many popular foods, from some types of milk and yogurt to breakfast bars to tofu and those addictive edamame beans.

The common culprit is soy, a plant that contains chemicals with estrogen-like and anti-estrogenic properties — making it a nutritional minefield for breast-cancer survivors. While Western diets are relatively low in soy — compared with the typical diet in Asia, where people eat soy daily — the percentage of Americans consuming soy at least once a week increased from 15% in 1997 to 28% in 2003. In the meantime, studies on the effect of soy on breast-cancer recurrence and mortality have been conflicting, with some showing that it can reduce risk, while others show an elevated rate of recurrent disease among frequent consumers of soy. (See breast cancer’s fundraising warrior.)

Now the largest study to date on soy’s effect on breast cancer suggests that eating soy, even in large amounts, may not be harmful after all, and may even reduce recurrence and death from the disease. But while the findings are intriguing, not all doctors are ready to tout the benefits of tofu.

Analysis of the study, conducted in China between 2002 and 2006, is ongoing, but researchers based at Vanderbilt University and the Shanghai Institute of Preventive Medicine report data from the first four years of follow-up (total follow-up was five years) in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The 5,042 women enrolled in the study were all breast-cancer survivors, ages 20 to 75, and they consumed soy from naturally occurring sources, such as tofu or soybeans; none of the women took soy supplements. They fell into two groups based on soy intake: those who consumed more than 15.3 g of soy protein a day, or as much as would be found in three-quarters of a cup of edamame beans, and those who consumed less than 5.3 g per day, less than what is contained in a half-cup of soy milk, which has 7 g of soy protein. (Read “The Mammogram Melee: How Much Screening Is Best?”)

Among the women consuming the most soy, the risk of death from breast cancer four years after diagnosis was 7.4% and the risk of recurrence was 8%. Women in the lower soy-intake group had higher risks: a 10.3% risk of death from breast cancer and an 11.2% risk of recurrence. “I think based on our study, I am quite comfortable saying that soy food, particularly a moderate amount, is safe, and potentially beneficial,” says the study’s lead author, Dr. Xiao-Ou Shu, an epidemiologist at Vanderbilt.

Other breast-cancer experts agree that soy intake may not be harmful for cancer survivors, but they draw the line at saying it can reduce cancer incidence or mortality. “There is no take-home message here to go out and eat as much soy as you can,” says Dr. Larry Norton, medical director of the Evelyn Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Norton notes that the study was not a randomized clinical trial of soy consumption. That is, rather than randomly assigning breast-cancer survivors to consume or not consume various amounts of soy, then following those participants to see whether they developed recurrent tumors, the study looked retrospectively at women’s self-determined soy-eating habits. The randomized clinical trial is the gold standard upon which medical practice is determined, and the only kind of trial that gives scientists confidence that other variables are not confounding their results. In the new study, for example, the authors note that the women eating the highest amounts of soy were also more likely to have received chemotherapy to treat their disease and to eat vegetables and exercise regularly — all factors that may contribute to lower breast-cancer risk. Shu and her colleagues adjusted for these variables, but, says Norton, “with any observational study, you don’t know what else is going on.”

Although not all experts are convinced that it’s safe to begin advising women to add soy to their diet, they agree that there is no need to avoid soy altogether. “What I’ve been telling my patients right now is that soy as part of a healthy balanced diet is safe. But I would avoid trying to eat a totally soy-based diet or taking a soy supplement. You have to be careful in not extrapolating beyond the study,” says Dr. Richard Lee, medical director of the Integrative Medicine Program at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

See pictures of the faces of breast cancer.

See the new mammography guidelines in TIME’s Top 10 Everything of 2009.

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In February 2009, Australia’s Environment Minister Peter Garrett made a depressing announcement. The Christmas Island pipistrelle bat — an inch-long winged creature no heavier than five grams — was about to go extinct. Articles about its imminent demise were accompanied by photos of the bat’s minuscule body, barely big enough to embrace the full diameter of a human finger. In February, there were estimated to be just 20 bats left. One was seen fluttering around the island in August, but there have been no sightings since.

