All around the world today people are coming together to call for international action against climate change. The focus has been on the number 350, which is the parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists, including the UN's top climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri, believe we need to stay below in order to avert disaster. 350.org has organized a series of events around the world calling attention to the target, and they're giving visitors and participants alike some real time gratification through Twitter feeds and Flickr slideshows. We've blogged about Maldivian officials holding a cabinet meeting underwater to raise awareness of rising oceans, and now the Divers Association of the Maldives is hosting an underwater rally with the goal of having 350 divers stay underwater in teams for 24 hours. You can find out what's going on near you at 350.org.

At Link TV we've been exploring how climate change is already having an impact in the US and elsewhere through a series of short videos called Climate Change Hits Home.

For World Food Day 2009 (which is tomorrow, October 16th!), Link TV is helping to promote a campaign called Stand Up, Take Action, a movement now four years in the running. As part of the framework for the UN Millennium Development Goals adopted by global leaders in the year 2000, worldwide hunger and poverty must be eradicated by the year 2015. A lofty endeavor, you say? Maybe. But millions of global citizens are demanding that this promise be kept, or at the very least, kept a priority. Each year, through events organized by Stand Up, Take Action, attention is called to this ongoing issue, and the movement is growing. Last year, it broke its own Guinness World Record for the largest mobilization around a single cause in recorded history. Click here for events taking place this weekend in your area.

Watch this video and join the countdown to World Food Day!



Link TV has a lot of great food and hunger related programming, that can be found on our ISSUE: Food page, like a new Michael Pollan special called “Deep Agriculture”, and more. Also, learn about the coffee industry and Fair Trade practices that are effecting small farmers in poor countries around the world from Dean Cycon, Founder and CEO of Dean’s Beans.

President Richard Nixon solicited the help of Brazil's notorious leader Emilio Medici in early talks of overthrowing Chile's President Salvador Allende, according to a secret memo from 1971 released to the public for the first time on Sunday. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote up the meeting, and was asked to act as a back channel between Medici and Nixon.

Two years later Allende was killed in a US-backed coup which put Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power. Pinochet's name would later become synonymous with brutal human rights abuses and "disappearances" in the thousands.

The actions of Brazil's leadership, who were no strangers to torture and assassination, are detailed by the victims themselves in the astonishing contemporaneous documentary Brazil: A Report on Torture [watch here]. The young students and professionals who appear in the film were living in Chile as political refugees when Pinochet came into power, throwing them again into a world of detention and pain. In this interview, filmmakers Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Saul Landau (Fidel) talk about their time in Chile interviewing the Brazilian victims, as well as US involvement in South American politics. Wexler and Landau were in Chile working on a documentary about Allende when they met the victims.

Link TV also broadcasts the documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger. Check here for airdates and a clip from the film.

Link's latest episode of Latin Pulse/Pulso Latino travels to Toribio, Colombia, symbol of the indigenous resistance movement following a devastating attack by FARC guerillas in 2005. With their land under attack, occupied by guerillas, paramilitaries, and police, the Naza Indians native to this region in Southern Colombia are struggling to pick up the pieces. The dangers for civilians remain high in Colombia's Cauca region, as FARC guerillas, drug traffickers and police continue to do battle, including this recent attack in Buenos Aires, Cauca, Colombia.

This video footage comes from Colombian TV program Contravia, led by investigative journalist Hollman Morris, who was featured in this previous Latin Pulse interview. The Foundation for a New Iberian-American Journalism, an organization founded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, awarded this episode of Contravia its highest prize in 2007 for journalistic excellence.

Link's Latin Pulse/Pulso Latino programs have only been getting better, presenting hard-hitting journalistic reports from countries like Colombia, Mexico and El Salvador. If you missed the recent report "Colombia: Stories That Kill", be sure to go back and watch online for some great analysis on free speech (or the lack thereof) among journalists in Colombia.

Today, we've just published the web-exclusive complete interview with Hollman Morris, the award-winning journalist who is featured in the above-mentioned report. The Colombian secret police have been illegally spying on Morris since 2004, and this fascinating interview (conducted via the video phone service Skype) explains why.

(Click here for the original version of the interview, en Español.)

You can read more about the claims that journalist Hollman Morris was a Colombian secret police target at Contravia.tv, a partner organization of Latin Pulse.

Writer and adventurer Jon Bowermaster explores the world's oceans from the seat of a sea kayak. Used as both transportation and as floating ambassadors, sea kayaks allow Jon and his team of the world's best photographers, filmmakers, scientists and navigators - to reach corners of the world rarely seen. Tonight's new episode takes us to South America's Altiplano, the mountainous desert region crossing the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, looking for water in the driest place on earth.

Watch Oceans 8 - Into the Altiplano Online Now

Visit Link's ISSUE: Oceans Page

This week Latin Pulse goes to Colombia to investigate the often-dangerous undertakings of independent journalists, in a country plagued by drug-trafficking, corruption, and violence. The journalists are pushing up against the boundaries of free speech as they struggle to tell the stories of the country's bloody reality, a task they feel is key to creating more peaceful Colombia.