Here's something I wrote for The Georgia Straight about this weekend's protests in Toronto.

Here's something I wrote for The Georgia Straight about South Africa and the World Cup.

Here's my blog post for rabble.ca.

The Toronto Star reports on some alternative and more-democratic meetings during the G20 summit.

Wonderful documentary titled "Apartheid Did not Die". Watch it here.

It makes the argument that apartheid continues by other means in South Africa. Though legal apartheid has ended, the economic divisions have been so institutionalized that it is as if nothing has really changed.

Life in Gaza:

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Here's an article of mine on the 50th Anniversary of independence for 16 African countries.

Here's my article in The Georgia Straight on Bill C-11, the Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act.

Two separate reports show just how bad Canada's environmental record is. Read here and here.

Two thighs will always rub together.

The Zambian capacity for forgiveness.

The Lesser Evil

Beautiful speech by Walter Mosley. He discusses the two evils of poverty and charity. The former, for obvious reasons, is counted as an evil. The latter, however, is often mischaracterized as undeniably good. Well, it's not. Charity is often a band-aid fix where deep solutions aimed towards the root-problem is needed instead. Watch the moving clip:

Round up

The organizers behind the upcoming G20 summit are calling on doctors to help out, treating detained protesters. They've also managed to write this in an email: “I am assuming that these patients are a fairly young, healthy population, and some of whom will probably claim factitious (sic) injury as part of their tactics,” the email continued.

Sounds like an attempt to interfere and colour the judgment of the doctors at the summit, according to Nathalie Des Rosiers of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who said this: “In our view, this is an attempt to interfere with proper medical decision making and this could lead to serious injuries and misdiagnosis of serious injuries.”

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Profile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Toronto Star's Insight section. It's unfortunate that Ali has drawn the wrong lessons from her experiences. Rather than looking at the issue historically - recognizing the legacy of imperialism and the role of economic deprivation - she seeks to condemn Muslims. She is a conservative who works at a right-wing think-tank and is married to the right-wing historian, Niall Ferguson. Very unfortunate, because she could have used her personal experiences to call for a progressive movement, a more tolerant world. Not one where, according to her, some cultures are superior to others.

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From today's Toronto Star: "A new report based on 2005 Census data being released Thursday, shows that visible minorities in Ontario are far more likely to live in poverty, have trouble finding a job and earn less in the workplace."

It also found that:

"• Workers from visible minority groups faced unemployment rates of 8.7 per cent compared to 5.8 per cent for all Ontario workers.

• Visible minority workers were paid 77.5 cents for every dollar a white worker earned.

• Visible minority families were three times more likely to live in poverty, with poverty rates of 18.7 per cent, compared to 6 per cent for white families."

Compelling article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the New Yorker. Though I understand where she's coming from in her critique of Islam - considering her very brutal upbringing - I don't like what she's saying: that one culture is better than another, that Muslims should embrace "Enlightenment", Western, even Christian, values. This is a profoundly naive approach to take.

As the writer puts it:

her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam—fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism—are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity. Many more young women are killed in India for failing to bring sufficient dowry than perish in “honor killings” across the Muslim world. Such social pathologies no more reveal the barbaric core of Hinduism or Islam than domestic violence in Europe and America defines the moral essence of Christianity or the Enlightenment.