Current Events

  Joseph Alcoff has been charged with aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation, and conspiracy, among other offenses. By Victor Fiorillo · 1/29/2019, 9:55 a.m.    It has been more than two months since two United States Marines said they were assaulted in Philadelphia by a “mob” just blocks from the controversial We the People Rally, and now a third man has been charged in the attack.    The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office has charged 37-year-old Washington, D.C., resident Joseph Alcoff with aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation, and conspiracy — all felonies — among other charges. He has pleaded not guilty and is currently out on bail. Alcoff joins codefendants Tom Keenan and Thomas Massey in the case. Both Keenan and Massey were arrested at the end of November and are also out on bail awaiting trial. Suspects Thomas Massey (left) and Thomas Keenan (right) in their Philadelphia Police Department mugshots.

  The Democratic Party and its affiliated media outlets are insisting that all political energy must be directed toward the election of Joe Biden. This line comes not only from the Democratic Party itself, but also from ostensibly “socialist” or left organizations that surround it. The leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) circulated a letter earlier this month pledging to go all out to ensure as large a possible turnout for Biden. Wednesday evening, Adolph Reed, a leading left academic and DSA member, insisted: “Obviously, we need to do whatever can be to try to bring about a Biden victory.” The “left” argument for supporting Biden was summed up in an op-ed published in the New York Times on Tuesday. The column, written by freelance journalist Zeeshan Aleem, was published in the newspaper’s print edition under the headline, “Why Socialists Should Vote for Biden in Droves.” The decision by the New York Times , the main newspaper of the Democratic Party, t

 

Islamic Militant   David Hockney Happy Picture

  2020 11:41 AM CDT By Bill Meyer ‘40 Years a Prisoner’ It was over 35 years ago when Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo ordered the bombing of a townhouse in West Philly that was inhabited by dozens of militant Black revolutionaries, killing over 11 people inside the burning edifice, including women and children and the founder of the movement, John Africa. Never before or since has this type of violent act against citizens been done in U.S. history. This revolutionary group called MOVE suffered at the hands of the police, and eventually, nine of its members were given life sentences for the killing of a police officer. The last of those who survived imprisonment were finally released this year after 40 years in priso

  David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian , New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020, 240 pp. In 2005, we suggested  on the WSWS that David King—British artist, designer, editor, photohistorian and archivist—was “one of the more remarkable artistic-intellectual personalities of our time.” There is no reason, four-and-a-half years after his sad death in May 2016, to retreat from that assertion. David King—Designer Activist Visual Historian Rick Poynor, a frequent writer on graphic design and visual communication and founder of Eye magazine, a quarterly print magazine on graphic design and visual culture, has written a well-researched, sympathetic and honest book on King’s life work, David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian (Yale University Press). The new volume is welcome and recommended to both those familiar with King’s art and design and those coming to it for the first time. In his preface, Poynor argues convincingly that what “we see in King’