October In Review

Canada's military exports have tripled in the past five years, according to a study conducted by the CBC. Exports of tanks, rocket launchers and other military hardware currently at $3.6 billion per year. ... Wildfires in Southern California forced over 700,000 people to evacuate their homes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staged a fake press conference, with staff members . Actual journalists were given 15 minutes notice about the event, and were allowed to listen in via telephone, but not to ask questions. Critics say US emergency infrastructure has once again been found inadequate to deal with natural disasters. The Asia Times reported that, at the close of the Chinese Communist Party's 17th National Congress, the country's leadership has much to fear from discontent among the country's massive population of rural peasants. "Mass incidents"--the official term for riots and large protests in the countryside, are said to be a "daily occurence" as resentment about deeping inequality comes to a head. ... Elsewhere in Mexico, indigenous representatives attending a recent intercontinental indigenous gathering in Vicam, Sonora have called for an international boycott of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. According to a press release issued by BC First Nations representatives at the gathering, hundreds of Indigenous people plan to attend the Olympic games "not in celebration, but in resistance to the danger the Olympics poses to Indigenous lands, identity, culture, health, livelihoods, and to future generations." A detainee arrested in September during a protest at a subdivision outside of Caledonia, Ontario, near the site of the Six Nations occupation, has allegedly been subjected to threats by correctional staff within the Hamilton Barton St Jail, according to supporters. According to an alert issued by Six Nations supporters, Skyler Williams, one of at least 9 people arrested during the September demonstration, has been denied working plumbing within his cell, has been threatened with denial of his legal counsel as well as detainment in solitary confinement, and has been told that he would be transferred to a unit reserved for serious violent offenders. The Six Nations demonstrators were protesting the development of Stirling Creek Estates, whose housing developments are located on Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) territory. ... In Alberta, following a month-long media campaign undertaken by multinational oil companies, the Stelmach government announced plans to increase the share of oil royalties the province receives by $1.4 billion starting in 2009. The decision follows a ruling by a government-appointed review panel which had called for the royalties to be increased by 20 per cent, or $2 billion. The current royalties regime in Alberta was introduced in the 1990’s in order to offer bargain basement tax rates for investment in tar sands development. It has remained unchanged in the years since, despite the massive profits reaped by the oil industry from the tar sands after oil prices increased. New studies have found that Boreal forests are losing the ability to absorb man-made carbon dioxide emissions due to climate changes. The studies, conducted by professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, found that temperate woodlands in the Northern hemisphere, extending from Alaska and Canada to China and northern Asia, are beginning to lose their ability to be an overall absorber of carbon dioxide. Scientists fear that these boreal forests may soon reach a point where they will be releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of an increase in large-scale forest fires, much like those that have overtaken California in recent weeks, than they will be absorbing. In Haiti, former government minister Maryse Narcisse became the second high-profile activist affiliated with the Lavalas party of ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be kidnapped in the past three months. Narcisse, along with her friend Delano Morel, was released after a ransom was reportedly paid to the kidnappers. The whereabouts of another grassroots Lavalas activist and human rights advocate, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, who was kidnapped in Port-au-Prince in August, remain unknown. Both Pierre-Antoine and Narcisse spent two years in exile following the February 2004 coup of Haiti's elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by US, Canadian, and French military forces. Their kidnappings have raised fears that high-profile Lavalas activists have been deliberately targeted. Although human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were quick to denounce the kidnapping of Narcisse, neither have issued any statement in three months about the kidnapping of Pierre-Antoine. Canadian Auto Workers union President Buzz Hargrove has signed an agreement with auto parts giant Magna International which will allow the union to organize within the company’s Canadian plants in return for a guarantee that no worker strikes will take place for an indefinite period of time. The agreement has encountered heavy opposition within the Canadian Labour movement, as well as within the CAW itself. Chris Buckley, president of the CAW’s biggest local in Oshawa, argued in a letter to Hargrove that the no-strike clause compromises the fundamental right of union workers to strike. The CAW leadership’s position is that the Canadian manufacturing sector has faced large-scale job loses in recent years, and that compromises are necessary if Magna’s 18,000 Canadian workers are to have any hope of unionized representation. The agreement will be put to a vote at a CAW conference in December. .... etc etc http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1514

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