Hosted by the New World Coalition, a Bates student organization that focuses on social justice and community activism, this event is free and open to the public. Following the panel, guests will have an opportunity to converse with the panelists and enjoy refreshments.The organizers see this panel as an effort to offer insights about the situation in Afghanistan. The panel will include three Bates College students, each offering a unique perspective. Jared Golden, a junior from Leeds, is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan before coming to Bates. A history and politics major, he returned to Afghanistan last summer to teach school.

Mustafa Basij-Rasikh, a sophomore majoring in politics and economics, came to Bates from Kabul, Afghanistan. He is one of several siblings studying in the U.S. who plan to return to Afghanistan to help restore their war-torn nation. Their supporters include Sally and Don Goodrich, whose son Peter, a member of the Bates class of 1989, died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The panel will also include Bates College politics professor Eric Hooglund. Hooglund’s background includes 30 years of research, teaching and writing about the domestic politics and international relations of countries in the Middle East, particularly Iran, and of U.S. foreign policy toward the region.

Hooglund sees his classroom as a forum in which students can confront stereotypes of a region too often portrayed, especially in the media, as a potentially threatening monolith.

The fifth member of the panel is Mark Roman, who was a founding member of Waterville Area Bridges for Peace and Justice and is a member of CODEPINK Maine, the state branch of a national peace and social justice movement. Roman’s particular interest is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in the conflict.

Titled “Revisiting Iraq: Five Years Later” and sponsored by the New World Coalition, a student organization at Bates, the event is open to the public at no cost.

Nemitz, Cote and Cornell du Houx will discuss the war’s impacts on U.S. foreign policy, the state of Maine and young voters.

Nemitz is a popular columnist for the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram newspapers. He has traveled to Iraq three times since 2004, embedding with units of the Maine Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve.

The Maine Press Association named Nemitz and Press Herald photographer Greg Rec as Maine’s 2004 Journalists of the Year for their reporting on the Guard’s 133d Engineer Battalion in Iraq.

Cote is a former Democratic candidate for Maine’s 1st Congressional District. He served in the U.S. Army in Bosnia and in Iraq, where he worked to rebuild schools, hospitals and other infrastructure. He created the “Adopt an Iraqi Village” program, distributing donated clothing, toys and household necessities to villages. His service in Iraq led to two Army Commendation Medals.

A graduate of Colby College and the University of Maine School of Law, he serves on the Renewable Energy and Governmental Relations Practice Group at the law firm of Pierce Atwood LLP in Portland.

Cornell du Houx grew up in Solon, where he attended Carrabec High School. As a student at Bowdoin College and an active member of the Brunswick community, he went into politics after returning from eight months of training with the U.S. Marine Corps in 2004.

He was deployed to Iraq with the Marines in 2006, stationed in Fallujah. He returned last spring to complete his degree and to continue serving the community of Brunswick. He is currently running for the state House of Representatives District 66 seat, representing part of Brunswick.

It’s “the world’s largest family,” a retailing innovator whose low prices are good for consumers, its supporters say.

It’s an evil corporation that exploits its workers and decimates traditional downtowns, its detractors argue.

“It,” of course, is Wal-Mart, and during the next two weeks, student groups at Bates College offer presentations laying out arguments for and against the discount giant.

At 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, the Bates College Republicans offer a screening of the documentary film Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Makes Some People Crazy in the Filene Room (Room 301), Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

At 4 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, the New World Coalition presents a panel discussion featuring a touring group of women who worked in sweatshops producing goods for Wal-Mart stores. The panel takes place in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road. For more information, visit the International Labor Rights Fund Web site.

Both events are open to the public at no cost.

Why Wal-Mart Works, directed by Ron Galloway, is an inside look at the world’s largest company, and how Wal-Mart’s quest for lower prices has created new efficiencies in distribution and an overall stronger marketplace. For more about the film, visit the film Web site and blog.

Some 1.3 million people work for Wal-Mart and nearly 138 million shop there every week. Consumers love a bargain, and their quest to save money has helped make Wal-Mart Stores the world’s top retailer.

“Wal-Mart opponents deny the economic reality of the situation,” noted Abbott, of New York City. “The majority of Wal-Mart’s customers go there for the low prices because they cannot afford to pay any more at another store.”

“Wal-Mart is good for consumers — that’s why it’s successful,” Abbott said.

The Feb. 7 panel is organized by the International Labor Rights Fund and is part of a campaign to hold Wal-Mart accountable for its use of sweatshop labor, says event organizer Erin Reed ’08.

The panel speakers are from the Philippines, Nicaragua and Colombia, and have worked in sweatshops that produce clothing for Wal-Mart and at flower plantations owned by Dole, which sells nearly all its flowers at Wal-Mart.

