A housing shortage mixed with grinding poverty has led to the common practice of home owners renting out overcrowded illegal shacks, built literally in their backyards, to families scrabbling to make a living in the city...The Zimbabwe National Pastors Conference condemned the crackdown in a statement and urged the government to make war on poverty, not the poor.

While the Bush administration claims that CAFTA will help secure and strengthen democracy throughout the hemisphere by promoting growth and reducing poverty in Central America, economic indicators convincingly establish that U.S. agribusinesses and multinational corporations will be the pact’s overwhelming beneficiaries as a result of cheap labor and easily penetrable and non-competitive local markets.

The American people must understand the full magnitude of the Bush administration’s failure at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. This may not happen because the administration has been so remarkably successful in spinning the news to suit its unilateralist, militarist and triumphalist worldviews... We must demand the reversal of these policies and the resumption of constructive engagement with the rest of the world.