Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Two years of the Gaza genocide: A crime of Zionism and imperialism
Today marks two years since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, one of the greatest crimes of the modern era. Before the eyes of the entire world, the Israeli government—armed, financed and defended by every imperialist power—has carried out a campaign of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation. At least 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 20,000 children, and the entire population has been repeatedly displaced.
In order to launch this long planned genocide, Israel used as its pretext the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, in which a few thousand fighters with small arms, possessing no armored vehicles or aircraft, breached the Israeli border without resistance. To claim that Israel, with one of the most sophisticated intelligence networks in the world, was taken completely by surprise by a few thousand Hamas fighters is a despicable fiction.
As the events of the past two years have shown—in Israel’s assassinations of foreign leaders, military officers and scientists—Israeli intelligence has penetrated every state and movement in the region. Indeed, within months of the October 7 attacks, newspaper accounts revealed that Israel possessed the entire Hamas battle plan but orchestrated a deliberate stand-down of its troops stationed on the border.
The genocide that followed was the premeditated outcome of 75 years of brutal oppression, the implementation of the “final solution” to the Palestinian problem. It has exposed before the entire world the bankrupt and reactionary character of Zionism. The Israeli state has shown itself to be a murderous instrument of imperialism.
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The perspective of a two-state solution has failed. Only the unification of all the peoples of the Middle East can lead to a viable future. The Israeli state has proven to be a historical monstrosity, resulting in demoralization and degradation. The Israeli working class must repudiate the poisonous ideology and politics of Zionism, reject the reactionary dystopia of the “Jewish state” and strive for the unity of Israeli and Palestinian workers in the struggle for the United Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
In a lecture delivered on October 24, 2023, three weeks after the beginning of the genocide, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North explained:
In the final analysis, the liberation of the Palestinian people can be achieved only through a unified struggle of the working class, Arab and Jewish, against the Zionist regime, as well as the treacherous Arab and Iranian capitalist regimes, and their replacement with a union of socialist republics throughout the Middle East and, indeed, the entire world.
This is a gigantic task. But it is the only perspective that is based on a correct appraisal of the present stage of world history, the contradictions and crisis of world capitalism and the dynamic of the international class struggle. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine are tragic demonstrations of the catastrophic role and consequences of national programs in a historical epoch whose essential and defining characteristics are the primacy of world economy, the globally integrated character of the productive forces of capitalism, and, therefore, the necessity to base the struggle of the working class on an international strategy.
Two years later, there are growing signs of a global resurgence of working class struggle. The Trump administration’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship is bringing it into head-on conflict with the working class in the United States, despite all efforts by the Democrats to sow complacency and passivity. President Macron in France is unable to form a stable government, amid mass opposition to his demands for austerity to pay for remilitarisation. Starmer in the UK and Merz in Germany have no popular support whatsoever.
Internationally, there has been an explosion of popular anti-government struggles, led by “Generation Z”—in Kenya, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco and Madagascar.
The development of this opposition along revolutionary lines requires that workers break free from the control of the social democratic, Stalinist and trade union bureaucracies, along with their pseudo-left defenders, who work to contain and dissipate opposition. This requires building new, democratic organizations of class struggle—rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood—to coordinate and lead a unified international offensive of the working class.
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The genocide in Gaza has laid bare the historical dead end of the capitalist system itself. The “normalization” of genocide is the product of a system that has exhausted any progressive role. It is accompanied by the normalization of fascism, the normalization of military-police dictatorship, the normalization of world war and oligarchic rule.
The perspective that must guide the working class is Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. The democratic and social aspirations of the oppressed can be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, on a world scale, for the conquest of power.
The critical task is the building of a new revolutionary leadership to guide this struggle. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its sections, the Socialist Equality Parties, fight to unite workers and youth across all borders in a single movement against capitalism, for the establishment of workers’ governments and the socialist reorganization of the world economy to meet human need, not private profit.
2. Fall of the French government: the ruling class seeks dictatorship
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu offered President Emmanuel Macron his resignation yesterday, making his 26-day government the shortest since the founding of France’s Fifth Republic in 1958.
While Lecornu was unpopular, falling to 15 percent in the polls in just a few weeks, his resignation reflects not a revitalization but a mortal crisis of French democracy. It cannot be understood apart from the martial law and civil war policies pursued across the Atlantic by the Trump administration, which is illegally sending troops into major US cities with an authorization to use deadly force. In each country, the world crisis is driving the capitalist oligarchy towards dictatorship.
Lecornu, France’s fifth prime minister in two years, has not resigned because the rival capitalist parties in the National Assembly have irreconcilable policy differences. They are united on rejecting tax increases for the capitalist oligarchy and instead imposing austerity to repay an unsustainable, €3.4 trillion sovereign debt, raise military spending, and strengthen the police-state machine. The capitalist oligarchy, aware that these policies face overwhelming popular opposition, is moving to install a far-right regime.
In Macron’s administration, a bitter struggle is unfolding between those trying to recruit factions of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) to an ultra-reactionary government led by Macron, and those prepared to form a government directly with the neo-fascist National Rally (RN). Either regime would seek to violently repress mass opposition to its policies.
Lecornu resigned after outgoing Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, a leader of The Republicans (LR) whose positions are close to the far-right RN, threatened to censure Lecornu in the National Assembly. Retailleau denounced Lecornu’s nomination as defense minister of former Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, whom Retailleau blames for not resolving the debt crisis with harsh enough austerity.
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In a sign of the crisis at the top of the government, Macron was filmed by TV cameras taking an unprecedented solitary walk through central Paris as he tried to decide what to do. Last night, he demanded that Lecornu stay on at least until Wednesday to continue government talks. The Elysée presidential palace told AFP that Macron would “face his responsibilities” if these talks failed, and call new legislative elections.
