International

Canada’s new and more secure $5 and $10 polymer bank notes were unveiled today at the Bank of Canada’s Ottawa head office, and from aboard the International Space Station. Both of the new notes will begin circulating, at the same time, this November.

Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney and Paul G. Smith, Chairman of the Board at VIA Rail Canada, were joined via satellite by Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Chris Hadfield, Commander of the International Space Station, to unveil these final two notes in the new Polymer series.

The Huffington Post

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, who was seriously wounded and unable to speak, is awake and responding in writing to questions from authorities, according to a Tweets by ABC and NBC news networks.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is in the intensive care unit of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is responding sporadically, the ABC news network reported on its Twitter feed.

NBC's Pete Williams is also reporting Tsarnaev is writing answers to questions from law enforcement.

The occasion of International Women’s Day is an apt time to discuss how abstract ideas of global sisterhood and women’s universal human rights hide the actual differences of class and social location which divide women in the real world, and how certain varieties of feminism not only cannot address the real foundations of women’s subjugation, but may in fact contribute to them.

In the 19th and early 20th century, the civilising mission through which colonialism was justified was supported by western feminists who spoke in the name of a ‘global sisterhood of women’ and aimed to ‘save’ their brown sisters from the shackles of tradition and barbarity. Today, this imperialist feminism has re-emerged in a new form, but its function remains much the same – to justify war and occupation in the name of ‘women’s rights’ . Unlike before, this imperialist feminist project includes feminists from the ‘Global South’.

A documentary film by John Pilger

Sanctions enforced by the UN on Iraq since the Gulf War have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, including over half a million children - many of whom weren't even born when the Gulf War began.