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.
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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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Howard Zinn, author of the People’s History of the United States, reviews the history of the abolitionists and the Vietnam War to encourage a new generation of resistance against the Iraq occupation and the war at home.
Labor Day was established more than a century ago.
It was a time of tremendous unrest in America, Grover Cleveland was president, railroad workers organized by Eugene V. Debs were leading a nationwide strike against George Pullman. Pressured by the railroad executive, president Grover Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and called out 12,000 troops.
U.S. deputy marshals fired on protesters near Chicago. The strike was over, and Cleveland tried to win the labor vote in his re-election by signing off on a congressional bill establishing Labor Day.
He was not reelected.
In 1898, Samuel Gompers head of the American federation of labor called it, “the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”
But according to the Encyclopedia of the American left, Gompers and the A.F.L. elevated Labor Day as the preferred holiday of the American House of Labor over May Day, he criticized May Day for its ties to anarchists and socialist politics.
Today we’re going to turn first to Howard Zinn. He wrote “People’s History of The United States.” He spoke in August in Provincetown on Cape Cod. He talks about Iraq, about labor and the people’s history of the United States.
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