As part of what the Clinton administration calls the “month of Africa,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will be presiding over a UN Security Council meeting today about the civil war in Congo (formerly Zaire). The following analysts are available for interviews: ADAM HOCHSCHILD Author of the widely acclaimed “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa,” Hochschild said today: “The unlucky Congo has known virtually nothing but plunder for the last several hundred years. First by the slave-traders; then by the rapacious King Leopold II of Belgium, who slashed the population of his privately-owned…

BETTY AHRENS Program director for the Iowa Citizen Action Network, Ahrens said: “There’s really a wealth primary, we’ve already determined who the favorites are — largely based on how much money they’ve raised. The caucuses enable participants to introduce resolutions to the party platforms; they are debated and voted on. We have developed a resolution which calls for comprehensive campaign finance reform that 700 people have committed to introducing in their caucus on Monday night. This will send a strong message to elected officials and the political parties that Iowans are fed up with the current system and want comprehensive…

While Martin Luther King Jr. will be widely commemorated next Monday for his work in the civil rights movement, the following analysts are available to discuss King’s work — including aspects that are often overlooked. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered a year to the day before he was killed, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” saying it was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” In his “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech he criticized the nature of capitalism, arguing that “we must come to see that an edifice…

Initiating what the Clinton administration calls “the month of Africa,” Vice President Al Gore spoke about AIDS in Africa at the UN Security Council on Monday. The following analysts are available for interviews on U.S. policy toward Africa and on AIDS drugs: DEBORAH TOLER A policy analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Toler is working on a book on myths and realities about the causes of poverty and hunger in Africa. She said: “As horrendous as the AIDS epidemic is in Africa, the neo-liberal economic policies of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization are resulting in the…

In the largest corporate merger in history, America Online and Time Warner announced a $350 billion deal today. The following analysts are available for interviews: ROBERT McCHESNEY Professor at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois and author of “Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times,” McChesney, who participated in a CNN discussion on the future of media with Time Warner head Gerald Levin a week ago, said today: “This deal culminates five years of frantic deal-making that have seen our media culture come to be dominated by less than 10 transnational media firms operating…

Vice President Al Gore and former Senator Bill Bradley repeatedly sparred in last night’s debate over health care — but some analysts are criticizing both politicians’ policy prescriptions as serving the interests of insurance companies. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER, M.D. Director of the Center for National Health Program Studies at Harvard, Dr. Woolhandler said: “In 1993 Clinton’s managed competition proposal rejected a single-payer system, putting most Americans into private HMOs. Bradley’s plan is actually a step to the right of that. Unlike Clinton, Bradley doesn’t aim to cover everyone — he admits at most 95 percent, though it would probably be less.…

JANINE WEDEL Author of “Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe,” Wedel is associate professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and currently a fellow at the National Institute of Justice. She said Monday: “One of the very first things that the new Russian president Vladimir Putin did was to pardon Yeltsin, who is named in several investigations. The Clinton administration tends to see Putin as one of the ‘reformers,’ but these so-called reformers have been more about wealth confiscation than wealth creation. Their leader, Anatoly Chubais,…

MARY BETH BRANGAN Brangan is U.S. co-coordinator for the World Atomic Safety Holiday Campaign, an international network of 50 groups. She said: “It’s absurd that while major oil pipelines are being shut down as a precaution, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is relaxing normal safety rules in order to keep the reactors running during the rollover.” More Information LLOYD J. DUMAS Author of “Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies” and professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dumas can assess potential Y2K technical problems as well as the millennial activities of religious cults. EDWARD S.…

LLOYD J. DUMAS Author of “Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies” and professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dumas can assess potential Y2K technical problems as well as the millennial activities of religious cults. JOHN J. SIMON Albert Einstein has just been named Time magazine’s “Person of the Century.” In 1949, Einstein wrote the essay “Why Socialism?” for the premier issue of Monthly Review, a magazine on whose board Simon now serves. [Einstein’s essay is on the above web page.] Simon, a retired book publisher, said today: “Einstein was a lifelong socialist and a…

DAVID KOTZ Co-author of “Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System” and professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Kotz said Tuesday: “The war in Chechnya revived the political fortunes of pro-Yeltsin parties in the election to Russia’s relatively powerless Duma, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ‘strong hand’ proved popular with voters. However, the real contest will be the June-July 2000 election to select a successor to President Yeltsin… By June the war might turn into one more political liability for the power bloc behind the Yeltsin regime, in addition to the economic and social disaster inflicted…