Calling themselves Custer Battles, the ex-Army Rangers formed a limited liability corporation before the invasion and let it be known in Washington, D.C., that they were looking to snap up rebuilding contracts.Battles, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2002 as a Rhode Island Republican, was a former CIA case worker who claimed White House connections.At its apex, Custer Battles employed more than 700 people in Iraq working on projects worth at least $100 million.But Custer Battles gained a certain reputation in Iraq

Condoleezza, entering Latin America last week, with the budget to bribe and the might to blackmail, went searching for just one more vote to impose Mexico's Derbez as the new OAS chief.The victory was supposed to be consummated while she was down here, to emboss her image as an effective foreign minister.Had Lucio still been in power in Ecuador, he would have offered the easiest pickins.But by the time Condi's jet touched down in Bogota, Lucio's head was bouncing somewhere alongside the Amazon, and Ecuador had slipped through her fingers -Narco News

Venezuela might have played a role in the revolt that toppled Ecuadorean President Lucio Gutierrez last month, according to reports that are emerging about events in Quito.The crisis highlighted Latin America's growing instability last week as Condoleezza Rice made her first tour of the region as U.S. secretary of state -Martin Arostegui/Washington Times

Argentina has voiced outrage at the inclusion of the Falkland Islands as British territory in the draft EU constitution. Argentina has complained to Brussels and ordered its ambassadors in the 25 EU capitals to issue protests.Argentina's diplomats have stood before the UN decolonisation committee almost every year since 1948 requesting recognition of its sovereignty over the islands -Telegraph UK

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the cornerstone of anti-proliferation efforts. But it is faltering and in need of aid: Israel, India and Pakistan never signed the treaty, Iran seems to be working on nukes despite having signed it, North Korea withdrew from it completely and terrorists could not care less.The five established powers, especially America, stand accused of weakening the NPT too -Economist UK

The world's nuclear powers are set to face calls to speed up disarmament as a conference on atomic arms control opens in New York.Critics say the US, France, UK, China and Russia have failed to comply with their commitments to disarm -BBC

Fighting inflation is job No. 1 these days for the Federal Reserve.With energy and other prices rising, policy-makers are expected to keep nudging up short-term interest rates _ for now.At its meeting Tuesday, the Fed is poised to raise the federal funds rate by one-quarter of percentage point, to 3 percent.That would be the eighth such increase since June 2004, when the central bank began its campaign to tighten credit -Washington Post

Two months of touting personal retirement accounts as an alternative to Social Security haven't done much for President Bush's attempt to reform the New Deal program.That's because his idea didn't really address the public's foremost concern: The system won't have enough money in coming decades.The president's idea(progressive indexing) revives the system's early notions of it as a welfare program that largely served the nation's poorest elderly -Christian Science Monitor

The increasingly rich and well-schooled Taiwanese aren't like the mainland's 700 million, little-educated peasants whom the communist leaders usually manipulate.Yet last week Beijing treated the people of Taiwan like dupes by meddling in their politics in a foolhardy way.China rolled out the red carpet, literally, for a visit by Taiwan's opposition leader, Lien Chan -Christian Science Monitor

The American military has set a target of December for handing over responsibility for security to Iraqi army and police units, says a classified document being circulated among senior officers.-Telegraph

North Korea lashed out at President Bush yesterday for comments he made about the country's leader, Kim Jong Il, at a news conference Thursday, asserting that the North Korean nuclear impasse will never be resolved while Bush remains in office. Bush is "a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine whom we can never deal with," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. The statement described Bush as the "world's dictator," who as president had "turned the world into a sea of blood."-Washington Post