Blogs

On our way from the airport to the center of Jeremie, a town on the tip of Haiti’s southern peninsula, we pass a contingent of UN soldiers decked out in shorts and Oakley shades going for a jog along the road. Our driver informs us that this is part of their usual routine: down to the beach for some swimming or volleyball in the day, jogging in the afternoon, a little game of soccer in the evening. In other words, a military man’s Club Med. It’s deployments like these that have earned MINUSTAH the popular nickname of “TOURISTAH” among Haitians.

GUARDA EXPOSED: How a nice Quebec firm found itself in a war zone. The Citizen's Don Butler sings praise to Guarda, Canada's Blackwater. According to Guarda's CEO "We hire locals, which is rare. We're perceived differently because we're Canadian."

IPPERWASH: Harris, Ottawa assailed in Dudley George's death. Read full text of the inquiry.

NIGERIA: Nigerian oil output falls as protest lasts a third day. The BBC, meanwhile, is reporting that the "dispute" has "ended."

CANADA IN IRAQ: The G&M is reporting that "Four of five Britons kidnapped by gunmen wearing police uniforms in Baghdad [April 29th] are employees of Canada's Garda World Security Corp." The BBC notes that "The company is one of the biggest suppliers of private security in Iraq, and is mainly staffed by Britons."

The editor at the Owen Sound Sun Times wrote an amazingly frank editorial (for a CanWest-owned paper), entitled "Indian Act is racist at heart and should be abolished". His opening line: "Canada is a an apartheid state."

More:

Most reserves (the exceptions are communities that have negotiated self-government) still operate under the rule of the Indian Act, first authored in 1876 and "updated" several times since then.

Editorial by Kate Heartford defending democracy promotion & the invasion of Afghanistanin today's Ottawa Citizen.

BBC is reporting that BP is going to resume operations in Libya, thanks to political wrangling by Tony Blair. BP pulled out of Libya over 30 years ago.

When a snake is not a snake: the limbless lizard.

BoingBoing calls the RCTV decision "a political decision through which Chavez seeks to gain total control of the basic freedoms of the country's citizens."

Is that sort of like a military coup that overthrows a democratically elected government?

Racist threats: hate crime in Kanata, Ontario.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will be visiting Ottawa on Wednesday, May 30th. He brought back the death penalty in California in 2005. Since then three people have been murdered by the state, including Stan "Tookie" Williams.

There's another round of coverage of the expiry of RCTV's broadcast license in Venezuela.

It's entirely understandable that there would be concern about this, but news agencies are only damaging their own credibility by not reporting the relevant facts.

The Tyee has published the first in a series about the 2010 Olympics.

People of Aboriginal identity accounted for 30 per cent of the region's homeless population, while making up only two per cent of the total population.

FAIR makes the obvious point that if a television channel participated in a military coup against an elected government in the US (or Canada, I'd say), its proprietors would be put in jail.

In this case, nothing like that is being proposed. It's a simple matter of revoking the broadcasting license of a channel that did in fact support a military coup against an elected government.

* Note : The names of the guilty have been changed to protect the innocent *

On our first full day in Port-au-Prince, Aude and I hit the ground running. A Haitian friend in Montreal had arranged for us to meet with Madame Beauchamp, a Senator, to further a legislative project he'd been working for years. Our mission was simple enough: hand over a few documents and briefly discuss the project with the Senator.

While interesting, the coverage of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Estonia's web and internet servers (I was wondering why the Postimees website was down for the last two weeks) leaves out some pretty important technical explanations.

Guardian: Feminist, socialist, devout Muslim: woman who has thrown Denmark into turmoil

Phil Fontaine, who is about as un-radical as it gets:

"The number of First Nations children today who have been removed from families and placed into state care is now three times the number of children that were in residential schools at the height of this terrible experience.

Ahni at Intercontinental Cry has compiled a list of links to underreported indigenous struggles around the world.

Historian of technology David Noble wrote an interesting article detailing the corporate turnaround on climate change--from denial to appropriation.

Subsequently, Justin Podur zeroes in on three recent articles by leftists expressing different levels of skepticism or denial about climate change (of which Noble's is one), and responds to them at length.

By Amy Miller [1] and Mahmood ALI [2]

The world hasn’t been paying attention to Nepal lately. Why would they? As the plan of action seems to go for the Goliath International Institution, the UN comfortably settled into the poor South Asian country last year ready to play its usual role of peace broker, supplier and judge and the global gaze moved on to newer, more exciting stories. The few stories that we can read are often published from New Delhi, and follow the UN line.

Independent journalist Stefan Christoff is holding a film screening tomorrow night of turbulent waters, a documentary about the international shipping industry--a topic familiar to former Prime Minister, Paul Martin.

At the request of ZNet, George Monbiot has written a rebuttal to Alex Cockburn's persistent contrarianism on the topic of climate change.

Today was an international day of action against Toronto's Barrick Gold, said to be the largest gold mining company in the world. Here's one activist with a concise summary:

Estonia isn't in the news much, but after the government decided to implement a controversial law to move a Soviet memorial to soldiers who died fighting the Nazis, and unearth the bodies of several soldiers buried near the monument--which is referred to in the Estonian press simply as pronkssõdur, or bronze soldier--an international furor has ensued, with German, US, Russian and other governments weighing in.

The Stanley Cup is in Afghanistan, visiting the troops. And helping fight off the hordes of the east, specifically Persia, no doubt.

A Tiny Revolution continues to combine worldly political savvy with a sharp sense of humour.

Upon hearing that Nicholas Sarkozy's Montreal office had been vandalized, I couldn't help but bike over and snap a few photos. They didn't seem to be in much of a hurry to clean things up; they hadn't even taken down the sheets of paper that had been pasted to the window.

Some of the slogans: Sarkozy, sacre ton camp d'ici; Ni en France ni au Canada: pas de patrie pour les fachos; Lutte sans frontière contre le fascisme.

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion celebrates the anniversary of the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (the UN says 711,000) from their homes, cities and villages that marked the founding of the state of Israel. And he dances the Hora, which would be more amusing in a different context.

So. It's been determined that Canada was sending Afghani POWs to be tortured. If true, it means that Canadian officers are guilty of war crimes.

But its also the case that Canadian soldiers are directly engaged in combat operations, undoubtedly resulting in civilian deaths. Which there is no doubt information about, but it's not available. The press seems content to repeat claims that "40 Taliban were killed" in fighting, and so on.

I've just published a new article about the UN's propaganda machine in Haiti and the way it has been misrepresenting its humanitarian work in the country. The article deals with the mass arrests in February in Cite Soleil and the photo ops and lies that followed each phase of these arrests. These lies continue to this day via the UN News Service and were unexamined by Canadian journalist Jean-Michel Leprince (Radio-Canada) when he was embedded with MINUSTAH in February during these missions. To read the article, go to Montreal Serai Magazine.

When in Haiti recently, I conducted an extensive interview with Mario Joseph, the head lawyer of the Bureau des avocats internationaux, the only legal firm working on the tens of thousands of human rights violations that preceeded and followed the Feb 29th, 2007 coup d'etat. In the interview, Mario discusses the impact of the coup on the justice system, the struggle to rebuild the rule of law, the thorny problem of MINUSTAH, the continued problem of foreign (including Canadian) hypocrisy and more.

Bill Moyers' documentary about "how the media got it so wrong on Iraq" will apparently be available to view on the PBS web site after it is broadcast tonight.

I would imagine it will have some relevance to contemporary coverage of, say, Afghanistan.