Hilda Solís (US)

Hilda Solís - US Labor Minister

I heard about her when reading about Zelaya (ousted Honduras president) where Zelaya thanked to a couple of people for their support, including Mrs Solis.

Zelaya:
"On behalf of the people, we thank the International Community, the OAS, Secretary Insulza, the ex-President of Chile Mr Ricardo Lagos Escobar, and the US Labor Secretary Mrs Hilda Solís."

"...arguably the most progressive member of the Obama cabinet"
link

Hilda Solís was part of the Honduras Verification Commission, together with the former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos:

Lagos is a particularly interesting addition to the Verification Commission. In 1972, Chilean President Salvador Allende nominated him as ambassador to the Soviet Union and Congress refused to vote on his nomination. After the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile he was forced into exile to Argentina and then the United States. He returned to Chile to lead the resistance against the coup regime of General Augusto Pinochet, including the successful "vote no" referendum of 1988 that brought down the then fifteen-year-old coup regime.

There is great rejoicing in the selection of Hilda Solis and as part of the Verification Commission of the Accord. Both she and Lagos bring strong commitments to authentic democracy. Their skills will very much be needed to confront the ongoing stalling and deceptive tactics of the coup regime in Honduras. This is a step forward for President Obama to earn something already granted: the Nobel Peace Prize. Now if we would stop letting the military-industrial complex keep fueling the wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq, then he will get definitely deserve it.

link

en.wiki (Solis)
en.wiki (Lagos)
other
other

Sophie Scholl

A German trio (Scholl, Meinhof, Ensslin) - three women I did not know before and I was only and mainly inspired by films I saw. Germany is a country next to mine but I was not aware of these important fighters who lived not so long ago, in the 40s and 70s.
First I saw the German film "Die Welle" about a US school experiment where there is a week of autocracy class, a film based on real events. There was a scene which copied the events carried out by the White Rose movement in Nazi Germany, where one of the leading figures was Scholl (she was cought and arrested for throwing out anti-Nazi leaflets at university). Then, logically, I went to see a film about her short life and resistance movement - Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.
Meinhof and Ensslin very much continue in the line of resistance in Germany, they are almost autobiographically portraied in the film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. I knew about RAF from the film Munich and also because of the Lufthansa plane hijacking, but I did not know any details about the group, who they were, how they started, what they fought for, how did they form their minds and what they wanted to achieve and what they caused. The film gives a good overview of this.

Gudrun Ensslin

Gudrun Ensslin - a German social activist and leader of RAF. Took no compromises and was quite militant. Radical writing and fighting against injustices and what she saw as forms of fascism. Sexual freedom. (I will write more on her later, I could not find many links..., but she is the driving source of the RAF movement, as others say, more than Meinhof.)
Blogger info / en.wiki / youtube (de)

Ulrike Meinhof

Ulrike Meinhof - a German writer, social activist and member of RAF (Red Army Faction). She wrote articles against state imperialism, like on the occasion of Shah of Iran's visit to Germany in 1967 or about the injustices of Vietnam war, moving to guerrilla writing and fighting together with Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader.
en.wiki / youtube / writings

Helen Thomas (US)

I would have asked [Bush] why—why do you

continue to support the killing in Gaza?
And that’s what we’re doing.

“The greatest sin of all in the Nazi era was silence.”
When you remain silent to the suffering and the incredible aggression
against a people, then you are culpable.

Helen Thomas is an American journalist and for the last 60 years she has reported on US presidents, she was the journalist who attended the last 10 US presidents' press conferences and was a member of the White House press corps. She is known for asking tough questions and demanding straight answers. On DemocracyNow!, after George Bush jr. gave his final press conference, she talked among others on Obama's upcoming presidency:

AMY GOODMAN: Do you expect to see a change of policy, for example, on Israel and the Occupied Territories?

HELEN THOMAS: No, I don’t.

AMY GOODMAN: Why not?

HELEN THOMAS: Because I think that Obama, during the campaign, made many promises, as every president, potential president does to Israel, that they seem somehow bounded by their promises, promises to uphold all Israeli goals.

I don’t see how the US can provide F-16s, gunships, Apache gunships, phosphorus, possibly phosphorus, and cluster bombs and so forth to kill helpless people, children who are starving to death. They control the checkpoints. They control the arrivals and departures, supplies and people. And the Americans—President Bush has remained silent to that suffering. He has blocked by a veto at the UN any stoppage of the warfare, and he continues to supply Israel.

Susan George

Susan George is a political scientist and writer on Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. I heard about her in the news of 07/07/2008 on Democracy Now - there were protests in Japan during the G8 summit and Susan George was among the protesters who were blocked from entering Japan, together with Lydinyda Nacpil, the Asia-Pacific coordinator for Jubilee South (more here).

More about Susan George e.g. on en.wikipedia or on the pages of Transnational Institute where she is a fellow. Also I found two youtube videos: 1, 2 and a related video on debt.

Benazir Bhutto

" Ce jour-là, elle a trop parlé... "

Benazir Bhutto - a Pakistani politician and twice a Prime Minister, assassinated in December 2007. She was in exile in Dubai and in 2007 she returned for the presidential elections. In a book by the French Eric Raynaud 'Jusqu'au bout du destin', the author noted that Bhutto delivered to CIA a plan of Al Qaida's attack of World Trade Center in ...1995, six years before 9/11, and also, a couple of days before her assassination she publicly spoke on Al Jazeera/the BBC about the death of Ossama bin Laden and his assassin. More info also here, in Czech also here and here.

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman - a US journalist who founded and is the principal host of the internet tv/radio Democracy Now!.

"Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful."

democracynow.org interviewed key personalities such as Tariq Ali, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Lori Berenson, Jimmy Carter, Hugo Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Bill Clinton, Robert Fisk, Dennis Kucinich, Evo Morales, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said etc.

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist, writer and activist. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things, and, in 2002, the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. Ever since, she has concentrated her writing on political issues. These include the Narmada Dam project, India's Nuclear Weapons, corrupt power company Enron's activities in India. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.

More info: Wikipedia, her webpage, zmag, sawnet, ratical, narmada, World Tribunal on Iraq video, Come September video and discussion, Czech econnect link and iliteratura link, Sydney 2004 video.

Eve Ensler

"When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us."

"Happiness exists in action, it exists in telling the truth and saying what your truth is, and it exists in giving away what you want the most."

Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler is an American playwright most famous for her books The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body, and also a founder of the global movement V-Day working to stop violence against women and girls. In this talk from 2004, Eve Ensler speaks about how she 'found' vaginae and how she started talking about vaginae with women (an innocent conversation with her friend about her 'old and dry vagina' and more and more women wanting to talk about their experience of being abused, raped, beaten).

She talks about the V-Day movement where women would gather and share their experience and fight against violence contra women. She calls "Vagina Warriors" women (or vagina friendly men) who witnessed or suffered a terrible violence, and are fighting so that this does not happen anyone else.

She goes on and speaks about women she has met on her journeys and who have been helping other women against violence.

The story of Agnes from Kenya was most fascinating for me: Agnes was mutilated when she was 10 years old. At that time she decided that she would fight against this practice. When she became older, she created an anatomical sculpture of women's body showing vagina and vagina replacement parts. She was showing what a vagina looks like and what a mutilated vagina looks like. She was traveling through the country educating people.

In 8 years Agnes saved 1500 girls from being cut, she created a alternative ritual for girls coming off age without being mutilated. When Agnes received a jeep for her travels from the V-Day movement, in that year she saved 4500 girls from being mutilated.