WASHINGTON - Two people who helped rescue 15 hostages from Colombian rebels posed as journalists from a real Venezuela-based television news organization, Colombia’s defense minister said Wednesday.
Two of the nine rescuers assumed the roles of journalist and cameraman from the news organization TeleSUR during the daring rescue, Juan Manuel Santos said.
An actual doctor and nurse [...]

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan has warned the international community that India’s historic nuclear deal with the United States could accelerate a nuclear arms race between Delhi and Islamabad.
The warning was made in a letter addressed to more than 60 nations as the Indian government, having survived a no confidence vote on Tuesday, dispatched diplomats to clear [...]

BRUSSELS - The European Union’s top food safety agency said on Thursday cloned animal products may not be safe and further study was needed, prompting another battle of conscience within the bloc over the merits of new technology.
“It is clear there are significant animal health and welfare issues for surrogate mothers and clones that can [...]

WASHINGTON - Where do gardening, small-scale agriculture and the future of planet Earth converge? For three Washington women, it’s on a road less traveled, on byways unseen from the gotta-get-there, high-speed chaos of the interstate.
It has been a year since Lara Sheets, 26, Liz Tylander, 25, and Kat Shiffler, 24, climbed on their bicycles in [...]

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL - A local antiwar organization that is planning a march on the final day of the Republican National Convention said Wednesday that its demonstration will be “more militant” than protest marches earlier in the week.While eschewing violence, members of the Anti-War Committee told reporters at a news conference outside the Xcel Energy Center [...]

NEW YORK - Not every musician will make a film that features a fan facing him from a concert audience with two arms raised, middle fingers extended - more than one fan, in fact.Neil Young was singing protest songs on a “Freedom of Speech” tour with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash at the [...]

Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has moved from blue to green, and similarly, she demonstrated her move to the left side of the political spectrum in a speech she gave in Durham: “It’s time to move from protest to resistance.”
McKinney, a former six-term Democratic congresswoman turned newly minted Green Party candidate for president, spoke at two [...]

Ali Abunimah writes on how Obama’s “recasting himself as a stalwart backer of Israel” has only deepened with his recent trip to the region.

Today about one hundred Palestinian, Israeli and international women
demonstrated in Nilin against the apartheid wall being constructed by Israel
cutting deep into the West Bank effectively appropriating village lands to
nearby settlement Hashmonaim.

WASHINGTON - Experts calling for changes in the U.S. foreign aid system got a sharp reminder Tuesday on Capitol Hill from representatives of half the world’s population: put women at the center of efforts to improve lives in developing countries.
A growing consensus around the need to put a new face on Washington’s 40-year-old Foreign Assistance [...]

Lucio Urtubia could be described as a modern day Robin Hood, a man who stole from the rich to give...

NAIROBI - More than 14 million people in the east Africa region require urgent food aid due to drought and spiralling cereal and fuel prices, aid agencies say.
In an emergency appeal launched today, Oxfam warns that millions of people in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Djibouti and Kenya are fast being pushed “towards severe hunger and destitution”. [...]

MOSCOW - Russia was today considering the use of bases in Cuba for its nuclear bombers, in a move that revives memories of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and which is likely to profoundly annoy the United States.
Russian military sources said that Moscow is contemplating using Cuba as a refuelling base for its nuclear-bomb carrying [...]

WASHINGTON - Auditors at a Pentagon oversight agency were pressured by supervisors to skew their reports on major defense contractors to make them look more favorable instead of exposing wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office.
The Defense Contract Audit Agency, which oversees contractors for the [...]

WASHINGTON - U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said on Wednesday he had rejected a request from lawmakers that an outside special counsel investigate the case of a Canadian taken off a plane in New York and sent to Syria, where he says he was tortured.
Mukasey said under questioning at a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee [...]