By Gareth Porter WASHINGTON (IPS) — Criticism in the memoirs of former secretary of defense Robert M. Gates of President Barack Obama’s lack of commitment to the Afghan War strategy of his administration has generated a Washington debate about whether Obama was sufficiently supportive of the war.But the Gates account omits two crucial historical facts […]

By Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. The 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a war on poverty brought long overdue attention to his commitment. Today, with one in five children in America still raised in poverty, an accounting is vital as part of a renewed commitment.But largely absent from the debate around the war on […]

By Lee A. Daniels Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. hasn’t been this alive since 1968.He’s no longer that visually distant, two-dimensional figure, limited to speaking a single sentence taken out of context and shorn of its true meaning. Instead, the honest scholarship and media commentary considering what King faced and what he did have broken […]

By George E. Curry, NNPA Editor-in-Chief  PRETORIA, South Africa (NNPA) — A month after his death, there is a bitter struggle to define —and, in many instances, re-define — the legacy of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically elected president.“There is an attempt to do in his death what they could not do in life […]