FINANCE: Bread Before Circuses, Poverty Activists Urge Govt

British Columbia's auditor general says the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, set to take place in Vancouver and Whistler, will cost at least 2.2 billion dollars, fueling concerns that the games could divert scarce resources for affordable housing and other critical needs of low-income Canadians.

RIGHTS-CANADA: Native Tribes Fight to Block New Pipeline

With oil sands crude production in the western Canadian province of Alberta projected to triple by 2015, several pipelines are competing for access to Asian export markets.

DEATH PENALTY: DNA Tests Prove Justice Has Failed

When we talk of capital punishment there is no room for mistakes; no allowances for doubt or indecision. There is definitely no mechanism for review of guilt or innocence after someone has been killed.

POLITICS-US: Bush Loyalist Flounders in Florida

Katherine Harris, the former Florida secretary of state who played a key role in the hotly contested U.S. presidential vote recount in 2000, is now running a quixotic campaign against a Democratic incumbent for one of the state's two seats in the U.S. Senate.

ENVIRONMENT-U.S.: Dunes at the Centre of All-Terrain Battle

Despite strong objections from environmental groups, the U.S. government wants to allow off-road vehicles in protected areas of sand dunes in the southern California desert.

RIGHTS-US: Jailed for Life, Migrant Says Justice Was Too Blind

A California immigrant serving a life sentence for lying to the Department of Motor Vehicles got a day in court Wednesday. Santos Reyes has already served six years for that crime, which he has never denied.

ENVIRONMENT-US: Another Piece of Alaska Goes on Sale

While the George W. Bush administration has so far failed in its bid to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, eight million acres of pristine Alaskan wilderness goes on sale to oil and gas companies Sep. 27.

POLITICS-US: Republican Control of Congress in Peril

As the 2006 U.S. mid-term election campaign officially got underway over the three-day Labour Day weekend, Republican hopes of retaining control of both houses of Congress look increasingly fragile.

FINANCE-US: Executives Cash In on War and Oil Bonanza

Top oil and defence industry executives in the United States are raking in record personal profits on the backs of the U.S. wars following the terror attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 and sky-high oil prices, two think-tanks said Wednesday.

RIGHTS-CANADA: Native Band Presses Land Claim Decision

Earlier this summer, Canada's Indian Claims Commission recommended that the federal government negotiate a settlement with the Williams Lake Indian Band on its claim to village sites in Williams Lake, British Columbia, in the interior of Canada's most western province.

RIGHTS-U.S.: The Strongest Survivors

They were the backbone of the U.S. Gulf Coast economy, working the hardest jobs for the lowest pay.

DEATH PENALTY: U.S. States Widen Scope for Executions

Politicians in primarily southern U.S. states have passed laws that expand the use of the death penalty to include repeat child sex offenders - a move mental health professionals say is ineffective in stopping molestation and abolitionists believe ultimately will be ruled unconstitutional.

POLITICS-US: Bush’s Faith-Based Agenda Losing Steam

The appointment of Jay Hein, a relatively unknown right-wing think tanker, to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives may be a sign that the George W. Bush administration has just about thrown in the towel on promoting what was supposed to be - when announced in January 2001 - the centrepiece of the president's domestic policy initiatives.

HEALTH-CANADA: Conservatives Question Safe Injection Site

Three former mayors of Vancouver have joined current Mayor Sam Sullivan in calling for Canada's Conservative minority government to renew the exemption which allows North America's first legal safe injection site to operate for users of heroin and other addictive drugs.

ENVIRONMENT: Information Cleansing, Canadian Style

If you're a teacher, student, journalist or just a plain concerned citizen interested in finding well-researched documentation about climate change, you can no longer depend on the Canadian government to supply that information.

ECONOMY-US: Oil Field Closure Revives Energy Policy Debate

Despite rhetoric from Washington that the United States must wean itself from dependence on oil, the shutdown of a BP oil field in the state of Alaska has shown how far the country remains from that goal and the lack of a consensus on how beat to achieve it.

DEATH PENALTY-U.S.: Exonerated, Florida Death Row Inmate Tells His Tale

Juan Roberto Melendez has not been able to stop talking since he was freed from a cell on Florida's death row four years ago.

DEATH PENALTY: Increasingly, Doctors Refuse to Do Harm

When Stanley "Tookie" Williams was strapped to a gurney awaiting his execution last December, things did not go as planned. California executioners had trouble finding a suitable vein in which to inject a lethal combination of drugs.

ENVIRONMENT: Mega-Project Scrapes Bottom of Oil Barrel

Thousands of square kilometres of tar-laden soil and sand underlying Canada's boreal forests are being gobbled up to feed an insatiable appetite for oil in the U.S. and elsewhere.

POLITICS-US: Congress May Sue Over Bush’s Use of Tacit Veto

U.S. President George W. Bush's widespread use of so-called "signing statements" to unilaterally decide which parts of acts passed by Congress he will enforce came under sharp criticism from a blue-ribbon task force assembled by the nation's premier legal organisation.

ENVIRONMENT: Burning Energy to Produce It

Everything about the Alberta oil sands development is impossibly big. Monster-sized trucks and giant excavators are carving up hundreds of square kilometres of land, thousands of kilometres of pipelines and roads have been laid, and millions of litres of water are being super-heated to process millions of tonnes of rock and sand.