Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. David North’s Nuremberg video on US war against Iran evokes powerful response
A video of World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North speaking outside the Nuremberg Palace of Justice on the criminality of the US war against Iran has been viewed nearly 200,000 times across social media platforms, generating an outpouring of support.
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North’s remarks were made shortly after he was barred from speaking at the “No Kings” rally in Nuremberg on Saturday by Democratic Party-aligned organizers, who blocked him from addressing the crowd because he intended to condemn the illegal war against Iran and the Democrats’ support for it, raising similar points to those he made in his video on the Nuremburg Trials. Video of the confrontation at the No Kings protest was also widely shared on X and other platforms.
2. As ground troops arrive in the Middle East, Trump threatens “obliteration” of Iran’s infrastructure
On Monday, the 30th day of the US-Israeli war against Iran, US President Donald Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran’s energy generation and water desalination plants unless it surrendered to his demands. “If for any reason a deal is not shortly reached,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, “we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!).”
Destroying all of Iran’s power plants would uproot the basis of civilized life in the country—cutting off water treatment, hospitals and food refrigeration. And the destruction of its water desalination plants would deepen the already catastrophic water crisis in Iran, which is facing the worst drought in its modern history.
What Trump is threatening is a war crime — the latest in a war full of them. Article 54 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions states: “It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations...”
Trump’s threats constitute collective punishment—one of the oldest prohibitions in the laws of war. It is the Gaza model applied to a country of 90 million: the systematic destruction of the infrastructure necessary to sustain human life.
The criminality of the Trump regime is so naked that even the media has been compelled to take note. When NBC’s Garrett Haake asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt why the president was “threatening what would amount to potentially a war crime,” she did not deny it. She replied that the US Armed Forces “has capabilities beyond their wildest imagination. And the president is not afraid to use them.”
The New York Times published an opinion piece Monday headlined “Is Trump Threatening to Commit a War Crime?” It admitted that Trump’s threat “would almost certainly amount to a war crime. One of the central tenets of the laws that govern modern conflict is that the targeting of civilians is off limits in military campaigns.”
This is true. But the entire war is criminal and illegal. The Nuremberg Tribunal defined the initiation of a war of aggression as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” This is precisely what the US-Israeli war on Iran is.
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There is a logic to the increasingly genocidal rhetoric coming out of the White House. The Trump administration, having hoped to overthrow the Iranian government by assassinating its leaders, has failed to achieve its objectives and must either escalate US involvement in the war or face a catastrophic defeat. Trump called it an “excursion” and said it would be over in days. A month later, thousands are dead—but Iran’s government remains intact, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and oil prices have surged 59 percent.
The administration is turning to the Gaza model—the total destruction of a society as a method of war. In Gaza, Israel has killed more than 72,000 people, displaced the entire population of 2.3 million, destroyed every hospital and university and reduced the territory to rubble. Trump is threatening similar methods to a country 40 times the size of Gaza.
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The Trump administration operates outside of all legal and constitutional restraint. It is the criminal underworld in power, speaking the language of gangsterism on a global scale. Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday that his “preference” is to “take the oil in Iran,” resurrecting the colonial premise that a great power can invade, destroy, and then claim ownership over a nation’s resources.
A ground invasion of Iran—a country of 90 million with a large military, rugged terrain and the capacity to inflict serious casualties—will not produce a swift victory. When the invasion bogs down, when casualties mount, when the political crisis deepens—what will be Trump’s next move?
As White House officials are so fond of saying, “Nothing is off the table.” Mohamad Safa, who served 12 years as the Permanent Representative of the Patriotic Vision Association to the United Nations, resigned this week, warning that the US “preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran.”
The administration has staked the credibility of American imperialism on this war. A defeat would call into question the capacity of the United States to project power against Russia and China—the central strategic preoccupation of both parties. Trump’s threat to unleash “fire and fury” on Iran should, in fact, be taken as a threat to use nuclear weapons.
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The Democratic Party, which, before Trump’s election, had been waging war in the Middle East for over a year, is seeking to divert and neuter this mass popular opposition to the war.
At the “No Kings” rallies, Democratic politicians either ignored the war or reduced it to a passing phrase. In Boston, Senator Elizabeth Warren did not mention “Iran” at all. “No kings today and we vote in November,” as AFT President Randi Weingarten put it. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told the crowd to “vote for people who don’t start wars.”
Ellison was telling attendees to vote for the Democrats. But the experience of the Biden administration, together with every other Democratic presidency before it, shows that this is a completely bankrupt perspective. Biden provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine and then massively escalated the war. He armed Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which was intended from the beginning as a prelude to war against Iran.
The claim that the crisis will be resolved by electing Democrats in November is a fraud. And what will happen between now and then? The real significance of this focus is to buy time: to give Trump the months he needs to prosecute the war that the Democrats support in its fundamentals.
Trump does not speak and act simply as an individual madman. He is the political personification of a capitalist oligarchy—an American ruling class that has broken with democratic restraints and turns to war abroad and repression at home to defend its wealth and global interests.
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The working class is the only social force capable of stopping this war. Eight million people took to the streets—but that opposition will be strangled if it remains under the control of the Democratic Party. The fight against war requires an independent movement of the working class, organized in rank-and-file committees in every workplace and linked across industries and borders, armed with a socialist program against the capitalist system that produces war, dictatorship and social inequality.
3. Ukraine announces military deals with UAE, Saudi Arabia for war on Iran
The Ukrainian ruling class has quickly seized upon the criminal United States war against Iran to strengthen its own domestic defense industry and garner support from the Gulf states in its ongoing NATO-backed war against Russia.
