While the number of new HIV infections has substantially dropped in sub-Saharan Africa, it has changed very little in the United States, especially in African-American communities. Indeed, although black Americans represent just 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for almost 50 percent of Americans living with HIV/AIDS and 40 percent of total deaths to date.
Agent Orange on Okinawa: The Smoking Gun
Since 1945, the small Japanese island of Okinawa has been unwilling host to a massive U.S. military presence and a storehouse for a witches’ brew of dangerous munitions and chemicals, including nerve gas, mustard gas, and nuclear missiles. However, there is one weapon the Pentagon has always denied that it kept on Okinawa: Agent Orange. But a recently discovered U.S. army report puts lie to those denials once and for all.
Destroying the Commons
Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.
Taliban Vaccination Ban: Paranoia or Based in Fact?
CIA taints polio vaccination campaigns by using them as a cover for espionage.
WHO Under Siege From Private Sector
It was symbolic of the crisis facing the United Nations’ World Health Organisation that billionaire Bill Gates, the Chairman of Microsoft, was the special guest speaker addressing last year’s World Health Assembly (WHA) of WHO member states.
Psychologists and Torture, Then and Now
History repeats itself, Marx famously warned, first as tragedy and then as farce. In the case of U.S. torture psychologists, the ” tragedy” occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation and the like found its way into the Agency’s counterintelligence interrogation manual. The 1963 KUBARK Manual and its later iterations were used widely by U.S. intelligence and disseminated to other governments in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The “farce” was played post-9/11, as psychologists became involved once again in aiding counterintelligence interrogators.
Obama Requests Slightly Higher Aid Levels for 2013
WASHINGTON, Feb 14, 2012 (IPS) – Despite strong pressure to reduce the yawning federal deficit, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is asking Congress for a slight increase in funding for the State Department and foreign aid next year.
The Under-Examined Story of Fallujah
Seven years after the U.S. invasion of Fallujah, there are reports of an alarming rise in the rates of birth defects and cancer. But the crisis, and its possible connection to weapons deployed by the United States during the war, remains woefully under-examined.
Mexican Constitution Now Recognizes Right to Food
On April 29, 2011 the Chamber of Deputies approved the constitutional reform that establishes the right to food in Mexico. On August 17, the Senate received reports that the required majority of the states in the country had approved the reform and ordered its publication in the official federal record.
The Politics of Nuclear Crisis and Renewable Energy in Japan
On August 26, 2011, Prime Minister Kan Naoto resigned from office after a tempestuous fifteen months in power. Since May 2011 a virtual lynch mob egged on by the media bayed for his resignation. Kan’s ouster became an obsession of the nation’s powerbrokers. This article examines why, in the midst of an unprecedented cascade of disasters, natural and nuclear, the Kan problem trumped all others.