February 19, 1993
Coal miners in West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana set up picket lines February 2 against Peabody Holdings Co., the nation’s largest coal producer. Some 7,000 members of the United Mine Workers of America are involved in the strike. The UMWA struck Peabody after negotiations broke off with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association.
Many coal companies, including Peabody, use an antiunion practice called “double breasting.” Through this tactic, new coal mines are opened under concealed ownership. The operators then hire nonunion miners while laying off at union-organized mines. The procedure directly contradicts a clause in the 1988 contract that requires coal companies to hire laid-off UMWA members for three of every five jobs in nonunion mines owned by BCOA companies.
February 19, 1968
Feb. 13 — Late this afternoon, Lyndon Johnson responded to the critical setback of Washington’s military and political situation in South Vietnam by ordering 10,500 more GIs to the battlefield. These forces will probably be drawn from troops already trained but not previously scheduled for duty in Vietnam. This will bring the total U.S. troop strength to 510,500.
At the beginning of the third week of the revolutionary offensive, the guerrillas continue to hold sections of both Hue and Saigon. Where the rebel forces have withdrawn, whole sections of cities have been bombed to rubble by the U.S. and its Saigon puppets.
In three years, the U.S. devastation of the countryside has driven about two million peasants into refugee hovels in the cities. That number has been increased by a quarter in the last 12 days.
February 20, 1943
The Rumanian government announced its willingness to allow 70,000 Rumanian Jews to leave that country for any refuge selected by the Allies.
The more than 10,000,000 Jews of Europe and North Africa have undoubtedly been the chief sufferers at the hands of capitalism in its most horrible manifestation: fascism.
Before the war, when hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews clamored at American consular offices for permission to enter the United States, only a trickle were allowed visas. The great majority had to wait for deportation to the slave-ghettoes of Eastern Poland, en route to certain death at the hands of fascist detachments.
Only by a mass outcry, not only from the Jewish-American, but the American masses as a whole, can the doors of life be flung open to these 70,000.