Peace

At the beginning of April 2007, people in Puerto Rico saw pictures of Jason Núñez Fernández from the town of Naranjitos on their television screens. The 22-year-old husband and father of two daughters had returned home in a casket covered with the U.S. flag, a casualty of Iraq.

SAN FRANCISCO — We rarely hear that a powerful labor movement in Iraq is defending workers’ rights, campaigning for an end to the U.S.-led occupation and for better daily living conditions for ordinary people, and upholding the Iraqi people’s right to keep control of their country’s great oil resources.

WASHINGTON — Muchos reaccionaron con incredulidad por la admisión de parte de la Casa Blanca de que el presidente Bush proyecta una ocupación norteamericana en Irak que puede durar 50 años, modelado en el medio siglo en que tropas estadounidenses han permanecido en Corea del Sur.

The “benchmark,” or goal, that the Bush administration has been working on furiously since the United States invaded Iraq is the privatization of Iraq’s oil. Now they have Congress blackmailing the Iraqi Parliament and the Iraqi people: no privatization of Iraqi oil, no reconstruction funds.

The Bush administration’s planned anti-missile complex in eastern Europe and its joint development of an anti-missile system with Japan are raising the specter of a new Cold War with far-reaching consequences for global political stability.

When Israeli Communist Meir Vilner co-signed Israel’s Independence Charter on May 14, 1948, he, and the Jewish/Arab Palestine Communist Party he was representing, stressed the promise contained within the charter: to help implement the United Nations resolutions providing for two independent states, Israel and Palestine — a promise still deferred.

CHELMSFORD, Mass. — More than a hundred people packed the Chelmsford police station May 23 to hear five candidates seeking to replace Rep. Martin Meehan (D-5th C.D.). Meehan is stepping down from Congress to become chancellor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell effective July 1.

WASHINGTON — Disbelief greeted the White House admission that President George W. Bush envisions U.S. occupation of Iraq for 50 years, modeled on the more than half-century U.S. occupation of South Korea.

WASHINGTON — Activistas contra la guerra vocearon su ira contra el Congreso por aprobar el 24 de mayo un proyecto de financiamiento a la guerra en Irak sin una fecha límite para retiras las tropas estadounidenses.

The press dispatches bring the news; the submarine belongs to the Astute Class, the first of its kind to be constructed in Great Britain in more than two decades.