On Saturday, just a day after announcing a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made an unannounced visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to meet with Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and discuss Ukraine’s military cooperation with the UAE, specifically its drone warfare capabilities, which the NATO-backed country has employed extensively in its own war with Moscow.
A day earlier, Zelensky met with Amir of the State of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Following the meeting, the Chiefs of the General Staff of Ukraine and the State of Qatar signed a 10-year intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the defense sector. “Key areas of cooperation include the development of the defense industry and technologies, air defense, counter-drone capabilities, military training, exchange of experience, cybersecurity, AI, and command and control systems,” a statement from the Ukraine president’s office said.
In exchange, Ukraine will receive huge funds to develop its own arms industry and drone production for the war against Russia, and access to foreign technology. Ukraine has also secured a year-long diesel supply deal. It is reportedly also trying to gain access to high-grade air defense systems held by the Gulf states.
The military collaboration between Ukraine and the brutal authoritarian regimes in the Gulf to aid the imperialist war of aggression against Iran not only gives the lie, once again, to the NATO propaganda which portrayed the war against Russia in Ukraine as a war in defense of “democracy.” Above all, it makes clear that, essentially, both wars are part of a global conflict, in which the fronts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are closely interlinked.
Even as Zelensky has attacked the Trump administration for its temporary lifting of oil sanctions on Russia and “insufficient” pressure on Russia, the Ukrainian oligarchy is proving itself a willing enabler and beneficiary of the blatantly criminal war on Iran.
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According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, Ukraine launched more than 345 drones overnight at Russian targets nationwide and 31 drones were downed over the Leningrad region as part of the attack.
It remains unclear from where exactly Ukraine was firing the drones. However, military analysts estimate that Ukraine likely sent the drones from within Ukrainian territory over 935 kilometers away, underlining the increasingly vast distances from which drone technologies are being deployed. Last year, Ukrainian drones hit Russian airfields deep inside Siberia.
Apart from being used in military operations on the battlefield, drones are being used to attack and damage critical infrastructure such as energy plants, dams, oil refineries, electrical substations and more.
The individuals inevitably killed in such attacks while manning these facilities on 24/7 schedules are not soldiers, but workers with no stake in an expanding world war that threatens all of humanity.
4. Storm clouds gather over global financial system
Storm clouds are gathering around global financial markets as the US war on Iran enters its fifth week and oil prices continue to rise along with a range of oil- and gas-dependent commodities such as fertilizers.
Even before the war began, there were growing concerns about the stability of the financial system. This focused on the financing of the massive investments in AI data centers and the role of private credit in financing software firms which could find their business models severely impacted or even wiped out by the develop of AI-based tools.
For the first couple of weeks of the war, financial markets, sustained by the claims of US President Trump that it would be over in a few weeks and the US had already achieved “victory,” did not experience major movements. There was certainly nothing like the shifts which took place in April last year when Trump unveiled his sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” against the rest of the world.
In an effort to calm the markets, Trump has claimed that negotiations are underway, that Iran is desperate for a deal and the war will soon be over. But with the preparations for an intensified onslaught involving the use of ground troops becoming ever more apparent, these efforts are wearing thin.
Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani addressed a news conference Monday morning in front of New York City Hall to denounce the Zionist-instigated assassination plot that was disrupted last week by the arrest of 26-year-old New Jersey resident Alexander Heifler in a joint FBI-New York Police Department operation.
Three of Kiswani’s civil rights attorneys and several other political activists joined her at the press conference, which was covered by a number of local media outlets and drew a supportive crowd.
Kiswani pointed to the activists supporting her and said, “I’d just like to point out that the largest demographic of supporters that we have today actually came from Muslim women and from Jewish communities who are standing unequivocally against this attack on me.”
She added, “Today I am standing here not just as an organizer, but as a mother, as a Palestinian, and as someone who was a target of a Zionist assassination plot that I have been warning has been inevitable for far too long. When I learned that someone was preparing to attack my home, building explosives with the intention of taking my life, I was not just processing that as a public figure. I was processing that as a mother, holding my infant, thinking what it means for someone to target my home—where my child sleeps, where my family is supposed to be safe.”
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In comments to the World Socialist Web Site after the press conference, Kiswani said “they are trying to suppress anti-genocide, anti-war, pro-Palestinian, pro-freedom advocates by whatever means they can” and are “resorting to violence.”
The more “they try to silence us, the louder we will be,” Kiswani added. “I am not going to give them this win by going into hiding and not speaking out about Palestine anymore.”
Eric Lee and Christopher Godshall-Bennett, whose law firm represents Kiswani, both addressed the press conference. Lee drew the connection between the planned violence in New York City and the ongoing violence in the Middle East.
Referring to the would-be assassin, Lee said, “His aim of silencing a Palestinian activist and murdering her young child mimics the official policy of Israel, where he planned to escape for protection. His method, that of a firebombing in the dark of night, is the method of the Ku Klux Klan.”
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Lee argued that the broader political climate—marked by official indifference to, and even celebration of the assassination of Rene Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis—encouraged violent attacks by signaling that they would be tolerated.
“And so the attack on Ms. Kiswani is no accident,” Lee concluded. “It’s not the product of bad apples. It’s the deliberate and intended product of a political strategy by the Trump administration to cultivate extra-legal parliamentary militia forces to murder its opponents and suppress dissent in the aim of establishing a dictatorship in this country.
