by Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Feb 4 2013 (IPS) — Canada’s major Israel lobby organisation is running into conflict with critics who say it is betraying the historical liberal legacy of this country’s 380,000-member Jewish community.
by Vandana Shiva
Traditional patriarchy has structured our worldviews and mindsets, our social and cultural worlds, on the basis of domination over women and the denial of their full humanity and right to equality. But it has intensified and become more pervasive in the recent past, taking on more brutal forms, like the murder of the Delhi gang rape victim and the recent suicide of a 17-year-old rape victim in Chandigarh.
by Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 29 2013 (IPS) — Weird is the only way to describe the way January temperatures whipsawed between record warm and arctic cold over a span of a few days. Experts say that is what climate change looks like: weird, record-shattering weather.
By David Swanson
In War Is A Lie I looked at pretended and real reasons for wars and found some of the real reasons to be quite irrational. It should not shock us then to discover that the primary goal in fighting a war is not always to win it. Some wars are fought without a desire to win, and others without winning being the top priority, either for the top war makers or for the ordinary soldiers.
by Stephen Leahy
After Hurricane Sandy swept through the northeast of the United States late October 2012, millions of New Yorkers were left for days without electricity. But they still had access to drinking water, thanks to New York City’s reliance on protected watershed areas for potable water.
by John Baglow
Idle No More was the brainchild of four young Saskatchewan women, concerned about the treaty-breaking implications of Stephen Harper’s omnibus Bill C-45. The notion quickly went viral, nationally and internationally, a single spark falling on dry tinder. Closely interrelated with the eruption of the Idle No More movement was the (yet ongoing) hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence, from the remote northern reserve of Attawapiskat. And it has been given substantial intellectual force and effect by indigenous Constitutional scholar Pam Palmater.
In this brief article I want to look at the past few weeks of controversy through a gender lens, and offer up some observations for consideration and discussion. Let me be self-critical, to begin with: until now, I have failed to foreground gender in my consideration of the movement and the strident media reaction against it. The frame of “race” has been consistently deployed: one consequence of the protests has been to reveal a shockingly deep and visceral, but perhaps not surprising, racism in settler Canada. But this is only a part of what appears to be at stake.
by Janet Larsen
The world produced 2,241 million tons of grain in 2012, down 75 million tons or 3 percent from the 2011 record harvest. The drop was largely because of droughts that devastated several major crops — namely corn in the United States (the world’s largest crop) and wheat in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Australia.
by William A Collins
Tidy rip-offs
From free trade;
For which we
So dearly paid.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement, being negotiated in secret even as we speak, has a lot to say about worker rights and environmental protections. This pact, which is shaping up between the United States and 10 other nations, comes out squarely against them.
By Robert Fox, Oxfam Canada executive director
In a briefing note published ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Oxfam says it’s time for a commitment to reduce poverty and to curb income extremes when the $240 billion net income in 2012 of the richest 100 billionaires would be enough to make extreme poverty history four times over.
Too often we focus on the symptoms of extreme poverty without looking at the causes. We look at the poor as if they are a problem rather than the consequence of a problem: growing inequality and injustice.
Elites in the north and the south are amassing greater wealth at an astonishing rate while the yawning gap between their privilege and the bleak reality of someone earning $400 a year – which is how low you need to go before you officially qualify as “poor” on this planet – grows wider by the moment.
The political corrosion, ecological damage, economic inefficiency and social injustice of the accelerating concentration of wealth and power are toxic. Action can and must be taken to tackle extreme wealth and its devastating impact. We know what we need to do to reverse this trend. And the first step is to name the problem and begin to rally opposition to this injustice. Only then will governments find the political will to act.
The President:
Vice President Biden, Mr Chief Justice, members of the United States Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:
