1. The World Socialist Web Site and the fight against war, genocide, fascism and the Big Lie
Trotsky wrote, in response to the Big Lies of his time: “Revolution explodes the social lie. Revolution speaks the truth. Revolution begins by giving things and social relationships their real name.”
These words define the principles that guide the World Socialist Web Site.
In recent weeks, multiple universities have either withheld or threatened to revoke graduating students’ diplomas for using their commencement platforms to denounce the US-backed genocide in Gaza. This is a deeply anti-democratic attack on the First Amendment and freedom of speech.
The Trump administration seeks to transform all institutions of higher education into arms of the surveillance state and tools for propaganda. It has demanded direct control over curriculum at several Harvard departments.
4. Chaos and repression on first day of US-backed Gaza “aid” operation
One father told Al Jazeera:
We are suffering from starvation. We need to feed our children who are hungry. What else can we do? Fear does not compare to hunger.
5. Merz government on course for war
By escalating the war against the nuclear power Russia, the Merz government is taking a huge risk. An expansion of the war threatens to turn the whole of Europe into a wasteland. Despite this, not one serious voice is being raised against it in official politics and the establishment media.
6. Trump issues flurry of pardons for millionaire tax cheat, corrupt sheriff and reality-TV swindlers
Over the last 48 hours, the convicted felon and professional swindler in the White House has issued a flurry of pardons targeting those who politically, economically, or ideologically support his fascist agenda. The pardons are not acts of mercy for those wrongly or unfairly convicted and sentenced by the US injustice system, but political patronage doled out by President Donald Trump to his ruling class allies.
The strike at Pratt & Whitney has been ended in similar fashion to that of the New Jersey Transit engineers, who were sent back to work by officials from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) without even having seen the new contract. In the run-up to the vote at Pratt & Whitney, workers were raising questions on Facebook about the mysterious agreement being hidden from strikers. On the morning of Tuesday, May 27, workers were given a handout of the “highlights” of the agreement, which solicited the immediate disgust of many workers.
On Monday, the workers sent their own representatives to the Labour Office in Colombo to discuss their fears. Only then did the workers come to know that the corporation and the Inter-Company Employees Union (ICEU) leaders had entered into a deal.
Although yesterday was a day off, around 2,000 workers and supporters from the area gathered at the factory to protest. They all warmly received Aruna Nishantha Malalagama’s speech....
Amazon is one of the largest private employers in the United States. With over 1.1 million workers, what happens at Amazon’s warehouses isn’t local—it’s national and international.
The company’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, backs President Donald Trump, who in return has nominated David Keeling, a former safety director for both Amazon and UPS, to head the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration—in a move hailed by Teamsters President Sean O’Brien.
11. Australian private hospital giant’s liquidation threatens jobs and patients
Australia’s second biggest private hospital operator, Healthscope, was placed in receivership on Monday. This means the future prospects of 38 hospitals, 19,000 staff and hundreds of thousands of patients are now in the hands of ruthless international hedge funds, to which the private equity fund-owned company owes an estimated $1.6 billion.
12. Australia: Northern Beaches Hospital, a case study in the consequences of profit-driven healthcare
Like its federal and other state counterparts, the New South Wales Labor administration is systematically starving the public health sector of desperately needed funds while imposing brutal working conditions on all health workers and refusing to pay them decent wages. In fact, the harsh and dangerous conditions in the Northern Beaches Hospital are little different from those in all public sector hospitals.
13. The Virginia Opera’s Loving v. Virginia revisits critical civil rights battle of the 1960s
The Loving case raises profound democratic issues that cannot fail to resonate today. The opera focuses on the lives and case of Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple from rural Caroline County, Virginia, whose relationship was at the center of the legal fight.
Financial engineering created by the CBC (Taiwan's Central Bank) and regulators has only prepared the way for a much bigger financial disaster. A rush on Taiwan’s life insurance sector will dwarf the collapse of SVB [the US Silicon Valley Bank], the second-largest bank failure in US history.
It would be naïve to suppose that any looming financial calamity of this scale will stay in Taiwan.
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Taiwan is experiencing a perfect storm. As Trump’s economic offensive against the world’s second largest economy escalates, the Taiwanese ruling elite’s complicity in US manoeuvres against China (be these economic, financial or military) will also intensify.
The stance on “world peace” taken by Lai Ching-te’s government is comparable to that of US-backed Arab despotic regimes.
Arab client states have enabled the Gaza genocide by serving as the border Gestapo and supposed peace brokers. They praise the would-be führer Trump, who has been carrying out US-Israeli ethnic cleansing operations on a scale unseen since the Holocaust, as “a man of peace” who “wants to bring peace,” to quote Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. “We can continue working together to achieve it,” the Emir told Trump.
15. Ofcom’s “investigation” into Royal Mail: A cover for sabotaging the Universal Service Obligation
[The United Kingdom's] Royal Mail delivered only 76.5 percent of First Class mail within one day— well below the 93 percent target— and 92.2 percent of Second Class mail, versus the required 98.5 percent. This is the third consecutive year of systemic failure. Ofcom’s threat of a fine follows token penalties of £5.6 million and £10.5 million in 2023 and 2024—paltry amounts for a company being restructured to gouge out hundreds of millions in profit.
16. US postal unions seek to divert opposition to privatization to dead-end appeals to Congress
Union heads from the four major postal unions participated in a Capitol Hill roundtable on May 14 organized by US Representative Stephen Lynch and Representative Steny Hoyer. The roundtable was a stunt designed to cover up the responsibility of the union bureaucrats and the Democratic Party for preparing the way for the privatization of the United States Postal Service, a top priority of the Trump administration.
Workplace accidents and deaths, caused mainly by the unbridled capitalist profit motive, are an international problem of the working class and are on the rise worldwide amid escalating attacks by the ruling class on working conditions.
