Obama desperately needed a new nuclear arms treaty to replace START I to provide some justification for the Nobel Committee's gamble. The award in the face of US imperial wars and hubris is proving to be extremely embarrassing to everyone, left and right. In awarding the Nobel Prize to Obama on 9 October, the selection committee “in particular looked at Obama’s vision and work toward a world without atomic weapons,” giving him an out, if he could at least bring a nuclear arms treaty with him.

Instead, US inspectors packed their bags last week and left Russian nuclear sites unmonitored for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union almost two decades ago. The expiration of the treaty and stalled talks on a replacement dealt a blow to those in the Obama administration who had hoped to achieve at least this one tangible step before the president goes to Norway.

A scandal erupted last week in sleepy Ottawa with the revelations of Canada’s chief diplomat in Kandahar in 2006-07, Richard Colvin, who told a House of Commons committee on Afghanistan that Afghans arrested by Canadian military and handed over to Afghan authorities were knowingly tortured. His and others’ attempts to raise the alarm had been quashed by the ruling Conservative government and he felt a moral obligation to make public what was happening.

The startling allegations -- the first of their kind from a senior official -- have caused extreme embarrassment to the government, which has more than once stated categorically detainees were not passed to Afghan control if there was any danger of torture. Canada has 2,700 soldiers in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the hotbed of the insurgency, on a mission that is due to end in 2011.

On the occasion of filmmakers withdrawing last month from the Toronto Film Festival in protest of Israeli involvement in the event, Eric Walberg takes a radical look at Israel's cultural and political connections in Canada

The Teflon cloak Israel has tried to wrap itself in since Operation Cast Lead, the invasion of Gaza in December 2008, looks as strong as ever in Canada. "Canada is so friendly that there was no need to convince or explain anything to anyone. We need allies like this in the international arena," gushed Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in July.

Eurospeak: “peace” via US missile bases, a mobile missile “blanket”, a “convention” on cybercrime, “Long live NATO!” Eric Walberg strains to hear a Euro voice of reason

After being the playground for 20th century militarism, after finally uniting with no enemies in sight, you think that Europe would be the world’s bulwark for peace. But a continent that rejected the US war in Vietnam is in thrall to US militarism as never before. None of the European peoples support the current wars and arms race, yet Euro governments dutifully cough up troops to send to Afghanistan. Many sent forces to Iraq. All of them are happy members of NATO, which is unashamedly the forward presence of the US military around the world, having long ago cast aside any pretense of defending Europe from the dreaded communists.

There have been rare glimmers of protest -- the German and French refusal to back the invasion of Iraq, and the grassroots Czech campaign against the Star Wars base. Germany’s Die Linke is the only party to call for immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and has surged past the Greens to 14 per cent, but it will be kept out of any future government. Messy coalition politics (in the worst case, the safe “grand coalition”) allows the US to bully weak little countries into keeping “defence” policy bi-tri-partisan. “Kick the bums” out, as happened last in Poland in 2007, did not mean an end to the unpopular missile base plans there, nor an end to Polish troops in Afghanistan, though 81 per cent want the troops home now.

The Pentagon has made remarkable strides in militarisation of space this year, but its techno-schemes are built on the same sandy foundations as the rest of its defence policy, laments Eric Walberg In April, Air Force Space Command activated a new unit --  the 24th Air Force at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas -- to keep pace with “the rapid changes in information technology and allow space and cyberspace capabilities to be more accessible to military ground commanders”, according to the Space Command’s top military officer General Robert Kehler. Kehler called the activation “the beginning of what will be a deliberate and focused effort to develop and evolve cyberspace forces and capabilities.”

In August, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) commenced its 12th annual Space and Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville, Alabama, at the shiny new Von Braun Centre,