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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in His Own Words

Source: Democracy Now

Today is the federal holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King. He was born January 15th, 1929. He was assassinated April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just thirty-nine years old. While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People’s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic of US foreign policy and the Vietnam War. We play his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, which he delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, as well as his last speech, “I Have Been to the Mountain Top,” that he gave on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated. read more

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Latin America: The Decade that Transformed a Continent

Source: Americas Program

In many ways, the first decade of the 21st Century was the flip side of the last decade of the twentieth century in South America. There have been numerous and significant changes. We still don’t know if it’s a glitch in time or a new beginning. In any case, the region will never be the same.

Carlos Menem, Alberto Fujimori, Carlos Andrés Pérez, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Julio María Sanguinetti, Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada, Hugo Bánzer… The names of the figures who dominated the 90s say it all: it was an era of privatization and deregulation, of the unprecedented shrinking of the state, an intense concentration of wealth and a dramatic increase in the presence of transnational corporations. Calculations made by Brazil, where whole sectors of the economy were privatized, estimate that 30% of the Gross National Product changed hands in these years. “A veritable earthquake,” writes the Brazilian sociologist Francisco de Oliveira[1]. read more

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India’s Green Party Maverick

Source: In These Times

Subhas Dutta does not look like the man busy fathering the Green Party of India. Balding, with a pencil thin mustache, the legendary green activist looks more like an accountant, which he was trained to be.

Dutta is best known in West Bengal for beating environmental polluters in court. In 2008, the Calcutta High Court ruled in favor of his petition to permanently remove the city’s most toxic vehicles, those more than 15 years old, from the roads. Two-thirds of Calcutta’s air pollution is caused by its 1.2 million vehicles, according to Jayanta Basu of Calcutta’s Telegraph newspaper. read more