Thousand of troops are being deployed to different parts of Chile, a country recently ravaged by a massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake, to try to prevent looting and criminal acts, Al Jazeera reports.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet has doubled the number of troops patrolling the hardest hit areas to almost 14,000. Her government has been accused of mishandling disaster relief efforts, especially because some of the troops are guarding stores full of supplies so desperately needed by the people.

Government officials say until supplies can be distributed fairly, no one is allowed to have any. This in an effort to prevent a survival-of-the-fittest scenario, similar to the one that emerged in Haiti weeks ago.

Hundreds of tons of food, water and aid are being flown in to Chile from abroad, but teams are struggling to distribute the materials evenly.

Looting

Residents of Concepcion, a town about 300 miles from the capital city of Santiago, have been the most vocal in their anger over relief efforts. Recently, some members of the town set a store on fire after armed guards prevented them from entering and taking supplies.

Food, water and aid is being distributed, for the first time since the deadly quake, today in Concepcion. Up to now, residents have had to rely on looting, which is becoming harder and harder as guards patrol the area, or on stockpiles of  food they may have had before the quake hit.

According to Al Jazeera’s Teresa Bo, people in Chile are telling workers that the aid being supplied is not nearly enough. Government officials say they’ve now purchased all the food in Concepcion’s supermarkets and will begin to distribute it evenly shortly.

US aid

Secretary of State Hiliary Clinton arrived in Chile on Tuesday with the news that the US will send water purification systems and mobile hospitals very soon.

Clinton met with the country’s president, and plans to meet with the Chile’s president-elect, Sebastian Pinera, soon.

Death toll

Thus far, 795 people have been found dead. Relief teams are now making their ways to the more isolated but equally hard-hit neighborhoods, where they expect to find many, many more dead.

Very rarely does victory resemble defeat. In Sri Lanka, while government officials celebrate triumph and some citizens light firecrackers in the street, more than 250,000 displaced Tamils are trapped in tiny, dense relief camps in northern Sri Lanka waiting to hear whether or not they can return home. What kind of victory is this?

Yes, the fighting has ended and lives will now be spared. But these men and women deserve better treatment from their own government.

The LTTE used civilians as shields against government fire in the civilian populated “safe zone”. The region’s name bears no resemblance to its true nature, as both the army and the LTTE used that area to fight each other, killing an UN-estimated 6400 civilians.

But many got away and sought refuge in poorly kept relief camps away from all the fighting. The fighting has now ended, but the displaced remain in dense captivity.

Though the civil war and violent conflict in Sri Lanka has come to a halt, a new conflict has risen from its ashes. A humanitarian conflict, pitting humanitarian relief agencies against a government complicit in the killing of its own civilians, guilty of firing into a safe zone, ignorant of the aid so desperately needed by its own people and somehow, seemingly unaware of the toll the war has had on the entire world.

The LTTE and the government have put civilians in a horrible place and because of them more than 250,000 have been displaced and thousands killed. The incipient attitudes of both the Tigers and the government have caused so much disruption that humanitarian organizations now must repopulate and rebuild a whole region. They must relocate a whole population while simultaneously providing them with the supplies and aid necessary for them to come somewhat close to their previous way of life.

The UN and relief agencies like Oxfam are trying to access relief camps to provide the displaced with supplies and aid, but the Sri Lankan government has placed restrictions on the areas, denying vehicular access. The government says they’ll relocate the displaced by year’s end.

But the Tamil diaspora, especially here in North America, is pretty sick of these promises. Now that the war has ended, they want relief for their people and they want it now. Their protests have disrupted large western capitals (like Toronto) and their resolve is one that hasn’t been seen in long. Many Tamils are especially angry at Canada, home of the largest population of Tamils outside Sri Lanka, for displaying so much apathy even now that the war has ended. Vigils and protests still occur weekly in downtown Toronto.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon made his way to Sri Lanka last night, traveling with 20 reporters who were previously banned from many war-torn regions in the country. He said, according to the AFP, he was “deeply moved” as his plane flew over the desecrated, stripped and people-less landscape.

Ban will press for unrestricted access to relief camps so aid can be quickly and efficiently supplied to the displaced and homeless. He will argue his case to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse and Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama.

Good luck.

TORONTO – It’s a bitter, windy March morning. A few dozen Tamil students gather downtown, big brilliant red flags draped over their shoulders, brown clipboards in the hands of a few of the protest leaders.

