It was Horace Mann who said, “Education is the great equalizer.”

But what the 19th century education reformer and abolitionist didn’t realize, perhaps, is that these days, education reflects the rise in global economic inequality.

In our continuing series titled "The Great Divide: global income inequality and its cost," we are turning the lens today on inequality – racial and economic – in two cities: Selma, Alabama and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

On this weekend of remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it seems particularly fitting to compare Selma and Rio, which share a similar history of struggles with slavery and racism, and the deep economic inequality left in their wake.

EDITOR'S NOTE: With the searing image of Shell’s big drilling rig up against Alaska’s frozen, rocky shoreline and a relentless, powerful surf crashing against it, the world was offered a horrifying glimpse this month of how the Arctic can leave even the best laid plans smashed on the rocks.

It is an image worth pondering and a reality worth remembering as Shell vows to push forward this year with its plan to officially begin drilling for oil and natural gas in the Arctic and its ambitious hopes to tap into some of the largest unexploited reserves in the world.

Global warming has led to a historic level of surface melt of sea ice and has subsequently opened the Arctic for oil exploration and shipping. Environmentalists and native populations now worry that a big oil spill in the Arctic would devastate a fragile environment that the whole world relies on as a central cooling system for the planet, and which the traditional Inuit Eskimos rely on for subsistence hunting and fishing.

BOSTON – Three years on from the devastating earthquake that brought Haiti to its knees and the world to its aid, there is, by many accounts, light emerging from the darkness.

It is a light that radiates, in part, from several sources right here in Boston, people who have dedicated extraordinary time, effort and money to help Haiti build a teaching hospital and a new orphanage. And you can literally be part of spreading the light through a campaign by a startup company known as MPOWERD.

MPOWERD has developed solar-powered lanterns for Haiti that can end what this company calls “energy poverty.”

But I will come back to the light that these three projects — the hospital, the orphanage and the lanterns — provide. 

Journalists at the Southern Weekly, a Chinese newspaper from the Guangdong Province that has been described in the western press as "liberal" and "edgy", have staged a strike after an editorial was modified by government censors so as to praise the Communist party system. 

The reporters claim that more than 1,000 articles have been edited or censored by the government.