Newsitem List

I recently traveled to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast with the volunteer organization Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) to assist in ongoing relief efforts there. It is painfully obvious, nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the region, that the market-based approach to relief and reconstruction has left the entire region devastated, generating even higher levels of social inequality....

Spike Lee's 4.5-hour documentary on New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is mesmerizing. Just as important, the writer says, it's an evenhanded take on what went wrong, and a loving tribute to the city and its residents. Randy Fertel, a native New Orleanian, teaches the Literature of War and of Exile at the New School for Social Research. He directs the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation, which is devoted to education in Louisiana. He serves as executive producer on the forthcoming documentary "Tootie's ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Dawn Peterson, Miss Wheelchair Louisiana 2005, was paralyzed from the waist down by gunfire in a carjacking gone bad. Yet, armed with an education and ferocious perseverance, she continued to sustain herself as a paralegal, fully employable, she said, until Hurricane Katrina ripped the wheels off her life....

> > This Calendar of whats up this week in New Orleans is brought to you by your friends at www.neworleansnetwork.org....

In what has become a tragic annual ritual during the summer (June-September) monsoons, rains and overflowing rivers have killed at least 400 people and left more than 4 million homeless in the Indian states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh over the past two and a half weeks. The lives of as many as 15 million people have been disrupted by the flooding....

The Bush administration's "ABC" policy of "Abstinence, Be Faithful, and Use a Condom" is being criticized by many - including Microsoft founder Bill Gates - at the 16th International World Aids Conference in Toronto. We take a looks at the issue of AIDS prevention with a New York-based activist and speak with a leading advocate for sex workers in Canada....

The World Health Organization warned earlier this week that the countries hit hardest by AIDS desperately need 4 million more health workers to cope with the crisis. Many of the locally-trained doctors and nurses in these countries have been lured away to the United States and Europe by higher salaries. We speak with Smita Baruah of Physicians for Human Rights....

It has become clear in recent months that ending homelessness is no longer on America’s political radar screen. Terrorism, global warming, the war in Iraq, the ongoing health care crisis, rising gas prices---these are the issues that concern Americans, who have become as resigned to seeing people on the streets as they are to the latest Bush Administraton fiasco. UCSF’s recent study of San Francisco’s homeless population over the past 14 years was given front-page coverage in the San Francisc...

The Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) is applauding what it calls “important steps forward and major new promises” taken by Gilead in making its AIDS drugs Tenofovir (Viread) and Truvada affordable and available in Africa and the global South. The Student Global AIDS Campaign—a national network of AIDS activists in high schools and colleges—has been running a campaign focused on Gilead since this winter. That campaign has engaged students from across the country in asking the company to rec...

One year after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the talk about a war on poverty turned out to be just that, talk. There’s no reason to think that will change, says New America Media’s Associate Editor, Earl Ofari Hutchinson. Hutchinson is the author of the forthcoming The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a look at Bush and The GOP’s court of black voters....