24.02.2006 | Published by: Magne Ove Varsi

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia – Evo Morales and his party, the Movement towards Socialism (MAS), have promised to engage in large-scale protests if Congress does not approve a proposed bill that would create a Constituent Assembly, Prensa Latina reports.

(Australian Prime Minister John Howard's)..."put out more flags" campaign is pure George W Bush. Schools have been ordered to erect flagpoles, and on "Australia Day"...which "celebrates" the "settlement" of another people's country, flags are distributed and often displayed with gormless aggression...This was never part of Australian life; Americans wrapped themselves in their flag, but not we Australians. We saw it as a respectful reminder of those who had gone to fight and die in Australia's mostly catastrophic imperial wars, who "did their best". The Howard regime has changed all this. The little leader wears a plastic flag in his lapel, just like Bush, and puts his hand on his heart, just like Bush, and reinforces a race-based society, just like Bush. While the neglect of New Orleans is Bush's symbol, the contempt shown the first Australians is Howard's.

02/17/2006 | By Geoff Olson | Vancouver Courier

Emerson's seamless and shameless move to a cabinet position demonstrates party ideology is as rubbery, and ultimately as dispensable, as political principle...His true constituents-corporate leaders, financiers, and international investors-have nothing to complain about.

[A] second lesson is that in both the U.S. and Canada, the elite increasingly sees representative democracy as a frill-an unnecessary and time-consuming expense.

|By Moisés Montoya|Freedom Socialist|February 2006|

Montoya delivers a first person account of why Chicanos in the military - fighting racist wars (and any person for that matter) doesn't make sense, and how to show support for US students who are resisting recruiters in their schools.

Constitution Allows for Aristide Return

President-elect Rene Preval has pointed out that Haiti´s Constitution allows for the return home of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide, who was forcedly ousted in a US-backed coup in 2004.

Paul Weyrich, widely considered one of the founding fathers of the United States' modern conservative movement, is looking north these days with hopes that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's newly elected government will transform the social and political landscape of Canada.

Two articles from the corporate press on Israel's pressure campaign against the Palestinian Authority's Hamas-led government.

We true First Nations peoples never perpetrated genocide on a massive scale against the Palestinian people and never will.

The participants of this delegation to Isreal are in reality known collaborators of the colonial regime known as Canada and have nothing less than a hidden opportunistic propagandist agenda to better serve their selfish goals.

|By Ann Harrison|Open Flows|04-01-06|

BERLIN - When the Austrian government passed a law this year allowing police to install closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces without a court order, the Austrian civil liberties group Quintessenz vowed to watch the watchers, employing a whole manner of tactics they've tried to push back the unprecedented onslaught of surveillance technologies.

Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?...And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran.

|Associated Press|Technology Review|February 13, 2006|

The Homeland Security Department ran a mock Internet attack last week. The biggest-ever exercise of its kind to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers, and bloggers. The results are due out this summer.

|AlJazeera.net|February 13, 2006|

Hamas leader Khalid Mishaal has stated again that the only thing needed for Hamas to halt its armed struggle is for Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories it occupies. "If Israel recognises our rights and pledges to withdraw from all occupied lands, Hamas, and the Palestinian people together with it, will decide to halt armed resistance." This comes as Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has indicated that he might take over diplomatic contacts with Israel, leaving domestic issues to a Hamas government and Vladimir Putin has extended an invitation to Hamas to begin talks on the future of the Middle East peace process.

|Reuters|Feb. 6, 2006|

Sri Lanka's government and the Tamil Tiger's have set a date to begin peace talks later this month. On Monday, Erik Solheim, a Norwegian peace broker told reporters by telephone that "a date has been agreed between the government, the Tigers and Oslo". The climate appears positive, but cautiously optimistic for implementation of a ceasefire agreed upon in 2002.

|Monday Magazine| Feb. 1, 2006|

Liberals failing to address rising homeless.

As the Gordon Campbell Government attempts to apply band-aid solutions to the gushing wounds of poverty and homelessness in BC their response appears too little too late, and their too expensive, too few cold wet weather beds serve to illustrate further that when it comes to addressing homelessness they just don't have a clue what their doing, and they don't seem to care.

During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship - A-bomb technology.