Vol. 76/No. 32 August 27, 2012
August 28, 1987
MONTREAL—For more than two weeks in July the Canadian government illegally detained 174 Sikhs from India seeking refugee status. They were kept in a military barracks in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Held incommunicado in virtual concentration camp conditions they were branded as suspected terrorists.On June 5 the Quebec Provincial Police arrested three leaders of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN) on trumped-up criminal charges.
The attacks against the Sikhs and the CSN are part of the most far-reaching offensive against democratic and trade union rights in Canada since World War II.
The brutal treatment of the Sikhs is part of a campaign by Canada’s ruling rich to convince working people in Canada that people fleeing from repressive regimes and severe economic hardship “steal Canadian jobs.”
August 27, 1962
William Worthy, noted Negro journalist, was convicted of the crime of re-entering the United States, his native land, without a passport after a two-hour trial in Miami on Aug. 8.The trial’s shortness was because Worthy does not deny the fact on which the precedent-setting charge is based, namely, that he re-entered the U.S. from Cuba without a passport.
Immediately after Judge Emmett Cheate pronounced the verdict of guilty, Worthy’s attorneys announced an appeal. Sentencing was deferred, probably until mid-September, and the defendant was continued in the $5,000 bail set earlier.
“If at any time in the past five years I had been willing to go along with a State Department deal on passport renewal,” the veteran newsman declared after the trial, “I would not stand convicted now of coming home to the land of my birth ‘without bearing a valid passport.’”
August 28, 1937
When Japanese imperialism moved into North China six weeks ago, Gen. Sun Cheh-yuan, the Nanking Government’s representative in Peiping, unconditionally accepted all the conditions posed by the invaders. He agreed to the withdrawal of all Chinese forces from the Peiping Tientsin area and forced some of the units under his command to evacuate their positions.The resistance of the 29th army soldiers to the orders of their own commanders and the revolt of the supposedly pro-Japanese Chinese militia at Tungchow, however, convinced the Japanese imperialists that they could not reliably depend on any Chinese forces. So they moved in with men, planes and tanks and took over Peiping and Tientsin themselves. The soldiers of the 29th army put up an heroic but futile resistance. They were smashed by the enemy in a week.
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