El Salvador has hired PR giant Fleishman Hillard to promote the country internationally encourage foreign investment reports PR Week. The campaign, "El Salvador Works," seeks to double the rate of foreign capital by 2004. In the past two years, foreign countries have sunk $500 million into El Salvador, with about 60% coming from the US. Fleishman Hillard highlight the country's low interest rate and "open economy" as selling points to international investors.

"On Nov. 22, 2000, the so-called 'Brooks Brothers Riot' of Republican activists helped stop a vote recount in Miami -- and showed how far George W. Bush's supporters were ready to go to put their man in the White House," writes Robert Parry, who cites newly-released documents which "show that at least a half dozen of the publicly identified rioters were paid by Bush's recount committee.

Public domain information - including our shared culture of literacy and democratic dialogue, basic drug research and government information resources paid for with public tax dollars - has grown in importance now that the Internet has empowered everyone to become a creator and to readily share information with others. As a result, writes David Bollier, corporate "content aggregators" -- film studios, publishers, record labels -- have "brazenly cast a broad net of claimed ownership rights in the intangibles of our culture.