“[Maher Arar's] lawsuit challenged “extraordinary rendition,” a process by which federal authorities have, without legal proceedings in U.S. courts, allegedly sent suspected terrorists to be held and tortured in other countries.”

Commentary on the demoralised and struggling U.S. antiwar movement.

“The combination of the pull of the election on mass antiwar sentiment and UFPJ’s liberal strategy of orienting on Democrats has precipitated a crisis in the antiwar movement. At a national level, it is really the weakest it has been since the beginning of the Iraq war. It is in near collapse. Even at a local level there are real weaknesses in antiwar organizations on campuses, in cities, and at workplaces. Thus there is an enormous gap between consciousness and the organized movement.”

–Cuba’s biotech industry.

–A glimpse into life in Cuba.

–Crazy to think that we are having this much effect on the climate. Crazy to think that we, as a society, still have not done anything to fix the problem.

–Things can only get better because he is at rock bottom. The “New” in the Labour Party needs to be expelled and the old socialist politics need to be embraced, otherwise the party is doomed and Britain will end up with a Conservative government whose first act will be to attack the unions and working people. If you think that New Labour is bad, wait until you see the Tories in action.

–It is hardly news for those that are involved in this debate. The fight continues.

–This is from LabourStart. Caps on the spending in the BC elections are going to hurt any chance that a progressive voice will be heard. The idea that there is such a thing as “big labour” when considering the control the corporate agenda has on the media is just laughable.

–How about the fact that they are 50% of the population and there is no good reason that women shouldn’t be in government?

–Not sure that this is true, but it is an interesting article.

Two weeks after a new contract in which GM bosses promised no more layoffs and no more plant closures until 2011, in exchange for a wage freeze and other concessions, they have now announced closure! The profit motive is stronger than any rotten deal the union tops can broker with the bosses and they are prepared to break the law to do so. Workers will be drawing some bitter lessons from this experience.

–The violence will not stop until the government takes serious action to bring these criminals and murderers to justice.

–Columbia is not the only place that has attacks against trade unionists.

–More on Bolivia and the counter-revolution that is being waged by the super-rich minority.

–Some comments on the revolutionary process in Nepal. We knew that there were different tendencies in the CPN(M) and they are now starting to express themselves. The problem should be solved by putting it to the people. The communal assemblies should be deciding the direction forward, not opportunists in the upper strata of the Party. The direction forward must be transitional, not “reformist” (ie: backwards and to the right).

–It strikes me that politics at the municipal level in the US is rather different than at the federal level. Good move by the mayors.

–The same solution that we (used to) use to fund our health care system will work to solve the environmental solution. Tax those that make a profit off of emissions and use that money to invest in green public infrastructure. We must not tax the poor and the working “middle class” to solve the problems caused by the rich. Carbon dioxide regulation needs to be sector specific, needs to be brought in progressively and aggressively, and need to make sure that the government can provide an alternative to the high emitters. Public investment in and socially own production facilities need to be built that have the input from the academic and union sectors to all flexibility for future changes and upgrade, but at the same time we need to be producing solutions now. We cannot wait for the market to fail once again. The risk has been born by the working class too long, it is time for those that profited off the exploitation of the environment to pay for the damages they have brought.

–More about the Liberal’s “green” flat-tax scheme.

–Duncan Cameron sets the record straight. The market cannot help us here, we must take the polluters and emitters on as a society.

The most obvious problem with the Green Shift proposed by Stéphane Dion is that the Liberal party plan will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly, if at all. The hidden assumption is that if the new carbon tax works, it will reduce the revenues available to the federal government (i.e. for needed investments in green energy). The biggest shortcoming is that the Liberal Green Shift relies on market pricing to fix a massive market failure that threatens the extinction of the planet.

–It is about time the BBC ran a headline like this. Of-course, this is not an indepth analysis by the BBC, it is a report on Oxfam. Food prices do not have to rise that much to force millions into poverty — or worse. For Lula to claim that it only increases food prices 3% is insulting and narrow-minded. There may be a way to produce fuel from algae, but that technology is not the answer to our problems right now as it will be years before we can use it. We must have a plan for implementing currently available technology to reduce emissions and it must be done in a planned and regulated way for it to actually reduce emissions significantly.

–There are a lot of things that I could say about the MDG (one of which is that it is silly to think that these “developed” countries are developed enough to stick to their investment promises), but Salil Shetty outlines why he thinks they are not working.

–The oil companies and others that ran an extremely well funded campaign to try to convince people that there is no such thing as climate change for their own profit margin should be treated as criminals.