Sometimes we are reminded that the Olympics can serve as an international platform not only for nationalism and truck commercials, but also resistance. In an incredible piece by Grant Wahl on Sports Illustrated.com, the Iraqi Olympic Soccer team has issued a stinging rebuke to George W. Bush's attempt to use them as election year symbols.

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Many advocates of information technology claim it brings greater democracy. This optimism is naive if blindly accepted. Information technology must be managed at every step by citizen oversight. The role of new technology will be largely determined by how democratized our institutions are before it is implemented.

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ON July 15, and for the first time in 40 years, a cooperation agreement was signed by Cuban and U.S. companies for the transfer of biotechnological technology directed at developing vaccines against cancer. The agreement was signed between the CancerVax Corporation and the Center for Molecular Immunology at the International Conference Center in Havana.

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Many places in China are surprisingly close to the United States in its economic and social problems in 1929, such as the proportion of agricultural income to GDP and the proportion of farmer's per-capita income to average social income are almost equal. Take another example. The unemployment rate and the moral issue have become problems of serious concerns to society.

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When the federal welfare program was restructured in 1996, the government promised to provide child care to single parents required to take jobs outside the home. Often, however, that promise is not being kept and families pay the price.

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John Kerry and John Edwards left the Democratic National Convention July 29 to barnstorm across the country, buoyed by ringing calls both inside and outside the convention for George W. Bush’s defeat as a menace to world peace and democracy.

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President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela made democratic history today in a triumphant defeat of the recall referendum on his Presidency. After six years in office, in this recall referendum held on Sunday, August 15th, Chávez lead with a 58% majority. Voters clearly exercised their constitutional right to confirm the President in a historic referenda process.

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You know it’s Olympic season in the USA because Playboy has unleashed its ‘Women of the Summer Games’ issue, where world class female athletes are seen performing pole vaults, long jumps, and backstrokes, completely in the air brushed buff. We are also getting bombarded with stories about how Athens is "a city transformed" by the Olympic Midas touch.

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Our enemies never stop thinking of new ways to harm our country and our people and neither do we," said the United States president [sic] last week, totally unaware of his audience's muffled titter in response. This latest in a long series of amusing Bushisms smacks of reality for more and more Americans railing at the growing McCarthy type ambience within the country fuelled by the politics of fear.

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Bush is going after workers when they are hurting most. In a period of high unemployment, growing length of unemployment, cuts in wages and benefits, and increased job insecurity under globalization and outsourcing, working people need to know that there is a safety net that will not allow them to fall into dire poverty. Unfortunately for millions the far right has successfully led the push to shred that safety net over the last two decades, and now Bush, with his proposed onerous funding cuts in his 2005 budget for worker-related programs, is doing his level best to force workers out of the frying pan into the fire.

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Supporters of democracy should be watching Venezuela this weekend. Has respect for the rule of law and constitutional government truly taken root in Latin America or will traditional ruling elites and their backers in Washington bring us more of the same old "respect for the electoral process, but only if you vote the way we want" you to vote?

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In one of the more ironic twists to come out of Fahrenheit 9/11, the Loews theater group, whose screens are currently showing the anti-Bush opus across the country, was recently bought by the Carlyle Group. The shadowy private investment firm is implicated by Moore as a key part of the insidious web that connects (or once connected) the Bush family to the Saudis, including the bin Laden family.

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The scandal of British and United States soldiers torturing Iraqi people is growing and is getting worse by the minute and it won’t go away. Torture is not inflicted to individuals only, but it is also inflicted upon their families, their friends, and their communities and to society as a whole. It is a mark and a scar, which will stay there for many years, if not forever.

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"THERE is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq," writes a senior serving CIA official with nearly 20 years' experience. Calling himself Anonymous, he recently published a damning critique of the policies of George Bush titled Imperial Hubris: Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror.

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PABLO Neruda, poet, political activist and a simple human being was considered a legend in his lifetime and many think that after his death he got resurrected more like a living heroic figure that inspired one and all. García Márquez considers him the greatest poet of the 20th century.

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Wounded in her pride, Cuba plans to go to the Olympic Games in Athens and re-conquer its baseball title, lost four years ago to its perennial rival, the United States, although the latter did not classify, and so will not provide the opportunity for a rematch.

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The idea of government using advanced technology to control people has probably teased people’s collective imagination since before technology was even a word. Denzel Washington’s character thinks so in the new film, The Manchurian Candidate, about right-wingers at the highest levels of government posing as liberals to seize power, and using thought control to do it.

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The United States was born from the struggles of the settlers for the right to have a say in their lives and their future. The Boston Tea Party in 1774 mobilized the citizenry around the slogan, "no taxation without representation." This is still the beacon call for today’s African American community and other segments of our multi-racial and multi-national country. It is imperative that the African American community be fully mobilized in this presidential year if Bush and his band of warmongers is to be defeated.

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The process of revolutionary changes that the people of Cuba started since the triumphal events of 1959 provided a potential for solid, wide-ranging and representative citizens’ participation in all aspects of life. This type of civil society makes possible and guarantees the ways and means for direct participation by Cubans in debate, the submission of proposals and the adoption of decisions relating to all matters of interest to our nation, including its political life, economic development, foreign relations, distribution of wealth and the protection of national patrimony.

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IRAQI trade unionist Abdullah Mushen demanded an end to the occupation and a "sovereign and democratic Iraq" in central London on Thursday night.

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