Check out all of our coverage of the first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century.
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The first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century occurred last Sunday in Honduras. It was led by a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, a military facility that has trained some of Latin America’s worst torturers, murderers and human rights abusers.
Filed under Weekly Column
Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.
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The Environmental Protection Agency has declared a public health emergency in the town of Libby, Montana, where hundreds of people have died from asbestos contamination. It is the first time such a declaration has been made by the EPA. For decades, W.R. Grace and Co. mined asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in Libby.
See extended Democracy Now! coverage
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As the Obama administration pushes for a vote on health-care reform before Congress recesses in August, has health-industry money too thoroughly polluted the process for anything good to come of it?
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Ken Saro-Wiwa and Alberto Pizango never met, but they are united by a passion for the preservation of their people and their land, and by the fervor with which they were targeted by their respective governments.
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Dr. Tiller was assassinated while in church in Wichita, Kan., on Sunday, targeted for legally performing abortions. His death might have been prevented simply through enforcement of existing laws.
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Profits are higher than ever at oil companies Chevron and Shell. Yet across the globe, from the Ecuadorian jungle, to the Niger Delta in Nigeria, to the courtrooms and streets of New York and San Ramon, Calif., people are fighting back against the world’s oil giants.
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Now we are going to go back in time to Olympics past. During the 2000 Olympic summer games in Sydney, when Aboriginal Australian Olympic sprinter Cathy Freeman lit the cauldron that signified the beginning of the games, Democracy Now! interviewed two of the most remembered Olympians of all time, bronze medallist John Carlos and gold medallist Tommie Smith. Together they helped create one of the defining moments at the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico.
The 1968 Olympics were among the most controversial Olympics ever held—buffeted by the Vietnam War, the DemocraticConvention in Chicago, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The U.S. Civil Rights movement was grappling with the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King. And ten days before the Olympics were scheduled to open inOctober, scores of Mexico City University students were killed by army troops.
But officials at the Olympic Games managed to quell any disruption until two black Americans, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who finished first and third in the 200-meter run, bowed their heads and, at great personal risk tothemselves, raised their fists in the Black Power salute during the national anthem as a protest against racism in the U.S.
They were immediately thrown off the team by the U.S. Organizing Committee. Thirty years have passed since that bold demonstration. We go now to a Democracy Now! interview with the two medalists. I asked John Carlos to describe the scene at the 1968 Olympic ceremony.
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