April 23, 1976
Thirty-two students and teachers were arrested by New York City cops April 12 at the main building of Hostos Community College in the South Bronx.

The building has been occupied by demonstrators since March 25, when more than 500 people, organized by the Community Coalition to Save Hostos, had taken over the facility as a protest against the city's plan to close down the school.

Hostos is unique among the twenty colleges of the city university system. It is the only bilingual college on the East Coast of the United States....

It opened its doors in 1970, as a by-product of the successful open-admissions struggle waged by Black and Puerto Rican students a year earlier. It was named after Eugenio María de Hostos, an outstanding leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement in the late 1800s.

Hostos is the first college in the City University of New York designed to serve the needs of a ghetto--the South Bronx, an impoverished Puerto Rican neighborhood.

More than 90 percent of the students are Blacks, Puerto Ricans or other minorities--the highest percentage of any CUNY campus.

About half of the 2,600 students are enrolled in special courses teaching English as a second language. In addition, more than sixty classes--ranging from calculus to psychology--are conducted in Spanish, so that students do not have to postpone their education until they can handle the subject in English.
 
 
April 23, 1951
Washington is concealing from the American people the true figures of U.S. casualties in Korea. The losses are almost double the misleading figures given out by the Defense Department.

The actual toll is "considerably more than 100,000," reveals Hansen W. Baldwin, the well-informed military analyst of the N.Y. Times.

"Our total battle casualties--now approximately 60,000 killed, wounded, prisoners, and missing since the Korean war started," wrote Baldwin on April 12, "probably would be swollen to considerably more than 100,000 if actual casualties such as motor accidents and plane crashes, frostbite, disease, etc., were included."

A GI who has had his feet frozen and amputated as a result of being exposed to sub-zero weather in an open fox-hole is not considered a "battle casualty" in the Army records.

Baldwin observes that "one hundred thousand total casualties in nine months of war is a sizable price to pay for a limited conflict in which no decision...is possible." If we accept General Omar Bradley's figures of 250,000 U.S. ground troops in Korea, Army casualties from all causes in nine months are at the frightful rate of more than one out of every three men.

Combined battle casualties of all UN forces were reported on March 31 as 228,941. The South Koreans have been hit hardest, with 168,652 casualties.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home