“When the New World Coalition showed the documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price this fall, hundreds of people became aware of how powerful Wal-Mart is,” says Reed, of Pembroke, Mass. “This panel will give a face and a voice to the people who have suffered as a result.”

The evening lecture, The Challenge of Feminist Peacework in Israel and Palestine, begins at 8 p.m. in Chase Hall Lounge. The public is invited free of charge to attend both presentations and may call 207-786-8272 for more information.

These events are co-sponsored by the chaplain’s office, Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the Multicultural Center, Mushahada Association, New World Coalition, the political science department, the Women’s Resource Center and the program in women and gender studies.

An Arab-Palestinian feminist and peace activist with the Coexistence Forum for Arabs and Jews and with the New Israel Fund’s Empowerment and Training Center for Social Change Organizations in Israel, Abu-Rabia coordinates the Bedouin Women’s Empowerment Program that reaches out to Bedouin women and raises their awareness about their rights. “I believe that living in a reality of conflict does not excuse me from my responsibility and duty towards my society,” Abu Rabia says.

Safran is an Israeli peace activist with Women in Black, a weekly peace vigil that opposes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Co-founder of the Coalition of Women for Just Peace, she coordinates the Haifa Feminist Center and the women’s studies program at the University of Haifa.

The women’s tour is organized by Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, a network of university faculty promoting peace in the Middle East.

For the past three months, five student interns have conducted research for the Maine People’s Alliance, hoping to shed light on health care issues in connection to the Baldacci-proposed statewide plan for an improved health care system. The student presentation will focus on small businesses and uninsured/underinsured individuals who have been hardest hit by rising health care costs, says Bates junior Ryan Conrad, of Middletown, R.I., one of the research interns.

The presentation is sponsored and hosted by the Bates College New World Coalition. For more information, call 207-777-6781.

Thirty-four countries in the Western Hemisphere met in Miami in November to produce a tariff-reducing agreement that would extend the North American Free Trade Agreement throughout the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, except for Cuba. The plan ran into difficulties when Canada, Chile and several other nations disagreed with a deal brokered a few weeks earlier by the United States and Brazil.

Seven Bates students traveled to Miami and videotaped their experiences, including everything from “street celebrations with puppets and music to brutal police violence,” says Bates junior Ryan Conrad of Middletown, R.I., coordinator of the coalition.

“I oppose the F.T.A.A. because I believe this corporate agreement is detrimental to the life of this Earth,” says Conrad, a member of the Maine Fair Trade Campaign, who works on and off campus to promote ideals of fair trade as well as universal human and environmental rights. “The agreement is undemocratic, will undermine labor rights and cause further job loss, and will jeopardize consumer and environmental protection,” Conrad says.

New World Coalition members hope to tour Maine and New Hampshire with the video.

Ayers is the force behind Porters’ Progress, a non-profit organization that provides empowering education and apparel suitable to harsh Himalyan conditions to mountain porters in Nepal. Bates is one stop on a U.S.-Canadian tour that Ayers is making with his 90-minute presentation, which includes a slide show and the award-winning BBC documentary Carrying the Burden, a 2001 Banff Mountain Film Festival selection.

A creative writing major at Bates, Ayers spent a junior semester in Nepal. In that country known for stunning natural beauty and harsh poverty, he started working with the porters who accompany tourist treks in the Himalayas. Moved by the hardships that these hardy and hardworking people endure, he founded Porters’ Progress after graduation.

Not to be confused with the Sherpas famed for their role in newsmaking mountain climbs, the porters that Ayers supports are typically lowland farmers who augment a subsistence living by carrying luggage for tourist treks. In thin clothes and flimsy shoes, they spend weeks at high altitudes carrying up to 250 pounds. Their cargo baskets are strapped to their foreheads with a cord that distributes weight to the spine.

“There’s a certain brilliance to them,” Ayers says, “that I was amazed at in the face of such hardship.”

Ayers’ presentation is sponsored by the New World Coalition, the Anti-Sweatshop Coalition and Amnesty International.

The conference, sponsored by Maine Citizens to Defend the Bill of Rights and the New World Coalition, a student organization at Bates, features a talk by Raymond Kohlman, an attorney who in December 1999 successfully represented the family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in a lawsuit claiming the civil rights leader was the victim of a vast murder conspiracy, not a lone assassin. The King family had sued Loyd Jowers, a retired businessman who claimed six years ago that he paid someone other than James Earl Ray to kill King in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968. Kohlman claimed the FBI, CIA, the Mafia and the U.S. military were involved in the assassination.

The conference also features a talk by Hoppy Heidelberg, a member of the Oklahoma City bombing grand jury who believes the FBI was involved in the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Heidelberg, a Reform Party gubernatorial candidate in Oklahoma, also is a member of Oklahomans for Truth, a group that recently took depositions from an FBI informant who testified to the FBI’s involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing.