Bush Asks Congress to Double AIDS Effort

Prez announces new sanctions, visa ban at UN

(NEWSER) - President Bush told the UN General Assembly today that the US will tighten economic sanctions on Burma and impose a travel ban on its military junta leaders. The US has long maintained an embargo against the country, which is now in its eighth day of anti-junta protests. “The people’s desire to freedom is unmistakable,” Bush said. More»

Bono, George W. Bush warn against the US pulling back

(NEWSER) - Two big names—Bono and George W. Bush—weigh in on World AIDS Day, both with the general theme that tremendous progress has been made in the last decade but that it won't matter if the world, specifically the US, gets complacent now. Some highlights:

• Bono: How did all this progress happen? "America led," he writes in the New York Times . "I mean really led." He calls the unlikely alliance of left and right the nation's "greatest act of heroism since it jumped into World War II." US action saved millions of lives. Among those singled out for praise is the "conservative" Bush and his President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. (He recalls Bush "banging his desk when I complained the drugs weren't getting there fast enough.") For the US to back off now "would be one of the greatest accidental evils of this recession," he concludes.

We've taken big strides, but the fight's not over

(NEWSER) - When George W. Bush became president, “much of sub-Saharan Africa was on the verge of catastrophe” thanks to the HIV epidemic. So America took action, and now millions are on AIDS medication. The relief effort served US interests in helping to stabilize a region on the brink; but what’s more, taking action reflected “American character and beliefs,” Bush writes in the Washington Post . More»

Even Bush was better, Kristof writes

(NEWSER) - When is comes to Sudan , Barack Obama has been worse than even George W Bush, argues Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times , who despite his many failings, managed to secure the 2005 deal that ended Sudan's 20-year civil war. Obama's "incoherent, contradictory and apparently failing Sudan policy" is setting the stage for a bloody war or another round of genocide next year, when oil-rich Southern Sudan is likely to vote to secede. More»

Actress slams president's Darfur policy in Newsweek

(NEWSER) - Angelina Jolie “hates” President Obama so much that she and partner Brad Pitt “get in nasty arguments all the time” about him, sources tell Us —and she lets a bit of her distaste shine through in a piece she wrote for Newsweek on Darfur. “When the administration says it intends to work to 'improve the lives of the people of Darfur,' I would like to know what that means, besides the obvious point that their lives could hardly get worse.” More»