Apr 23, 2005

On April 5 nearly 300 University of California–Santa Cruz students and community allies shut down the annual Stevenson Event Center Career Fair, where recruiters from the Army, Navy and Marines had set up tables. The activists demanded that recruiters leave immediately and turn their tabling spots over to student counter-recruitment activists, which they eventually did.

BERKELEY, Calif. — Hundreds of striking service workers, other campus workers, students and faculty gathered on the steps of International House on the University of California–Berkeley campus April 14 to greet incoming UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau with shouts of “Living wage now” and signs reading, “Strike for justice at UC.” Birgeneau, who was attending a faculty reception on the eve of his inauguration, has said he supports a living wage for the service workers. The service workers, whose wages have not been raised in two years, held their one-day walkout at a dozen UC facilities statewide.

Tensions between Japan and its East Asian neighbors have reached a boiling point, with demonstrations against rising Japanese militarism erupting in China, Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere within the past few weeks.

April 17 was widely observed across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as “Prisoners’ Day,” a day of solidarity with Palestinian prisoners who are languishing in Israeli jails. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest what the Palestinian Prisoner Club called “intolerable living conditions” inside Israeli prisons.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The Liberal government’s long-delayed introduction of a bill to the Canadian Parliament to allow same-sex marriage has unleashed a firestorm of debate.

Millions of Cubans elected delegates to their nation’s 169 municipal assemblies on April 17. The elections came at the end of a two-month long process in which the people themselves — in the words of National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon — exercised their right to select, elect and be elected.

Poland: Troops to come home from Iraq; Brazil: WTO elections ‘lack transparency’; Haiti: U.S. ships arms to provisional gov’t; Sudan: Southern peace accord moving slowly; Pakistan: Workers win union recognition

George W. Bush’s proposed 2006 budget is actually the strategic plan for his second term. Read carefully, the budget reveals the real agenda of this administration, and helps clear away the usual rhetoric designed to conceal and confuse.

What is the middle class and why is it periodically given a status of high exaltation by the ruling class?

Workplace safety enforcement in the United States is largely a cat and mouse game, with the mouse usually coming out on top. Although American companies are required to keep a log of injuries and illnesses suffered by their employees, they are not required to actually report incidents to OSHA unless three or more workers are hospitalized as a result of a single incident, or if a worker is killed.