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The Parti de l’égalité socialiste reiterates its call to prepare in the working class a general strike to bring down Macron. As mass protests erupt across Europe and internationally against the Gaza genocide, and Trump goes to war on the American people, explosive international struggles are being prepared. Macron’s regime must be brought down in the course of an international offensive of the working class, not via reactionary intrigues of cabals of capitalist politicians. The solution to the debt crisis must be the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchy by the working class.
As the PES explained in its statement after the fall of Lecornu’s predecessor, “Which way forward for the working class after the fall of the French government?”,
Two stark alternatives are presented. Either the capitalist oligarchy builds a fascistic dictatorship to crush the working class, or the working class wages a revolutionary struggle on a socialist program to expropriate the oligarchs. This requires breaking through the straitjacket of the union bureaucracies and building genuine, rank-and-file organizations dedicated to prosecuting the class struggle.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls for the transfer of power from the trade union bureaucracies to the workers in all factories and workplaces. Such new forms of class organization, uniting workers in France and throughout Europe, are necessary to organize resistance to and defeat the corporate-financial oligarchy’s program of fascism, genocide and war.
3. Powerful earthquake kills at least 72 in the Philippines
At least 72 people have died after a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck the island of Cebu in the central Philippines last Tuesday. Nearly 600 people were injured while 25,000 families have been displaced, many of them forced to sleep outdoors.
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Regional officials estimate the earthquake damaged or destroyed thousands of homes and has affected around 210,000 families, equivalent to 370,000 individuals. Over 110,000 across 42 communities will need assistance rebuilding homes and restoring livelihoods.
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Aid has been particularly delayed in reaching rural areas and mountainous villages, with many bridges still impassable and roads covered from landslides. The Philippine Star spoke to villagers in Tinubdan, including Macasero, 35, a mother of a two-month-old baby who had slept in fields and begged for food on the streets, like many of her neighbors.
Food, potable water, shelter materials and medical supplies remain the top priorities, along with the need for water tankers, generators, and heavy equipment to clear debris and restore access roads, which are clogged with traffic between Cebu City and Bogo.
Aftershocks of 4.5 magnitude were recorded on Sunday, alarming residents still reeling from the devastation. The Cebu Provincial Government is maintaining a “red alert” status.
The Cebu earthquake has come in the middle of one of the worst flooding and typhoon seasons on record in the Philippines. One week before, Cebu and other provinces were battered by Super Typhoon Ragasa, which left at least 27 people dead, knocked out power in entire cities and towns and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands. In July, typhoon flooding killed 31 people.
It was under those conditions that mass protests on September 21 erupted across the Philippines. Tens of thousands joined rallies, including in Cebu, to protest government corruption surrounding flood control infrastructure projects. Recent revelations uncovered kickbacks to government officials and the theft of billions by private contractors.
Catastrophic natural disasters plague the Philippines, a country sitting atop the volcanic Ring of Fire, lashed by two dozen typhoons a year and whose cities are submerged during the monsoon months.
The devastating impact of these natural calamities, however, is a product of the lack of disaster facilities, the unplanned and underfunded system of public infrastructure, and densely crowded urban communities, which are the responsibility of successive governments.
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During his visit to the earthquake site, President Marcos promised to provide a miserable 10,000 pesos ($US171) to each family that lost its home. Meanwhile, his administration’s drastic increases to military spending, as part of a US-led war drive against China, express the real priority of the Philippine ruling elite.
The Marcos government is no doubt fearful that such a pro-corporate agenda will provoke further mass opposition, as it has in recent weeks. According to local media outlets, the Philippine military reportedly deployed soldiers to “help maintain order” during the government’s relief efforts.
4. Behind Britain’s housing crisis—the fictionalization of housing and the rise of the rentier class
Wherever you go, one topic dominates the conversation: the high and ever-rising cost of housing, be it mortgage payments or rents.
In London, it takes four incomes to afford a two-bedroom apartment. The high cost of housing is pushing people into poverty and homelessness. Many of those made homeless are families with children.
According to the affordability rule, rent should not exceed 30-35 percent of gross household income. Yet two nurses earning £38,000 each will struggle to pay the average rent in London in even half of London’s boroughs. So, without an income well above average or access to subsidized housing, two incomes are essential, and even then, location matters enormously.
As a result, about one quarter of London’s population—and one in three children—are living in poverty and are struggling to meet basic living costs.
In the poorer countries, the situation is far worse. More than 1 billion people, one seventh of the world’s population, live in informal housing, which includes unplanned, squatter and marginal settlements, unconventional dwellings, non-permanent structures, inadequate housing, slums, and housing not in compliance with planning and building regulations.
Over the last 45 years, successive British governments have overseen a massive sell-off of public land and public housing to the private sector; legislation and regulation to support the expansion of credit for the land and property sector; the bailout of banks and mortgage lenders in the 2007-08 financial crisis; and soaring inflation of land and housing prices. These are universal processes and are reflected to a greater or lesser extent in all the advanced capitalist countries.
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Between 70 and 75 percent of housing costs in Britain today reflect the price of the land, not the building itself, up from just 2 percent in the 1930s. While this is higher than in most other advanced capitalist countries, it is at least 50 percent in the US, France, Germany and Australia and a staggering 80 percent in South Korea.
Based on data from the Office of National Statistics, the real estate sector has, since the 1990s, been the single most significant contributor to the UK’s economic growth. Its Gross Value Added (GVA) at £270 billion in 2024, up from £40 billion in 1990, is the largest for any single sector, including Britain’s much vaunted financial sector. It testifies to the increasing parasitism and non-productive nature of modern capitalism.
