Illinois
Fast-food workers vow civil disobedience
VILLA PARK, Ill. – Fast-food workers from across the country voted in suburban Chicago to escalate their campaign for higher wages and union representation by including civil disobedience.
More than 1,300 workers gathered Saturday in Villa Park, Illinois. They voted to add sit-down strikes and restaurant occupations to their campaign to win $15-an-hour wages and a union.
Industry officials say a $15-an-hour wage would hurt job creation, and that the solution is more education and job training.
Cindy Enriquez said at the convention the $8.25 she makes an hour at a McDonald’s in Phoenix makes her dream of going to college impossible.
The workers’ effort is supported by the Service Employees International Union.
Their actions so far have included one-day strikes and a protest outside this year’s McDonald’s Corp. shareholder meeting.
France
UN finds second black box of crashed Air Algerie jet
PARIS – French President François Hollande said Saturday he wants the remains of all passengers on the Air Algerie plane that fell from the sky and disintegrated to be brought to France, and the site of this week’s catastrophe marked with a memorial to the 118 who died.
U.N. peacekeepers in Mali found the second black box of the Air Algerie plane at the remote disaster site in the north, and the French president said the data and voice recorders must be analyzed as quickly as possible to determine the cause of the crash early Thursday.
French authorities have said extreme bad weather was the probable cause but aren’t ruling out anything, even terrorism.
Syria
American suicide bomber shown smiling in video
BEIRUT – An al-Qaida-linked group fighting in Syria has released video of the first American to carry out a suicide attack in the country’s civil war, showing him smiling and saying he looked forward to going to heaven.
The Nusra Front released the new video late Friday showing American citizen Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, 22, with other fighters before the May 25 attack that targeted several army positions in the government-held northwestern city of Idlib at the same time.
Pennsylvania
Son: Joe Paterno feared wrongly accusing Sandusky
HARRISBURG, Pa. – Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno told his son the day after his firing that he hadn’t informed the coaching staff about allegations Jerry Sandusky may be a child molester because he was unsure whether they were true, Jay Paterno writes in a new book.
In Paterno Legacy: Enduring Lessons from the Life and Death of My Father, which hit the shelves at some central Pennsylvania bookstores last week, Jay Paterno writes that his father said he didn’t want to accuse somebody of something he didn’t witness or know to be true.
“I didn’t know that he’d done all that stuff,” Joe Paterno told his son, according to the book. “I had no idea. I just didn’t know.”
The book takes a defensive tone toward the elder Paterno, who lost his job shortly after Sandusky’s arrest in November 2011 and died of lung cancer just months later.
Associated Press
