"...the incoming Bush administration pressured the Inter-American Development Bank to take the lead in canceling over $650 million in development assistance funding in order to undermine Aristide’s presidency. Since the latter’s expulsion, Washington, after superimposing an extra-constitutional interim government on Haiti, has lifted its weapons ban on the island and now has given the corrupt and ill-trained local police force the firepower to terrorize peaceful demonstrators."

The Bush administration secured Khartoum’s promises to promote Bush administration foreign policy objectives in Northeastern Africa and the Middle East in exchange for material assistance and tacit legitimation of its ruthless regime.

"The “China threat” theory which ceased to beat the drum for a while following the breakout of the war in Iraq shows a trend of making its way back in America recently. Among those who preach the “China threat” theory, some have little knowledge of China’s contemporary development and policies, hence many misunderstandings."

This week several thousand supporters of public education marched in Lansing, Michigan demanding that Michigan’s government fully fund public education. A severe budget crisis brought on by massive cuts in grants and spending by the federal government and grinding economic recession in that state has the Republican-controlled legislature targeting public schools and colleges for cuts.

Based on 44 in-depth interviews by the ODIHR[Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights] team between 26 May and 2 June, with asylum seekers who had fled Usbekistan living in the Suzak Camp near the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border, the report provides a first hand account of what activists both locally and abroad have called a massacre...The fact that the ODIHR team was barred from visiting Andijan and speaking with residents there can not be ignored.

Chávez and Castro’s mutual affection for each other began 11 years ago when Chávez visited Havana upon his release from a Venezuelan prison in 1994, after staging a failed coup. Since then, the two men have remained friendly and after Chávez won the Venezuelan presidency in 1998, they have collaborated on several trade and political programs.

There are ideological forces in our country ... whose entire political programme is premised on [obedience] to the G8. Whether it is the developments around comrade Zuma or worker rights, these forces do not give our local challenges their own value and dignity - they are all conceptualized as useful sacrifices to the G8, tokens of our compliance. These forces do not look at their own country with the eyes of South Africans...

A group of trade union leaders representing various Iraqi labor unions called for the end of the US-led occupation at a press conference in Washington, DC early last week...When the CPA took power it developed a so-called transitional law that adopted a 1987 labor code written by Saddam Hussein that severely restricted the right of Iraqi public sector workers to organize unions and collectively bargain...sponsored by United States Labor Against the War

The proposed new laws place iron fisted restrictions on the rights of workers to defend themselves and their rights. They expose individual workers as well as their unions and union officials to massive compensation claims from anyone who claims to have been affected by their actions.

As polls show dwindling support for Bush’s Iraq war, the administration has ramped up its rhetoric about why it went to war. It claims that Iraq was the center of the global terrorist threat and that the September 11th attacks justified the invasion.

While Bolton is a poster boy for everything wrong with Bush’s foreign policy, rewarding him with such a sensitive post would indicate approval for the Bush administration’s continuing challenge of the UN’s role as arbiter of international disputes. It mocks the concept of international law and peaceful resolution of conflict.

Human rights organization, Amnesty International, last week described the Bush administration’s decision to expand the prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as a "wrong decision." Amnesty International calls for closing the Guantanamo prisons and for charging the prisoners held there under US laws in US courts or release them.

“When our country was on it’s knees, he brought America to his feet.” So is the tagline for Ron Howard’s Depression Era boxing film Cinderella Man starring Russell Crowe. Cinderella Man, the story of 1930’s heavyweight champion James J. Braddock, has been compared to the 2003 film Seabiscuit...In reality, the 1930s was an era of not only poverty but also mass resistance, as strikes swept the south and shut down the cities...

It is pretty obvious that Friedman, the Times’ so called expert on foreign affairs, hasn’t a clue as to what is going on over in the middle east-- and neither does anyone else who relies on the Times for his or her information.... He wants to go gung-ho and win the war: “This is no time to give up – this is still winnable....”

Holocaust education is important as part of a general program of fighting reactionary and fascist ideology in the United States and the world. Marxists have a valuable role to play in rescuing it from both narrow academicism, that is, research by and for small groups of academic specialists as part of normal careerist work, and the “mass market” Hollywood approach, which uses melodrama to portray horrors without any explanation of fascism and the social classes that supported it...

Experts who have tracked the outcomes resulting from NAFTA’s policies have described it as a disaster for small farmers and working people in all three countries. US workers lost 879,280 jobs and real wages in Mexico have fallen as a result of NAFTA in the past 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute.

None of the 49 countries, identified by the United Nations as the least developed countries (also called the fourth world), has become strong and prosperous with Neo-liberalism approaches such as privatization. Some even became poorer. The global economy is in urgent need of vigorous growth and sound development in reflection on and transcending the conservative Neo-liberalism economic thoughts.

THE current political turmoil in Bolivia is part of a wider movement in Latin America, of people rejecting not only corrupt politicians, but also – and more importantly – the neoliberal economic policy paradigm that enriched a few at the expense of the vast majority.

Under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

WHILE most media analysis of the failed European Union summit concentrated on the personal joust between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, the most astounding phenomenon was the collective self-delusion over the constitutional treaty.