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The transfer of housing to the private sector has been no less significant. Thatcher’s Right to Buy (RTB) scheme was by far the largest of Britain’s privatizations. The sale of Britain’s public housing — built following the Russian Revolution and World War I as “Homes fit for Heroes” and paid for by generations of British workers — realized between £50 and £60 billion in the first 25 years.
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In 1982-83, the Thatcher government merged several pre-existing schemes into a single national system, creating the Housing Benefit, which was later standardized in 1988 and payable by local authorities for private renters. Since 2013, Housing Benefit has been phased out for many claimants and replaced by Universal Credit.
That is, the high private sector rates were and are directly subsidized by the government—yet another subvention that lines the pockets of the financial elite.
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In 1988, after the initial surge in RTB purchases had subsided and the most desirable council homes had been sold, the Thatcher government allowed local authorities to sell their remaining, very dilapidated housing stock en masse. It turned to housing associations, the so-called third sector or not-for-profit housing, whose origins lie in the 19th-century philanthropic and voluntary organizations, and housing associations specially created for the purpose, subject to a ballot of tenants, for these “stock transfers”. The Act redefined housing associations as non-public bodies and granted them access to private finance to allow them to carry out the necessary renovation and refurbishment, whose financing costs the councils had long been denied.
But it was Tony Blair’s incoming New Labour government of 1997 that got the Conservatives’ policy up and running, putting pressure on the councils to offload their estates and tenants onto the housing associations and wiping out the debt attached to the estates they acquired. New Labour portrayed it as part of its much-vaunted Third Way — along with its Public-Private Partnerships, which accomplished the privatization of public services like health that were neither politically nor financially amenable to outright privatization — that was neither profit-driven nor state-managed.
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In 2008, the Labour government even changed the law to enable the establishment of for-profit housing associations, a growing sector backed by private equity, developers or investment funds. In 2010, the incoming Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government cut by two-thirds the grants for housing associations, forcing them to take on additional debt and raise their rents to finance it. This, in turn, has forced them to diversify into other construction and facilities management operations, so that housing associations are increasingly resembling private corporations, paying their CEOs exorbitant salaries.
Housing associations now run 60 percent of the total social housing stock of 4 million homes, up from 13 percent in 1985, with local authorities managing the rest.
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All this was accompanied by new legislation and regulations that made the acquisition of land and housing more attractive and increased their value. The Thatcher government’s 1988 Housing Act ended rent controls in England and Wales, enabling rents to be set by the “market”, and ended secured tenancy, introducing fixed-term or short-term tenancies that became the default under the 1996 Housing Act, initiating insecurity of tenure for private rental tenants and allowing no-fault eviction of tenants under Section 21. The 1996 Act also introduced the Buy to Let (BTL) mortgage, offering far lower interest rates than had previously been available to prospective landlords.
The New Labour government, taking office in 1997, did nothing to reverse any of these policies or trends that had become an international phenomenon. Indeed, most of the increase in the value of the real estate sector took place after the 2007-08 financial crisis. The crisis arose from intense speculation in US housing and property markets, fueled by “subprime” mortgage lending to low-income households and marketed through complex derivatives to international investors.
Central banks and governments around the world, particularly in the US, UK and the European Union, stepped in to rescue the banks—but not the millions of households in the US, Ireland, Spain and other countries that lost their homes when they defaulted on their repayments. They took measures that fundamentally reshaped “asset” markets, including the housing market.
The Bank of England slashed interest rates from 5 percent in 2008 to 0.5 percent in March 2009, lowering the cost of borrowing and fuelling the demand for mortgages and property investment. Its purchase of £200 billion of government bonds, known as Quantitative Easing (QE), further reduced long-term interest rates and accelerated the trend towards higher-yield assets such as real estate.
It relaxed capital requirements and stress tests to ensure that banks could continue lending and enable mortgage markets to continue functioning as global finance dried up. The impact on real estate was significant, with investors piling into property and driving up prices, particularly in the land component of housing value, which ballooned above all in London, as real estate became the preferred investment vehicle and the UK’s largest economic sector.
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The high street banks now direct most of their lending to property and residential mortgages, accounting for around 60 percent of total UK bank lending, with a further 10 percent lending for commercial property. Residential mortgages alone account for more than £1.7 trillion in outstanding balances as of 2025, exposing the economy to volatility in the housing market and a re-run of the 2008 financial crash.
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Land prices surged after 1997 and then again after the 2008 financial crisis. This was driven by the availability of cheap credit under a system that was deregulated and liberalized after 1979, particularly after 1996, when cheap credit was made available for Buy-to-Let. Residential mortgage lending increased by more than 500 percent in the decade after 1995.
At around £50-55,000 an acre, land prices are now 10 times those prevailing in 1979 (around £5,000 an acre), with urban land, especially in London and the south east, rising at about 5 percent a year in real terms. This represents one of the most dramatic asset price inflations in modern British economic history. By way of comparison, the average value of land increased by about 1.5 percent a year between 1900 and 1980.
With land ownership concentrated, this has benefited the financial elite, including corporations, wealthy families and individuals who own land for both capital appreciation and rental income.
The increase in land values means that land constitutes a major component of the UK’s non-financial wealth and has outpaced all other asset classes. While intellectual property assets rose by around 200 percent in real terms between 1995 and 2025, machinery, equipment and weapons systems rose by 140 percent, inventories by 100 percent, infrastructure and buildings without land by 100 percent, land rose by 300 percent.
This reflects a structural shift: land is no longer just a factor of production; it’s a speculative store of wealth. It has fundamentally reshaped the UK economy, making housing—both rented and owner-occupied—unaffordable and fueling wealth inequality, while hollowing out the state’s asset base without any corresponding productivity growth.