“We will do everything that we can in the courts to expose the right-wing conspiracy, but ultimately, the fight against dictatorship and right-wing terror is not going to be led from within the American state apparatus. It’s going to come from the population of this country, which is furious at what this government is doing, which is furious at what this terrorist network has done to our client. And here, as we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the revolution that gave birth to this country, we encourage the people of this country to understand that the responsibility of defending our client and whatever remains of democracy falls on you, the people.”
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Kiswani and her attorneys took a series of questions from the press after the opening round of statements. She explained, “I have been going to bed every night worried about my child, worried about my family, my husband, my family, my siblings, my parents are always making sure that I don’t have to go anywhere alone. I share my location with all of them in case anything happens. And that was all before the assassination plot. So for this to happen, it just, you know, it confirms our fears. It validates them, especially because the threats haven’t stopped.”
The attorneys explained that the next action would be a hearing in the Southern District of New York on April 14 on the lawsuit against Betar brought under the anti-KKK Act.
6. US allows Russian oil tanker to dock in Cuba even as Trump threatens military action
Washington has allowed one Russian oil tanker to dock in Cuba as the Trump administration moves to impose starvation fuel rations on the island of about 8 million people.
The tanker Anatoly Kolodkin, carrying 730,000 barrels of crude from Primorsk, reached the Cuban port of Matanzas on Monday after being escorted through European waters by a Russian warship sanctioned by the US, the European Union, the UK, Australia and Ukraine.
Trump simultaneously boasted on Friday that “Cuba’s next” for US military intervention, underscoring that the regime-change operation against the island is accelerating, not easing.
The ship’s arrival may offer Cuba a brief breathing space but only that. Jorge Piñón, an expert at the University of Texas Energy Institute, says it could take up to 25 days for the crude to be processed in Cuba’s decrepit refineries, yielding only about 180,000 barrels of diesel—enough to meet roughly nine to ten days of demand.
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Even as he openly states his intent to expand his genocidal war on Iran to “take the oil,” Trump said in a forum during the weekend: “I built this great military. I said you’ll never have to use it. But sometimes you have to use it. And Cuba’s next by the way. But pretend I didn’t say that please.”
The entire political establishment has lined up behind this agenda. The New York Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, published a piece last week echoing the administration’s claim that mere suspicions of Russian and Chinese “spy outposts” justify denying Cubans access to the essentials of a modern society.
Republican Representative Carlos Gimenez's claims that Chinese sites in Cuba are “one of the most brazen intelligence operations ever attempted near the American mainland,” adding that supposed targets include a US military facility in Florida that is 'the only training range that actually can simulate battle in the Taiwan Straits.'
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Since the blockade was launched in January, the US has allowed roughly 30,000 barrels of fuel into Cuba’s private sector through individual sales arranged through Miami and Texas, often via social media, according to Reuters.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has openly admitted that these exports are intended “to put the private sector and individual private Cubans—not affiliated with the government, not affiliated with the military—in a privileged position.” That is, Washington is consciously cultivating a capitalist layer on the island as a lever against the state and against the working class.
Cuba’s bourgeois nationalist regime has responded with major concessions. It has expanded the role of private business, opened the door wider to public-private partnerships, courted exile capital in Miami, invited FBI “experts” to the island, and entered into talks with the Trump administration over fuel and “security cooperation.”
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The drive to recolonize Latin America and Cubans’ assault on the right to food, medicine, transport and energy on are inseparable from the broader war program of US imperialism. At the same time, the unanimous accommodation to Trump by the Cuban, Venezuelan and other “pink tide” governments confirms that imperialism cannot be opposed on a national basis under bourgeois leaderships.
The “No Kings” mobilization Saturday, the largest single-day protest in American history, testifies to mass opposition in the working class against war and dictatorship in the United States and internationally.
What is required is a conscious, political break with all nationalist and pro-capitalist parties and union bureaucracies and the construction of an international movement of the working class against imperialist war and capitalist rule.
7. CNN news team assaulted and detained by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank
On Friday, a group of three Israeli soldiers assaulted and detained a CNN news team who were in the northern West Bank village of Tayasir to report on the aftermath of a settler attack and the establishment of a new illegal Zionist settler outpost.
The crew—reporter Jeremy Diamond, producer Abeer Salman, and photojournalist Cyril Theophilos—was set upon by armed soldiers who pointed rifles at them, ordered them to sit down, placed Theophilos in a chokehold, damaged camera equipment and detained the team for roughly two hours.
CNN reported that the journalists were speaking with Palestinian residents in Tayasir after settlers had attacked people in the village and erected an unauthorized outpost in the area, when Israeli soldiers intervened to stop the journalists from filming.
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The attack in Tayasir is part of the escalation that began with the Gaza genocide and has spread across the region. In the West Bank, the killing of Palestinians by Israeli forces and settlers has intensified dramatically throughout the assault on Gaza, with UN and rights groups documenting a rising death toll and repeated attacks by settlers acting under IDF protection. As of March 2026, reports cited by humanitarian and rights organizations placed the number of Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank at 1,071 since October 7, 2023.
The Gaza genocide was also extended into Lebanon, where Israel has carried out repeated strikes that have killed civilians, journalists and other noncombatants, while occupying southern areas under the pretext of security and “buffer zones.” Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported at least 3,445 conflict-related deaths in Lebanon from October 7, 2023 to mid-November 2024.
The attack on the CNN team is part of Israel’s deadly war on journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported that Israel was responsible for the most journalist deaths in 2025 and that it has killed more journalists than any government on record.
