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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Today marks the second anniversary of the execution of West African author and activist Ken Saro Wiwa. He led a campaign against the ecological devastation that petroleum giant Shell was causing in his homeland—the oil-rich region of Nigeria called Ogoniland. The protests targeted the company’s abusive practices and even caused a partial shutdown of some of its facilities. But the Nigerian military regime, led by General Soni Abacha, launched a wave of fierce repression against the Ogoni, which led to the hanging of Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other men on November 10, 1995, in the yard of Port Harcourt prison.
Sportswear giant Nike has come under repeated attack by human rights and labor groups for the atrocious and exploitative conditions in the company’s 150 factories that employ some450,000 workers across Asia. Nike has denied that it mistreats its workforce, even going so far as to hire former UN Ambassador and civil rights leader Andrew Young to inspect the factories. After completing a two-week tour of 15 Asian factories, Young said earlier this year that Nike was doing a good job.