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Report: Military Spending Tops $1T Mark
By MATTIAS KAREN, Associated Press Writer
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Global military spending in 2004 broke the $1 trillion barrier for the first time since the Cold War, boosted by the U.S. war against terror and the growing defense budgets of India and China, a European think tank said Tuesday.
Led by the United States, which accounted for almost half of all military expenditure, the world spent $1.035 trillion on defense, equal to 2.6 percent of global gross domestic product, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said...
Bush, Blair Agree on Aid For African Famine Relief
But Leaders Disagree on Amount and on Global Warming
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who forged a close and complicated relationship over Iraq, agreed yesterday to increase financial assistance to developing African nations suffering from famine, AIDS and war. But the two leaders parted ways over how much money rich nations should provide to Africa and how they should ease global warming...Bush, however, refused to endorse Blair's more ambitious plan to double aid from rich nations to $25 billion each year and $50 billion annually starting in 2015. ...
Bullets 'fell like rain' during Uzbek massacre
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
The United States has come under fresh international pressure to close its military base in Uzbekistan and drop the country's President as a strategic ally after Human Rights Watch released a damning report into the recent Andijan massacre.
The New-York based human rights organisation said its investigation into the events of 13 May left it in no doubt that the Uzbek government had systematically slaughtered hundreds of its own citizens in a "massacre" and then tried to cover up the atrocities. The evidence it had uncovered was so compelling and the Uzbek government's duplicity, guilt and intransigence so obvious, it added, that Washington was morally obliged to shut its air base in the south of the country....
Sixteen killed in two days of separatist violence in Kashmir
SRINAGAR, India (AFP) - Suspected Muslim separatists shot dead five people while Indian troops killed eleven militants in separate clashes in the past two days in Indian-administered Kashmir, police said.
Suspected militants kidnapped four Muslims and subsequently shot them dead in the districts of Baramulla and Anantnag on Sunday, a police spokesman said on Monday.
"Heavily armed militants raided their houses and abducted them," the spokesman said...
Mass protests in Bolivia turn violent
President's offer to quit fails to quell unrest
Jimmy Langman in La Paz
Tens of thousands of protesters marched through the Bolivian capital yesterday, hours after the president, Carlos Mesa, offered to resign.
The mass demonstrations of peasant farmers and miners followed three weeks of sustained pressure on politicians, which has brought turmoil to the country....
At least 16 killed in Somalia over water, pasture battles
MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) - Fighting over access to water and pasture in central Somalia has left at least 16 people dead and 30 wounded in battles that have involved hundreds of clan fighters, witnesses said yesterday...
http://alternet.org/rights/22134/
Patriot Act 2?