As President-elect Barack Obama focuses on the meltdown of the U.S. economy, another fire is burning: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You may not have heard much lately about the disaster in the Gaza Strip. That silence is intentional: The Israeli government has barred international journalists from entering the occupied territory.
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Evo Morales knows about “change you can believe in.” He also knows what happens when a powerful elite is forced to make changes it doesn’t want.
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Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But Monday, I called her to talk about a true story. The Obamas had just visited the White House. The first African-American elected president of the United States had visited his soon-to-be residence, a house built by slaves.
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Democracy Now! producer Anjali Kamat writes, “To all those for whom America has represented generations of racial injustice, the election of America’s first Black president marks the beginning of a new era…But unless the inspired millions who brought him to power continue to believe their demands matter and insist on holding him accountable each step of the way, it will be Obama’s corporate and hawkish friends who determine the domestic and foreign policies of the coming administration and our collective future.”
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You could almost hear the world’s collective sigh of relief. This year’s U.S. presidential election was a global event in every sense. Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, represents to so many a living bridge—between continents and cultures.
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The legendary radio broadcaster, writer and oral historian Studs Terkel has died at the age of 96 in Chicago. Over the years Terkel has been a regular guest on Democracy Now!
In 2005, Studs Terkel appeared on Democracy Now! shortly after undergoing open heart surgery. He told Amy Goodman, “My curiosity is what saw me through. What would the world be like, or will there be a world? And so, that’s my epitaph. I have it all set. Curiosity did not kill this cat. And it’s curiosity, I think, that has saved me thus far.”
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Election Day approaches, and with it a test of our election system’s integrity. Who will be allowed to vote; who will be barred? Who will get paper ballots; who will use electronic voting machines? Will polls be open long enough to accommodate what is expected to be a historic turnout?
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We continue now with a major address at the Riverside Church by Buddhist Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich NhatHanhis a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. During the US war in Vietnam, he worked tirelessly for reconciliation betweenNorth and South Vietnam. He championed a movement known as “engaged Buddhism,” which intertwined traditionalmeditative practices with active nonviolent civil disobedience against the South Vietnamese Government and the US.Martin Luther King, Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. Hanh’s Buddhist delegation to the Parispeace talks resulted in accords between North Vietnam and the United States, but his pacifist efforts did not endwith the war. He also helped organize rescue missions well into the 1970’s for Vietnamese trying to escape frompolitical oppression. He now lives in exile in a small community in France called Plum Village. Thich Nhat Hanh haswritten more than seventy-five books of prose, poetry, and prayers and continues to be banned from his native country of Vietnam. He spoke Tuesday night at the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan, where Martin Luther King firstspoke out publicly against against the Vietnam War. The subject of his talk was “Embracing Anger.” We pick up wherehe left off.
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