Vol. 71/No. 29      August 6, 2007

Olympia Newton, 29, replaces Argiris Malapanis as editor. Malapanis edited the paper for the last four years. Paul Pederson, 31, is the Militant’s new managing editor.

Newton joined the Militant’s volunteer staff in September 2006. She has covered U.S. politics as well as developments in China, Cuba, north Korea, and Venezuela.

Newton joined the communist movement 10 years ago in Washington, D.C. Before becoming an editorial volunteer for the paper, she worked in the national office of the Socialist Workers Party. She has served on the party’s National Committee since 2002.

From 2004 to 2006, Newton lived in Price, Utah, where she was part of organizing solidarity with miners at the Co-Op mine in Huntington, Utah, who fought a three-year battle to organize themselves into the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). While working in a coal mine, she wrote for the Militant on that struggle and on the Militant Fighting Fund—a broad labor defense effort to defend the paper from a harassment lawsuit filed against the it, individual Co-Op miners, the UMWA, and scores of supporters of the union-organizing struggle by the Co-Op bosses.

Over the years, Newton has reported for the Militant from Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, north Korea, and several countries in Europe. Since 2001, she has represented the Young Socialists leadership at international meetings of the World Federation of Democratic Youth.

Pederson has been a member of the Militant’s full-time volunteer staff since September 2002, during which time he served as the paper’s copy editor and business manager.

He has covered political developments in the Middle East and reported from Western Sahara in 2003 and Palestine in 2004. In 2006, Pederson reported from West Virginia and Kentucky on the response by workers to a rash of mine deaths in those states. He has also written articles on U.S. politics, the labor movement, and the economy.

Pederson joined the communist movement in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after returning from a youth exchange in Cuba in 1996. Before volunteering for the Militant staff, he was a meat packer and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in Brooklyn, and Long Island, New York, where he distributed the paper among his co-workers.

A member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee since 1999, Pederson was on the ballot as the SWP’s candidate for U.S. Congress from Brooklyn in 2000 and 2002. He has been the chairperson of the New York branch of the party since 2005.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home