May 3, 1999
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — David Sanes, a resident of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, was killed April 19 when two U.S. Navy warplanes on a training mission for the U.S. bombing campaign against Yugoslavia dropped 500-pound bombs on a lookout post there. Four other Vieques residents were injured. A U.S. Navy spokesman called Sanes’s death “an unfortunate accident.”
The same night of the bombing, 200 angry protesters demonstrated at the entrance to the U.S. Navy’s Camp García. The next day 300 people picketed in front of City Hall to demand that the Navy leave.
Vieques is a small island east of the main island wi th a population of 9,500. The U.S. Navy has occupied two-thirds of the island since World War II. It is the only place in the world where ships, aircraft, and submarines can all fire live ammunition in the same general area.
May 3, 1974
On May Day, tens of thousands of workers are expected to fill the streets of cities in Quebec. They will be marching for regular wage increases tied to the rise in the real cost of living and for reopening all contracts to implement this demand.
This action was called by a united front of the three main trade-union federations. The front demanded an increase of the minimum wage and the tying of the minimum wage to the cost-of-living index. They also demanded that pensions, unemployment insurance, welfare payments, and family allowances rise with the cost-of-living index.
On March 29, the united front turned out more than 8,000 demonstrators in front of the United Aircraft plant near Montreal. A major issue in the long fought strike there is the refusal of United Aircraft to grant the workers’ demand for a cost-of-living escalator clause.
May 2, 1949
Signs of growing resistance to the witch hunt are beginning to appear. This past week has seen two significant challenges against those who would stifle free speech and free thought.
At the University of Chicago, 105 professors and educators have attached their names publicly, in the midst of a “subversive” probe of their own institution, to a statement in defense of James Kutcher, the legless veteran fired from his job for membership in the Socialist Workers Party.
And the members of the National Maritime Union in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, have condemned the proposal of their National Council to introduce the witch hunt and “loyalty” purge into the NMU by constitutional amendment.
The defense of democratic rights must be waged on every front by the united efforts of all to whom civil liberties mean more than a catch-word.