One of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's first major foreign visits after being elected to his first minority government in 2006 was to Latin America and the Caribbean. The trip aimed to promote a Canadian foreign policy focused on establishing "new partnerships in the Americas."

Canada has aggressively pushed to establish trade agreements in the Americas and, in pursuit of this, signed bilateral trade deals with Peru and Colombia in 2009. Concurrent to the push towards more trade pacts in the Americas, Canada has cut the number of nations receiving bilateral aid through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Major international media networks failed to cover the war from the ground in the Gaza Strip, as Israel barred international reporters from entering the besieged territory for the majority of the conflict. As global news networks including CNN and the BBC had no permanent correspondents on the ground in Gaza, major media institutions covered the conflict from the outside, reporting on the war from hilltops in Israel.

Reporting independently from the front lines of war is an increasingly rare engagement for journalists working for major international media outlets. From Iraq to Afghanistan, reporters are increasingly embedded with Western military forces, operating without independence.

Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip continues, a major military invasion unleashed by the most advanced military power in the Middle East against the besieged Palestinians in Gaza; 1.5 million people locked-in by land and sea in open collusion between Israeli and Egyptian authorities.

As hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes, protests in solidarity with Gaza have rapidly swept across the globe, a striking contrast to the resounding silence or straight-up complicity expressed by high-level politicians from the Middle East, to Europe and to North America.