1. Taking stock of the cumulative long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which are staggering and growing

Our perspective:

 It is important to state clearly that the Trump administration’s false assertion of the end of the pandemic was enabled by his predecessor Joe Biden, who notoriously declared “the pandemic is over” in an interview in September 2022. At that time, there were 800,000 infections per day. Since then, five additional waves of the pandemic have occurred, while the death toll has grown by at least 7 million worldwide and by 250,000 in the US.

2. In the 1930s, when the world market collapsed, there arose rival trade and currency blocs and deep economic conflicts that played a role in creating the conditions for war. There are now signs that such developments are again getting underway

3. The direct precedent for the Trump administration’s criminalization of thought is the concept of Willensstrafrecht (“punishment of the will”), developed by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler

 What does it mean to state that not only “beliefs” but “expected beliefs” can have “adverse foreign policy consequences”? This goes beyond violating the First Amendment, criminalizing not only speech, but thought itself, and the potential for thought. The assertion is a wholesale repudiation of the principles that guided the founders of the American republic, who believed, as James Madison put it, that “conscience is the most sacred of all” rights.

4. Amid the Gaza genocide and President Trump’s escalating trade war, not only a US war but also a US deal with Iran would ultimately threaten war with China and Russia, who signed alliances with Iran

5. A Socialist Equality Party online meeting exposes the fraudulent character of claims by all the parliamentary parties and the corporate media that Australia is an “exception” to the crisis unfolding worldwide

6. Australia's federal election: All of the major parties and the media are complicit in the criminal US-led war against Russia in Ukraine and knowingly propagate the lies used to justify it

7. Sri Lankan President Dissanayake guarantees full cooperation with Modi's India, Washington’s key strategic partner in South Asia as the US ramps up its confrontation with China

8. In an interview with the pseudo-leftist online Jacobin website, the United Auto Workers union president, Shawn Fain, attempts damage control over his embrace of Trump's tariff measures under conditions of mounting rank-and-file anger over layoffs and attacks on democratic rights

9. How a union representing doctors in New South Wales, Australia is betraying them

10. The position of the US government is that under the Alien Enemies Act the president can disappear anyone to a foreign gulag and then claim they are outside any judicial review

 Following a Supreme Court ruling on Thursday, the Trump administration has steadfastly refused to return— or even acknowledge the whereabouts of— Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland resident. He is one of more than 260 men who were kidnapped by the US immigration Gestapo and deported to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) under the Alien Enemies Act

11. Among hundreds revoked across the United States, the US Trump administration revokes the visas of 22 current and former international students at the University of Michigan

 A protester in Ann Arbor, Michigan

12. Using attacks on various monuments by participants in demonstrations against police violence as his pretext, US President Donald Trump redirects humanities-funding to build a “National Garden of American Heroes"

13. A summit in Brussels, Belgium underlines how the United States and its former European imperialist allies are increasingly working at cross purposes in the war against Russia in Ukraine

14. While denying plans to directly cut Social Security checks, the US Trump administration is imposing job cuts, office closures and “identity-proofing” requirements designed to wreck the Social Security Administration and block seniors from applying for and receiving benefits

15. Quebec, Canada's Bill 89, that gives the government power to put an end to any work stoppage, represents a major new attack on the working class— not just in Quebec, but across Canada

16. A socialist response to China’s being labelled “a foreign
hostile force” by Taiwan’s president

 How did the DPP rise as “the opposition” in the late 1980s? What role did the KMT and US imperialism play in this development? What do social democrats and Stalinists mean when they say “peace”?

17. Peaceful protestors holding pillows to represent murdered Palestinian children are arrested in Dublin, Ireland

18. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has branded opposition to Israel’s war and expressions of support for the Palestinians as antisemitic, with police making mass arrests and mounting a clampdown on student protests at university campuses in the United Kingdom

19. Helen Halyard's classic remembrance of Viola Gregg Liuzzo, the Detroit mother of five murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama in 1965

Viola Liuzzo

Viola Liuzzo’s determination to participate in the struggle reflected great changes taking place in the US in the 1960s. The struggle in Selma was part of a growth of militancy and political awareness that would find expression later in the decade in the fight against the Vietnam War as well as a massive strike wave involving many sections of the working class. The mass movement for civil rights came only a few decades after the explosive battles out of which the industrial unions were formed.

Here is a link to a copy of From Selma to Sorrow

24. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia:

• Nepal: 

Teachers fight for better pay and conditions

• India:

Telangana state road transport workers to strike indefinitely

Sari weavers in Telangana strike for higher pay

Uttar Pradesh power utility workers to strike against privatization

Gujarat public health workers end strike after government assurances

ASHA health workers in Kerala determined to remain on strike until demands are met

Vocational teachers in Himachal Pradesh start hunger-strike protest

• Pakistan:
  

Sacked Steel Mills workers demand reinstatement

• Bangladesh: 
  

TNZ Group garment workers resume protest for unpaid wages

Garment and shoe factory workers in the Chattogram Export Processing Zone protest termination              

•  Sri Lanka:

   Garment workers protest unpaid New Year bonus

• Australia:
  

BAE shipyard workers continue rolling stoppages in South Australia

Boral Resources workers in Queensland strike for higher pay

Tomago Aluminum maintenance workers in New South Wales vote for industrial action

Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health workers begin industrial action for higher pay

25. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!

26. San Francisco, California city legal resources for immigrants needing help