Jun 22, 2002

LOS ANGELES – Expressing their concern over Republican efforts to expand so-called welfare reform, over 600 low-income residents, community activists, labor, religious and political leaders gathered at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in the Wilshire District here on June 15 for a Town Hall Meeting to jump start a national fightback campaign “to save the safety net.”

Spanish workers poised for general strike/Czech communists make gains in elections/Nigerian Labor sets warning strike/German construction workers strike/ICEM demands end to killing of Colombian unionists/S. Korean Hyundai workers strike

NEW YORK – The Communist Party’s national conference on building the Party clubs and grassroots organizing will kick off June 28 with a concert by the Irish band, Morning Star, which will follow CPUSA National Chairman Sam Webb’s keynote address to the gathering.

NEW YORK – Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion is a cult classic – which means most people have never heard of it.

ST. LOUIS, Mo. – The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 50 held a press conference here, June 13, filing complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Local 50, representing more than 3,000 janitors, charged six St. Louis cleaning companies with “blatant” sexual and racial discrimination.

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico – How best to fight the ongoing wave of violence against women here was the theme of Mexico’s 5th National Poets’ Encounter, held at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, June 1-3. The Encounter, titled “Eulogy for a City,” drew poets and writers from the United States and across Mexico, and featured a citywide grafitti-painting campaign and the establishment of a women’s memorial “time capsule” as well as more traditional poetry readings and seminars.

OAKLAND – It took 11 years and a five-week trial, but a jury of eight women and two men meeting in the Federal Court House here, unanimously decided that the FBI and the Oakland Police Department connived to frame Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney for the 1990 bombing of their car. The federal jury found that the FBI and Oakland Police violated the pair’s constitutional rights to free speech and protection from unlawful searches.

NEW DELHI, India – These are the statements of the two heads of the Indian sub-continent, spekaing in Kazhakistan, where they were attending a high-level conference on security in South Asia.

On July 25, 1978, three men climbed to the top of Cerro Maravilla near Ponce, Puerto Rico, where they planned to blow up a radio transmission tower as an act of “propaganda of the deed” in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. The police were waiting for them. After a brief struggle, they surrendered to the cops, who proceeded to murder Arnaldo Diario Rosada and Carlos Enrique Soto Arrivi in cold blood.

In November 2001, Monmouth County, N.J., was the scene of a strike by 900-plus teachers and secretaries employed by the Middletown Township Board of Education.