The Bush administration is very focused these days on Iran's nuclear program. This focus has only sharpened in the aftermath of the International Atomic Energy Agency's recent report that Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance of a UN Security Council demand.
China's much increased economic activities in Africa in recent years - investments in energy and natural resources extraction and loans to African governments - have provoked accusations that it is becoming a new neocolonial power in the continent.
For many, Russia is now a land of dashed hopes and profound disappointment. After the heady days of the Solidarnosc, the resounding defeat of the August 1991 coup, and the eventual collapse of the USSR itself, a feeling of numbing disillusionment has set in. For those who had held out hope of a new dawn of social equality and, dare I say it, economic abundance, the current epoch lies in stark contrast to the times of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the intense political enthusiasm they brought with them.
With the US presidential campaign preliminaries beginning in the Democratic and Republican parties, it is useful to recall one of the most innovative of campaign strategists, Russell Davenport, the spirit behind those chanting "We want Willkie" at the 1940 Republican convention in Philadelphia.
The stunt works like this: College Republicans give a student a name tag that reads "Illegal Immigrant" and players scour the campus to find him or her. The winner gets a gift certificate. This kind of event has been staged by College Republican chapters all over the country.
A pending merger in the cotton-seed industry is prompting sharp legal and environmental criticisms of biotechnology in US agriculture.The proposed merger would fuse the world's largest seed company, Monsanto, with one of the country's leading cotton-seed firms, Delta and Pine Land. Announced last year, the deal is now awaiting antitrust clearance from the Justice Department.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019