A small but enthusiastic group gathered on the fifth floor of the Chinatown community center, encuentro 5, last night to hear historian and author Paul Street talk about his new book, The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power. This stop on Street's book tour was hosted by Charngchi Way of the online anarchist radio show, The Authority Smashing Hour.

Eminent public health scientist and activist Richard Levins considered some of the most pressing issues facing humanity--food and water shortages, drug-resistant micro-organisms, global warming and social inequality--in light of the intellectual triumphalism that seems to accompany every claim of problem resolution. His Saturday morning talk, "Failures, Errors & the Boundaries of Our Minds" at encuentro 5 found an engaged audience in Boston and New York. It was simulcast to the Brecht Forum in Manhattan (as part of that organization's 35th anniversary celebration).

Somerville, MA - Prof. Charles Derber of the Boston College Sociology department gave a talk on his new book "Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy" on Thursday to a crowd of 35 people at the Somerville Public Library - Central Library. The event was sponsored by the Majority Agenda Project, Somerville-Medford United for Justice with Peace, and Transition Somerville, and was chaired by Jason Pramas, Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston.

Over 30 people attended an informal lunchtime debate on Climate Justice, South Africa and the World Bank last Friday between Prof. Patrick Bond of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa and Prof. William Moomaw of Tufts University and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The event took place at the encuentro 5 movement space in Chinatown, and was chaired by Jason Pramas of Open Media Boston.

BOSTON/Allston - Prof. Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke on current events in Palestine tonight at Boston University to a crowd of over 300 attendees. The talk was one of a series of events sponsored by Boston University Students for Justice in Palestine as part of "Israeli Apartheid Week" - an week of action being held March 1-8 by human rights activists in cities around the world. Full audio of the event follows below the photo set.

Cambridge, Mass. - Ralph Nader - citizen and consumer advocate, presidential candidate, and author - spoke at Harvard Law School last Tuesday. Nader covered a variety of current topics, from the quality of law school education, the bailout of the corporations, the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, the recall of Toyota cars, and more. He was preceded by Bruce Fein, progressive author and Harvard Law graduate 1972.

Cambridge, MA - The Men of Color Task Force hosted the panel discussion “Civil Rights : Policing, Discretion & Race in Cambridge” at the St. Paul A.M.E. Christian Life Center on Thursday, February 11. A follow-up to last July’s controversial arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his Cambridge home, the panel was introduced by interim mayor City Councillor Kenneth Reeves and moderated by Richard Harding. The keynote speaker was Northeastern School of Law professor Deborah A. Ramirez, who is also the executive director of the Partnering for Prevention and Community Safety Initiative. Prof. Ramirez joined the other panelists, who included former Cambridge Police Commissioner Perry Anderson, local hip hop artist Imam Firmin, activist and journalist Irene Monroe and Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker.

Cambridge, MA - On the one hand, newspapers like the Cincinnati Post, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Christian Science Monitor are going out of business or becoming on-line only publications. On the other hand, what remains of commercial print, broadcast, and online news, according to authors Robert McChesney and John Nichols, tends to favor celebrity and scandal driven reporting.

BOSTON/Boston Common - On Monday, people in Boston and around the U.S. celebrated the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But while many recognize his civil rights accomplishments and his many campaigns for racial justice, few people acknowledge his radical anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-socialist platforms. He was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, for example, long before it became fashionable.

Remembering this aspect of the man, a group known as Black Cross Anarchists, along with the Stop the Wars Coalition, honored Dr. King by speaking out against war and injustice at the Park Street MBTA station in the north east corner of the Boston Common.

Subrata Ghoshroy, an MIT researcher and former Congressional whistleblower on faked "Star Wars" missile defense tests by government contractors, spoke to a group of 250 striking students in early December at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. The students have been demanding that their college stop all military research - part of a national movement towards that end. In his talk, Ghoshroy gave a summary of the history of military funding of U.S. academic research, the significant role MIT leaders played in creating that military-academic complex, and discussed the struggles of the many MIT students and faculty that have protested the military role in higher education since the 1960s.