United States

On the fateful evening of September 18, when Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Bank Chair Ben Bernanke pulled together a closed-door meeting to discuss the rapidly unfolding crisis plaguing the financial system, congressional leaders feigned shock and horror at its severity.
The Wall Street “socialists” are at it again — with another big-government takeover of privately owned firms, aimed at protecting the rich by extorting money from working people.
The role of music in the early civil rights movements is fairly widely known.
Unionists protested on July 20 in San Francisco against the decision by Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to cut the wages of more than 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage of US$6.55 per hour, alleging he must do so because the state legislature has not passed a budget.
The Terror Dream: Fear & Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
By Susan Faludi
Scribe Melbourne, 2007
351 pages, $35
There’s no way of saying this without sounding a bit pretentious, but I was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. And the most instructive person I met may have been a frail old Black woman in a newsagent, who picked up a newspaper with a photo of Barack Obama on it, and thrust it under my nose.
On June 30, the collective agreements covering actors in the US television industry expired.
On June 5 the Eleventh Circuit of Atlanta’s Court of Appeals upheld the federal convictions for conspiracy against the Cuban Five — five Cuban citizens held in US prisons since their arrest on September 12, 1998.
On June 5, the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five — the five Cubans who infiltrated right-wing anti-Cuban terrorist groups in Miami and have been imprisoned in the US since 1997 — issued a statement condemning the decision the previous day by an Atlanta court of appeals to uphold the sentences against the men.
“The Penobscot Nation is committed to continue our efforts until the fish, wildlife and plants are safe to eat, and the sacredness is restored to the river. Only then will our culture be whole again …”
“America, this is our moment”, stated Barack Obama on June 3 after winning enough delegates to become the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party.
New York Governor David Paterson has instructed all state agencies to revise policies and regulations to recognise same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions, the Associated Press reported May 29. Such issues include family health care plans, joint