“No ifs! No buts! No education cuts!” was the chant by hundreds of students from several Philadelphia public high schools who walked out of classes May 9 in a spontaneous, militant march protesting $60 million in additonal education cuts. The demonstration was organized largely through online messaging and Facebook. After twice circling City Hall in [...]
The 28th anniversary of the racist bombing of the MOVE family house in Philadelphia, which killed 11 men, women and children, was observed May 11 with an event that asked participants to consider the question: “Where were you when you learned about the May 13, 1985, bombing of MOVE?” Around 150 people, including members of [...]
“Jobs, not jails or deportation; nothing less than legalization!” was a popular chant among the tens of thousands of workers, including undocumented immigrants, who turned out for May Day protests across the U.S. From coast to coast, they also demanded an end to racist and anti-union campaigns pushed by profit-hungry bosses at workers’ expense. Several [...]
Philadelphia — In one of many milestones in the decades-long movement to free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, the documentary film “Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal” opened at the Ritz at the Bourse, a Landmark theater, on May 3 for a six-day run. Film director and producer Stephen Vittoria and co-producer Noelle Hanrahan, of [...]
Philadelphia — On April 24, in celebration of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 59th birthday, hundreds of people from several East Coast cities rallied outside the Center City office of Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams to demand Abu-Jamal’s release. An award-winning journalist and former Black Panther Party member, Abu-Jamal spent nearly 30 years on Pennsylvania’s death row falsely [...]
In December 1981, award-winning journalist and political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal was accused of killing a Philadelphia police officer. While professing his innocence, Abu-Jamal was railroaded to Pennsylvania’s death row until December 2011, when a global movement succeeded in winning his release into the general prison population. This movement won’t stop until Abu-Jamal is released from [...]
Philadelphia — For the second time in less than two weeks, African-American professors and students at Temple University staged demonstrations on April 10 to protest racist attacks on the school’s Department of African-American Studies. The hundreds who turned out were joined by activists from the community. A march through the campus followed the rally. As the nationally renowned [...]
Residents of Mayflower, Ark., found out the hard way on March 29 that their subdivision was built atop Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Pegasus pipeline. The pipe ruptured, sending upwards of 10,000 barrels of heavy tar sands oil gushing onto yards and streets. Mayflower is about 25 miles north of Little Rock. Built in the 1940s, the [...]
For over 30 years, former Black Panther member and Philadelphia community activist, Russell Maroon Shoatz, has been held under torturous conditions, including two decades in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania prisons. Shoatz’s successful escapes from two maximum-security prisons earned him the title “Maroon.” In 2013, the first published collection of his accumulated written works along with [...]
On March 24, the pro-Monsanto “Farmer Assurance Provision, Section 735” rider was quietly slipped into the Agricultural Appropriations provisions of HR 933, the Continuing Resolution spending bill designed to avert a federal government shutdown. Section 735 should have been labeled the “Monsanto Protection Act.” Now law for the next six months after President Barack Obama [...]
A wonderful civilian-military parade capped the inauguration of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela on April 19. Maduro took the oath of office in the National Assembly as constitutional president for the period 2013 to 2019. Some 61 international delegations were present, including many heads of state, not only from Latin America and the Caribbean but from as far away as Iran and the Sahrawi Republic. […]
