The Alliance for Progress, whatever it signifies for Latin America, has meant for American labor an alliance with government and big business. American labor has never minced words about the unions of the Soviet Union. “The so-called trade unions in the USSR,” the AFL-CIO Executive Council has proclaimed, “are nothing but agencies of the Communist dictatorship.” The implication, sharp and clear, has always been: Unions of America are anything but agencies of government and big business. That has been a pride of American labor, but the new alliance raises questions that may make that pride ring a bit hollow. British Guiana is a good place to begin. American Government, business and labor have never been happy with the leftist administration of Cheddi Jagan that took office after the August, 1961, elections in the British colony. American woes and worries have multiplied with the approach of independence. The AFL-CIO boasts of its part in helping the trade unions there battle the Jagan government. “In British Guiana,” said a recent union advertisement, ‘‘the AFL-CIO has rendered generous aid to the free trade unions resisting the attempt of the pro-Communist Jagan regime to destroy their independence.” On the surface, American labor has moved into British Guiana to help brother unions fight communism. But the situation in British Guiana is far more complicated than that, and its “generous aid” has involved the AFL-CIO in racial and political strife. In addition, not all the aid given by the AFL-CIO has come from the labor treasury...

AN OLD FRIEND, encountering Representative Wilbur D. Mills in a Washington restaurant recently, reached out and squeezed the Arkansas congressman's arm. "Does it feel sore?" he asked. Mills showed a trace of a smile. "I haven't felt anything yet," he replied. Behind the jest was a serious issue: whether Lyndon B. Johnson, for all his Congressional arm-twisting, can persuade Mills to accept the principle of medical care for the aged financed through Social Security or a similar payroll-tax plan. This would represent a breakthrough for Medicare supporters, and might just be enough to send the program through Congress this year. There are many reasons why Medicare has never been approved, but the main obstacle has been Mills. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, where all Social Security and tax bills must originate, Mills has blocked a bill from the House floor for seven years. Although Mills has repeatedly turned aside administration pleas, there have been recent reports, perhaps based more on hope than on substance, that his opposition to the Social Security approach of the King-Anderson Medicare bill is softening...

A peculiar American disease has been isolated by medical scientists. The disease was first described in 1960 by Dr. J. V. Brown in the Western Journal of Surgery. An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association then drew wide medical attention to it. Commercial houses are now marketing products designed to cope with it. Statistics on incidence and morbidity are scanty, and the name of the disease is hazy. Some doctors call it “the fast draw syndrome”; others, “the Dodge City syndrome.” But whatever the name, it is with us. It is most prevalent, of course, among the numerous special gun clubs that have sprouted across the land in recent years. Members, taking a leaf out of days of yore and some scripts of today, draw guns from their holsters, quick as lightning, and fire away. Unlike their legendary heroes, they don’t shoot at one another but aim at balloons. Sometimes, though, they miss the balloon and hit themselves in the right foot...

A month after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an Army colonel testified before Congress that the deed might harm the Army's civilian marksmanship program. "I think that this terrible tragedy did have a tremendous impact upon marksmanship in the United States, and in this way, it focused the attention of all American citizens on the weapon that was used in the commission of that crime - the gun," Colonel John K. Lee, Jr., told the House Appropriations subcommittee on Defense. "The public sentiment is against it as a tool . . . There is a feeling of revulsion against the instrument which caused a tragedy of this sort." Colonel Lee made it clear that he did not share this revulsion: "To me, a gun . . . in itself never commits any act, wrong or right, but is controlled by the people who handle it." Almost all of the Congressmen present indicated that they agreed with the irrelevant logic of this cliché. Colonel Lee's testimony took only a few minutes and covered only $500,000 or so during days of hearings on the $50 billion Department of Defense budget. But his comments on the assassination attracted some attention and so drew notice to a little-known segment of Army life – its program of distributing guns and ammunition to civilians and training the recipients in their use...

Lie Detectors - The Industry, the Technology and the Victims. The first lie detector, employed centuries ago, was a handful of rice dropped into the mouth of a suspect. If the rice stayed dry while he answered questions, he clearly was a liar — exposed under the questionable theory that a liar's salivary glands would dry up when gripped by fear. The lie detector used most commonly today is far more sophisticated. Developed by the psychologist and criminologist Leonard Keeler almost forty years ago, it comprises a pneumatic tube that fits across a subject's chest to measure breathing, an inflatable rubber cuff that wraps around the arm to measure blood pressure and a pair of electrodes that touch the fingers and, by the flow of current, measure the dampness of the palm. These instruments activate pens that draw wiggles and waves on a rolling sheet of paper — a process that gives the lie detector its modern name, polygraph, Greek for "many writings." In theory, an examiner can look at the chart, note any unusual wiggles and waves, and nab his man. This polygraph, obviously more complicated than a few grains of rice, is also touted as more accurate. In truth, it is not...

Old Ben Franklin, ambassador to France during the American revolution, peered out his window early one morning and took in the Paris sun light. "Why are we not taking advantage of all this daylight?" he is supposed to have said. The philosopher and scientist then picked up his quill pen and scratched out a study that showed the immense number of candles that Paris would save if it changed its clocks to gain extra daylight in the summer. With these scratches, Franklin reputedly first outlined the idea that led to the 20th-century daylight saving time system that brings confusion and controversy to America every year. Millions of Americans in 15 states switched from daylight time back to standard Saturday. To some, the time-switching means little, except the twice-annual struggle to remember to juggle their clocks. But others are hotly concerned over the time-switching, and are demanding an end to it. They do battle with the defenders of daylight saving time...