June 10, 1977
STEARNS, Ky.--The 160 miners on strike here against the Blue Diamond Coal Company are all men. But the ten-month-old-strike for a United Mine Workers contract is also of great concern to the women of this small mining community.

And they’re not about to sit back and await the results. Wives, mothers, and friends of the striking miners formed the Stearns Women’s Club in March of this year.

It’s not your traditional "ladies’ club." In fact, the local sheriff and Blue Diamond’s vice-president have on occasion referred to the women as a "mob."

"They are not going to break this strike," says women’s club President Wanda Gibson, young wife of one of the strikers. "The men have been through too much."

The "too much" includes gun-toting company security guards who make the picket line a shooting range each night with steady gunfire. And it includes a judge who enforces his court order--intended to "preserve law and order"--only when it comes to strikers.

The union has been fined thousands of dollars for violating the court order, which includes a limit on the number of pickets. The judge ordered the union to post $100,000 bond out of which any future "damage" to company property would be paid. And thirty-one men have been indicted by a grand jury in the shooting of two of the company gun thugs.

What happens if the judge tries to send the miners to jail?

"I’ll tell you what I would like to do," Gibson told the Militant. "I would like to go to the picket lines to take their places."  
 
June 9, 1952
The Korea prisoner-of-war issue threatens to blow up in the Pentagon’s face as protests and suspicions of Washington’s actions and intentions in Korea mount throughout the world. A suppressed International Red Cross report on the Koje island prison camp, unearthed by I.F. Stone of the N.Y. Daily Compass, is helping to reveal the true picture of the PW "screening" process. Resistance by the prisoners themselves is a big factor in making Washington’s duplicity clear to the world.

In Britain, former Prime Minister Attlee and other members of the Labor opposition have questioned the Churchill government sharply on the Korean situation. The N.Y. Times of May 29 reports in a dispatch from London: "Several matters connected with the fighting in Korea are disturbing British public opinion ... For instance, there is a widely held suspicion that the United States itself wants to forestall an armistice for the present, and is using the prisoners of war issue as an excuse... In short, the Korean war, never popular in this country, is growing even more unpopular and the American conduct of it is constantly more suspect."

The Canadian government has protested to Washington against the use of its troops in Korea as guards in PW camps, reflecting the growing suspicion that soldiers on Koje island are being called upon to do a dirty job of butchery and repression. A leading Australian paper demanded in a May 27 editorial that the censorship over Korean events be lifted. "... We could be involved in a global war on account of some policy move there without any clear idea of how it came about," the Melbourne Argus said.  
 
 
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