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The article presents information on democracy in the U.S. Although people distrust simplistic litmus tests, especially when they are unevenly and cynically applied, people are all for free, democratic elections. Imagine the consternation, then, when people read in "U.S. News & World Report" that the CIA has been funneling millions of dollars into Panama in an attempt to rig that country's upcoming elections against U.S. President Bush's onetime buddy, Manuel Antonio Noriega, still wanted on drug-running charges in the United States. Reagan's Administration did it indirectly through "psychological operations" - such as publishing opposition newsletters and setting up television transmitters to interrupt regularly scheduled programming with subversive broadcasts. The U.S. Administration does it directly, if clandestinely, by giving money to support opposition candidates.

It is informed that the U.S. is slated to face hyperinflation, sharply higher interest rates, the crowding out of productive private investment in plants and machines and a further slowdown in its already meager rate of growth. It is opined that the deficits, currently being faced, is poised to raise calamitous risks for domestic and international financial markets. Future deficits will ultimately threaten the basic standard of living and national security of the future generations. However, the great deficit scare has, of course, been quite useful. It has served to restrain welfare and other expenditures disliked by those in power, and it has provided an excuse for a deep tax cut in the topmost brackets.

The article focuses on the summit meeting of the U.S. President Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It seems likely that the U.S. Administration will attempt over the next few months to describe the meeting as a famous success. For all the reasons that should have become obvious during the last five years, the Administration had no intention of compromising its strategy of dominance in superpower affairs, of striking a noninterventionist deal in Third World conflicts or of facilitating the demilitarization of the U.S. and Soviet economies.

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field at long last has begun to reach out for the root cause of union corruption-collusion with management. Playing unwitting Virgil to the Committee's Dante was a leonine, Chicago labor-relations advisor, Nathan W. Shefferman. A self-described spreader of good will between management and Labor, Shefferman offered some suggestive but incomplete testimony concerning his Labor Relations Associates firm which, he said, has separate offices in New York, Chicago and Detroit.

The article looks at how the voice of several executives in the U.S. is faltering in the midst of changing public opinion. The article discusses some of the dangers in misgauging public opinions, the large sums of money that have been spent on testing consumer's attitudes, and corporation's attempts to humanize their image. According to the article, among the major illusions being peddled by some managers is that business is not currently in politics and it must get into it with both feet. Furthermore, management sometimes speaks as if it were the sole repository of righteousness and good works.

The article focuses on the issue of the existing practice of bribery and corruption in New York City. When Donald Manes, leader of the Queens Democrats, plunged a kitchen knife into his heart last month, New Yorkers, whose attention span tends to be short, were reminded that their Big Apple is wormy with old fashioned corruption. A Queens lawyer charged with bribing city officials had accused Manes, a close ally of Mayor Edward Koch, of extorting $36,000 for a small city contract. How much more Manes and other politicians around town have taken awaits the outcome of several rival inquiries by Federal and state prosecutors.

Only a generation ago, the Sahrawis, the Arabic people of the Western Sahara, began to abandon their nomadic life for the Spanish towns, drawn by construction jobs, clinics and schools. After Spain pulled out, Morocco moved in, using French and American fighter bombers, to deprive the Sahrawis of their land and complete the task of sedentarization. Now the only wanderers in the desert are Sabrawi soldiers of the Polisario Front. The prospects of an independent Sahrawi state are probably doomed because of the growing convergent views between Algiers and the United States, the principal patrons of the combatants.

Presents letters to the editor on several issues. Opinion that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) is like any other army and should be judged by the circumstances surrounding its creation and by the recognized rules of war; Response of the author that the reader is wrong about the IRA; Information that there is only one grant to the Funding Exchange.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.) was created in 1934 to bring order out of chaos, to assign wavelengths to each radio station and fix its signal strength. In return for giving broadcasters exclusive use of a portion of the public domain, the U.S. Congress ordered that they be licensed by the F.C.C. in the "public convenience, interest or necessity." In effect, Congress offered licensees a valuable monopoly if they would provide programs that served the public welfare. It is this bargain that Reagan's F.C.C. has torn up. The commission has junked Congress's 1934 mandate. It is this bargain that U.S. President Ronald Reagan's F.C.C. has torn up. The commission has junked Congress's 1934 mandate. Indeed, it has gone further, reversing a Supreme Court ruling that "the right of the viewers and the listeners, not the right of the broadcasters is paramount," and enriching the owners of radio and television stations by scrapping the regulations designed to make broadcasters public trustees. The commission's engaging chair, Mark S. Fowler, is a former lawyer for broadcasters who can expect to resume this lucrative practice when he leaves government.

