Newsitem List

This month, ACT UP - the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power - is marking its 20th anniversary. We spend the hour with ACT UP co-founder, Larry Kramer. A legendary - and controversial - figure in the gay rights movement, Kramer wrote some of the first articles warning about the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. He has also written many plays including "The Normal Heart" and "The Destiny of Me." Kramer was diagnosed with HIV in the mid-1980s. He nearly died in 2001 from Hepatitis B in the liver. H...

Plastic surgery is on the rise in ethnic communities across the United States, and in 2005 Asian-Americans had 437,000 cosmetic surgeries, up 58 percent from 2004. NAM editor Andrew Lam, who contemplated getting double eyelid surgery, could have been part of that statistic. Lam is the author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.”...

The lead prosecutor in a six-year landmark government lawsuit against the tobacco industry has described how Bush administration loyalists intervened to weaken and manipulate the Justice Department’s case, resulting in a drastic reduction of the financial penalties demanded by federal prosecutors....

In recent times high-profile Wall Street investment banks have brought slick financial reasoning to the base art of loan-sharking. The most vulnerable Americans have been targeted for loans they can ill afford. Those with poor credit histories can be charged at double or treble the interest of a customer in good standing with the rating agencies. By the end of last year housing loans to six million unrated customers ­ 'sub-prime' mortgages ­ totalled $600 billion....

Gordon Brown’s last budget as chancellor of the exchequer ended his time at the treasury as he began it—robbing the poor and gutting the social services on which millions rely in order to benefit the rich. It was, at the same time, a declaration that, should he become prime minister as expected after Tony Blair steps down, the interests of big business will remain his paramount consideration....

The Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill, which had its second reading in the House of Commons in early March, proposes new powers that will enable the agents of bailiffs—court officers involved in the collection of debts and fines—to force entry into people’s homes, seize belongings and, in certain cases, restrain people....

In the deadliest mining disaster in Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, 107 miners have lost their lives in a gas explosion that ripped through a mine 60 kilometers south of the southern Siberian town of Novokuznetsk early Monday morning....

The Working America program, "In the Heart of the Health Care Hustle," gives us a way to talk about why the health care system is broken--and gives us a way to do something about it....

While statistics do not capture the real social dimension of homelessness in the United States, new data confirm that the homeless face increasing brutality, criminalization and neglect. But like the growing poverty population, the suffering of the homeless population finds no meaningful reflection in the budget or policy priorities of the federal government....

At a public hearing held Tuesday at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, soldiers being treated for wounds suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan and family members of injured servicemen detailed the bureaucratic red tape, long delays, lack of financial and social support and other problems they face at the Army’s most prestigious medical facility....