The U.S. has urged Russia to accelerate its removal of two former Soviet military bases in Georgia, but Russia now says it will require at least 11 years to dismantle them. Powell told Russian reporters that the U.S. is ready to help pay for closing the bases, an offer some Russians see as interference.

Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?
Poor countries that are geopolitically of strategic value to Empire, or have a "market" of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, God forbid, natural resources of value--oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal--must do as they're told or become military targets.
It's important to understand that the corporate media don't just support the neoliberal project. They are the neoliberal project. This is not a moral position they have chosen to take; it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media work.
We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then-Maharashtra government signed a power purchase agreement that gave Enron profits that amounted to 60 percent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!

Think about it: If we had been collecting millions of fingerprints and photos before Sept. 11, 2001, would that attack have been foiled? Probably not. We already had all sorts of specific and relevant information about the 9/11 hijackers; we had the raw data at our fingertips; we just didn't analyze it well.
Former Vice President Al Gore, in making this very point, recently listed all of the information we had in hand, weeks before the attacks, about the 9/11 hijackers:
? In late August 2001, Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar bought tickets to fly on American Airlines flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon. They bought the tickets under their real names -- names that were also on a State Department/INS watch list (spelled correctly, and not at all Welsh-sounding).
? The CIA and FBI were looking for Alhamzi and Al-Midhar as suspected terrorists, in part because they had been observed at a "terrorist meeting" in Malaysia. The whole time, they were in San Diego -- where they'd rented an apartment under their own names and were listed in the phone book.
? Using the Internet to search for common addresses, analysts would have discovered that other hijackers shared an address with Alhamzi and Al-Midhar -- including Mohamed Atta (who was on American Airlines flight 11, which flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and Marwan Al-Shehhi (on United flight 175, which crashed into the South Tower).
? Similar searches of common addresses, phone numbers and even, believe it or not, frequent flier numbers -- coupled with an INS watch list of expired visas -- would have led to all of the other hijackers, including those who boarded United flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

The Bush Administration wants to widen the definition of "professional" so that it denies overtime pay not just to those with four-year degrees -- but also those who have accumulated work experience "equivalent" to college.
"I think it should be your job to tell our military men and women in Iraq that when they come home, their service of their country will be used as a way to cut their overtime pay."

This is a wonky one, but worth watching. You've got credible, documented allegations that the attorney general committed a federal crime -- and then conspired to cover it up.

"State of the World 2004" is the latest in an annual study put out by the Worldwatch Institute. The authors tell us that in the past 30-odd years, refrigerators have gotten 10 percent bigger, new American homes have gotten 38 percent bigger, and those homes are more likely than ever to house multiple refrigerators.