August 21, 2000
PRETORIA, South Africa — “Let us not equivocate: a tragedy of unprecedented proportions is unfolding in Africa,” Nelson Mandela told delegates at the 13th international AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa. “Decades have been chopped from life expectancy and young child mortality is expected to more than double in the most severely affected countries.”
Southern Africa is the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic. The spread of the disease is fueled by the horrendous social conditions imposed on hundreds of millions of workers and peasants as a result of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation, including the oppression of women.
There are 16 countries on the continent where more than one-tenth of the adult population (aged 15-49) is infected with HIV. By 1998, AIDS-related diseases had killed 11.5 million Africans.
August 15, 1975
James Eagle, one of the four Indians the FBI was looking for on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation last June, has been charged with the deaths of two FBI agents. Eagle, nineteen, and his family are known on the reservation as American Indian Movement supporters.
The charges are based on an FBI claim that two prisoners who had been incarcerated with Eagle told agents he had admitted to the shootings. The charges can only be considered a frame-up, the latest in a long series the government has been fabricating against Indian militants in the past several years.
On July 26, American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks was convicted on charges of armed riot and assault in such a frame-up. Russell Means, another AIM leader who faces multiple frame-up charges, was the target of an apparent murder attempt on the Rosebud Indian Reservation July 28.
August 21, 1950
By more than doubling its military budget in the space of nine weeks the Truman administration has started a switch of the domestic economy from a civilian to a war basis.
The crises of war economy take the form of inflation (soaring prices, acute shortages of necessities and consumer goods, debasement of currency, shattering of the fiscal system).
Since Truman’s undeclared war in Korea erupted, in the space of these few weeks, military armaments have been hiked in price by 40% to 50% and in some cases even by as much as 90%.
It is these fantastic inflationary leaps in arms costs that will determine, as the months go by, the general price levels. A military budget of $50 billion annually would mean a 20% reduction in living standards. This means the scourge of inflation on a scale never experienced by the workers of this country.