The Bush administration was shocked this past week by the unanimous adoption of a resolution denouncing the US blockade of Cuba at the Ibero-American summit in Salamanca, Spain.

The travel ban is a failed, outdated, Cold-War era policy. The current policy succeeds only in restricting the rights of U.S. citizens and hurting the Cuban people; it responds to the interests of a small group of hardliners in the Cuban-American community. It is time to create a forward-looking U.S. policy toward Cuba based on sensible foreign policy objectives.

I wrote these remarks down on Thursday, when a Washington Post columnist was pleading with Patrick Fitzgerald to please just go away, and a New York Times news article was claiming that if Lewis Libby leaked anything, he did so with the best of intentions.

Under the cloud of a possible indictment, Bush's top adviser Karl Rove returned yesterday to the grand jury investigating which member of the Bush White House leaked the identity of a CIA agent.

The Veterans Affairs Department is currently reviewing approximately one-third of the cases of veterans who are receiving disability benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

HUMAN rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance.

Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly on September 27 discredited the United Nations by stating, "Only fools take the U.N. Charter seriously."

In recent months, members of the Bush administration have wrongly accused Venezuela of being a "destabilizing" force and have implied without evidence that it supports terrorist groups.

According to the official story, he spread the benefits of civilisation across the continent; in reality, his arrival heralded a new age of terror and genocide which took the lives of over 100 million native Americans...President Chávez has described Columbus as being "worse than Hitler" and renamed October 12th as "Day of Indigenous Resistance".

California’s working families are mobilized to beat back special election ballot measures proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) and financed by his millionaire corporate friends that attack union members’ political freedom, teachers’ jobs and school funding.

Formal talks between Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were put on hold this week. The first face to face dialogue between the two since the "disengagement" of the Gaza Strip was sidelined for a second time because of a difference in "objectives."

Describing the continuing US occupation of Iraq as a "quagmire," a recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies elaborated on the massive cost in lives and resources for the war in Iraq.

The thorny and long-standing problem came into the world media spotlight in recent weeks, with televised images of desperate African migrants being shot at and crushed trying to enter Europe and scores of others deposited in the vacant sands of Morocco with no food or water.

Take e-action to protest the Bush agenda for the Gulf Coast, to support the demand to ratify the Kyoto Treaty, and to protest TimeWarner's exploitation of child labor.

Venezuelan government to give material and cultural support to the country's indigenous population by turning over millions of acres of land and by funding institutes to preserve indigenous culture.

Today's list includes the White House as a whole, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Karl Rove, James Dobson, Harriet Miers, the religious extremists at the base of the GOP, and goofy Pat Robertson.

On August 25, Cornell University students began a "Fast Relay" in memory of the estimated 100,000 Iraqi lives lost since the March 2003 invasion and in protest of the US occupation of Iraq. In 48-hour shifts, the students will fast one minute for every dead Iraqi, the relay totaling 70 days.

Last October 7 2005, Belgium witnessed a 24-hour general strike the first in more than 12 years. The social democratic trade union federation (Federation Generale du Travail de Belgique or FGTB, with more than 1.3 million members) had called for a general strike because the workers opposed the prolongation of their employment career by 5 years thus limiting the access to early retirement schemes.

Iraqis voters overwhelmingly favor troop withdrawal from their country. New report shows the Iraq war costs US taxpayers almost $6 billion per month. To pay for it, big business and Republican-dominated tax advisory panel plans to advise Bush to raise taxes on working families. Was the New York terror hoax a diversionary tactic?

Even in the midst of devastation, life goes on. The global media have descended on the country, their reports repeating the same images and the same banal comments every few minutes. Soon they will move on, so that when they are really needed, to monitor relief efforts and reconstruction or keep watch on the funds, they will no longer be there. The citizens of the west will also forget. But Pakistan will never be able to.