1. Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, (1924-2024)

2. Widespread social distress and economic insecurity in America’s supposedly booming economy: US credit card defaults reach their highest level since 2008

3. A total sellout: the IG Metall union in Germany agrees to a 20% real pay cut for the Volkswagen workers it represents

4. Covid-19: "If people really understood the science... they would have a very different attitude"

5. Film, television, and politics: the World Socialist Web Site looks back at 2024 and forward to 2025

6. Victims of financial parasitism, being taken over by private equity firms and saddled with debt: brick and mortar retail chains close stores, eliminate jobs

7. The US-backed Pacific Policing Initiative-- a new multi-national police force created for deployment across the Pacific in response to civil unrest, natural disasters, transnational crime and major events-- opens its headquarters in Brisbane, Australia

8. Speculators are nervous about the incoming Trump administration largely because the bottom third of Americans are financially "tapped out"

9. Families wait years for explanations: the dire and deadly conditions within Canada's jails and prisons

10. The union covering Sydney and New South Wales, Australia passenger railway workers collaborates with the Labor government to put off fights against wage cuts until next year

11. The crash of Jeju Air Flight 2216 results in the deaths of 179 people of 181 on board

12. The Brazilian pseudo-left Socialism and Freedom Party exploits a popular campaign to shorten the working day to reinforce the right-wing shibboleths of nationalism and the bourgeois state 

13. The Bibi Files-- shortlisted for nomination for an Academy Award, but widely banned from screening-- ignores the fact that the war on Gaza was coordinated with the Biden administration

14. A petition asks that fabricated charges against members of a pseudo-left Turkish political party be dropped and that those under house arrest must be released 

15. Kenyan trade unions suppress worker strikes scheduled to take place across the country over the Christmas holidays

16. Part Three: The essential feature of the Ted Grant/Alan Woods International Marxist Tendency has been its implacable hostility to any break with Stalinism and UK Labourism, and a struggle for the independent revolutionary mobilization of the working class

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