“The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.” — Huey Newton

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Pacifica Radio Archives 60th Anniversary Mp3 CD collectionThe sounds of Black History as preserved in the Pacifica Radio Archives. Today as we begin to wrap up this pledge drive, we spend the hour exploring the Archives’ 60th Anniversary Black History collection, much of it newly preserved and digitized through a special grant from the American Archives Pilot Project funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Many of the recordings in this collection were previously publicly unavailable due to severe tape deterioration, but thanks to new restoration technology we can once again share these historic voices on radio that have been obscured in silence for decades.

The collection of 50 hours of black history recordings include Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Dick Gregory, Angela Davis, Julian Bond, Stokley Carmichael, …

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This week on Uprising:

* Conversation with Huwaida Arraf, Chair of the Free Gaza Movement
* Empire Notes on the Afghanistan Offensive
* How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace

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Conversation with Huwaida Arraf, Chair of the Free Gaza Movement

Congressman Brian Baird told a group of students in Gaza this past Monday that the United States should break Israel’s blockade of the territory. The Democratic representative from the state of Washington also suggested that President Barack Obama’s Mideast envoy visit and survey the …

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A number of scientific institutions including the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the World Meteorological Organization, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that 2009 was one of the warmest years on record and that the decade 2000-2009 was warmer than the decade before it, which was warmer than the decade before it. Yet, conservative naysayers continue to ignore the overwhelming evidence of global warming. Fox News’ Sean Hannity falsely claimed on his radio show that “global temperatures continue to plummet year after year.” Even conservative members of Congress are pointing to the severe snow storms on the East Coast to mock advocates of curbing greenhouse gases. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe built an igloo in Washington and marked it with a sign that read “Al Gore’s new home.” In fact, the extremely cold weather …

“We can build an economy that does not destroy its natural support systems, a global community where the basic needs of all the Earth’s people are satisfied, and a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized. This is entirely doable.” — Lester Brown

“Democracy asks us to put the needs and rights of people at the center of our endeavors. This means investing in people. Investing in people means first of all food, clean water, education and healthcare. These are the basic human rights. It is the challenge of any real democracy to guarantee them.” — Jean-Bertrand Aristide

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A report released this past Tuesday has deemed the earthquake that devastated Haiti last month as likely the “most destructive natural disaster in modern times.” The description was placed in the context of the tremor’s impact on the population and the economy of the western hemisphere’s poorest country. The Inter-American Development Bank, in the findings of its report, placed the cost of reconstruction to be a minimum of 8.1 billion dollars while estimating the number of dead and missing to be 250,000. Rebuilding costs could rise to nearly 14 billion dollars although the figures are considered conservative by some in the international relief community. The low-level reconstruction estimate reported by the development bank exceeds Haiti’s entire gross domestic product for 2008 by a billion dollars. The earthquake death toll, when adjusted per capita, vastly outpaces those in other …

“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

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Pacifica Radio Archives 60th Anniversary Mp3 CD collection. This special MP3 collection contains fifty hours of newly preserved and digitized audio, made possible thanks to a generous grant from the American Archives Pilot Project funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Many of the recordings in this collection were previously publicly unavailable due to severe tape deterioration, but thanks to the restoration expertise of our partners at the Safe Sound Archive in Philadelphia, we can once again share these historic voices that have been obscured in silence for decades. Presented on five MP3 discs.

Thank you Gift:

Pacifica Radio Archives 60th Anniversary Black History Month 5 MP3 CD set – $150

Call 818-985-5735 (KPFK) to make a pledge.

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A study published last Thursday in the Environmental Health Perspectives Journal links fetal exposure to a class of chemicals called Phthalates with attention and behavioral problems in childhood. The study is the first to find significant negative effects from the phthalates found in every-day products like lotions, shampoos, and nail polish. Researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine interviewed the mothers of 188 New York school children who answered 130 questions that measured their child’s cognitive functioning. The children exposed to the highest levels of the chemical were 2.5 times more likely to exhibit clinically significant attention problems. Phthalates are known to disrupt healthy hormone development, and researchers theorize that disorders like ADHD may be the consequence. This report is just the latest proof that humans are saturated in toxins to an absurd degree and that clearly …