"'Where is Luciano Arruga?'" His mother, Monica Alegre, struggles to answer this question, responding with hopelessness and despair in her eyes, the look of a mother who has lost her child. Luciano Arruga is a 16-year old boy who was forcefully disappeared on January 31, 2009.Demanding Justice at Police Station
Viktor Yanukovych, the once-disgraced Ukrainian politician who was defeated by outgoing President Viktor Yuschenko in 2004 as a result of election tampering, a Supreme Court ruling that overturned fraudulent election results and massive street protests dubbed the "Orange Revolution" has finally gotten the last laugh. He is expected to be named the next president of the former Soviet Republic with an election victory on February 7, thanks in no small part to former presidential campaign advisors of Senator John McCain. Viktor Yanukovych
Source: IPS News
(IPS) – Indicating further integration with its closest neighbour and ally’s foreign policy priorities, the Canadian government is in the advanced stages of establishing a foundation to promote liberal democracy, akin to the controversial U.S. National Endowment for Democracy.
Last December, the minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper quietly tabled in parliament a bipartisan blue panel report titled, "Advisory Panel Report on the Creation of a Canadian Democracy Promotion Agency". The panel is recommending that the government create The Canadian Centre for Advancing Democracy, with a proposed budget of between 28 million and 65 million U.S. dollars per year.
Last November the World Summit on Food Security in Rome issued a declaration that the world is now hungrier than ever before. Significantly, this is not the result of food shortage, with world production at 11/2 times that needed to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet. The root cause of this insecurity is the food system itself, which is controlled by a handful of global monopolies. In fact, the crisis comes at a time of record global profits for the world's agri-food corporations.
Source: Green Left Weekly
On February 12, the corporate sporting behemoth known as the 21st Winter Olympic Games will open to great fanfare here. In a time of economic hardship and government cuts to social programs across Canada, huge sums of public money have been spent to stage this uber spectacle.
Billions of dollars have been spent constructing venues, a new convention center and airport terminal; widening and paving untold kilometers of roads and highways; building a hugely expensive rapid transit line connecting the city’s airport to its downtown; and erecting new hotels to serve the influx of corporate sponsors and spectators.The hotel, travel, restaurant and real estate industries hope to make a killing off the influx of out-of-town spectators and partygoers. Construction companies have already earned hundreds of millions of dollars during the years of preparation furiously pouring concrete and asphalt.
Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline. On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections-a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.
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