United States

A Louisiana appeals court threw out the only remaining conviction against Mychal Bell, the first of the Jena 6 to be put on trial in an example of modern-day Jim Crow injustice that has stunned people around the globe.
Tens of thousands of people marched in Washington, DC, on September 15 demanding an end to the US war in Iraq. Pennsylvania Avenue was filled shoulder to shoulder from the White House, where the action began, to the Capitol building. The turnout was larger than expected, a shot in the arm for anti-war activists.
Following the first collapses among its lenders last year, the US subprime mortgage market began a sharper collapse in recent weeks, sustaining losses that an investment offshoot of Banque Agricole estimated in mid-August to be US$150 billion.
The following is abridged from the August 3 edition of US Socialist Worker.
Michael Moore’s Sicko, released in the US on June 22, has already become one of the five highest grossing documentaries of all time. Predictably, the film’s withering attack on the US’s profit-driven health-care system has elicited a strong response from apologists for neoliberalism. The following article on the reaction to Moore’s film originally appeared as an editorial in the US Socialist Worker.
More than 3 million people in Vietnam are estimated to be still suffering from the devastating health effects of Agent Orange, a herbicide that the US used extensively during the Vietnam War. In 2004, these victims sued nearly 40 US chemical companies for their role in supplying the deadly chemicals, but the case was rejected by a US court. An oral presentation of the appeal by the Vietnamese victims started on June 18 in New York City. US veterans held a vigil in San Francisco on June 19 in support of the appeal. On June 15, on conclusion of a visit to Vietnam, Ricardo Alarcon, the president of Cuba’s parliament, also expressed his support for the Agent Orange victims’ appeal case.
An estimated 3 million Vietnamese are suffering from the horrendous health effects inflicted by the dioxin-laden herbicide Agent Orange, which was employed liberally by the US during the Vietnam War. In 2004, the victims, represented by the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA), initiated a legal action in the US against nearly 40 chemical companies that supplied the chemical.
In the wake of the Democratic Party taking control of the US House of Representatives and Senate in the November 2006 elections, hopes were high among the more liberal layers of the anti-war movement that it spelled an end to President George Bush’s Iraq war. No-one seriously doubted that behind the Democrats’ electoral resurrection was anger about the war, by that stage over three-and-a-half years long.
Documentary maker Michael Moore has made headlines again with his latest film, SiCKO!, which premiered at the Cannes Film festival on May 23. The documentary is a loaded gun aimed at the US health-care system, which is the most expensive in the world and yet provides the worst cover in the First World, according to the latest World Health Organisation scorecard.
A few months ago, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would have seemed the least likely Democratic presidential candidate to lead a congressional charge to repeal the authority of Congress bestowed in 2002 upon George Bush to wage war on Iraq.
A new vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease that causes most incidents of cervical cancer, is being opposed by religious conservatives in the US who claim it will “encourage promiscuity” in young women. According to Newscientist.com, half of all sexually active women in the US between the ages of 18 and 22 are infected with HPV and some of these cases go on to develop into cancer later in life. After successful trials of the vaccine, the US Centers for Disease Control and Protection recommended vaccination of all 11-12 year-olds. But so far only Virginia has passed a law requiring vaccination and West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi and New Mexico have rejected the program. In Texas, the Senate overturned the governor’s order for the program to be introduced in that state.
On October 6, 1976, two bombs ripped through Cubana Flight 455 mid-flight from Barbados to Cuba. All of the 73 civilians onboard, including Cuba’s national youth fencing team and 11 Guyanese medical students, were killed. Until the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, this was the worst terrorist attack in the Western Hemisphere. On April 19, the mastermind behind this mass murder, Luis Posada Carriles, was released on bail from prison in the US, where he was being held since 2005 for violating immigration law, and allowed to return to his luxury penthouse in Miami.