March 29, 1993
LOS ANGELES — Rodney King’s testimony in the trial of the four cops who brutalized him dealt a setback to the racist campaign by the police and government officials to turn him from victim into criminal.
King’s testimony confirmed what was plain to see in the famous videotape of the incident — that he was the victim of police violence, not a “PCP-crazed giant” who posed a threat to the cops, as the defense has systematically and falsely argued.
In his testimony King reaffirmed that, after the police stopped him on the night of March 3, 1991, he fully complied with commands given to him by the cops.
He told the court that he did not try to resist arrest, nor did he attempt to attack the cops, as the defense lawyers have claimed. “I was trying to stay alive,” he said, “and they never gave me a chance to stay still.”
March 25, 1968
The University of Rome has been occupied by its students for 47 days now, and the struggle between the students and the Italian government is far from over.
The major grievances of the students are directed against the archaic structure of the universities and the authoritarianism of the professors and the administration. In Rome, there are close to 70,000 students enrolled at the University, and there is physical room for only 6,000.
The students are not alone in this fight, which began in Turin and rapidly spread across the country. Last week every single public university was occupied by the students; university education had come to a standstill; the struggle was spreading to the high schools; attempts to use police power to force the reopening of the universities had brought only more determined resistance from the students.
March 27, 1943
No matter what the final version of the motion picture, “Mission to Moscow,” will show when it is presented on the screen a few weeks from now, it has been definitely established that the purpose of its authors, advisers and producers was to film the biggest frame-up lie in the history of motion pictures.
Warner Brothers produced the picture from the book by ex-Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. The book and film give the official Stalinist version of the infamous Moscow Trials of 1936-37, which were staged to discredit and eliminate many of the working class opponents of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, and were rejected by world labor opinion as crude frame-ups. The trials were filled with all kinds of false charges against [Russian revolutionary leader Leon] Trotsky, all of which were later irrefutably disproved.