001 public speeches

It was announced in November 2006 that a chemical plant producing paraxylene (PX) and teraphalic acid would be built in the Haicang District 7km from Xiamen, a city of about 3.5 million residents in southeastern Fujian Province China. The two compani...

The 1980s saw a new consciousness of environmental awareness, particularly around the Earth’s rain forests. Scientists had discovered that, aside from their enormous biodiversity, rainforests also helped to keep carbon from being released into the at...

Beginning on August 29, 1949, Soviet officials conducted aboveground nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk facility in Kazakhstan. More than one million people resided in villages in the Semipalatinsk oblast. In the next oblast, Karaganda, there were tw...

During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned the South African team from participating in the Olympics in order to demonstrate the unified and international disapproval of South African apartheid.\n\nIn order to pa...

By the start of the 21st century, there were 53 active industrial plants in the area around Tonawanda, New York. Residents of the area had complained about air quality problems for decades, but regulators failed to intervene to ensure plants complied...

In the early twentieth century, Kansas was the third largest coal producing state in the United States, with more than 8,000 unionized miners concentrated in the two southwestern counties of Crawford and Cherokee. In January 1920, the Kansas legislat...

In 1972, Matthew Coon Come, a young Cree student, happened upon a newspaper article that proclaimed Quebec’s ‘hydroelectric project of the century’. Looking at a map attached to the article, Matthew realized that his community’s lands in northern Que...

The Montgomery, Alabama sit-ins took place during the era of Jim Crow laws in the southern United States. The first of the Supreme Court rulings against these laws – which are symbolized by the phrase “Separate but Equal” – took place in 1954, in the...

On 1 March 2000, 400 Yale University students rallied to demand that their administration withdraw from the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and join the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) instead. Both organizations focused on monitoring sweatshop labor an...

Following the conclusion of World War Two, Austria was separated from Germany and zones were created, each of which was controlled by one of the four allies (United States, United Kingdom, France, Soviet Union). Austria had a crippled economy because...

The Republic of Seychelles is a small island nation in the Indian Ocean, east of Tanzania. The Seychelles People’s Progressive Front (SPPF) has held power in the Republic of Seychelles since their coup d’etat in 1977. Despite laws that nominally prov...

Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, has spent the last several centuries under the control of alternating powers. In 1942, Britain began its occupation of Hong Kong, following the First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking. Japan occu...

Iranians turned out in large numbers to elect their President on 12 June 2009. The candidates included the incumbent and favorite of the religious authorities, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as three challengers: Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mohsen Rezaee, and...

The United States first used Napalm as an incendiary device in Japan during WWII. It melted flesh and produced horrific wounds. Napalm once again took on a functional role for the US in Vietnam, and the government requested bids from chemical manufac...