Furthermore, Britain’s tax structure has favored the ownership of land as an asset class. While the UK’s capital gains tax on the sale of land is similar to that elsewhere, it has relatively low rates for high-value gains and does not levy capital gains tax on primary residences. The UK is one of only a handful of countries that does not impose annual tax on property or land values. Neither does the UK have any mechanism to tax the increase in land value after planning permission has been granted. All this combines to make the UK attractive to international investors in land and property.
It was Blair’s New Labour government that introduced Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in 2007 to boost liquidity in the real estate sector. REITs are publicly listed companies that own, operate or finance income-producing real estate. They allow individuals to invest in large-scale property portfolios, such as offices, shopping centers, warehouses or housing, without having to buy property directly. Exempt from both corporation tax and capital gains tax, they must distribute more than 90 percent of their rental income to shareholders annually.
There are now more than 110 REITs that collectively manage tens of billions of property-based assets, with major REITS such as British Land, Landsec, and SEGRO covering a range of sectors, including logistics, retail, office and residential. They have become the cornerstone of pension funds and investment portfolios.
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This means that the financial sector (including private equity funds, hedge funds, pension funds and insurance companies), property developers and builders, as well as corporations with extensive land banks such as National Grid and Royal Mail, and wealthy families/individuals own much of Britain’s non-farming land. This is predominantly commercial property—retail, office and industrial—and undeveloped land; however, these sectors now play a small but increasing role as residential landlords, particularly in new large-scale urban development projects.
While owner-occupiers form the majority of households at 63 percent in 2025, 20 percent of households rent from private landlords and 17 percent from public or social housing organizations. Nevertheless, despite the growth of corporate landlords, the overwhelming majority of private renters (92 percent) are renting from small landlords. These are often pensioners (47 percent, according to the English Private Landlord Survey 2024) or “accidental” landlords that own a few properties, acquired through inheritance or retained after downsizing from the family home, and may depend on the rent to supplement their pension amid rising inflation.
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The average UK private sector rent is now approximately £1,350 a month, more than triple that of the late 1970s, especially in London and the South East, and more than the cost of the average mortgage.
But crucially, the explosive growth in rent has outpaced the growth in wages, which have increased by only 35–45 percent over the same period (depending on whether the mean, median or weekly vs hourly earnings are used), as inflation eroded whatever meager increases were won. It is this that has led to the now rampant cost of living crisis and the rise in homelessness, the number of young people still living with or returning to their parents, and a falling birth rate, as young couples can no longer afford to have children.
While rents in social/public housing are generally lower at around £420 a month (£600 in London), social renters are disproportionately affected by unemployment, disability, and low wages, with many relying on Universal Credit or Housing Benefit to make ends meet.
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The British housing market, where house prices have risen more than anywhere else in the developed world except perhaps Canada, has also led to greater economic and social income and wealth inequality in and between generations.
Wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, already high in 1979 at 60 percent, has risen to nearly 70 percent today, primarily driven by housing and land price inflation, with younger people increasingly locked out of home ownership and facing high rents and insecure work. The bottom half of households have little or no financial assets beyond their current account at the bank, as the rising cost of living has eroded the capacity of lower-income groups to save. In contrast, financial assets are heavily skewed towards the top decile.
But the increase in income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient has been much greater, rising from between 25 and 28 percent in 1979 to 34-36 percent in 2025, as wages stagnated in absolute terms and insecure work, including zero-hours contracts, the gig economy, short-term contracts and part-time employment, increased. Tax policy became less redistributive as the top income tax rates were cut by the Conservative government in 1988, along with a shift to regressive consumption-based taxes that took a far greater proportion of income from the poor than the rich. The welfare safety net was shredded with a shift from universal to means-tested support.
This has led to ever-increasing indebtedness as successive governments relaxed controls on lending. Total household debt, including both mortgages and unsecured debt (personal loans, student loans and credit card debt), as a percentage of income was less than 30 percent in 1979. It has now risen to around 120 percent. Unsecured debt as a percentage of income was between 23 and 29 percent in 2024. The increase in the absolute level of unsecured debt—especially student loans and personal credit—indicates the increasing financial strains on household budgets.
Whatever remained of the welfare state and a relatively egalitarian society by historical standards in 1979 is all but erased, with Britain a deeply polarized society and an asset-driven economy.
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The provision of decent housing, so essential to humanity, is incompatible with capitalism, a social order based on private profit, not social need. Access to universal and high-quality housing cannot be achieved by tweaking housing legislation or financial regulation; it can only be won through a social and political struggle by the working class against inequality and the capitalist profit system.
The productive forces of society—the giant banks, financial institutions and corporations, including the property companies—must be taken out of the hands of the financial elite and placed under the democratic control of the population. Combined with a major redistribution of wealth, such measures would free up immense resources for building homes and social infrastructure and ensuring all the rights of working people.
5. New autumn COVID-19 spike as UK government continues to limit access to free vaccines
The UK is experiencing a new spike in COVID-19 infections driven by two recently emergent Omicron subvariants dubbed “Stratus” and “Nimbus”. Together these now account for the majority of cases in the UK, with genomic surveillance indicating that roughly 63 percent of analyzed cases were Stratus and 25 percent were Nimbus by late September.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified Stratus as a “variant under monitoring,” noting it showed the highest global growth advantage in mid-2025, even outpacing Nimbus. Despite their similar overall impact, Stratus and Nimbus have each been linked to some unusual symptoms, reflecting subtle differences in how these variants affect patients.
Doctors have noted that both can cause an extremely painful sore throat—described by some sufferers as a “razor blade” sensation—often leading to a hoarse or croaky voice. Stratus infections in particular have been associated with a persistent dry cough, fatigue and fever, while Nimbus is noted to be highly transmissible due to an enhanced ability to bind to human cells.
