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Finance ministers from the G7 Industrialized Nations have pledged to forgive some $1.2 billion in debt owed by Haiti following last month’s devastating earthquake. Canadian Finance Minister, Mr. Jim Flaherty, made the announcement to the press during a two-day G7 meeting that took place in the Canadian Arctic town of Iqaluit.

On January 29, two families – one Palestinian and the other Israeli – participated in a joint lunch for peace and reconciliation between both peoples. Both families, who have suffered consequences from the Middle East conflict, chose the path of non-violence. The program has been promoted by the NGO Messengers for Peace and the Parents Circle Family Forum.

Alyn Ware, winner of a 2009 right-livelihood award promotes the Nuclear Weapons Convention and vegetarianism in his acceptance speech, at the award dinner in Sweden. He attacks the weapons industry and calls on individuals to act locally while thinking globally to tackle the threat of nuclear weapons and climate change. “It is a minority who are spoiling it for the rest”.

Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois, College of Law has filed a complaint with the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague against U.S. citizens George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and others for their criminal policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition” perpetrated upon about 100 human beings.

The members of the peace action network, US for OKINAWA, assembled on January 31st to express their concern about the enormous burden that U.S. military bases are placing on Okinawa. Already, U.S. military facilities occupy nearly 20% of Okinawa Island, and even the U.S. and Japanese governments agree that Futenma Air Base should be closed.

Under the motto “Vicenza fights back” pacifists of the Italian city of Vicenza protested against the expansion of the US military base there. Braving the winter snow and cold, they entered the zone currently under construction making a laughing stock of security guards during their change of shift, and hanging peace banners from the tops of cranes.

Confronted by the tragic earthquake that shook the ancestral destitution of the suffering Haitian people, a lot of debris has come to light. We, the Dominican people, did and will do everything that we should do in this painful and torturous time for the Haitian people and we appeal for them, for ourselves and for all the people of the world.

In a move expected to heighten tension in the Middle East, the Obama administration is quietly expanding its land- and sea-based missile shield system in the Persian Gulf region. The US is dispatching Patriot defensive missiles to Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait. In addition, the US is keeping two ships in the Gulf capable of shooting down missiles.

The US President who had made a commitment to reducing his country’s nuclear arsenal, acknowledging the United States’ responsibility for having dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and pledged to work to achieve a world that is free of nuclear weapons as soon as possible, has let everyone down by breaking his promises.

An appeal to the European Court of Human Rights is planned. A simultaneous legal challenge to the ban on same-sex marriage and opposite-sex civil partnerships is being prepared by LGBT human rights group OutRage!. The group has the support of legal expert, Professor Robert Wintemute, Professor of Human Rights Law at Kings College in London, who has agreed to take on the case.