News stories by Charles Davis

LOS ANGELES, Aug 27 (IPS) - A recent U.S. court ruling over a fight between Argentina and its creditors on Wall Street will increase global poverty by making it easier for "vulture funds" to seize the assets of indebted nations, according to anti-debt campaigners who are urging the U.S. government to overturn the decision.

LOS ANGELES, Jul 31 (IPS) - Vulture capitalist Paul Singer has hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in his legal battle with Argentina over the country's 2001 debt default.

LOS ANGELES, Jul 29 (IPS) - When Argentina defaulted on its national debt in 2001, U.S. hedge funds swooped in to buy the nation's bonds at pennies on the dollar, confident they would eventually prevail in the U.S. legal system and force the country to pay out in full.

By the end of 2011, the United States had elite special operations forces in around 120 of the 192 countries recognised by the United Nations, with U.S. military bases in more than half of the world's nation-states.

Its economy hurting from sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been making a show of bolstering its ties to Latin America, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this past week making his sixth official visit to the region since taking office in 2005.

Hundreds of protesters, dozens outfitted in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, took to the streets outside the White House on Wednesday to demonstrate against torture and indefinite detention on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Hundreds of people gathered today outside a U.S. military base where evidence against Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking classified information to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, is being presented before a military judge for the first time since Manning's arrest.

The top one percent of earners in the United States now controls over 40 percent of the nation's wealth, their income steadily rising while much of the country earns less than what it did a decade ago and an all-time high of 46 million Americans now live below the official poverty line.

Multilateral lending institutions — like the governments they serve — are ostensibly committed to the values of transparency and accountability. But more often than not, insiders who blow the whistle on waste, fraud and abuse at institutions like the World Bank are retaliated against, not rewarded, and typically find themselves out of a job for daring to speak out about wrongdoing.

When Kern Valley State Prison opened in 2005, the 379 million dollar facility in Central California was hailed as 'state of the art'. But within weeks of opening, a major problem was discovered: its water was poisoned - containing roughly twice the federally permitted level of arsenic, a known carcinogen.