In Lebanon, Israeli strikes have repeatedly killed media workers, including the March 2026 attack that killed Ali Shoaib, Fatima Ftouni and Mohamad Ftouni. In Gaza, where foreign journalists are barred and Palestinian reporters have assumed the burden of bearing witness under bombardment, the toll has been catastrophic.
Meanwhile, according to a United Nations/OHCHR report cited in August 2025, at least 247 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. CPJ has reported that by late March 2026 the total number of press members killed in Lebanon since the war began had reached 11.
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For decades, Palestinians have been killed, beaten and displaced while Israeli authorities shield perpetrators and convert “security” into a cover for ethnic expansion. The ongoing campaign in the West Bank is not separate from Gaza; it is the same program of dispossession adapted to different terrain.
All these crimes have accelerated under the cover of the US-Israeli war with Iran which began on February 28.
CNN said the assault on its crew was an “unprovoked” attack and demanded “an explanation and accountability for this unprovoked assault.” The network also said that its journalists were clearly identifiable as press, that the crew was covering rising settler violence in the area, and that the attack occurred despite the team following wartime regulations.
A statement by the Foreign Press Association on Saturday said, “The use of force was excessive and dangerous. Pointing rifles at journalists and civilians, physically assaulting a cameraman and detaining a crew are actions that cross every line. Such behavior reflects a deeply alarming pattern of hostility toward the media and cannot be tolerated under any circumstances.”
The US government has not responded to the attack and this silence is sending a clear political message. Washington is the chief sponsor, financier and diplomatic protector of the Israeli state’s operations in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. The lack of even a token defense of press rights by the Trump administration once again demonstrates that the US ruling class is dispensing with democratic rights in pursuit of global hegemony, and views Israel’s war crimes as a critical element of its strategic regional goals.
8. Australia: Glencore threatens tiered wages at Mangoola coal mine
Workers at Glencore’s Mangoola open cut coal mine in New South Wales (NSW) are voting this week on a proposed enterprise agreement (EA) that would introduce a three-tier pay structure. The immediate effect would be to slash the wages of labor-hire workers at the Hunter Valley mine, who are not directly covered by the agreement and are not allowed to vote on it.
The financial press has noted that, if successful, Glencore’s tiered wage workaround could set a precedent for the slashing of labor-hire wages throughout the coal mining industry and more broadly. The Mangoola workers stand to lose as much as $36,000 a year, according to the Mining and Energy Union (MEU).
The existing direct workforce—whose vote is needed to approve the EA—have been assured by the company that they will be grandfathered into the top pay rate. Glencore is trying to turn one section of workers against the other, even as it further cuts the real wages of the entire workforce.
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Glencore has already introduced new pay tiers at other coal mines that froze labor-hire workers’ pay following SJSP orders. The Mangoola tiers represent an escalation, explicitly and immediately slashing wages for labour-hire and new employees. The company is simultaneously pushing similar clauses at other mines in the region.
Glencore has also axed 1,000 jobs globally as part of a cost-cutting drive announced in December 2025, targeting $1 billion in operating cost reductions. At the same time, Glencore reported adjusted EBITDA of $13.5 billion for 2025 and announced approximately $2 billion in shareholder returns for 2026.
A new tentative agreement for Nexteer workers in Saginaw, Michigan, contains sweeping concessions, particularly on pay for new hires and out-of-pocket benefit costs. The sellout agreement is producing tremendous anger among workers at a key node in the global manufacturing network of the auto parts industry.
Details of the agreement have been explained in a leaflet being distributed by workers titled “Concessions our Leadership fails to tell you.” According to the leaflet, the deal creates a new layer of “third class employees” among new hires, who would be placed on a sharply reduced wage structure.
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Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker running for UAW president, issued a statement calling on workers to reject the contract and organize to impose rank-and-file oversight over the vote. “There must be vigilance against any attempt by the Local 699 bureaucracy to ram through this deal. In 2021, they declared a deeply unpopular contract ratified by a narrow margin without even releasing a detailed vote breakdown.”
This is a reference to the 2021 vote in which the UAW claimed the contract was ratified by a 52–48 margin. The result drew widespread suspicion from workers, many of whom called for a recount. Meanwhile, Local 699 President Tom Hurst was quoted by local media at the time as calling the “ratification” “a big relief for the bargaining committee and all of the staff at the union.”
Lehman concluded, “Workers must organize rank-and-file oversight of the ballot to ensure its integrity and to enforce the democratic decision of the membership. If the contract is rejected in a free and fair vote, then a strike must immediately be called.
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For many years in the mid-20th century, parts workers had maintained wages close to parity with those in the assembly plants. However, in recent decades they have been driven down to near sweatshop levels. The spinning off of in-house parts operations into nominally “independent” contractors has been a central mechanism through which automakers have slashed wages and conditions.
Nexteer itself emerged from this process. It originated as part of Delphi Corporation, which was spun off from General Motors in 1999. After Delphi declared bankruptcy, GM repurchased key operations in 2009. With the help of the UAW bureaucracy, management shed $6.2 billion in pension liabilities and imposed massive wage cuts, with hourly pay slashed from $26–30 to as low as $10–14. During the four-year bankruptcy process, the workforce collapsed from 50,000 to just 14,000. Nexteer was then spun off again and sold to a Chinese firm less than a year later.
