Mar 19, 2005

Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, the highly toxic defoliant used by the U.S. during the Vietnam War, have vowed to appeal the March 10 ruling by a U.S. federal judge dismissing their lawsuit against Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and 35 other companies that manufactured the poison.

United Nations forces have moved deposed and jailed Haitian Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, who launched a hunger strike three weeks ago to force the Haitian government to guarantee his safety, to a UN-run hospital in Port-au-Prince as a result of his deteriorating health.

In January 2005, some 500 prominent Russians calling themselves “Orthodox Christian patriots” signed a letter calling on the Russian prosecutor general to launch proceedings to ban all religious and ethnic Jewish organizations as “extremist.” Among the signatories to the letter were six members of the Russian parliament from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF).

An “invasion” is about to engulf Caracas, Venezuela. An estimated 20,000 progressive and radical youth will be pouring into the Venezuelan capital Aug. 7-15. The occasion? The 16th World Festival of Youth and Students.

Lebanon: Thousands rally for democracy and peace, Canada: Help for Wal-Mart workers, France: Massive protest vs. gov’t ‘reforms,’ Turkey: Protest attack on Labor Party headquarters, Guatemala: Protest passage of CAFTA, Zambia: Public workers protest wage freeze

When “Wanted: An Honest Budget” is Business Week’s headline, you know something is wrong.

“White House budget writers of both parties have a long history of fiscal gimmickry,” Business Week complained after the new Bush plan was issued. “But [past trickery] hid mere billions of dollars. Bush’s new spending plan will mask trillions, [largely skipping over] the costs of Bush’s own top priorities, including Iraq, restructuring Social Security, and taming the Alternative Minimum Tax.”

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — “They have outsourced the jobs, but they did not outsource the diseases and the conditions from which the people suffer,” said Dr. Syed Quadri at a Feb. 2 health care forum here sponsored by the Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center. The center held hearings in 15 Kentucky area development districts on the problems of people with little or no insurance.

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Key to dramatically ratcheting up labor’s power is improving the performance of state and local labor organizations, said a statement from the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting here March 2. The role of the federation’s 51 state and 543 local central labor councils (CLCs) has been an important part of the discussions about strengthening the labor movement.

Mother Jones was born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland, in 1836. As a child, she immigrated to North America with her family to escape the Irish famine. In her early 20s, she moved to Chicago, where she worked as a dressmaker, and then to Memphis, Tenn., where she met and married George Jones, a skilled iron molder and staunch unionist. There tragedy struck. A yellow fever epidemic in 1867 took the lives of Mary’s husband and all four of her children.

Medicaid, a state and federal partnership forged in the 1960s, provides care for 50 million poor men, women, and children in the United States who would otherwise have no access to health care. Medicaid takes care of children whose parents work at places like Wal-Mart that don’t provide health insurance. It pays for nursing home care for our elders. It covers treatment for disabled children and buys medications the poor and elderly would otherwise have to do without.