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    Vol.61/No.25           July 7, 1997 
 
 
25 And 50 Years Ago  
July 7, 1972
NEW YORK - An important victory was scored on June 22 in the ongoing effort to defend Puerto Rican nationalist Carlos Feliciano from the complex maze of legal charges that have been brought against him. A Bronx Supreme Court jury of nine men and three women acquitted Feliciano of all charges of attempted arson and bomb possession.

The prosecution had attempted to prove that Feliciano was planning to bomb a U.S. Army recruiting station on May 16, 1970. A pipe bomb, supposedly found in Feliciano's car by the police, was the main evidence offered by the prosecution. The defense contended that the bombed was planted by the prosecution's star witness, Andrew Gutiérrez, a police detective who had been following Feliciano's movements for about a year. In summarizing the case for the defense, [William] Kunstler asked the jury to find Feliciano not- guilty only if they agreed that Feliciano was being framed- up; none of the essential facts of the case were in dispute except for who put the bomb in Feliciano's car.

In pretrial publicity, prosecutor John Fine contended that Feliciano is an agent of "an alien government outside the limits of the United States," which he later indicated was Cuba. Fine also stated that Feliciano is a member of the MIRA (Movimiento Independentista Revolucionario Armado - Armed Revolutionary Independence Movement), an underground Puerto Rican independence group with an urban guerrilla orientation.

July 5, 1947
JULY 1 - "Let the Senators dig the coal!" was the embittered war-cry of 250,000 soft coal miners who angrily quit the pits last week in a spontaneous strike against the venomous Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Act.

By the week-end all mines were down as the strike continued directly into the scheduled 10-day vacation period for 400,000 members of the AFL United Mine Workers.

All the savage blows of the government against the miners - the injunction and fine levied by a Federal District Judge, the Supreme Court decision against the UMW and John L. Lewis, the Taft-Hartley Act directed most immediately against the mine workers - all these have failed to curb the miners' fighting spirits.

Their latest action is an expression of the American workers' wrath against the new union-busting law. This is but the beginning of wholesale defiance.  
 
 
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