The cost of the electric vehicle transition, combined with far lower than expected sales, is now being imposed on workers. At major automaker factories, thousands of jobs have been eliminated, beginning shortly after the UAW secured ratification of what it called a “historic” contract in 2023. Among parts workers, the impact is even more severe, as automakers shift losses onto the backs of suppliers.
“This resurgence of class struggle is colliding with the entrenched power of the union bureaucracy,” Lehman explained. “From the national headquarters—misnamed ‘Solidarity House’—down to the local unions, the apparatus operates as a dictatorship, beyond the control of the rank and file, while officials draw millions in income financed by workers’ dues.
“I am running for UAW president to abolish this bureaucracy, which has betrayed workers for decades. My campaign calls for workers to take back the union by replacing the existing hierarchy with a network of rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled from the shop floor. If elected, I will not take up a position in Solidarity House but will remain a worker on the shop floor.”
10. Berlin welcomes Syrian interim president and intensifies war and deportation campaign
Had any further proof been needed that Germany’s support for the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran has nothing to do with a fight against terrorism or oppression, it was provided by the reception of Syria’s transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Berlin.
The German state leadership quite literally rolled out the red carpet for the Islamist leader and de facto dictator. In the morning, al-Sharaa was received by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) at Bellevue Palace. He then took part in a German-Syrian economic forum at the Foreign Office before Chancellor Friedrich Merz welcomed him at the Chancellery with military honors and in a demonstratively cordial atmosphere.
If the label “Islamist terrorist” applies to any head of state in the Middle East, it applies to al-Sharaa. Under his former name, Mohammad al-Jolani, he was the emir of the al-Nusra Front, which was initially closely linked to the “Islamic State” and later directly to al-Qaeda. The United Nations designated the organization as terrorist as early as 2013.
That same year, al-Sharaa pledged allegiance in a video message to the then al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Subsequently, al-Qaeda supported his militias in the Syrian civil war with fighters and weapons. The al-Nusra Front carried out numerous bloody attacks in which countless civilians were killed.
Since al-Sharaa and his militia—renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—rose to power in Damascus at the end of 2024 with the backing of the Western powers, violence against religious minorities and political opponents has continued unabated. The World Socialist Web Site has reported extensively on this. Thousands of Alawites, Druze and Christians have fallen victim to Islamist terror under al-Sharaa. His inaugural visit to Berlin, originally planned for January, was postponed because he was at that time overseeing a military offensive against Kurdish forces. Nevertheless, the regime’s violence is systematically downplayed or ignored in the Western media.
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The reception of al-Sharaa in Berlin makes clear what is really at stake: not democracy, human rights or the fight against terrorism, but power, influence and the barbaric enforcement of imperialist interests—abroad through war and at home through repression and deportation.
11. Australian government’s “fuel plan” offers workers no real relief from Iran war impact
Following a second emergency meeting of the national cabinet of state and territory leaders yesterday, the Albanese Labor government announced a fuel security plan. Its purported aim is to ease the worsening cost-of-living crisis and supply shortages resulting from the criminal and increasingly catastrophic US-Israeli war on the people of Iran.
None of the measures outlined, however, will provide any meaningful relief for working-class households, which are being severely affected by sky-rocketing prices for petrol and diesel, as well as by the wider impact on the costs of food, gas, fertilizers, plastics and everything else derived from Middle East oil and gas.
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At yesterday’s media conference following the national cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese outlined a fuel security plan with four stages. The first phase—plan and prepare—supposedly has been completed already.
The second level, labelled “keeping Australia moving,” is said to consist of “current settings—fuel supply continues to flow, but there have been some disruptions.” In reality, shortages are mounting. Yesterday, for example, 75 petrol stations in New South Wales, the most populous state, had run out of at least one kind of petrol, while 242 had no diesel.
The third and fourth stages are described as “taking targeted action (ensuring fuel goes where needed most and adopting voluntary measures to limit fuel usage)” and “protecting critical services for all Australians (where action will be required to ensure critical users are protected and the economy is operating).”
These two phases have been kept deliberately so vague and variable as to be virtually meaningless. The plan states: “Level 3 and 4 are under consideration and may change, depending on circumstances. Governments will continue to work with industry and community.”
This not only hides whatever plans the government has. It leaves supplies in the hands of the corporate energy giants, such as BP, that dominate the global markets and extract massive profits from them.
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Over the past month, since being one of the first governments in the world to support the illegal war on Iran, Labor has made almost daily announcements of new measures, none of which have lessened the fuel supply and cost-of-living crises.
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As the devastating impact of the US and Israeli wars on Iran and Lebanon intensifies, both in the deaths of thousands of people and the destruction of civilian infrastructure and in working-class living conditions internationally, including in Australia, opinion polls indicate growing opposition. On Monday, even the Murdoch media’s Newspoll recorded 72 percent opposition to the US assault on Iran.
Under these conditions, the Labor government is desperately trying to distance itself somewhat from the carnage. Last night, Albanese appeared on national television, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “7.30” program, appealing to the Trump administration to clarify its war objectives and de-escalate, saying: “I think people want to see an endpoint.”
No amount of such posturing, or efforts to contain the severe domestic impact, can erase Labor’s complicity and involvement in this criminal war, to which it has committed a warplane, missiles and troops, as well as the facilities of the Pine Gap spy satellite base in central Australia.
12. War on Iran deepens social crisis in New Zealand
The average petrol price has risen about 40 percent in four weeks to $3.42 a liter yesterday, with Westpac bank predicting it will pass $3.70 by the end of the week. Diesel prices have nearly doubled to about $3.43 a liter, according to the website Gaspy.
