Dec. 16, 2006

Pinochet
Saddam Hussein
Landless in Montana
Indigenous peoples

Charged with possessing deadly weapons, Santiago Alvarez of Florida plea-bargained, dodged a potential 50-year sentence, and now goes to jail for four years. Alvarez, like some other right-wing Cuban Americans, has paid for, organized and carried out deadly attacks against Cuba.

A nightmare for progressives leading up to the Nov. 7 elections was that Maryland voters would go against the grain and elect Republican Michael Steele, an African American, to the U.S. Senate seat held by retiring Democrat Paul Sarbanes.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreign policy analysts have struggled to find a term to characterize the epoch we now inhabit. I propose a term that captures the defining characteristics of the current period: the Post-Abundance Era.

Henri Alleg’s book “The Question” is a searing, firsthand account of the torture that the author experienced during the Battle of Algiers. Although it was first published in 1958, it is a book that should still be read today: “the question” of torture is, unfortunately, still with us.

A few years ago, the entire life’s work of French communist director Robert Guédiguian was screened in a retrospective tribute at the Toronto International Film Festival.

A poem

An extraordinary trial, remarkable among other things for a novel legal doctrine unveiled by the Bush administration during the course of it, ended as a mistrial Nov. 21 in Washington.

Dec. 3 was a day the People’s Weekly World can be proud of. Still celebrating the results of the Nov. 7 elections, readers held banquets and dinners in various places across the country, attracting elected officials, leaders of people’s movements and rank-and-file fighters for justice and democracy.