ECONOMY-US: Activists Target Corporate Chiefs' Tax Subsidies

U.S. taxpayers shell out 20 billion dollars a year to pad business chiefs' earnings and to prop up the world's most lopsided corporate pay scales, say activists seeking to highlight inequality in this election year.

POLITICS-US: Biden Helps Obama Plug Key Gaps in Electorate

In picking six-term Senator Joseph Biden as his vice presidential running-mate, Sen. Barack Obama hopes to plug some key gaps in the electoral constituencies whose support he hopes will send him to the White House in the November elections just 10 weeks from now.

POLITICS-US: McCain’s Plan to Privatise Veterans’ Health Care

If John McCain is elected the next U.S. president, wounded veterans could be in for a world of hurt.

POLITICS-US: Anti-Obama Echo Chamber in Full Swing

Right-wing groups are stepping up their campaign against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, with two new books on the best-seller lists, another on the verge of publication, and a full-length documentary that will premiere during the party conventions later this month.

POLITICS: U.N. Renovation Threatens Disruption in World Body

When the United Nations begins a major 1.8 billion dollar renovation of its 39- storey headquarters early next year, there are fears that the relocation of nearly 4,000 staffers from the 60-year-old building will disrupt the organisational work of the world body.

HEALTH-US: HIV On The Rise

A new study shows that the annual number of HIV infections in the United States is greater than was previously believed. The findings place increased scrutiny on the country’s lack of a national HIV/AIDS program as well as the current Presidential candidates’ plans to combat the epidemic.

POLITICS-US: Marketing Obama to Evangelicals

For the past three decades, the religious right has dominated the religio- political dialogue in the United States. The right’s growth, and its agenda - which revolved around so-called traditional family values issues including, but not limited to, opposition to abortion and full equality for gays and lesbians - was pursued on two tracks: they built multi-million dollar political and media enterprises, and they made themselves an indispensable force within the Republican Party.

POLITICS-US: Faith in a Time of War

From Republican contender John McCain's Jul. 25 meeting with the Dalai Lama in Aspen, Colorado to Democratic candidate Barack Obama's visit to Jerusalem's Western Wall the same day, the intersection of religion, politics and the "war on terror" has been a recurrent theme in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

POLITICS-US: Gates Strategy Stresses Unconventional Warfare

U.S. defence strategy should be focused primarily in the short to medium term on unconventional threats, particularly "violent extremist movements such as al Qaeda and its associates", while it "hedge(s)" against the growing military power of "rogue states such as Iran and North Korea" and potential rivals, notably China and Russia, according to major policy guidance released here Thursday by Pentagon chief Robert Gates.

THEATRE-US: Native Son Rising

Edwina, played by de'Adre Aziza, an attractive young lady in the church choir, has her eye on "the Youth" (Daniel Breaker). She informs him, "And after we marry and you've got a job in the corporate sector, you'll buy me a sprawling two-storey house fulla African sculptures from tribes we know nothing about, kente cloth couch covers, and Malcolm X commemorative plates lining the walls of our airy, peach-coloured breakfast nook?"

DEATH PENALTY-US: D-Day Approaching for Overflowing Death Row

A high-level California commission has sounded the death knell for the state's "dysfunctional" death penalty system, calling for an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars or the closing down of the state's death chamber.

POLITICS-US: Voter Laws Need Reform, Groups Say

One of her sons is serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq while another who has just turned 18 is about to join the Navy. Yet despite being a mother of two U.S. soldiers, Annette McWashington Pruitt cannot cast her ballot in the upcoming presidential polls because the laws in her home state of Alabama do not allow ex-felons to participate in elections.

POLITICS-US: My Big, Fat Geek Voter Drive

Few events elicit the passion evident at the International Comic Con convention, as fanboys and gals descended upon San Diego over the weekend, braving long lines to marvel at the latest creations of their long-standing heroes.

ENVIRONMENT-US: New Push to Clean Toxic Hotspot

Two New York City Congressional representatives are calling for Newtown Creek, one of the country's most polluted waterways, to be tested for the high levels of toxic chemicals that would qualify it for Superfund clean-up.

POLITICS-US: Latino Voters Heavily Favour Obama

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is preferred by a nearly a three-to-one margin over his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, among Latinos who are registered to vote, according to a major new poll released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Centre.

POLITICS-US: New Spying Law Quickly Challenged

Civil liberties advocates have lost no time in asking a federal court to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the new wiretapping law passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush last week.

DEVELOPMENT: U.S. Sliding By Nearly Every Measure

The United States is "woefully behind" other developed countries when it comes to providing opportunities and choices - the very essence of the so-called "American Dream" - according to a new analysis ranking the quality of life in the country.

POLITICS-US: McCain Gets Religion

Over the course of the past few months, Senator John McCain, the Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee, accepted and then rejected the endorsements of the controversial pastors Rod Parsley and John Hagee, after media reports about Parsley's vitriol toward Islam and Hagee's views that the Holocaust was part of God's biblical plan for the Jews to move to Israel.

POLITICS-US: Obama Surges in Race for Union Support

With at least 10 national unions giving their formal endorsements to Democratic Senator Barack Obama in his quest for the presidency, Republican rival John McCain finds himself lagging badly in the battle for labour's support in the November election.

BOOKS-US: Blogging Brobdingnagian Blowback

It was neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer who, in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, inaugurated Washington's unipolar moment.

BOOKS: Muqtada – One Man’s Meat, Another Man’s Poison

"He is an American spy," the militiamen shouted at Patrick Cockburn four years ago in Kufa, south of Baghdad. He could have hardly imagined that he would live to write a book on the very people who kidnapped him.