Feb. 4, 2006

Beginning Jan. 16, an electronic billboard high on the side of the U.S. Interests Section building in Havana has been streaming words from Abraham Lincoln, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and European anti-Soviet dissidents like Vaclav Havel, all in 5-foot-high crimson letters. Their purpose is to slander Cuba’s democracy and to discredit its revolution.

A candlelight vigil was held here the evening of Jan. 26, hours before the first International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, established at the UN’s September World Summit.

After 13 years of center-right rule, angry voters on Jan. 23 penalized the incumbent Liberal Party of Paul Martin by electing a Conservative Party minority government headed by Stephen Harper.

An impressive wave of militant, popular resistance to an anticommunist resolution presented before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe blocked its passage when it came up for a vote Jan. 25.

Guernsey County in southeastern Ohio is having serious problems with the educational budget. Education is under fire by the Bush administration on a national level and by the administration of Republican Gov. Bob Taft on a state level. The state is asking teachers and administrators to resort to fundraisers and high-ticket prices for sports games in order to fund activities. Teachers have to buy many of their own job materials because of the loss of state subsidization. A health teacher at Cambridge High School was once noted telling her students to use the cheap construction paper because her department could no longer spring for nicer-looking and slightly more expensive poster boards for a class project.

Last October 12 U.S. Senators sent a letter to nine major oil companies, asking them to donate part of their record profits to help poor Americans faced with large increases in their heating oil costs this winter.

Putting “the coal industry in charge” of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration is leading to dangerous conditions for the nation’s coal miners, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts told lawmakers at a Jan. 23 Senate committee hearing on the Sago, W.Va. mining disaster.