In July, the World Socialist Web Site drew attention to the 11th wave of mass COVID-19 infection sweeping across the United States and other countries, driven by new highly transmissible variants.
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Under the bipartisan policy of “living with the virus”, the wearing of masks, isolation, contact-tracing, and other public health mitigation measures have been eliminated. The result is that, outside of individual choice, there are effectively no barriers to COVID-19 spreading through the UK’s schools, workplaces, and public venues.
The official guidance remains that if someone feels unwell with respiratory symptoms or fever, they “should avoid contact with vulnerable people and stay at home if possible”, but this is purely advisory. In reality, many cannot afford to isolate due to work pressures or may not even realize they have COVID because testing is so scarce. This laissez-faire approach virtually guarantees continued mass infection, which in turn means more illness and the potential for further variants to emerge.
One of the few remaining pillars of the pandemic response is vaccination, but this too has been drastically scaled back. As of autumn 2025, the National Health Service (NHS) is offering a COVID booster only to a very limited high-risk group: adults aged 75 and over, residents of care homes for older adults, and individuals with weakened immune systems (6 months+).
This is an even narrower criterion than the previous year which also included adults aged 65-74 and people in clinical risk groups, both dropped from free eligibility in 2025.
In other words, millions of people who once qualified for free COVID vaccination are now excluded. They must either pay out-of-pocket for a private vaccine or go without. The price of a private COVID jab in the UK is between £75–£105, making it unaffordable for many already devastated by a years-long and worsening cost of living crisis.
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Health officials still emphasize that vaccines are crucial. UKHSA data from last winter showed those who got the booster were 43 percent less likely to be hospitalized with COVID compared to the unvaccinated. The agency is urging everyone who is eligible this autumn to come forward for both the COVID and flu vaccines ahead of winter. “The most important thing is for those eligible to get their vaccination when it is due,” officials insist. However, this messaging rings hollow given that the majority of the population is deemed ineligible for free COVID boosters.
Past waves of infection have already left a devastating impact on the working class in the form of Long-COVID. According to the most recent Office for National Statistics /UKHSA estimates—published in April 2024—2 million people (3.3 percent of the population in private households in England and Scotland) report Long-COVID symptoms. Of these, 75 percent said their daily activities were limited, and 19 percent said they were “limited a lot.” Half reported symptoms lasting for two years; about 31 percent for three years.
Despite this lasting damage, NHS England ended ring-fenced funding for specialist Long-COVID services on April 1 this year. Many clinics are closing or scaling back services.
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Workers in the UK and internationally must oppose their governments’ slashing of resources to fight the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and fight for a policy of eliminating the virus to protect themselves and wider society from this devastating disease. Such a strategy must be funded by the hoarded wealth of the corporations and the super-rich, and organized democratically and scientifically, not subordinated to the demands of the capitalist oligarchy.
Australia’s National Press Club has cancelled a previously scheduled address by US journalist Chris Hedges, without providing any coherent explanation. The events of the Press Club in Canberra are generally nationally televised weekly by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and attract a large audience.
Its denials notwithstanding, it is clear that the Press Club’s decision constitutes an act of political censorship. In addition to bowing to a campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists, Hedges’ topic, the “betrayal of Palestinian journalists,” including by their colleagues in the west, was likely too close to home.
Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, former New York Times correspondent and author, had been set to deliver the speech on October 20, as part of a broader speaking tour in Australia.
Following the cancellation of the talk on Friday and a substantial backlash on social media, the Press Club has tried to limit the damage. In a statement over the weekend, it claimed to have only “tentatively agreed to a date” for Hedges to speak, “given his stature and expertise on Gaza.”
The Press Club denied Hedges’ assertion that the time and date of the address had been published on its website. That would clearly have indicated substantially more than a “tentative” agreement that he speak.
Sadly for those that issued the statement, people had taken screenshots of a page on the Press Club’s website that did indeed advertise Hedges’ talk, before it was quietly removed. It was posted on September 8 and even listed the price of admission, making clear that this was far more than a hypothetical proposal.
Given the shakiness of that assertion, one would have to question everything else in the statement. Its insistence that “there has been no pressure from anyone outside the board, either directly or indirectly” sounds very much like a case of they doth protest too much.
The reference to the absence of “indirect” pressure is particularly implausible. For the past two years, the entire atmosphere in official political and media circles has been marked by precisely such “pressure.”
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Hedges, in publicly protesting the cancellation, stated that: “The Israeli Ambassador, retired Lt. Colonel Amir Maimon, who spent 14 years in the Israeli military, is reportedly being considered to speak.”
In response, Hedges wrote: “Lt. Colonel Maimon can obviously, if he chooses, enlighten us about the artificial intelligence-based program known as ‘Lavender’ and how it selects people, along with their families, in Gaza for assassination… He can let us know why Israel continues the mass slaughter when an internal Israeli intelligence database indicates that at least 83 percent of Palestinians killed are civilians.”
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There are two other factors that may be at play in the cancellation, beyond the prospect of direct Zionist and Israeli lobbying.
In protesting the cancellation and explaining what he had intended to speak on, Hedges linked back to his September article with the same title as his cancelled address.
It is an excoriating denunciation of embedded reporters, who promote war and cover for imperialist crimes, whom Hedges contrasts with genuine investigative reporters exemplified by those Palestinian journalists who have lost their lives while telling the truth.
An obvious point of contention is that Hedges’ description of journalists who “slavishly disseminate whatever they are fed by officials, much of which is a lie, and pretend it is news” applies to the vast majority of the Australian press corps.
While there are honorable exceptions, collectively, they have covered themselves in shame over the past two years, devoting vast resources and limited talents to legitimizing the unfolding atrocities and frenetically attacking those that protest them.
