New York City police pumped 50 bullets into a car carrying three unarmed African-American men in the early morning hours of November 25, killing one man on his wedding day.
United States
Houston janitors have claimed victory after a four-week strike in a battle that was widely regarded as a test for organised labour in the low-wage, non-union South.
Memorial meetings were held on November 11 in Oakland, California, and on November 18 in New York City to celebrate the life of revolutionary socialist and union activist Caroline Lund. She died on October 14 from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“The central message of the 2006 election was so unmistakable that even George Bush couldn’t miss it. Get. Out. Of. Iraq.” This was how the November 17 US Socialist Worker weekly summed up the results of the November 7 US mid-term congressional elections, in which the Democrats won control of both houses of the US Congress for the first time since 1994.
A simple petition initiated by rank-and-file US service members has caught on and begun to attract a mass sentiment of GI opposition to the continued US occupation of Iraq.
Within hours of the November 7 mid-term US congressional elections, in which voters expressed their disaffection with the US-led war in Iraq by ousting a raft of Republican legislators, US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld fell on his sword, handing President George Bush his resignation.
Many of the 2.6 million US soldiers who served in the Vietnam War have contracted cancer and a cocktail of serious health problems that they believe to be directly linked to their exposure to the dioxin-contaminated defoliant Agent Orange. The US military sprayed Agent Orange heavily in some parts of Vietnam for 10 years during the war.
In the final countdown to the November 7 mid-term congressional elections, Democrats.com has already begun celebrating. Calling for candlelight vigils outside polling stations across the nation on election night, the website says its blue-clad supporters will bear moral witness against voting fraud during the historic moment when the Democrats are expected to retake Congress (well, at least the House of Representatives), with the “Republican Revolution” finally unraveling after 12 long years.
On October 17, a US federal appeals court upheld the US State Department’s 2004 designation of Kahane Chai, an Israeli-based spin-off of US ultra-Zionist Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defence League (JDL), as a “foreign terrorist organisation”.
The “What we think” column from the US Socialist Worker, newspaper of the US International Socialist Organization, argues that although the Republican Party stranglehold on the US Congress may end in the November 7 elections, the Democrats have an abysmal record of trying to “out-Bush” the Republicans.
George Bushs administration claims it is waging a war against terrorism. But since April 2005 Luis Posada Carriles, who worked for the CIA and engaged in brutal terrorist acts including the bombing of a Cuban airliner, has resided in the US, and Washington has resisted pressure to deport him to Venezuela, where he escaped from jail, to face justice. Posada Carriles is currently in immigration detention for entering the US illegally. Even a court filing by the US Justice Department described him as the admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks. The following letter, among the signatories of which are four Nobel laureates, was issued on October 6.
On October 4, Jim Gilchrist, a leader of the racist anti-immigrant Minutemen group, came to speak at Columbia University. Gilchrists hate speech was met with a peaceful demonstration in which students came on the stage unfurling banners reading No human being is illegal and No to racism. The Minutemen responded with force, punching and kicking protesters. Footage of the assaults can be seen at <><http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N41eXtVK7hA>.
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