Membership

NATO is unlikely to immediately put Ukraine and Georgia on a course toward membership, the group's spokesman said Wednesday night, dealing a setback to President Bush, who has pushed hard to expand the 26-nation alliance to include the two countries on Russia's southern flank that had been part of the Soviet Union.

Union membership dropped to 12% of U.S. workers last year, extending a steady decline from the 1950s when more than a third belonged to unions. After membership had held steady at 12.5% in 2005, it declined anew last year, a decrease of more than 325,000 workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. Membership had been 20.1% in 1983, when the bureau first provided comparable numbers. About 35% of American workers were union members in the mid-1950s.

Tiny oil producer Ecuador is considering rejoining the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in a political move even though the cartel's quota system may stymie the poor South American nation's own industry. With its daily output of 530,000 barrels a day, only about 5% that of OPEC heavyweight Saudi Arabia, Ecuador would have little sway in the group, which supplies more than 30% of the world's oil.

Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokees once owned as slaves. With a majority of districts reporting, 76% had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of "by blood" tribal members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission rolls from more than 100 years ago.

The Episcopal Church moved closer Wednesday to a showdown with the worldwide Anglican Communion, even as the church's bishops emphasized their desire to remain within that body. The bishops ended a crucial meeting near Houston with a news conference and a letter in which they rejected a call from Anglican leaders to allow dissident conservative congregations in the United States to be overseen by a separate body that could include leaders from outside the country. The U.S.

Venezuela will withdraw from Washington-based lending organizations the IMF and World Bank in a symbolic move that distances the nation's leftist president, Hugo Chavez, from much of the international economic community. Chavez plans to create an alternative lending bank run by South American nations and funded in part with his OPEC nation's high oil revenue.

The United States signaled Thursday that it may run for a seat on the U.N.'s new Human Rights Council after leading a successful campaign to keep Belarus off the body. The U.S. and other Western countries spearheaded a last-minute effort to get Bosnia-Herzegovina a seat instead of Belarus, which they described as having the worst human rights record in Europe.

Screen Actors Guild members who quit the union will have a tougher time rejoining under new rules adopted by the union's board of directors aimed at discouraging actors from taking nonunion jobs. According to rules effective today, quitting will be considered permanent. Members can be reinstated only if they undergo a rigorous procedure that involves petitioning a disciplinary review committee.

Jennifer Hudson, the former "American Idol" contestant who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress in the musical "Dreamgirls," has joined her costar and Oscar-nominee Eddie Murphy among the list of actors invited to become Oscar voters, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Monday. Also selected were Jennifer Aniston, new James Bond Daniel Craig and Steve Carell, star of "The 40 Year-Old Virgin."

The wait to get a membership for Disneyland's exclusive Club 33 is so long that wannabe members joke that the only way to move up the list is for somebody to die. Dale Mattson has been parked on Club 33's waiting list since 2001, and Robert Tickell for about that long. And poor Chris Villaflor -- Walt Disney Co. informed him this month that the list is so bloated, he can't even get on it. But now, there might be hope -- at least a glimmer of it.