“A third of teenage girls suffer sexual abuse in a relationship and a quarter experience violence at the hands of their boyfriends, a survey suggests.”

Video captured from a solidier’s cell phone show executions of Tamil men, and attacks on villages.

–There is no end to the interference of international corporation in the development of laws in Canada. The CFS continue to fight the good fight on copyright reform. More here from P2Pnet.

“The point about the “colour bar”, whether it operates formally or de facto, is that it excludes non-white labour from certain positions, or substantially reduces their participation in those roles. These positions are sought after for the levels of skill, responsibility, autonomy and rewards entailed in them. But those social facts about the job – skill, responsibility, autonomy and rewards – are interpreted by racist institutions as natural or cultural facts. Thus, ‘whiteness’ = skill, responsibility, self-government and the rewards those qualities deliver. In much the same way, the socially produced imperative to drive workers harder and extract more free overtime labour is interpreted as a particular expression of one’s culture and personality, ie. as a reflection of one’s ‘flexibility’. So, what race does is not just overlap with class, but constitute it, rendering its demarcations more intelligible in the terms of bourgeois ideology.”

If Chomsky says it, it must be true. The eyes of the world should be on Venezuela to witness the important democratic and socio-economic transformations taking place.

“The vote was seen here as an exhilarating moment in Japanese democracy, when the country’s traditionally passive voters showed they could control their nation. The hope among activists was that Japan would replace more than a half-century of virtual one-party rule with a more competitive brand of politics.”

Competitive politics via the two-party system is hardly a victory for democracy.

“The unrecognized villages are denied basic services to their homes, including water and electricity, and the villages themselves have no master plans,” al Sana said.

As a result, he added, the villagers are forced to live in tin shacks and tents because concrete homes are invariably destroyed by the authorities. In the past two years, several shacks as well as the local kindergarten in Amra have been demolished.

The stark contrast between the dusty encampment of Amra and the green lawns and smart villas of Omer, only a stone’s throw away and the country’s third wealthiest community, is unsettling even for some of Omer’s 7,000 residents.

On the film adaptation of Disaster Capitalism

“Klein’s account of this “disaster capitalism” is written with a perfectly distilled anger, channelled through hard fact. So what happened to the film? Winterbottom serves up a cold porridge of archive footage and soundbites that have some vague link to the book, without the connecting spine of Klein’s explanations. It is as though an idiot has explained the book to another idiot, who then made a film.”

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel has gained its first prominent ally from within Israeli academia – Neve Gordon, who writes that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions strategy should be employed on his country.

As a side note, it is interesting to see the subtle difference in the first paragraph of Gordon’s original opinion-piece, and what was printed in the Los Angeles Times.

“There are the jokes about women, about wives, about mothers, about raising daughters, about female bosses. They are told in my presence by men who are meant to care about me, just to get a rise out of me, as though I am meant to find funny a reminder of my second-class status.”

“There has long been a strong ideological bias in the United States that has pushed families toward becoming homeowners. Instead of resisting this bias, many people in the policy and advocacy community unthinkingly echoed this ideological refrain, joining the push toward homeownership.”

The 2009 Federal Convention of the New Democratic Party of Canada was held in Halifax recently. Normally, the party uses federal conventions to showcase its strengths. At the 2006 Convention in Quebec City, the party took a stand against the war in Afghanistan and passed its “troops out” policy. However, the convention in Halifax was markedly different in both form and content. There was not even the remotest mention of any policy that could be considered a new plank for the party’s platform.

–Angus of the NDP is interviewed on the current copyright consultations here in Canada.

An excellent article by the always-insightful Kolko.

–Indeed, for the working people of the world it is far from over.

–I, obviously, don’t have a sense of humour about these things, but many of you might find something amusing about student poverty and debt.

“The millions of Americans who gave their votes, contributions or energy to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in the hope that he would change US foreign policy probably didn’t expect to see this administration fishing around for rightwing allies to help block Latin America from trying to reverse a military coup. But that appears to be the reality.”

–Interesting commentary on Bloomberg (I know, it is a rarity) about Exxon and the company’s action against climate change bills in the US. More can be found on Democracy Now!’s interview with a Green Peace researcher here.

–Same take a look at the dismantling of retirement.

“On August 5, Federal Court Justice Tremblay-Lamer issued a court directive saying that “in light of the admission by the Ministers that the evidence is insufficient to meet their burden of proof”, she will consider whether to remove the certificate or order the Ministers to revoke it themselves… in early September. The security certificate has been used against five Muslim men to detain them without disclosing evidence against them. In Charkaoui’s case, he was accused of being a member of al Qaeda and detained for nearly two years in prison from 2003 to 2005.”

“Student debt across the country has surpassed $12 billion. … Student unemployment rates spiked to 20.9% for July –the worst since 1977, when Statistics Canada started monitoring it. Comparitively, in July 2008 the student unemplyebnt rate was 13.8%.”