News stories by Paul Weinberg, page 3

Stephen Harper's ruling Conservative government has managed to muddy the ideological right-wing aspects of his political agenda to stay in power in Canada without alienating his western and rural base of moral and social conservatives.

Amid reports that the Barack Obama administration is quietly lobbying the Conservative government in Ottawa to keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan's Kandahar province beyond 2011, Stephen Harper is finding himself in an increasingly awkward dilemma.

Canada and the United States are on different wavelengths when it comes to a shared and increasingly hardening of what had been a sleepy border within North America.

The murky post-9/11 sharing of information between western security and intelligence agencies and Sudan's notorious human rights-abusing regime appear to be at the heart of a year-long marooning of Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik at his country's embassy in Khartoum.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has no choice but to project optimism about his nation's ability to pull out of the economic recession by next year, although various economists and a former central bank chairman have all offered grimmer forecasts that the downturn will persist for a longer period.

Canada's reluctance to institute a full stimulus package in the recent federal government budget has international parallels, says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.