The article comments on the U.S. President Ronald Reagan's progressive income tax proposals. Reagan's plan, in his own words, is a giant step toward an ideal system, presumably a single rate for all. He compresses the fourteen brackets into three, lopping off three at the bottom and bringing down the top rate, for incomes over $70,000, from 50 percent to 35 percent, a generous slice of 30 percent. A single rate, however, is regressive: like a sales tax, it imposes the same percentage burden on rich and poor.

Focuses on the political conditions in Great Britain as of March 12, 1977. Likely situation on the continuance of Labour government in the office; Percentage of labor force organized by unions in Great Britain; States where Communists leads miners in the nation; Details of a ten-point program to achieve the destruction of capitalism by Robert Moss, one of the right wing polemicists.

Focuses on the social and political conditions in India. Incidents that illustrate a disturbing and little discussed trait in Indian life; Indifference of man toward man; Absence of social sense that extends beyond family; Exploration of the sources of Indian insensitivity by Indian writers like Nirad C. Chaudhuri; Description of the caste system; Reinforcement of the structure by Hindu religion; Other forces that make Indians insensitive to their fellows such as the joint family.

Examines whether financial aid from Western countries has ameliorated the economic condition of third world countries as of December 1966. Aim of George Woods, World Bank president, to increase the funds of its International Development Association; Expectations of the United Nations (UN) for poor countries in the 1960s; Differences in the procedures used by the UN and the Development Assistance Committee to compute the growth of poor countries between 1960-64; Assertion that development in the 1960s happened in Western countries.

Comments on the conditions established by French General Charles de Gaulle for the continuation of the European Common Market following the Great Common Market Crisis of 1965. Implications of de Gaulle's conditions for the Common Market Commission; Provision of the Rome Treaty, the charter that created the European Common Market; Major reasons for the creation of the European Common Market.

Examines the growing resentment of France-based businesses against U.S. corporations in the country and the rest of Europe. Pressure felt by the Belgian government for allowing General Motors to set up an assembly plant in Antwerp; Overview of the alleged fear of European companies regarding competition from U.S. companies; Problems about technology gap when European firms enter into joint ventures with U.S. partners.

The article discusses the military weapons policy of the U.S. and its expenditure on military weapons, equipment, roads, pay and other appropriations. Senator William Proxmire conducted an inquiry regarding the arms aid schemes. The author suggests that The U.S. contribution or sale of weapons to Pakistan will strengthen, Pakistan against India. The author further explains that explorations on Capitol Hill into the mysteries of military aid indicate that U.S. bureaucracies may have passed the point of relatively diminishing returns and may now have entered the wasteland where returns diminish absolutely.

Paul E. Magloire, President of Haiti, returned to Port-au-Prince last month after a nineteen-day swing through the U.S. and Canada. In Carrefour, a few mites west of the capital, some of the townsfolk planned an unofficial surprise for him. They decided to burn one of the welcome home arches, hastily erected in Port-au-Prince by a servile treasury. But with characteristic Haitian recklessness they told a night-club owner of the scheme. He told the police and the plot had to be abandoned. The tragi-comedy ended with a typical flourish; the informer's home was burned; but arsonists were so careless that fifty other houses were destroyed in the fire.

Bernard D. Nossiter's latest book is Fat Years and Lean: The American Economy Since Roosevelt (Harper & Row). As the economy sinks deeper into a slump, the Federal Reserve Board, [...]

Four nearly 3,000 years, Berber and then Arab nomads have roamed the Western Sahara, grazing camels, sheep and goats on the sparse grass and tress of the stony plateau. Even [...]