If the Christmas Island pipistrelle is truly gone, it will be the 23rd Australian mammal species to have become extinct in the past 200 years. The last to perish was the crescent nail-tail wallaby — a miniature wallaby the size of a hare — which disappeared from western and central Australia in 1956. Twenty years earlier, in what was perhaps Australia’s most infamous extinction, the Tasmanian tiger met its end. The largest carnivorous marsupials to live in modern times, the tigers, which looked like large, striped dogs, were suspected of eating sheep, and a group of wool merchants put out a bounty in return for the dead animals. Those that were not hunted down and killed in Australia’s southernmost state were chased out of their natural habitat by domesticated dogs. (See the top 10 animal stories of 2009.)

The accumulation of tragedies like these has given Australia the shameful distinction of having the worst mammal-extinction record in the world. Half of the mammals that have vanished from the planet in the past two centuries have been in Australia. And though the continent is hardly the only place grappling with die-offs — many biologists have conceded that a mass wave of extinctions is now sweeping the globe — as the list of Australia’s endangered species continues to grow longer, scientists there are looking for ways to put an end to the trend.

Mike Archer, a professor at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), has long been a proponent of domesticating Australia’s unique wildlife to keep it from disappearing. Archer has had sugar gliders employ his shoulder as transport, shared a bed with a cucumber-loving quoll and battled a swamp wallaby over a roast chicken. While he concedes that not all native animals make great pets (wombats and koalas come to mind), others do, and Archer is hoping that the government will start to legalize ownership of more native pets. “No animal that has ever entered [humans'] inner circle has become extinct,” he says. “When you value something and have an emotional connection with it … it simply doesn’t disappear.”

It’s a strategy that has worked before in Australia, albeit on a smaller scale. In 1987, rainbow fish were considered to be forever gone from the lakes in northern Queensland — their sole habitat. In a move to save them, fish enthusiasts collected the species for their personal aquariums, and when the Queensland fisheries caught on, the pet fish were used to start breeding programs. (See the top 10 new species discovered in 2009.)

Today, most Australians’ interactions with the continent’s native species are limited to zoos — many wouldn’t know a quoll from a bandicoot, or a numbat from a bilby. But Archer’s plan seems to be gaining some traction. The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC), a federal government organization, will release a study next year considering the potential to use threatened eastern quolls — native, cat-sized marsupials with white spots and bushy tails — as household pets, on the basis that they are rare and could be suited to an urban habitat.

Rosalie Chapple, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Studies at UNSW and a key author of the RIRDC report, cautions about the implications of utilization of wild animals as pets. “It should be based on a conservation imperative and not a commercial industry imperative,” says Chapple. “The well-being of the animal must be taken into account.” A native-mammal pet industry would need guidelines on living and food requirements for quolls, as well as a lot of paperwork for licensing and regulation.

Chapple is also wary about contributing to an overloaded pet industry. In the Australian state of New South Wales alone, over 63,000 cats and dogs are abandoned every year, and a recent bill brought before the state parliament sought, unsuccessfully, to ban the sale of cats and dogs from pet shops. “With cats and dogs, we already see gross welfare issues,” says Daniel Ramps, a senior research fellow with the Australian Wetlands and River Center at UNSW who is vehemently opposed to keeping quolls as pets. “Quolls have much more specific requirements. They need a lot of space,” Ramps says. “By encouraging a pet industry you are essentially opening quolls up to abuse.”

Ramps and other opponents of domesticating native species argue that cats and dogs have become domesticated over thousands of years of evolution, but quolls and other animals like them have a long way to go before they learn to share indoor spaces with humans. “[The quoll is] a predator,” Ramps says. “Its instincts aren’t able to be maintained in a captive environment.”

Archer dismisses the argument. “When I was given a western quoll as a kitten, we had a very strong bonding experience. It was so cute, covered in little white spots, with these huge eyes,” he recalls. And while he feels quolls and people would get along just fine, he is blind to the charms of less exotic housemates while his cause gains more traction. When asked if he has any pets now, Archer laughs. “We were waiting and waiting to legally own a quoll and then my kids told me, ‘Let’s face it, Dad, if we keep this up we will never know what it is to own a pet.’ Now we have two dogs.”

See TIME’s special report on the environment.