By Valia Kaimaki - Znet

The government...used the masked petrol-bombers to inspire fear of a "threat to democracy". "What democracy?" ask the protesters. It is true that schoolchildren and university students attacked police stations with rocks and that others damaged banks. But only a few days earlier the government, indifferent to the impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of Greeks, gave those banks a gift of €28bn ($39bn). And these are the banks which use private debt-collection agencies to insult and threaten anyone who owes them small sums of money, and to seize their property.

The University of Calgary and the 'Consortium for Peace' have awarded Louise Arbour the Calgary Peace Prize. Perhaps they shouldn't...

By Seth Sandronsky - December 31, 2008

Millions of Americans face home foreclosures, health care, job and pension losses. However, none of these crises currently threatens to alter the flow of their tax dollars to Israel's government. It takes these greenbacks and buys F-16 jets made by Lockheed Martin to drop bombs on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip...This aggression is an effect of the U.S. military-industrial complex...The Israeli government's intent to liquidate Hamas connects with the U.S. military-industrial complex.

By ROBERT WEISSMAN - Counterpunch

Here, presented in alphabetical order, are the 10 Worst Corporations of 2008:

Can it really be that the nonsense that has been force-fed us about "Genocide" in Rwanda, isn't true? So says Peter Erlinder and he ought to know.

Madoff expose reveals Wall Street as a den of thieves.

By Derrick O'Keefe - December 21, 2008

We can't wait until the end of 2011...[I]f we do, over the next three years a lot more Canadian and Afghan blood will be senselessly shed in defence of a pack of warlords, embezzlers and drug traffickers.

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS - Counterpunch Weekend Edition

Many Americans are wrongfully convicted because they trust the justice system. They naively believe that police and prosecutors are moved by evidence and have a sense of justice. The trust they have in authorities makes them easy victims of a system that has no moral conscience and is untroubled by the injustice it perpetrates.

By LAURA CARLSEN - December 12/14, 2008

In the first two years of the Felipe Calderon administration, Mexico has become a focal point in the violation of the human rights of immigrants even as it criticizes the treatment of Mexican migrants in the United States. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants Jorge Bustamante states the problem in no uncertain terms: "We are responsible for violations of the rights of Central Americans passing through Mexico, the same or worse as those of Mexicans in the United States."

War in Congo has again been splashed across world headlines and the same old cliches about violence and suffering are repackaged and rebroadcast as "news".

Rwandan President Paul Kagame looks closer to eventually having to answer for his crimes.

By Khalid Amayreh - December 3, 2008

After many years of the PLO being dormant, if not clinically dead, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas is trying to revive the organization in order to use it as a pawn against Hamas...[W]ith the American-backed and Israeli-courted PA regime in Ramallah, Abbas and his numerous minions, henchmen and hangers-on are constantly invoking the PLO mantra to justify their manifestly treacherous behavior...especially in the West Bank where the PA security agencies have effectively become another sinister layer of Israeli occupation and repression.

More than half of people imprisoned at the Detention Center of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, declare themselves "Political Prisoners of the UN".

By John Pilger - November 27, 2008

During the 1960s and 1970s British governments, Labour and Tory, tricked and expelled the entire population of the Chagos Archipelago, more than 2,000 British citizens, so that Diego Garcia could be given to the United States as the site for a military base. It was an act of mass kidnapping carried out in high secrecy.

CBC News

The City of Vancouver has agreed to lend up to $100 million to bail out the financially troubled company building the athletes village for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, CBC News has confirmed.

The developer, Millennium Development Corp., is facing an estimated $60 million in cost overruns on construction of the village.