WERU 89.9 FM Blue Hill, Maine Local News and Public Affairs Archives

Producers/Hosts: Meredith DeFrancesco and Amy Browne

Topic: The urgent impacts climate change will continue to have on food security through out the world. The G8 Summit in Italy this week has said they will examine these issues. Whether any plan will emerge remains to be seen. The leaders of the so-called Group of 8 or G8 countries are meeting in Italy this week in an annual summit to discuss global issues…

Guest: Gawain Kripke, Oxfam America’s policy director
To view report “Suffering the Science: Climate Change , People and Poverty” -www.Oxfam America.org. FMI www.350.org

 

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Executive Producer/Host: Amy Browne
Contributing Producer: Carolyn Coe
Topic: Carolyn Coe reports back from her recent trip to Gaza with CodePink
Segment 1: Conversation with Um Khaled. Her son Ahmed interprets. She describes her experience living with the Israeli blockade, her hopes for her sons, and the contrast between life in Gaza and other places where she has lived.
Segment 2: A woman’s story of living through the Israeli attacks during the “last war” and a call for the borders to open, with Nisreen Hisham AlBorno, Director of the National Center for Community Rehabilitation and John Ging, Director of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza.

 

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Producer/Host: Amy Browne
Zoe Weil, is the co-founder and President of the Institute for Humane Education, and author of several books, including “Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times”, (New Society Publishers, 2003); “The Power and Promise of Humane Education” (New Society Publishers, 2004); “Claude and Medea, The Hellburn Dogs” , Winner of the 2008 Moonbeam Children’s Book Award, (Lantern Books, 2007); & “So, You Love Animals: An Action-Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help Animals”, (New Society Publishers, 1994)

She joins us today to talk about her latest book “Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle For a Better World and a Meaningful Life” (Atria Books, 2009)

FMI: www.zoeweil.com & www.humaneeducation.org

 

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Producer/Host: Amy Browne

Audio contributed by: Meredith DeFrancesco, Eric Olson, Jim Harney

Music from School of the Americas Annual Protest at Ft. Benning, GA

Today we pay tribute to Bangor resident—and world citizen—Jim Harney, who died on December 26th at age 68.

Harney was former Catholic priest, and one of the Milwaukee 14, a group of priests and faith-based peace activists who broke into draft boards and burned about 10,000 Selective Service records with homemade napalm in a protest against the Vietnam War in 1968.  They read from the gospel while the records burned.  He spent more than a year in jail for his part in that protest.

In recent years many of us knew Jim Harney through the faces and voices of others that he shared through his photographs and stories.  The photographs of people he met in Iraq have adorned pins and posters, putting a real face on war.  Jim traveled extensively in Latin America, interviewing and photographing people whose stories might not otherwise be told— the poor, survivors of systemic economic violence, those struggling for change.  He accompanied them on their journeys–  running with his friends in El Salvador as US bombs rained down on them, sleeping in the mud in the corn fields, crossing the desert with the undocumented.

After learning he had terminal cancer,  Harney planned a walk  from Boston to Washington DC last summer, to call attention to the plight of the undocumented.  He was able to make it as far as Rhode Island.

In December 2008, Jim Harney was given the Sacco & Vanzetti Social Justice Award from Community Church of Boston— an award that over it’s more than 30 year history has also been presented to Howard Zinn, Scott and Helen Nearing, Cesar Chavez and Rachel Corie.

FMI: www.posibilidad.org, celebratingjim.net/, www.soaw.org

 

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