Earth Hour has done a lot to raise awareness of sustainability issues. But there’s more to it than switching off lights for one hour once a year. It’s all about giving people a voice and working together to create a better future for our planet. So At 8:30 PM on Saturday 26th March 2011, lights will switch off around the globe for Earth Hour.

Leonard I. Weinglass, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent progressive defense lawyer, who represented political renegades, government opponents and notorious criminal defendants in a half century of controversial cases, including the Chicago Seven, the Pentagon Papers and the Hearst kidnapping, died on Wednesday. Mr. Weinglass was working as a lawyer in racially torn Newark in the late 1960s when he met Tom Hayden, a founder of the activist group Students for a Democratic Society, who was working there as well. In 1968, when Mr. Hayden was indicted, along with seven others — the case was initially known as the Chicago Eight— for conspiring to incite a riot during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he reached out to Mr. Weinglass, who joined William M. Kunstler on the defense team in what turned out to be one of the most raucous trials in American history. (And Yes that’s Afeni Shakur standing next to him)