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Vol. 79/No. 12      April 6, 2015

 
25, 50, and 75 Years Ago

April 6, 1990
Wrapped in the mantle of the new Soviet presidency, Mikhail Gorbachev has sharply escalated his confrontation with the popular independence movement in Lithuania, attempting to force it to retreat from its March 11 political break with the Soviet Union. It is the first republic ever to use its right guaranteed by the Soviet constitution to secede from the Soviet Union.

Orders, ultimatums, threats, and provocations have come streaming at the Lithuanian government from the Kremlin. Soviet troops have crisscrossed Vilnius, the capital. Lithuanian youth who have refused to serve in the Soviet army have been rounded up. Moscow has now said that it will draft several thousand Lithuanian youth into the army. The Lithuanian government says its citizens are not subject to Moscow’s military conscription.

April 5, 1965

NEW YORK — Two demonstrations here protested the police department’s whitewash of Detective John C. Devlin, who beat and shot Gregorio Cruz, a 22-year-old Puerto Rican, last September.

Devlin claimed that he had stopped young Cruz for questioning as a possible homicide suspect and that Cruz slugged him and ran away. Devlin, who weighs 210 pounds, claimed that, after he had again caught the 140-pound youth, the latter nearly knocked him unconscious, forcing Devlin to shoot him three times.

Cruz, who police admit had no connection with the crime allegedly being investigated, charges that Devlin, without identifying himself as a police officer, accosted him in the dark in front of the Alfred E. Smith Housing Project.

April 6, 1940

Over a hundred delegates and alternates are making their way to the special national convention of the Socialist Workers Party this week.

Coming by automobile, by rail, by ship, by thumb, comrades from the Golden Gate all the way to New England and from Oregon down to Texas are converging on New York for the opening of the convention on April 5.

Among those representing branches of the party are automobile workers from Michigan, sailors and longshoremen from the West Coast and the Gulf, teamsters from the Mid-West area, steel workers from Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, cannery workers from California and W.P.A. militants from everywhere.

The convention will take a definitive stand on the question of the attitude to take towards the Soviet Union in the unfolding world war.  
 
 
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