These students have been tirelessly demonstrating their anger over the conflict in Sri Lanka for more than a month. A few of the attendants at the back of the pack look nervous, some look unhappy to be here. Some look defeated.

“Babe, how long do you want to stay for? It’s fucking cold outside” says one of the younger looking male students to his girlfriend.

“Shutup and listen” she says, annoyed either by his words or the meaning behind them. She looks ready; ready to protest for the welfare of her people, to go home with the feeling she contributed to her home country’s wellbeing. She’s wearing a crimson jacket to match the flag tied around her waist. The contrast of her red lipstick against her dark skin makes her stand out from the rest.

Her boyfriend looks like he just rolled out of bed. His hair is flat, his shoelaces undone and his jacket half-zipped. He rolls his eyes as the leader of the group begins to shout the slogan, “We want freedom! We want justice!” which he mouths but doesn’t actually say.

As the group walks down a busy Toronto street, big buildings towering over their small group, cars beep in approval. For every honk some cheer, but as the honks become more frequent, the cheers become less.

After a few blocks, the group looks cold; many didn’t anticipate the wind. They stop chanting and only a few – the gloved protestors – are left waving flags. The girl with the red lipstick looks disheveled, the wind has jumbled her once tidy hair and her red lipstick now bares a faint shade of icy blue.

Her companion, the tired young man, looks worn-out just like his jacket, which was definitely made for a warmer climate. He leans in beside his girlfriend, who hasn’t said a word to him since their arrival. He hands her a granola bar from his bag, which she takes with a smile. They look at each other and, before joining hands, yell out “We want freedom! We want justice!”

The rest of the protestors quickly remember why they are here, and begin shouting out “We want freedom! We want justice!” They carry on for the rest of their route with a new found enthusiasm, something not seen since the early stages of protesting. All thanks to the tired young man.

The conflict in Sri Lanka has been going on for sometime, and even with repeated calls from the UN to the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers to halt so those caught in the crossfire can leave, it continues. According to the UN, more than 200,000 have been caught in the violence, but the conflict goes largely unreported by major news media.

It’s of much importance, and is no small civil conflict. It deserves more attention.

If one was to judge by the calendar alone, the 21st century started eight years ago this week. Although, when people refer to the 21^st century in conversation, often they aren’t talking about the specific time period between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2099, but the attitude, philosophy, and technological savvy that is becoming a requirement in the modern world. Unfortunately for us, while individuals in the United States might be existing in the 21^st century, our government’s attitudes and actions over the past eight years have been stuck squarely in the 20^th.

When history is written, George W. Bush’s worst critics will accuse him of everything from willful negligence in handling 2008′s economic crisis to war crimes in the context of the catastrophic mistake that is the war in Iraq. In the end, they very well may be correct, but it is possible that all of his mistakes were not of the completely sinister nature like they’re sometimes characterized, but rather can be traced back to overall tragedy that he was simply a president stuck in the wrong century. Bush’s core beliefs “" that the free market could police itself, that oil is always our answer, and that we can bomb and kill others into submission without chain reactions of consequences “" were dying an eventual death around the time of Y2K, but Bush made sure to keep them on life support much longer than they ever should have survived.

There is no bigger example of The Past sucking the blood out of The Future than GM, Ford, and Chrysler begging for money from the U.S. Government yet again. This past month, we saw the Big Three auto companies fly in their private jets to Washington to request billions of dollars because for the past 25 years they have steadfastly refused to look at the calendar. They defiantly rejected efforts to increase their fuel efficiency standards as every country”"even China”"passed us in their mandatory requirements. Because executives lobbyied Congressmen to vote against everyone’s interests but theirs, their companies made short term profits that both crippled them and damaged the country. After all, only a 7.6 mile per gallon increase in our collective car efficiency would be enough to completely free ourselves from Middle East oil, while saving the individual American consumer critical pocket money. Instead, these companies marketed trucks that could pull airplanes down a runway and consumed oil at a breakneck pace. But why would they care about those details? They could just shove SUVs down Americans’ throats by luring them through tax breaks into a choice so obviously against their interests.

This is just the most blatant example of our chronic sickness of holding onto the past. It illustrates that the worst flaw of George Bush, and in turn of the corporations he represents, may be that he simply did not realize what century we lived in. The banking crisis, car company meltdown, and failed fight against Islamist extremism can be boiled down to using 20^th century policies in a 21^st century world.

