LAS VEGAS — Over 3,000 Steelworker delegates filled the Las Vegas Bally Hotel convention center last week with raring-to-go enthusiasm for “taking back America for working people” in the 2008 elections. One delegate described it as more like a strike vote than a convention. “The membership is fired up and ready to go. We don’t have to be rallied by the leadership, they just need to turn us loose and tell us where to be,” she said.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors June 23 adopted a resolution endorsing HR 676, the National Health Insurance Act. The bill, introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), would expand the Medicare system to cover everyone in the United States under a single-payer national health insurance system.

A scandal is brewing that connects rightwing Cuban exiles in the United States with violent Mexican drug gangs trained by the U.S. military. The story first broke in the leftwing Mexico City daily, La Jornada. On June 12, 33 undocumented Cuban immigrants and four Central Americans were picked up by Mexican immigration authorities. A gang of armed men held up the bus transporting the immigrants and kidnapped them.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party held a widely condemned election on June 29 in which the opposition dropped out because of widespread violence and intimidation. The African Union on June 30 joined the international chorus in rejecting the outcome. South African President Thabo Mbeki is mediating a “power-sharing deal between ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for a Democratic Change.

With 8,000 homeowners hit by foreclosure each day, legislation to meet the crisis ought to be high on the Capitol Hill agenda. But fighters for decent, affordable housing say the Bush administration and Republican lawmakers are blocking action.

Every day 82 people die to gun violence throughout the U.S. according to the Centers for Disease Control. Chicago Public School officials say 27 students have died by gunfire since September 2007.