Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported on US plans to open direct negotiations with Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.

Japan's stock market has been hit by extraordinary volatility over the past few days, hitting a 26-year low on Monday before recovering its losses yesterday after the government stepped in to announce a series of emergency measures.

Nicolas Sarkozy wants to protect "strategically important" French enterprises against their take-over by foreign investors. The French president announced his plan in a speech to business representatives in Annecy last Thursday.

Social inequality and poverty have dramatically increased in Germany in recent years compared with other countries. This is the conclusion of a study published by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) last Tuesday.

It was a golden moment for the Conservative press and they made the most of it. The October 8 Mail on Sunday headlined its article, "Teenage Trotsky is Cabinet's new adviser on radical Islam."

A wave of protests by laid-off workers is a sign of what is to come as the global recession hits China.

One month later, the bailout has been enacted, and all of the dire developments--banks and businesses disappearing, the stock market plunging, unemployment skyrocketing--which the American people were told it would prevent are unfolding with accelerating speed.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta, Georgia issued a stay of execution on Friday for death row prisoner Troy Anthony Davis. The ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals halts, at least temporarily, Davis's execution that had been scheduled for 7 p.m., Monday, October 27.

For the past month, a long-demonized word has been increasingly injected into political discussion in the United States—socialism.

During the recession of the early 1980s, the official unemployment rate rose above 10 percent. If a similar figure is reached in the next period, as appears increasingly likely, the social consequences will be even more severe than they were two decades ago.

The presidential election of 2000 marked a watershed moment in US history. The right to vote in the US, which expanded after the lifting of Jim Crow restrictions against blacks in the 1950s and 1960s and the lowering of the legal voting age to 18 in 1971, came under new assault.

A report issued yesterday by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) revealed the United States has the third worst level of income inequality and poverty among the group's 30 member states.

At recent campaign events, Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin have made sensational charges, alleging that widespread "voter fraud" is taking place in an attempt to manipulate the election in favor of Barack Obama.

Choke, written and directed by Clark Gregg, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) held its annual national membership meeting at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday.

With minimal debate, the French National Assembly endorsed the government's €360 billion rescue plan for the banks, a massive transfer of public funds to the financial elite, by a majority of 224 to 23.

The US Supreme Court has denied Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new trial. A well-respected journalist and political activist, Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1982 of murdering Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Wracked by political instability and hard hit by the global economic crisis, Pakistan is teetering on the brink of default.

Last month, the Royal Society's education director, Professor Michael Reiss, was forced to resign for advocating, at the very least, the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in school science classes.

A report issued Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documents how the infant mortality rate in the United States is growing in relation to other countries.

[I]t was deemed necessary to roll out George W. Bush on Friday to reassure Wall Street that there were no strings attached and no hint of nationalization in the bailout scheme.

A community activist group called ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) has become a lighting rod for Republican attacks as the US presidential election approaches.

Yesterday's downturn on the markets indicates a growing awareness that the bailout will not prevent the US from sliding into recession.

A report released Tuesday by the Working Poor Families Project reveals that more than 28 percent of American families with one or both parents employed are living in poverty.

In one day, the Dow Jones industrial average, the index that measures the stock values of 30 leading publicly traded corporations, climbed over 11 percent, its fifth largest increase on record in percentage terms, and its largest ever in terms of points.