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Pinochet and Us: From Villa Grimaldi to Abu Ghraib
by Marc Cooper | 1 June 2004

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, all of a sudden, is right back where he belongs--a hairsbreadth away from trial. On Friday, a Santiago appeals court made a stunning reversal when it stripped the 88-year-old former general of judicial immunity. A previous court ruling in 2001 had found Pinochet mentally unfit to stand trial on murder indictments deriving from his seventeen-year dictatorship.

But Pinochet was too wily by half. Instead of gratefully and quietly retreating behind his mansion gates, he was seen living it up in some Santiago supper clubs. And after he recently gave a lucid interview to a Miami-based Spanish-language TV station, the court apparently decided he might just be fit enough to spend some quality time in a courtroom dock. [Full Story]

The African Predicament
by Deborah Scroggins | 27 May 2004

Howard French has written a passionate, heartbreaking and ultimately heartbroken book about covering West Africa's blood-soaked descent into a nightmare of war and greed as a reporter for the New York Times in the 1990s. The book is called A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, and, much as French wished it otherwise, there is far more tragedy than hope in it.

... The blaze already licking at West Africa when French returned burst into an inferno, forcing French to play the fireman after all and eventually burning him so badly that he felt lucky to escape. ... Within a year, he would find himself covering the collapse of Zaire itself and the death of millions sucked into its conflicts. [Full Story]

Fight for Your Right to Protest
by Peter Rothberg | 21 May 2004

Last week the antiwar coalition United for Peace and Justice's application for a permit to rally on the Great Lawn in Central Park in Manhattan on August 29th was denied... Far from a radical cause, the city's refusal to grant the permit has sparked editorial condemnation from three of New York's daily newspapers as well as criticism from municipal labor unions and numerous members of New York's City Council, including Council president Gifford Miller, all of whom are calling on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to reverse the decision and allow the march to lawfully proceed. [Full Story]

The Struggle for Russia
by Stephen F. Cohen

The arrest last month of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the principal owner of Russia's biggest oil company, Yukos, and the richest of the country's seventeen state-anointed billionaire oligarchs, on charges of fraud and tax evasion has put Russia back in the forefront of US media attention. But is the story being reported the full, or essential, one? [Full Story]

Collapse in Cancún
by Doug Henwood

The mid-September failure of the World Trade Organization's ministerial conference in Cancún was widely cheered on the left. A Global Exchange (GX) press release described it as a "failure...for the giant transnational corporations that are manipulating the trade agenda to engineer a power grab that will dramatically reduce the strength of democratically elected government." [Full Story]

Dying for AIDS Drugs
by Esther Kaplan | 16 October 2003

AIDS deaths, which increased ferociously in the United States throughout the 1980s and early '90s to a peak of 51,000 a year, suddenly abated in 1996 with the advent of antiretroviral combination therapy, a pricey and toxic brew that pulled people from their hospital beds like Lazarus. The relief was so intense that Andrew Sullivan announced "the end of AIDS," and researcher David Ho held out the hope of "eradication." ... Throughout the late 1990s, Congressional support for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program was so strong on both sides of the aisle that appropriations exceeded presidential requests every year.

That has now changed. As the growing epidemic slams up against state austerity measures, ADAP has descended into crisis, and Republicans in Washington have refused to intervene. As of early October, more than 600 people with HIV have been denied access to medications through the program. [Full Story]