The official media has shown a complete incuriosity in Australia’s active involvement in the genocide. Recent revelations of the scale of ongoing military exports to Israel have been published by Declassified Australia, a small independent outlet, and then blacked out by the official press.
The other issue is the character of the Press Club itself. Notwithstanding its pretensions as a forum of public debate, it is essentially a conglomeration of reactionary political, corporate and media interests.
The Press Club’s principal sponsor is Westpac, one of the country’s four largest banks. Other sponsors include dozens of major corporations, including at least one weapons company, Thales.
More than 150 support staff at Airedale General Hospital near Keighley, West Yorkshire staged a three-day strike from October 1-3 demanding pay and conditions parity with their National Health Service (NHS) colleagues.
The strikers—porters, cleaners, catering workers, sterile services staff, security and other non-clinical workers—perform vital functions that keep the hospital running. They are denied NHS terms and conditions because they are not employed directly by the Airedale NHS Foundation Trust, but through its wholly owned subsidiary company (SubCo) AGH Solutions (AGHS), established in 2018.
This has created a two-tier workforce. Workers transferred into the SubCo from the Trust have retained “Agenda for Change” pay and conditions, while new starters employed by the subsidiary are on vastly inferior contracts. They receive fewer paid holidays, worse sick pay and maternity entitlements, lower enhancements for weekend and night shifts, and drastically worse pensions.
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Unite and Unison are not taking part in the strike action at AGHS despite representing workers among its 300+ workforce. The fight by non-clinical staff for equality has been ringfenced by the GMB and the other health unions from a broader mobilization of Airedale hospital staff against the backdoor privatization of vital hospital functions and the two-tier workforce entrenched over the past seven years.
The defense of the NHS and its workforce cannot be entrusted to any section of the leaderships of the health unions who are sitting on mass opposition. They have been enablers in the imposition of a 3.6 percent below-inflation pay award by the Starmer government for this year—against nurses, paramedics and other NHS staff in England under the Agenda for Change.
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The fight at Airedale hospital cannot be won through action against a single Trust. It requires a far wider mobilisation against the SubCos throughout the NHS—a struggle which all the unions have divided and demobilised.
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A World Socialist Web Site reporting team visited the picket line at Airedale on October 3 to interview strikers about their struggle, distribute the leaflet, “Unison claims victory over NHS England “pause” on private subsidiaries: Beware the fine print”, and discuss a unified fightback by NHS workers.
GMB officials intervened to shut down discussion, telling strikers not to take the leaflet or give any comments, with one official abusing the WSWS reporting team as “arseholes”. Peter Davies, the GMB’s Regional Senior Officer, threatened to call the police, claiming reporters were “harassing” the pickets.
In truth it is the actions of the GMB officials which constitute harassment, aimed at preventing free discussion among workers. At Airedale or any other struggle, every worker has an interest in opposing such bureaucratic methods.
The GMB’s actions underscore the need for precisely the type of democratic organizations of struggle described in the World Socialist Web Site article:
Rank-and-file committees must be built in every hospital, trust and care setting, uniting doctors, nurses, paramedics, and support staff in a common fight to defend the NHS as a public service, free from privatization and corporate control. The program for action is clear:
• Scrap the subsidiary companies and restore all workers to NHS contracts with full compensation for lost pay and benefits.
• Defend NHS pensions, pay, and conditions—stop the jobs cull.
• Fund health and patient care, not rearmament and war.
• Reject Labour’s 10 Year Plan, designed to accelerate privatization and corporate control.
• Build a unified, independent struggle to defend the NHS and its workforce.
Goodall’s discoveries gained world-wide attention in 1963 when National Geographic published her article, “My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees,” which was featured on the front cover of the magazine. The prominent evolutionary biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould praised her work, which he said, “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” She subsequently wrote 32 books, based on her research, including 15 for children, which further spread her findings among a wide audience. She was also featured in several television documentaries. In addition, her work earned her a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1965, despite the fact that she had no undergraduate degree.
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Jane Goodall was an extremely important scientific figure who changed the way people understand themselves, their relationship to the natural world, and the animal kingdom. Darwin’s most controversial assertion was that human beings and the great apes had a common ancestor not that long ago. This truth is proven by the fossil record, but Goodall’s work gave it a degree of staggering concreteness. She showed that chimpanzees make and use tools, hunt cooperatively, and display complex emotions and social structures once thought unique to humans.
The implications of her work, always understated, are in fact an assault on all forms of religious dogma, which hold that man was uniquely created in the image of a creator-deity. Actually, many of the unique traits of man are shared with the great apes because man is a member of the great apes family. The fact that Goodall held vaguely pantheist religious beliefs in no way undermines the profoundly materialist content of her work. However great a scientist she was, Goodall was known for her compassion and humanity both to people and to the animals she studied.
9. A socialist perspective against genocide, world war and fascism
An empowering statement of the the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (Germany).
10. Trump threatens to override courts, invoke Insurrection Act and unleash military on US cities
Speaking from the Oval Office Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump threatened to ignore court orders and override local governors and mayors to deploy US military assets in major American cities. In a “big lie,” Trump declared Chicago, the third largest city in the US, was “like a war zone” and said he would invoke the Insurrection Act “if it was necessary.”
“So far it hasn’t been necessary. But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump threatened, adding, “If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.”
The aspiring dictator promised to “go city by city” until he had “safe cities.”
11. Philadelphia hotel workers launch strike
Philadelphia hotel workers with UNITE HERE Local 274 launched a strike Sunday, walking off the job at several major downtown hotels. The action follows months of stalled contract negotiations over wages, staffing and healthcare.
