With rock concerts, public rallies and white bracelets alike petitioning world leaders to “make poverty history,” the issue of debt relief has recently arrested unprecedented international attention... Nearly all of the fanfare focused on Africa, whose development has been all but paralyzed by its crippling external debt of $333 billion (2004), an alarming 36 percent of the continent’s total GDP. At $720 billion, Latin America’s foreign debt is equivalent to 38 percent of the continent’s GDP.

Last Thursday, in a move that further cheapened the Bush administration’s already tawdry Latin American policy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the creation of a new State Department staff position to implement recommendations of the U.S. Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, a body which hopes to “accelerate the demise” of Cuban President Fidel Castro’s government.

A close compatriot of President Bush squats in a scandal so malodorous it led news shows from coast to coast. It's a scandal that some say is too hot for Bush to comment on. But there was the President, speaking without a stammer or stutter on this issue of pressing national concern.

It is not a proposal from former Pres. Fidel Ramos, nor a pending program of Pres. Arroyo, but a longstanding agenda of the United States, says IBON Foundation of Malacañang's renewed calls for Charter change (Cha-cha).

Nuclear weapons have not disappeared. The United States, France, Britain, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan and India still have more than 28,000 nuclear weapons. The Bush administration is not cutting its nuclear weapons. Instead it has developed more sophisticated and powerful bombs and is now developing mini-nukes, bunker busters and nuclear weapons for space.

According the[peace agreement], the former rebel group has two weeks to name a successor. Salva Kiir, a man held to have a more secessionist agenda for the south of Sudan than Garang did, is thought a likely candidate for Garang’s posts, not just as First Vice-President, but also as President of southern Sudan for a six-year interim period.

Managed care and the onslaught of privatization of health care in the country are setting the pace up on the Hill. The insurance and banking industries are getting more than just a little help from Washington.

One lawyer is a smooth, handsome corporate attorney whose political loyalties, partisanship, and ideological moorings earned him a seat on the fast track to the top positions in corporations and now in judicial branch of the US government.

An unpopular war drags on, gas prices rise and rise, as a cloud of scandal gathers over Washington D.C. At times, it seems as though the 1970’s never ended: it’s just Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton’s Quaalude-laced, faux populist snake oil caused us to sleep through the 80’s and 90’s – and now we’re awakening, hungover, groggy, queasy, still in the midst of that ugly and odious era.

Despite the President's sunny pronouncements regarding the capabilities and readiness of Iraq's security forces, Iraq is nowhere near being capable of fending for itself. Of Iraq's 107 military and paramilitary battalions, only 3 of them (2.8%) are capable of planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations completely independent of coalition forces.

President Hugo Chávez reiterated yesterday, Sunday, that this year, some 100,000 patients from Latin American are to undergo eye surgery in Cuba. On the 230th edition of his weekly Sunday program, "Aló Presidente," the leader noted that Operation Milagro (Miracle) also covers poor patients from the Caribbean free of charge, and has even been extended to the United States.

The preamble to our AFL-CIO Constitution is a remarkable document. It is our compass – our manifesto – our mission statement – and its powerful words remind us of the many layers of responsibility we shoulder as leaders of our Federation.

On the second day of its convention in Chicago, the AFL-CIO took a historic step, calling for the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and an end to the country's occupation. Public attention has focused largely on the split in US labor and the decision by two of the federation's largest unions to leave.

ast week the Republican-controlled Senate voted to make permanent most of the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. Democrats blocked a measure favored by the Bush administration that would have allowed the FBI to seek "administrative" subpoenas that do not require a judge’s approval.

I was reading the Sunday New York Times this week, the "newspaper of record" as they say in international establishment circles to understand what was the range of choices in what I was expected to think.

THE Nuclear deal entered into by India and the US as part of the Indo-US Agreement signed by president Bush and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh during the latter's recent visit to the US has been received differently by diverse quarters in India and abroad.

A statement issued at 1:00 am (2200 GMT) on Sunday by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's office said Garang, who had been visiting Museveni's ranch in western Uganda, was flying in a Ugandan presidential MI-72 helicopter.