The National Party-led coalition government has made clear that workers, already squeezed between high living costs and falling real wages, must endure a further cut to their living standards. It has responded to the fuel crisis by announcing a grossly inadequate $50-a-week temporary subsidy for a small number of families.
Nervous about the election approaching in November, the government is trying to distance itself from the assault on Iran. Finance Minister Nicola Willis told Radio NZ (RNZ) on March 20 that it was “not New Zealand’s war, it is not something that we support, but it is having a profound impact on our country.”
This contradicted Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Peters’ statement on March 1, which repeated US and Israeli propaganda that the war is “to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.” On March 21, Luxon signed a statement with leaders from 19 other countries including Britain, France and Germany, condemning Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and expressing their “readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait.”
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Last year the country’s economy grew by just 1.3 percent. Kiwibank chief economist Jarrod Kerr told RNZ on March 20 that disruption to fuel supply “will definitely increase the risk” of yet another recession, on top of recessions during 2023 and 2024, and a near-recession in 2025.
With no oil refinery, New Zealand relies on shipments of fuel from Singapore and South Korea, both of which are impacted by the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz. NZ’s fertilizer imports, 22 percent of which come from the Persian Gulf region, are also disrupted.
On March 24 the government announced that 143,000 low-income families with children will receive a “relief” payment of just $50 a week. This will reach about 7 percent of households and excludes some of the poorest members of society: unemployed people, disabled people, pensioners, students, and everyone without children.
The payment—which equates to just $12.50 per person in a family of four—is temporary and will stop after either one year, or when fuel prices stay below $3 a litre for four weeks.
“Good government means looking after your people,” declared Luxon. This meant giving support “to help people when times are tough” while keeping government debt down. He said it was a “hard reality that we cannot alleviate the pressure of rising fuel costs for everyone.”
The people the government is “looking after” are rich investors and corporations. In last year’s budget it delivered a $1.7 billion annual tax cut package for businesses, and in 2024 it cut taxes for landlords by $725 million. By contrast, it is allocating a maximum of $373 million for the temporary $50 payments.
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The New Zealand Hunger Monitor, a survey of 3,000 people late last year, found that 18 percent of households were experiencing “severe food insecurity.”
Unemployment has reached 5.4 percent and will certainly go higher. Major food processing companies Watties and McCain recently announced factory closures with hundreds of job losses.
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While Labour and the Greens criticized the attack on Iran, they support NZ’s alliance with US imperialism, which has launched a third world war in a desperate bid to reverse its economic decline. Labour supports plans to double the NZ military budget and integrate the country into US war preparations against China, which is being paid for by starving public services.
13. India roiled by economic shocks from criminal US-Israeli war on Iran
India is being roiled by the economic fallout from the month-long, criminal war that US imperialism and Israel, its Mideast attack dog, are waging on Iran.
The war’s economic impact is already severe. In a speech to parliament last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi compared it to the COVID-19 pandemic, which at its height caused a 24 percent contraction of India’s economy and ultimately killed more than 5 million people.
The war’s most immediate impact has been on India’s LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) supply. LPG cylinders, containing butane and propane are used for daily cooking both at home and by restaurants. Supply disruptions have led to sharp price increases, and forced street-vendors and restaurants to slash hours, limit menus, and in many cases close down entirely, slashing the incomes of tens of millions of households.
The war’s impact, however, threatens to quickly go far beyond LPG, and cascade across the economy, driving up inflation, especially the cost of food and transport.
India is massively dependent on oil imports, with half or more of those imports, approximately 2.5 million barrels per day, coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. To date, the surge in world oil prices due to the war has not translated into large price jumps at the pumps for diesel and petrol, due to government intervention, including a rollback of excise taxes. But should the war continue in the weeks and months ahead—and everything suggests it will—the BJP government, which is in the midst of a years-long austerity drive, will move to impose the full burden of the price rises and any temporary debts it has incurred in cushioning their impact onto the backs of India’s workers and toilers.
India is the largest importer of nitrogen fertilizers from the Persian Gulf region, which accounts for 45 percent or more of the world’s urea exports and 30 percent of global exports of ammonia, a vital component of urea and other nitrogen-based fertilizers. At least 75 percent of India’s urea imports and 80 percent of its ammonia imports typically come from the Gulf States.
Fertilizer shortages will raise farm input costs and reduce crop yields, both of which will squeeze farmers’ incomes and drive up food prices—this in a country where hundreds of millions already suffer from hunger and food insecurity.
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While India’s workers and toilers are paying an ever mounting price for the illegal, unprovoked US-Israeli assault on Iran, India’s Hindu supremacist BJP government and the Indian ruling class as a whole have made clear that they stand with Washington and Tel Aviv.
On the war’s eve, when it was obvious to all that a US-Israeli attack was imminent, Modi made a two-day visit to Israel to solidarize himself with the far-right Netanyahu regime and its genocidal assault on the Gaza Palestinians and to announce an enhanced Indo-Israeli “Strategic Partnership for Peace, Innovation & Prosperity.”
New Delhi has remained conspicuously silent on all the war crimes committed by the US and Israel—beginning with the launching of an unprovoked war of aggression, the “supreme international war crime” according to the 1946 Nuremberg judgement, for which the Nazi leaders were hanged.
