April 8, 2006

NEWBURGH, N.Y. — Students in this small city walked out of class at exactly noon, March 31, to demand immigrant rights, joining a wave of thousands of students doing the same thing in Los Angeles, San Diego, El Paso, Yakima, Wash., and scores of other cities across the nation.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — “They want to turn our schools over to corporate America to operate at a profit. But our children are not for sale!” So said an angry Marietta English, president of the Baltimore Teachers Union.

NEW YORK — “I don’t expect tens of thousands,” Melody Drnach, National Organization for Women vice president for action told the World, referring to the upcoming April 29 March for Peace, Justice and Democracy demonstration here. “I expect hundreds of thousands.”

CHICAGO — Wearing white coats and stethoscopes, and carrying signs and banners, medical students rallied in support for universal health care here March 31. The students were joined by health care consumers and elected officials at the Health Care Justice Rally.

WASHINGTON — Despite Republican efforts to kill it, a grassroots movement demanding that Congress censure or impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for “high crimes” is spreading across the nation.

WASHINGTON — Father Claudio Holzer, pastor of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Melrose Park, Ill., is a board member of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Yet even he was stunned by the mass demonstrations that swept the nation in defense of 11 million undocumented people in recent weeks.

Forty-five Florida tomato workers, members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), were lovin’ the solidarity from student, labor, community and religious groups in St. Louis and Chicago rallies last week. The events were part of the workers’ McDonald’s Truth Tour — “The Real Rights Tour” — that is traveling to 17 cities across the nation, fighting for living wages and worker rights.

BERKELEY, Calif. — After a long and sometimes bitter struggle, some 400 workers at the luxury Claremont Resort and Spa have won a new, multiyear contract providing wage and benefit increases their union says will raise their overall pay to the area union standard. For the first time, most workers will be eligible for health coverage.

Two hundred doctors, other health care workers, patients and “Charity babies” — New Orleans residents born at the city’s Charity Hospital — rallied March 25, demanding that President Bush, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and the Louisiana state Legislature “repair, re-open, and fund” the hospital.