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Insurer warns of global warming catastrophe
By Thomas Atkins
GENEVA (Reuters) - The world’s second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.
In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion (82 billion (…)

By Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele, AlterNet
Editor’s Note: A version of this commentary ran in the L.A. Times on March 3.
The 60,000 grocery workers who went on strike almost five months ago have reluctantly ratified a contract that most consider a setback in terms of their wages and benefits. In Los Angeles and around the country, the labor movement and its allies hoped the strike would be settled on the union’s terms — without significant givebacks. Instead, employees will now (…)

By ANDREW JACOBS
March 3, 2004
New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/03/national/03GEOR.html? ex=1079338391&ei=1&en=8f8d1cdb2214bbc6
ATLANTA, March 2 - Georgia’s headlong rush to block gay marriages through a constitutional amendment has been stalled, for the moment, by an unlikely group of legislators: black members of the House of Representatives, many of them church deacons and ministers who already support the state’s laws banning same-sex marriage.
Last week, (…)

There are moments in American foreign policy that run a déjà vu chill down one’s spine. Just such a moment was the recent talk to a group of Cali businessmen by William Wood, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia. In his remarks, Wood endorsed efforts by the present government of President Alvaro Uribe to overturn that country’s constitution to permit himself a second term. "The U.S. Constitution permits presidential re- elections," Wood argued, "that’s why we don’t see this proposal as (…)

By Conn Hallinan
FPIF Policy Report
http://www.fpif.org/papers/2004haiti_body.html
In 1994, when President Bill Clinton sent 20,000 American troops into Haiti to restore Jean-Bernard Aristide to the presidency, there was widespread support for a mission aimed at restoring democracy and relieving the misery of the Haitian people. It also seemed to herald a new day in the post-cold war world, when American invasions were not automatically synonymous with supporting some Latin American (…)

Black people across America and throughout the world, in fact all people who love and honor democracy and social justice, have to be outraged at what was surely the cloaked in darkness gunpoint kidnapping of Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide by U.S. militarists, this past Sunday, February 29.
We must speak as one to denounce this latest "lebensraum" (living space) foreign policy of the Bush administration, which is beginning to resemble more and more that of the German nazi era. (…)

BLACK POLITICIANS Bush administration assailed as withholding support
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 3/1/2004
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/03/01/ bush_administration_assailed_as_withholding_support?mode=PF
WASHINGTON — Many black political leaders blamed President Bush yesterday for failing to focus enough on the humanitarian problems boiling in Haiti, and said the administration’s unwillingness to support the government of its now-exiled president, Jean-Bertrand (…)

http://www.boston.com:80/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/ articles/2004/03/01/obligations_in_haiti
MAKE NO mistake about it: Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s resignation yesterday as Haiti’s elected president was a defeat for democracy. It was a defeat that the United States, so eager to inject democracy into the Middle East, could have prevented as recently as last week, when Aristide asked for foreign security forces to protect Haitian democracy from the armed insurgents threatening to (…)

EXCLUSIVE BREAKING NEWS: PRESIDENT ARISTIDE SAYS ’I WAS KIDNAPPED’ ’TELL THE WORLD IT IS A COUP’
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Multiple sources that just spoke with Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide told Democracy Now! that Aristide says he was "kidnapped" and taken by force to the Central African Republic. Congressmember Maxine Waters said she received (…)

March 1, 2004
By Jeffrey Sachs
The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen US manipulation of a small, impoverished country with the truth unexplored by journalists. In the nearly universal media line on the Haitian revolt, President Jean- Bertrand Aristide was portrayed as an undemocratic leader who betrayed Haiti’s democratic hopes and thereby lost the support of his erstwhile backers. He "stole" elections and intransigently refused to address opposition concerns. As a result he had (…)