Although Tehran is ostensibly an Indian ally, Modi and the BJP government have failed to condemn the decapitation strikes with which the US and Israel launched their war, killing senior Iranian leaders, including Ayatollah Khamenei, who in addition to being Iran’s head of state was a religious leader revered by millions of Shia Muslims. Nor did India utter a word of protest against the torpedoing of the IRIS Dena, in which more than 150 Iranian sailors returning from an Indian-hosted naval exercise were killed. The defenseless vessel was sunk by a US nuclear attack-submarine, off the coast of Sri Lanka, more than 1,000 miles from Iran’s shores.
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In pursuit of its own predatory great power ambitions, the Indian bourgeoisie has aligned itself ever more closely with American imperialism over the past quarter century, while massively expanding military expenditures. Through the development of a vast network of bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral military-security ties with the US and its principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, India has been transformed during Modi’s 12-year rule into a veritable frontline state in Washington’s military-strategic offensive with China. As a corollary to this, New Delhi has also developed extensive military-security and economic ties with Israel.
With the war on Iran, the utterly reactionary character of the Indo-US alliance and the costs it will impose on the people of India, the region and the world are being spelled out.
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Just ten days after the February 28 US-Israeli assault on Iran, the Modi government invoked the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA). ESMA has usually been invoked by both national and state governments to suppress strikes by workers in what are termed as “essential services.” These include healthcare, sanitation, water supply, and defence, communication, transport, and government food distribution.
Under ESMA, the government has ordered petroleum refiners to increase LPG output, imposed controls on distribution, and prioritized domestic consumers over commercial users. In some areas, restrictions such as longer intervals between cylinder bookings have been introduced, effectively rationing supply.
At the same time, reports indicate that black markets are flourishing. Investigations have exposed illegal refilling operations and profiteering networks exploiting the shortage to sell cylinders at prices far above official rates. The burden of the crisis is falling overwhelmingly on poorer working-class families. These households, already struggling with rising living costs, are being forced to cut consumption or switch to inferior fuels.
This is not an aberration, but an inevitable outcome of a system in which essential goods are distributed according to profit rather than social need.
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India’s workers and toilers must be armed with a genuine socialist internationalist perspective to oppose the Iran war, the growing danger of world war, and the reactionary Indo-US strategic alliance. The fight against war must be rooted in the working class and aimed at its mobilization in India and globally as an independent political force, rallying all the oppressed behind it, in revolutionary opposition to capitalism, the root cause of war.
14. Germany: Verdict in trial for death of railway apprentice Simon Hedemann
Our social life, our economic life, is organized in a way that continuously produces these disasters, and they will continue until a way is found of putting an end to the system which produces them. What is the system? What is this social organization? It is the capitalist system (David North at the IWA-RFC hearing in Detroit on the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr.)
On Wednesday, March 25, the trial concerning the death of the young railway worker Simon Hedemann concluded in Hanover. The 19-year-old railway apprentice was killed by a fast-moving freight train at the busy Hanover-Linden freight yard on September 8, 2023.
The Hanover District Court sentenced a 37-year-old signal mechanic for national rail operator Deutsche Bahn (DB) to a fine of €6,300 for negligent manslaughter. This is just below the sentence at which he would be considered to have a criminal record.
The signal mechanic had led the construction crew of the former DB Netz AG (now DB InfraGo) and decided that Simon should attach new QR tags to a track under “self-protection” rules, i.e., without closing the tracks. His colleagues were supposed to warn the young man of approaching trains merely by shouting. But a freight train, traveling at approximately 90 km an hour, knocked Simon over and killed him on the spot.
The public prosecutor had demanded an eight-month suspended prison sentence, plus a fine. The defense lawyer pleaded for acquittal and claimed that at DB, every employee was personally responsible for their own safety. The accused had allegedly warned Simon of the approaching train in good time by shouting “Train coming,” but the latter had not reacted. In other words, Simon was, in principle, responsible for his own death.
The judge clearly rejected this. The accused had clearly made mistakes and taken a wrong decision in the position for which he bore responsibility when he sent Simon onto the track under the “self-protection” rules. However, the accused had not been alone in his misjudgement. Even during the police interrogation, neither his direct superior nor the dispatcher had expressed doubts about the accused’s decision.
15. United Kingdom: Zack Polanski’s Greens block anti-Zionist motion at conference
A motion against Zionism and in support of the Palestinians was filibustered at the UK Green Party’s Spring Conference held this weekend. Fewer than 1,000 members, out of 220,000, took part in the online event.
The motion, “Zionism is racism”, identified Zionism as a “racist ideology”, called for a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital”, and backed “the right of the Palestinian people to resistance and liberation from Israeli occupation, domination and subjugation”.
Opponents never even engaged in a debate on the issues. They began by trying to have the motion ruled out of order, with Eleanora Folan, who runs the X account Stats for Lefties, arguing that the call for a single Palestinian state could not be moved because it contradicted the party’s previous support for a “two-state solution”.
A vote was delayed by problems with the party’s online system, which the Canary suggested might have been the result of a deliberate denial of service attack. Participants were eventually able to block the effort to rule the “Zionism is racism” motion out of order by an overwhelming majority.
There were then six spurious votes of no confidence in the chair, which the presiding Standing Orders Committee advised had to be taken, each of which was defeated by roughly 600 votes to 40. But the tactic succeeded in running down the clock on the debate, preventing a vote either on the motion or on several proposed amendments.
This debacle followed weeks of antisemitism smears against Green Party members, from the usual quarters: the tabloid media and the Telegraph, GB News, UK Lawyers for Israel and so on.
