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After a two-week lull in Poland’s labor turmoil a local Solidarity chapter called a strike alert as Soviet and Polish Communist Party leaders again raised the threat of intervention by other members of the Soviet Bloc if “anarchy and disarray” does not end in Poland. Leaders of the independent trade federation’s chapter in Lodz Poland’s second largest city said Wednesday that they ordered a strike alert to protest the firing of five hospital workers four of them Solidarity organizers. Under the strike alert union members distribute leaflets and posters and fly Polish flags in a show of strength. Union members are to meet Saturday in Lodz the center of Poland’s textile industry to discuss their next step. A union spokesman said the five were dismissed without explanation and local and national government officials failed to respond to the union’s appeal for their reinstatement. He said the alert was approved by the 10 million-member labor federation’s central headquarters in the Gdansk. Some felt the Soviet threat of intervention had an eerie echo to events in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, where Communist Bloc countries bonded together an invaded the country, thus ending Prague Spring for good.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., dismissing call to draw the line now on aid to El ! Salvador, says any further escalation of U.S. Involvement depends on what the Soviet Union and Cuba do. The possibility of additional aid, Haig .
said yesterday, “will depend largely on ; the willingness of Cuba, the Soviet Union and those associated with them to continue to Intervene Illegally In the affairs of . the member states of this hemisphere.” Specifically, Haig refused to say ! whether U.S. aid would stop with 20 addi-; tional military advisers and $25 million In new military assistance. “It would be foolish to attempt to do so,” he said. Haig and White House Press Secretary James Brady, meanwhile, denied a Salvadoran rightist leader’s statement that the United States wouldn’t oppose a military coup In the Central American Republic. Brady called that “pure fiction.” “We are In support of the stability of the current government of El Salvador, and anything that can be done to make sure that reforms are carried out and elections held,” Brady told reporters.
And efforts to settle a suit over the teaching of evolution in California schools collapsed Wednesday as the plaintiffs focused on an eighth-grade science text that they said unfairly presents evolution as fact not theory. A settlement seemed near Tues- day as the dispute narrowed to the wording of a few sentences on the development of life forms in state guidelines for science books that can be bought by schools with state funds. But an hour-long meeting Wednesday morning in the chambers of Superior Court Judge Irving Perluss ended without an agreement. Neither side would discuss details but Richard Turner, lawyer for the San Diego-based creationists told reporters “We’re not going to settle this case. We’re going to go all the way to judgment”.
And along with the developing situation in Poland, that’s just a little of what happened, this March 5, 1981 as reported by CBS Radio News.