The strike involves about 280 workers at two downtown Philadelphia hotels and comes amid a massive municipal crisis within Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania. At the national level, the Trump administration has waged war on the population through the deployment of the National Guard to Portland, Chicago and other cities on the transparently false claim of combating “left-wing terrorism.”
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The hotel strike involves housekeepers, cooks, bartenders and front desk staff. They are demanding significant wage increases including a $12 raise over three years for non-tipped workers, better pensions, expanded healthcare coverage and improved staffing levels. In Philadelphia, the average hourly pay for hotel workers is around $22, while their annual compensation is roughly $45,760 for full-time workers.
This comes in far under the real cost of living in the city, which is estimated to be at around $50,000 to $55,000 a year before taxes to cover essentials like rent, utilities, food, transportation and personal expenses. Monthly costs excluding rent range from $1,200 to $1,600, while the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about $1,300 to $1,700 per month.
Working conditions include long hours, overwork, understaffing, physical strain and having to do multiple jobs at once. Contract negotiations have been ongoing since spring, with current contracts expired since last year, and have been extended recently.
The union says hotel management companies have not offered satisfactory proposals despite rising inflation and an expected surge in tourism for major 2026 events like the FIFA World Cup.
According to City and State Pennsylvania, “As the nation approaches 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence … the Keystone State will be at the forefront of celebrations commemorating the revolutionary document’s 250th anniversary.” The city of Philadelphia will host several major sports events in the next year, including the “MLB All-Star Game, the PGA Championship, and the first and second rounds of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament.” In total, the state and city expect “a historic influx of visitors and dollars throughout the year.”
Hospitality workers hold immense leverage under these conditions.
The strike brings these workers up against the most powerful real estate firms in the world, as well as major supporters of the Trump administration.
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Any struggle against these conditions necessarily brings the working class against the combined forces of management and the state. This also includes the forces of the Democratic Party and trade union apparatus. Local 274, with over 4,000 members, is attempting to continue the betrayal of Philadelphia workers with its misleadership.
The union has only mobilized a few hundred workers at the two locations. UNITE HERE Local 274 has assets worth over $2.4 million, which could provide all of its striking members with strike pay at or greater than their $880 per week they earn working in the Hampton and Sheraton hotels for over two months. As a national union, UNITE HERE possesses over $238 million total assets.
Rather than put these resources to use, its leaders are stringing their 280 striking members out on poverty-level strike benefits. On Sunday, the union paraded leaders of local unions to spout empty slogans. Among them was AFSCME District Council 33 leader Greg Boulware, who declared that members should “stand together and be strong.”
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Workers must take the initiative to develop their own organizations to resist the coming sellouts of their struggle while fighting to connect them to the broader movement of the working class. Rank-and-file committees must take up the fight against exploitation, the shredding of social services and the corporate oligarchy’s attempts to build a dictatorship in its effort to contain the class struggle.
Local 274 workers must unite with these workers and build the Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee as the vehicle to oppose exploitation, fascism, war and spread their strike beyond the limits which the official union apparatus is allowing.
12. Australian Labor government presides over 000 breakdown
The talk of a “Pacific family” is cynical window-dressing for a neo-colonial pact aimed at chaining the oppressed masses of PNG to the imperialist war drive against China.
13. United States: Right-wing Democrat Mikie Sherrill struggles in New Jersey gubernatorial race
The improper release of Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill’s entire US Navy record by the administration of fascistic President Donald Trump has thrown the gubernatorial race in New Jersey into turmoil. News of the release broke hours after a poll indicated that the race between Sherrill and Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli was in a dead heat.
The distribution of mostly unredacted documents has the earmarks of an attempt to sabotage the campaign of Sherrill, who was first elected to Congress in 2018 as one of more than a dozen military-intelligence operatives who won seats that year, a group identified by the WSWS as the CIA Democrats.
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Sherrill, who has centered her gubernatorial campaign on her Navy career, now faces questions about what role she played in a cheating scandal that erupted at the US Naval Academy in the 1990s. More than 100 midshipmen were implicated in cheating on the final electrical engineering exam, which is notoriously difficult and required for all third-year students who are not engineering majors.
Sherrill did not participate in her Naval Academy graduation ceremony in 1994 but nevertheless received a commission and served in the Navy for nine years. She left the Navy at the rank of lieutenant in December 2003, before going to law school and becoming a federal prosecutor. Sherrill has said that she was not allowed to walk at graduation because she did not inform on classmates who cheated on the exam. She herself has not been accused of cheating. The documents released by the NPRC do not suggest Sherrill played any direct role in the cheating scandal.
Consistent with the focus of her campaign and her political orientation to the military, Sherrill has presented the release of documents as an attack on the armed forces. In a statement to CBS, Sherrill said, “That Jack Ciattarelli and the Trump administration are illegally weaponizing my records for political gain is a violation of anyone who has ever served our country. No veteran’s record is safe.” Sherrill has not decried the release of documents as interference in the gubernatorial election or an attack on democratic rights, including the right to privacy, or connected it in any way with the larger Trump administration assault on democracy.
Ciattarelli has demanded that Sherrill release her full Naval Academy records, including her disciplinary files. “She could clear this all up by approving the release of her disciplinary records, but she won’t,” he told Fox News.
Sherrill and Ciattarelli represent equally repugnant factions of the American ruling class. During her Navy career, Sherrill was a Russian policy officer and flew missions in Europe and the Middle East. In the US House of Representatives, she unfailingly supported Biden’s agenda of austerity and war. A staunch backer of the NATO proxy war against Russia, Sherrill met and was photographed with members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in September 2022. During the recent gubernatorial debate, it took Sherrill only nine seconds before she mentioned her Navy career.
