Only a couple of weeks ago, as the nation celebrated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful “I Have a Dream” speech, I was reminded of the Rev. King’s last birthday, in January 1968.

He combined it with work — a staff meeting, planning for the multiracial Poor People’s March, where we made plans to occupy the National Mall. He spoke to us of the need to march to demand an end to the War in Vietnam and to push for a full commitment to the War on Poverty.

This week — four-and-a-half decades later — the U.S. Census Bureau reported that “the nation’s official poverty rate in 2012 was 15.0 percent, which represents 46.5 million people living at or below the poverty line.” That’s up from 46.2 million in 2011, and translates to a poverty rate of 15 percent — one out of every seven Americans. The Census Bureau says that number includes about 16 million children and almost 4 million seniors. Is anybody listening?

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Rich or poor, king or commoner, when some Buddhists and Hindus die their funeral can include bending the corpse into an upright fetal position, or burying the body and later burning the bones in a "double funeral".

Buddhists and Hindus hope to ensure the best possible reincarnation, and eventually escape the cycle of rebirth to achieve nirvana.

Many of Cambodia's traditional rites appeared during week-long ceremonies in the capital, Phnom Penh, when former king Norodom Sihanouk was cremated in February.

Sihanouk was entitled to have an elaborate royal cremation, but had indicated preference for a simpler, albeit relatively grandiose, funeral.

"Before King Sihanouk, the body of a [previous] deceased king, with the help of [cotton] strings, was put in the position of 'a fetus in the mother's womb' and the body was put in a big urn," said Ang Choulean, a professor at the faculty of archeology in the prestigious Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh.

"The height of the urn was shorter than the size of a human being, because the body of the dead had to be bent, like a fetus in the

We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focussed on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.

Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.

The one thing certain about this crisis is that Tepco does not have the scientific, engineering or financial resources to handle it. Nor does the Japanese government. The situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientists and engineers our species can muster.

Why is this so serious?

Now that public pressure has foiled U.S. plans to bomb Syria, the next urgent step is to build public pressure for stopping the deluge of weapons into that country.

Top officials in Washington are happy that American “lethal aid” has begun to flow into Syria, and they act as though such arms shipments are unstoppable. In a similar way, just a few short weeks ago, they -- and the conventional wisdom -- insisted that U.S. missile strikes on Syria were imminent and inevitable.

But public opinion, when activated, can screw up the best-laid plans of war-makers. And political conditions are now ripe for cutting off the flow of weaponry to Syria -- again giving new meaning to the adage that “when the people lead, the leaders will follow.”

Five years after the beginning of the financial collapse and the Great Recession, where are we? This week, President Obama offered Americans a progress report. He hailed the steps taken to turn the economy around and rescue the auto and financial industries. He used the occasion, sensibly, to challenge Republicans in the Congress not to do more damage to the slow recovery by manufacturing another unnecessary budget crisis.

The president was candid about how far we have to go. He suggested that the very trends that were destroying the middle class prior to the Great Recession have gotten worse. The wealthiest 1 percent has captured virtually all of the rewards from growth coming out of the recession, while most Americans haven’t experienced a recovery at all.

This isn’t an accident. The auto industry was rescued, and the big three are generating profits and beginning to hire more workers. The big banks were rescued, and are now bigger, more concentrated and more dangerous than ever.

But while the big boats were righted, too little was done for the boats on the bottom.