from the Georgia Straight
"The federal government’s Safe Streets and Communities Act should be amended or revoked, a report issued today by B.C.’s provincial health officer recommends.
"The report, titled Health, Crime, and Doing Time, argues that changes included in the federal crime legislation enacted last year amount to a step backward that could result in more aboriginal youth and adults in correctional centres, and lower health status for aboriginal populations. …"
from the Washington Post
"Bipartisan agreement in Washington usually means citizens should hold on to their wallets or get ready for another threat to peace. In today’s politics, the bipartisan center usually applauds when entrenched interests and big money speak. Beneath all the partisan bickering, bipartisan majorities are solid for a trade policy run by and for multinationals, a health-care system serving insurance and drug companies, an energy policy for Big Oil and King Coal, and finance favoring banks that are too big to fail.
"Economist James Galbraithcalls this the “predator state,” one in which large corporate interests rig the rules to protect their subsidies, tax dodges and monopolies. This isn’t the free market; it’s a rigged market. …"
from the Georgia Straight
"Well, another election, and another big decision for those of us who are cynical about whether "serving the public" is the first priority of either party. The BC Liberal government has announced a balanced budget as part of their pre-election strategy — and has commercials on TV bragging about it. But, then again, Glen Clark’s NDP government did the same thing once before and it turned, miraculously, into a huge deficit after they won the election. I guess some things only balance when you hold your thumb on one end of the scale.
"I’m at a stage, presently, where elections are kind of like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. We know that when he runs up to kick it Lucy will pull the ball away, Charlie’s foot will fly up into the air, and he will land flat on his back as Lucy walks unconcernedly away — but we, like Charlie Brown, participate because there always exists the slim possibility that things may, somehow, be different this time. We appear to have a streak of incurable optimism within us that provides hope for better outcomes than the evidence suggests. …"
from The Guardian
"Peru has declared an environmental state of emergency in a remote part of its northern Amazon rainforest, home for decades to one of the country's biggest oil fields, currently operated by the Argentinian company Pluspetrol.
"Achuar and Kichwa indigenous people living in the Pastaza river basin near Peru's border with Ecuador have complained for decades about the pollution, while successive governments have failed to deal with it. Officials indicate that for years the state lacked the required environmental quality standards. …"
from the Ottawa Citizen
"The Defence Department has quietly removed from the Internet a report into the killing of a Canadian military officer by Israeli forces, a move the soldier’s widow says is linked to the Conservative government’s reluctance to criticize Israel for any wrongdoing.
"Maj Paeta Hess-von Kruedener and three other United Nations observers were killed in 2006 when the Israeli military targeted their small outpost with repeated artillery barrages as well as an attack by a fighter aircraft. …"
from Mother Jones
"In a largely symbolic vote early Saturday morning, the Senate agreed that badly behaving financial institutions should not be "too big to jail," or so large that the government is afraid to prosecute them for fear of damaging the economy.
"After 1,448 days without a budget, the Senate finally passed one Saturday morning. The process entailed a 13-hour voting session, called a vote-a-rama, in which lawmakers filed over 500 amendments, and voted on 70. Amendment 696 was Sen Jeff Merkley's (D-Ore.), which would officially warn the Department of Justice that "too big to jail" is unacceptable and recommend prosecution when a crime is committed. Most of the amendments are more political posturing than anything else, because it's pretty unlikely the Senate's budget will be merged with the radically different House budget. Still, some of the add-ons, like Merkley's, are important because they point toward legislation that might not be far off. …"
from Mining.com
Latin American governments are allowing destruction of forests, rivers and local communities in exchange for money from companies with ties to environmentally destructive industries, claims a regional study published by Washington-based advocacy group Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).
According to the document, governments are racing to attract foreign investors eager to cash in on natural resources, which has led Latin American countries to return to a "colonial mentality."
from The Courier
"Climate change will bring greater extremes in weather, the Government's outgoing chief scientific adviser has warned as he called for urgent action to tackle global warming.
"Professor Sir John Beddington said the effects of climate change on the weather were already being felt in the UK.
"'In a sense we have moved from the idea of global warming to the idea of climate change, and that is rather important — yes, indeed, temperatures are increasing but the thing that is going to happen is that we are going to see much more variability in our weather,' he told BBC Breakfast. …"
The federal government is “blackmailing” First Nations into supporting its policies through revised funding contribution agreements and telling them to “take it or leave it,” say First Nations chiefs.
“The government through its contribution agreements is trying to get First Nations to sign onto [their policies] or else be cut from their funding,” said Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Alberta.
Mr. Adam, who was in Ottawa last week with a group of Canadian and U.S. First Nations chiefs to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline going through their lands, told The Hill Times that the ACFN has refused to sign its contribution agreement worth more than $1-million because it doesn’t agree with the federal government’s omnibus budget implementation legislation and bills such as C-27, the Financial Accountability and Transparency of First Nations Bill….
See original story in The Hill Times
from truthdig
"I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place. The descent was gradual — a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news. But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq. …"