———

As tears were streaming down the faces of millions of Americans on the night of November 4, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama said, in words that would ring loudly far after the last piece of confetti had fallen, “The time for change has come.” It was a beautiful sight for more reasons than one. Many were crying because the sight of a black man winning the American presidency was possibly the most powerful symbol of American exceptionalism anyone had ever seen. But those words were much more than a symbol of tolerance and the triumph of ability. They were a prologue to the tangible changes that will dramatically alter this country in the coming months”"much more change than has ever happened in our lifetime.

Obama has spent his transition months putting together what has been almost universally lauded as a cabinet filled with experience, pragmatism, and overall excellence. It is a cabinet based solely on achievement, without regard for partisanship or political and financial connections.

While all of Obama’s cabinet picks have been praised for their qualifications and temperance, none exemplifies the stark realities of the new way of doing things better than Obama’s pick for Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu. Chu is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a global warming research center whose primary goal is “to develop methods to “store” solar energy in the form of renewable transportation fuel.” There is a reason Al Gore is planning a Green Inaugural. It’s because The Age of Oil is coming to a close and Obama plans to kick it out the door.<!–nextpage–>

Bush’s pick for Energy Secretary, on the other hand, was Spencer Abraham, a Michigan senator most famous for taking more campaign donations from those same dinosaurs in the American Auto Industry than any other senator, and led the fight against corporate average fuel efficiency standards in automobiles. Change indeed.

But this is not just a Liberal president replacing Conservatives with more of the same from the other side. It’s a complete change in a philosophy that has run our government since its inception. Obama, when asked what he would do to help his “friends” in Springfield, Illinois to stem their State’s budget shortfalls,‚  challenged the very nature of the question.

“Part of the charge [of the budget team] is to make sure that we are proceeding on projects and investments based on national priorities and not based on politics,” he said. “Now you mentioned, sort of, ‘my friends.’ I want to be clear friendship doesn’t come into this. That’s part of the old way of doing business.

“The new way of doing business is, let’s figure out what projects, what investments are going to give the American economy the most bang for the buck. How can we protect taxpayer dollars so this money is not wasted; restore a sense of confidence among taxpayers that when we spend their money, it’s on things that are actually gonna improve their quality of life; create the jobs that are so desperately needed; help to spur on economic growth and business creation in the private sector? That’s all part of the new way of doing business.”

Being friends with the President is no longer a means to an end in any sense. Just ask John Kerry, one of Obama’s biggest and earliest supporters. He was passed over for Secretary of State in favor of Hillary Clinton, a person many accused of secretly rooting for Obama’s political destruction only months ago. While Kerry was certainly qualified, Obama’s decision underscored the notion that the age of cronyism is over. No more “Heckuva Job” Brownies or “I do not recall” Alberto Gonzaleses.

This Cult of Competence has been put in place to help Obama alter our policies as smoothly as possible, and the cornerstone to this change will come in the form of a massive stimulus package that Obama plans to sign perhaps as early as Inauguration Day, every single element of which is designed take take us out of the antiquated 20^th Century once and for all.

For a month now, Obama’s economic team has been crafting this new package, not aimed at Wall Street Banks or the crumbling car companies, but for Middle Class Americans. And it starts with the Internet. The money will be spent on laying broadband across the country, with the goal of giving every American free Internet access, a move that’s been on the FCC’s desk for years but which the Bush Administration has stubbornly tabled. As Obama has said, “we are the nation that invented the Internet, yet we are 15^th in the world in broadband adoption. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online.”

But that is just the start of what may come to be known as America 2.0. Every goal of the stimulus bill is designed to put Americans to work immediately, but even more importantly, set us up for the future. A nationwide high-tech power grid that will allow states to share solar and wind power will accelerate our ability to get off our dependence on foreign oil. Along with that universal access to the Web, a transfer of all hospital records to an electronic broadband system will eventually save the country billions of savings in administrative costs annually. Moreover, massive construction efforts to modernize public schools will encourage young Americans to learn and save massive amounts of money by making the buildings more energy efficient with new lighting and insulation.

As Obama often said during the campaign, the money that we spent on the Iraq War could have been used to rebuild every road, bridge, and school in our country “" an intriguing thought that some might say is farfetched. Not anymore. This stimulus package could reach as high as $800 billion, actually approaching the number we have fiddled away in Iraq.

