May 9, 2003

You can work for the Red Cross for 50 years, but if you have peace signs in your car, you're not welcome in their lot. That's what H. Thayer Kingsbury of Keene, New Hampshire, found out.read more

May 10, 2003

Tom Treece gives a course called "Public Issues" at Spaulding High School in Barre, Vermont. Right now, he's embroiled in a public issue himself, after a local police officer entered his classroom under peculiar circumstances on April 9 to take photographs of student artwork. read more

April 28, 2003

To be a freethinking high school teacher in New Mexico during the Iraq War was a perilous occupation. On March 11, Carmelita Roybal, who teaches ninth-grade English at Rio Grande High School, was suspended for two days without pay when she did not take down her "No War Against Iraq" sign. Heather Duffy, who teaches art at the school, hung a similar sign the next day in solidarity with Roybal and she, too, was suspended, according to the Albuquerque Tribune.read more

April 25, 2003

CBS is airing a miniseries in May called "Hitler: The Rise of Evil," but the man who was producing it is out of a job for speaking his mind.read more

April 11, 2003

The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, was going to have a celebration later this month in honor of the 15th anniversary of "Bull Durham," the film about a minor league team starring Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, now husband and wife, as well as leading peace activists. But the celebration is off, as Ira Berkow reported in The New York Times on April 11.read more

April 5, 2003

Outspoken actress Susan Sarandon was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at an April 11 event of the United Way of Tampa. The event was going to highlight the leadership of women in volunteerism. But the event is off.read more

April 5, 2003

A classified ad that ran in national newspapers in India last month seeking applicants to work at a U.S. military base in Kuwait specified "non-Muslims only," according to an article in the Hindustan Times on March 26.read more

April 5, 2003

On March 30 in Rochester, Minnesota, pro-war organizers put together a "Support the Troops" rally, which 3,000 people attended at a public park called Soldiers Memorial Field. About thirty members of the Southeastern Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers decided to attend in silent protest. "Support the Troops: Bring Them Home" was one of their signs.read more

April 5, 2003

Warner Brothers decided to change its ad campaign for the new release "What a Girl Wants" to avoid even the hint of political controversy. The initial print, billboard, and poster ads, according to AP, featured "a photograph of star Amanda Bynes wearing a tank top with an American flag on it and flashing the peace sign with her fingers as she stands between two British royal guards. But with the war in Iraq sparking anti-war protests in the read more

April 5, 2003

Republican State Senator John Minnis, who chairs Oregon's senate judiciary committee, introduced a bill that would define people who engage in civil disobedience as "terrorists" and would imprison them for 25 years to life.read more

On June 26, 1945, in San Francisco, the United Nations was born, and former Secretary of State Cordell Hull won the Nobel Prize for his efforts in creating the institution. He called the U.N. Charter "one of the great milestones in man's upward climb toward a truly civilized existence." Almost six decades later, George W. Bush has done more to reverse this upward climb than anyone in the postwar period. read more

March 20, 2003

On March 2, Seth Goldberg of New Jersey was flying from Seattle to San Diego. At the Seattle airport, he says he was picked out for additional screening and sent over to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). There, TSA agents x-rayed his check-through bags and then said they wanted to go through them, so he left them with the TSA personnel and picked them up when he arrived in San Diego.read more

March 18, 2003

Aquil Abdullah is a member of the U.S. national rowing team. He also gets hassled by the government when he flies. On Jan. 31 at Newark International Airport, Abdullah was detained and missed his flight because he is on the "no fly list" that the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration have put together. (See "The No Fly List, The Progressive, June issue.) According to Ira Berkow's column in the Feb. 21 issue of The New York Times, Abdullah had a similar experience a few months back. Abdullah, by the way, was a silver medalist in the 1999 Pan-American Games.read more

March 18, 2003

On February 6, the New York Sun published an editorial saying that peace activists were "giving, at the very least, comfort to Saddam Hussein." That meets the definition of treason in the Constitution, as Timothy Noah noted in Slate on Feb. 11. (Noah, for his part, cited Joe Conason in Salon, Brendan Nyhan in Spinsanity, and Eugene Volokh in National Review Online.)read more

March 18, 2003

Stephen F. Downs, the chief lawyer for New York State's Commission on Judicial Conduct, was arrested on March 3 for refusing to take off a peace T-shirt in a mall near Albany.read more