Two days before Christmas, Canadians got another gift from the courts under the Charter of Rights.

Apparently, enforcing homosexual marriage in eight provinces isn't enough. {REST}
A Manitoba trial judge decided that the Charter gives people a right to a free abortion, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Even if you've actually read the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, you may not recall exactly where it lists your right to a free abortion.

That's because it doesn't. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] The real reason why we -- "we" meaning Canada --haven't sent the much-ballyhooed DART to Sri Lanka or Indonesia is because we can't. It doesn't exist. Oh, it exists mostly on paper and in rhetoric, but there is no emergency team poised to rapidly respond to disaster as federal propaganda claims.[. . . . ]

[. . . . ] Even when the news from the disaster area over the next couple of days became horrifyingly worse, Martin remained in Morocco, Pettigrew in Paris, and Carroll wherever. [. . . . ]

The biggest foreign exchange realignment in 15 years is likely to come home to roost on the world economy in 2005. Growth in Europe, Japan and Canada is expected to recede as a grinding two-year decline in the U.S. dollar sends their currencies soaring and exports sliding. Continued strength in Asia, however, will keep the slowdown in global growth to a minimum: forecasts hover around 4%, down slightly from a 30-year high of 5% in 2004.

Besides currencies, the U.S. current account deficit, commodities and inflation will be hot topics for debate. And underlying all these, China will loom ever larger, gobbling up natural resources, snapping up foreign companies and enticing international merchants with its billion-strong consumer base.[. . . . ]

[. . . . ] "Companies purposefully make it difficult for consumers to understand their privacy rights, and to opt out of having their information disclosed, if they want to."

Some companies won't answer inquiries about the subject. Loblaws stores, for example, which operates one of the largest loyalty card programs in the country, did not respond to requests for information about what kinds of data the company collects on its customers.

Customer information also feeds a growing number of data-mining organizations that amass details about people's lives -- based on information from credit card and telephone companies, banks, retailers, airlines, the courts, the media, online chat rooms and political activities -- and create dossiers for sale over the Internet. [. . . . ]

Washington — The FBI, concerned that terrorists could use lasers as weapons, is investigating why laser beams were directed into the cockpits of six commercial airliners since Christmas.

Laser beams can temporarily blind or disorient pilots and possibly cause a plane to crash. [. . . . ]

[. . . . ] During the 1950s and 1960s, Strong was involved in the oil industry and utility industry and was quite successful. By the time he was 35 Strong was president of a major holding company, the Power Corporation of Canada.

[. . . . ] Strong now occupies a PMO (Prime Minister's Office) position as an evironmental advisor for Kyoto implementation in Paul Martin's PMO (the Current Prime Minister Of Canada). Prime Minister Martin appointed Strong to this position before he had won the party leadership race. Current Prime Minister Martin and Maurice Strong were employed by Paul Desmarais' PowerCor company where the two met. Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien (who signed the Kyoto Accord) has a daughter Married to Andre Desmarais Powercor heir. http://www.canadafreepress.com/2004/main070904a.htm

Globalization, according to one source, is defined politically and economically as "the process of denationalization of markets, politics and legal systems, i.e., the rise of the so-called global economy. The consequences of this political and economic restructuring on local economies, human welfare and environment are the subject of an open debate among international organizations, governmental institutions and the academic world."[1] (http://www.globalization.com/index.cfm?MyCatID=1&PageID=1321)

Globalization removes control over local resources to remote insensitive trans-national corporations operating solely on an agenda of profits, underinformed of and with insufficient concern for local effects. [. . . . ]

Another perspective equates globalization with the phenomenon of intercontinental contracting. [. . . . ]

For Wanzhou, a Yangtze River port city, the script was incendiary. Onlookers spread word that a senior official had abused a helpless porter. By nightfall, tens of thousands of people had swarmed Wanzhou's central square, where they tipped over government vehicles, pummeled policemen and set fire to city hall.

[. . . . ] Yet the Wanzhou uprising, which occurred on Oct. 18, is one of nearly a dozen such incidents in the past three months, many touched off by government corruption, police abuse and the inequality of the riches accruing to the powerful and well connected.

"People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat," said Mr. Yu, reflecting on the uprising that made him an instant proletarian hero - and later forced him into seclusion. "Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark."

[. . . . ]Police statistics show the number of public protests reached nearly 60,000 in 2003, an increase of nearly 15 percent from 2002 and eight times the number a decade ago. Martial law and paramilitary troops are commonly needed to restore order when the police lose control. [. . . . ]

There was a time when the political lines about foreign policy were well drawn. Those on the Left felt that American democracy and global capitalism did not necessarily offer the rest of the world a much better alternative than either Soviet-sponsored Communism or third-world thuggery. Instead, in this view, American realism favored order, but not spreading liberty or social justice abroad — and only managed to promote overseas more of the unfairness and racism that we supposedly suffered from at home.

[. . . . ] The old critique of American policy in the Middle East was driven by charges of petro-imperialism — that we would do any and all things to secure fuel for our gas-guzzlers. But China now satisfies most of its skyrocketing oil appetite from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Oman. Unlike the United States, there is no internal Chinese opposition to question the new superpower's oil politics, which are heating up global energy markets. The so-called Peoples Republic cares only about price and availability. It worries not at all about its petro-trade’s subsidizing Wahhabism, theocracy, or Islamic extremism.

We may still rant about the American rejection of Kyoto. But is anyone alarmed over the hundreds of coal plants sprouting up in India and China to ensure billions of people that there will be enough energy for a possible future lifestyle of the type we now take for granted in Santa Barbara and Nantucket? In short, we will soon enter an age in which China may well change the world's environment, affect the price of oil, and govern the world's trade as much as the United States — and will care almost nothing about what Western liberals say, secure either that its fraying socialist veneer or sheer size and power will earn it a pass from the censure of Western intellectuals. [. . . . ]