With all of this new technology helping the lives of people in the United States, Obama’s foreign policy will be aimed at change for everyone that lives outside of the country. He is in the midst of planning a major foreign policy speech to be given in an Islamic country in his first 100 days, through which he hopes to win the hearts and minds of everyone looking for an end to the seemingly never ending violence in the Middle East and beyond. This has never taken on greater importance than now as Israel’s War against Hamas threatens to put the region and the world on an even greater imbalance. The 20th Century was filled with religious wars and intolerance on a global scale, and as the leader of the Free World, the weight of moving not only our country, but the world in a new direction has fallen squarely on Obama’s shoulders

Our new president will face tough questions about how to bring the Iraq War to an end and how to fix a war in Afghanistan that now includes Pakistan, India, and even complications with Iran”"a daunting challenge. But if we learned anything from Barack Obama on that historic November night, while the path to the future may be tough, there is only one answer to the question as to whether this country and the world can succeed. Yes We Can.

SYDNEY, Australia — Lesbian relationships in Australia received welcome recognition this November after two bills enforcing equality were passed through the Senate.‚ The amendments expanded the terms “de facto relationship”, “parent”, “step-parent” and “relative” to include same-sex couples giving them equal rights on a number of issues.

Australian Social Security entitlements, Medicare health care, tax, and employment benefits were some of the areas where gay and lesbian couples would receive equal rights.

Openly gay Labor Senator Penny Wong said her government had followed through on last year’s election promises to remove discrimination from Australian Commonwealth laws.

“They deliver, on an important day for us, on a very important election commitment”, she said.‚ ”More importantly, they will deliver the sort of equality before the law that same-sex couples have never previously experienced.”

Liberal opposition Senator George Brandis acknowledged the significance of the bills saying they would complete law reform in the area of same-sex relationships which began 40 years ago when homosexual relationships were decriminalized.‚ Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens party and also openly gay, was not so commending.‚ While he commended the ‚ recognition of rights, he was scathing for the ‚ lack of leadership to include equality in same-sex marriage.

“Both the older parties have a task to undertake: to communicate better with the Australian community and to understand that the pressure coming from sectional groups, minority groups, to sanction marriage for all couples regardless has great public support”,‚ Brown‚ said.

A poll taken by Australasia’s largest online lesbian dating and community site Pink Sofa supported Senator Brown’s sentiments with 88 per cent of the more than 4000 respondents wanting same sex marriages legalized. Website‚ member Jenny Ball was thrilled with the outcome but also wanted more.

“This really is a milestone for the Australian Gay and Lesbian Community and is something that has been long-awaited and now brings us in line with a number of other forward-thinking countries,”‚ Ball‚ said. ‚ ”The next key step is for the government to ratify the laws that currently prevent same-sex marriage, thereby removing the final piece of discrimination and marginalization against the community”.

Marriage for same-sex couples remains on the horizon however with the Labour Government as well as the opposition parties refusing to be swayed by public opinion.

The bad guys are going virtual more and more, and American businesses and government networks are getting victimized at a record pace, according to an FBI report.

“The increasing number of such crimes not only impacts the economy but threatens national security,” the FBI said Friday.

The man at the head of the opposition is the FBI’s Shawn Henry, recently appointed head of their Cyber Division. He told reporters Wednesday that the FBI has literally thousands of open cyber crime cases.

“One case in point: We joined our international partners yesterday in announcing a major takedown of a transnational criminal network that was buying and selling stolen financial information through an online forum known as ‘Dark Market‘,” the FBI said Friday.

“The business of the United States is done on the Internet,” said Henry, “And the information that flows electronically 24/7 is increasingly the target of not only identity thieves and scammers, but organized crime groups, terrorists, and overseas governments.”

Yes, even other countries are trying to virtually penetrate the U.S. Henry says about 24 different governments have an “aggressive interest” in obtaining information from or making attacks against American cyber infrastructure.

Henry says that individual hackers and crackers have grouped up into “virtual gangs.”

“In years gone by, if a gang wanted to rob a bank, it needed crooks with various skills — safe cracker, get-away driver, look-out, etc. That’s essentially what we’re seeing in the cyber world today, only these virtual gang members have never met in the physical world,” Henry said.

“There are organized groups that are very successful.”