STWR - Share The World's Resources

Global military spending rose 3.5 percent last year to $1.2 trillion as U.S. costs for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan mounted, a European research body said on Monday in an annual study.

To paraphrase the famous quip during the 1992 US Presidential debates, when an unknown William Jefferson Clinton told then-President George Herbert Walker Bush, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the present concern of the current Washington Administration over Darfur in southern Sudan is not, if we were to look closely, genuine concern over genocide against the peoples in that poorest of poor part of a forsaken section of Africa.

Our world today is deeply polarized. Comparisons are increasingly being made with the Cold War but in many ways it is more complex and dangerous now, because the opponents are not just governments but also armed groups with little or no stake in international relations.

The "politics of fear" are polarising the world and leading to an erosion of human rights, according to Amnesty International's annual report released Wednesday.

No one is paying much attention to it, but the U.S. top export is the deadliest.

Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. Michael Shank interviewed him about the conflict between Congress and the U.S. president over Iraq and Syria, the scandal enveloping World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz, and the nature of foreign debt.

In his April 21 radio address to the nation (inspired by the violence at Virginia Tech earlier in the week) George Bush announced that he has directed federal officials to conduct a national inquiry into how to prevent violence by dangerously unstable people. It is a worthy endeavor.