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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As the Bush administration gives the leadership in occupied Iraq a face lift, Iraqi civilians are preparing to sue Gen. Tommy Franks and other U.S. military officials for war crimes in Iraq.
Lawyer Jan Fermon says the complaint will be presented in a Belgian court next week. It will state that coalition forces are responsible for the indiscriminate killing of Iraqi civilians, the bombing of a marketplace in Baghdad that killed scores, the shooting of an ambulance, and failure to prevent the mass looting of hospitals.
Meanwhile, the BBC has uncovered evidence that US troops not only failed to prevent mass looting in Iraq, but encouraged it. Eyewitnesses told the BBC US troops encouraged looters to storm the campus of Nasiriya’s Technical Institute. The institute’s acting dean, Dr Khalid Majeed, said he appealed to US troops to prevent the looting. They refused. When his colleague manage to rouse some Americans based near the local fire station, they arrived in five vehicles and fired several dozen rounds at the college’s south wall. Now the college of higher education is a shell, its laboratories and lecture rooms charred almost beyond recognition.
Washington has reacted angrily to the lawsuit. The US State Department has told Belgium not to allow its laws to be used for “political ends”. A senior Bush administration official warned there will be “diplomatic consequences” for Belgium if the complaint is taken up by a court.
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