February

Pablo Neruda: One poet, many lessons

OPINION “As the first bullets ripped into the guitars of Spain, when blood instead of music gushed out of them, my poetry stopped dead like a ghost in the streets of human anguish and a rush of roots and blood surged up through it. From then on, my road meets everyman’s road. And suddenly I see that from the south of solitude I have moved north, which is the people, the people whose sword, whose handkerchief my humble poetry wants to be, to dry the sweat of its vast sorrows and give it a weapon in its struggle.” — Pablo Neruda, “Memoirs”

Dont take away Social Security

OPINION After reading a column in her local paper, the Albuquerque Journal, calling Bush’s Social Security privatization plan “a step in the right direction,” PWW reader Rose Shaw didn’t just get mad – she wrote a response! It was published on the Journal’s op ed page Jan. 5. Her piece is reprinted below. We hope other readers will follow her lead.

LETTERS

D.C. hotel employees OK pact

WASHINGTON (PAI) — Using the presidential inauguration as leverage, workers at Washington, D.C.’s top hotels reached a new three-year contract with major downtown chain-owned hotels. Local 25 set its strike deadline after learning the hotels planned to overwork the employees through George W. Bush’s inauguration — and then lock them out. The strike threat forestalled that scheme.

NATIONAL CLIPS

NASHVILLE: Baptists call for Iraq war end, no-vote on Gonzalez / WASHINGTON: Victory for Guantanamo prisoners / COLUMBUS, Ga.: Freedom fighters sentenced / BALTIMORE: NAACP defies IRS Probe / MONTGOMERY, Ala.: State sues drug companies / WASHINGTON: Americans support legal status for immigrants