All of this will be very familiar to those who lived through five years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. Beginning with high-profile figures close to Corbyn, like Ken Livingstone and Marc Wadsworth, scandals were manufactured by the right-wing press and the Blairites equating opposition to the Israeli state with antisemitism and declaring the latter to be rampant in the Labour Party. This was rolled out to the wider party in a campaign of slander, intimidation, suspensions and expulsions.
The Labour witch-hunt was able to gain traction because Corbyn and his allies capitulated, to the point of becoming active accomplices. First, they turned a blind eye to their allies being targeted, refusing to name the Blairite slander campaign for what it was, then they endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, then they began organizingand encouraging suspensions and expulsions themselves.
Zack Polanski’s leadership has shown this weekend they will act no differently. Polanski took the excuse provided by the Together Alliance march in London not to be present, consummating a series of evasions on the question of Zionism in the lead up to the conference.
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The political issues posed by the Corbyn phenomenon, which mobilized much larger numbers than Polanski, are not solved simply by switching efforts at a “left capture” from Labour to the Green Party. They have manifested again almost immediately and produced their first major betrayal.
These issues are: the impossibility of mounting a consistent opposition to imperialist war and genocide outside of a struggle against capitalism; the bankruptcy of all purported national solutions to social and democratic questions; the need for a revolutionary offensive against capitalist states impervious to reform; the need, therefore, for an independent party of the working class opposed to all collaboration with the ruling class and its representatives.
The Socialist Equality Party fought and fights illusions in Corbyn on this basis, and does the same today against Polanski and the Greens. Join our revolutionary socialist tendency today.
16. Ethylene plant closing in Scotland with 400 jobs lost
ExxonMobil will start laying off workers from April 1 at its Mossmorran ethylene production plant near Cowdenbeath, Fife, Scotland. The plant’s closure was announced last November. In total some 400 jobs, half of whom are contractors, are to go.
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The plant closure is being facilitated by Scotland’s main political parties. Fife Council is run by a Scottish Labour minority administration under leader David Ross. The Scottish National Party has the largest single group in the council, but do not have enough seats to govern alone. Labour has passed major legislation and budgets mainly through the informal backing of the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives.
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The Mossmorran plant was set up in the late 1970s, with production starting in 1985, to process naturally occurring ethane from the North Sea into ethylene, a base component in the production of plastics. The plant’s closure reflects a worldwide trend as petrochemical companies move production to cheaper, less regulated labor markets and consolidate their capital into more profitable oil and gas extraction, refining and related operations.
By closing the Mossmorran plant, ExxonMobil aims to pass on the costs of market shifts to workers while continuing the bonanza to shareholders. UK chairman Paul Greenwood told the Scottish government that the plant was “inefficient” and “would need £1 billion in spending to make it profitable.” ExxonMobil is the third largest oil and gas company in the world and the £1 billion required to modernise Mossmorran is less than 3 percent of 2025’s profits. Its reported profits fell by 14 percent in 2025 to $28.8 billion, but the combined total of share buybacks and dividends increased from $36 billion in 2024 to $37.2 billion in 2025.
While vast sums were squandered, noise and pollutants from the Mossmorran operation have blighted neighboring areas for years. Residents in Cowdenbeath and Lochgelly have been subjected to repeated disturbances from the flaring of surplus gas.
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The trade unions are wholly complicit in the plant’s closure. Such statements that have been made have appealed to the ruling class to retain Mossmorran alongside the huge Grangemouth complex, some 30 miles away, on the other side of the Firth of Forth.
The oil refinery at Grangemouth ceased production last year while an adjacent ethylene plant will now be Britain’s only producer. In December, Grangemouth’s owners INEOS, owned by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, pocketed a £150 million package from the Labour government in exchange for a promise to keep ethylene production running for another five years. The British government views the process, underpinning production of a range of goods including war related industries, as, in the words of Business Secretary Peter Kyle as “of strategic national importance.”
As the Grangemouth refinery was being closed, Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham warned of an “avalanche of redundancies taking place across Scotland’s oil and gas industry.” She complained that the “UK and Scottish governments are failing to protect thousands of jobs. Government policy is also accelerating these huge losses without any credible jobs plan in place.” When Mossmorran’s closure was first announced last year, Graham merely called for “meaningful negotiations with all key players to ensure the future of the plant and jobs.”
Unite’s restriction of opposition to appeals to government and employers ensured that production at both sites was maintained to the last. No united offensive was organised in these key installations to defend jobs and living standards.
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The closures at Mossmorran and Grangemouth underscore the fraudulent character of all claims from the authorities, the energy companies and the trade unions of a “just transition” to a “low carbon” economy. Communities affected by closures of sites such as Mossmorran cannot rely on governments, corporations, or the pacifying assurances of pro-company trade unions to effect a transition to a more just, ecological form of capitalism. The “just transition” to “net zero” much-promoted by unions and environmental groups suggests that there exists a national route to bypassing the profit motive.
But companies exist to maximize private profit and capitalist institutions are incapable of producing the rational, democratic, and globally organized changes necessary to plan a sustainable future. Today, the struggle over control of oil and gas extraction rights is a major factor in driving US and European imperialism to war against Iran.
Workers in the oil industry and those dependent on it can only defend jobs, living conditions, and democratic rights by organizing rank-and-file committees independent of the trade union and company apparatus, seeking to unify with workers across industries and national borders. Contact the SEP today to discuss these questions further.
17. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Brazil:
Canada:
Quebec post-secondary students take strike action over education cuts
Chile:
Students protest in Santiago over right wing policies of Kast administration
United States:
First Student school bus drivers vote to authorize national strike
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
