Former Senate Majority Leader and Presidential candidate Bob Dole is lobbying for Malawi reports O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "His firm, Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand, is receiving $300,000 in annual fees from the country, where the average life expectancy is 37 years for both men and women. Malawi's ten million people face an HIV/AIDS epidemic, deforestation and erosion among other problems.

The Internet has been hyped as "a revolutionary new medium, so inherently empowering and democratizing, that old authoritarian regimes would crumble before it," but Andrew Stroehlein points out that the reality is more sobering. "The idea that the Internet itself is a threat to authoritarian regimes was a bit of delusional post-Cold War optimism.

In the aftermath of the failed coup against populist Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Bush administration officials have admitted that they "met several times in recent months" with leaders of the coup "and agreed with them that he should be removed from office." Those meetings, and the haste with which the White House proclaimed its support for the military-installed regime, have prompted suspicions that the U.S. helped instigate the coup.