Ciattarelli served in the New Jersey Assembly from 2011 to 2018 and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2021. Having initially called Trump a “charlatan,” he later cast aside any scruples and supported Trump’s reelection in 2020. Moreover, he headlined a “Stop the Steal” rally, thus helping to promote the lie that the election had been rigged in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. Ciattarelli urges full cooperation between local police departments and Immigration and Customs Enforcement and opposes equal rights for sexual and gender minorities.
The release of Sherrill’s Navy records and the questions about her role in the cheating scandal of the ’90s recall the Swift boat smear campaign against Senator John Kerry in 2004. During that year’s presidential campaign, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth publicly accused Kerry, a Navy veteran who was the Democratic candidate, of misrepresenting his conduct during the Vietnam War. Kerry commanded combat missions in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam and became a prominent opponent of the war after his return to the US.
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Far from representing an alternative to the Republicans, the Democrats defend the interests of Wall Street, the military and the intelligence agencies. This is being demonstrated in the most glaring fashion in the only two major statewide contests this year, the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia, states with a combined population of nearly 19 million people.
The Democratic Party has nominated two of the original 2018 class of “CIA Democrats” in these races. Sherill, the former Navy pilot with close ties to the NATO command structure, is running in New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger, a former career Central Intelligence Agency agent, is running for governor of Virginia. Both are favored in the polls, Sherrill narrowly, and Spanberger by a comfortable margin over fascist Republican lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Spears, whose campaign is so dismal that Trump has declined to appear on her behalf.
14. United States: The manufactured science that claims Tylenol causes autism
The September 22, 2025, White House press conference on Tylenol and autism marked a turning point in the politicization of science by the Trump administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump and Kennedy are seeking to impose right-wing ideology as medical fact with far-reaching implications.
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The White House’s rationale for this sweeping policy action rested almost entirely on a single scientific publication, the Mount Sinai-led systematic review published in BMC Environmental Health in August 2025. Widely known as the Prada and Baccarelli study, it synthesized findings from 46 observational studies examining prenatal acetaminophen exposure and child neurodevelopmental outcomes. Although the authors explicitly cautioned that their results suggested only the “possibility of a causal relationship” and called for further research, the distinction between association and causation in scientific research was quickly discarded.
According to the Harvard Crimson, in conversations with administration officials, co-author Andrea Baccarelli may have overstated the strength of his findings, employing an assertion of causality that went beyond what his paper could legitimately support. During the White House press conference, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary amplified that exaggeration, quoting Baccarelli as saying there “is a causal relationship between prenatal acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders of ADHD and autism,” a distortion that directly contradicts both the study’s published language and the authors’ formal statements to the press.
The press briefing marked a decisive shift, transforming what should have remained a cautious discussion of an association between Tylenol and autism, speculative at best and unsupported by better-designed studies, into a state-sanctioned claim of causation. The event amounted to an orchestrated scientific hoax, in which the president and his partners in crime seized and repurposed academic findings of questionable quality to legitimize a predetermined political agenda. The White House further concealed a crucial fact: Baccarelli had served as a paid expert witness in the 2023 federal Tylenol multidistrict litigation, where his testimony—based on the very same studies later used in the August 2025 paper—was excluded by Judge Denise Cote for being “cherry-picked and misrepresented” and for presenting a “result-driven analysis.”
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Irrespective of the court’s decisive critique of Baccarelli’s methods and biases as an expert witness, in the weeks leading up to the recent White House press conference, the Crimson reported that Baccarelli had held phone discussions with Kennedy and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya regarding his new review, meetings that set the stage for its political appropriation. Since the event, he has declined public interviews, now stating only that his research identified an association and not a causal link, the distinction that lies at the core of the present scientific inquiry on Tylenol and autism, one which the White House has deliberately obfuscated.
The administration’s claims were swiftly condemned by experts from leading universities. Samuel S. Wang, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, called the assertion that acetaminophen causes autism “a massive overstatement and possibly completely untrue,” while Dennis P. Wall, a professor of pediatrics and biomedical data science at Stanford University, emphasized that “there needs to be much more work done … to identify causal mechanisms,” and that this “simply hasn’t been done.” Catherine E. Lord, a professor of psychiatry and education at UCLA, likewise cautioned that “to take it the next step and say this is causal, is really irresponsible.”
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In the meantime, the strongest, most methodologically sound research points away from any causal connection. Revisiting the Swedish sibling-control study, the researchers analyzed data from nearly 2.5 million children, comparing outcomes between siblings—one exposed to acetaminophen during pregnancy and another not. By holding genetics and shared family environment constant, the study effectively eliminated many of the biases that had produced weak associations in simpler observational research. The results clearly revealed that the small increases in autism and ADHD risk seen in conventional models—about 5 to 7 percent—disappeared entirely once sibling comparisons were applied. The authors concluded that the earlier associations were likely due to familial confounding, not acetaminophen exposure itself.
A year later, the Japanese nationwide birth cohort study led by Yusuke Okubo reached the same conclusion. Using data from more than 217,000 mother-child pairs, the researchers applied propensity score matching, sibling comparisons, and probabilistic bias analysis to identify hidden confounders. As in the Swedish study, small risk increases for ADHD and autism seen in basic models disappeared once genetic and environmental factors were controlled for. The authors cautioned that “unmeasured confounding, misclassification, and other biases may partially explain these associations,” effectively nullifying any causal link.
Taken together, these two large-scale studies, conducted independently on different continents, using distinct healthcare systems and genetic populations, dismantle the narrative that the Trump-Kennedy administration elevated to national policy. What appeared, in weaker analyses, as a potential signal has now been shown to be statistical noise.
Trump and Kennedy’s declaration that Tylenol causes autism stands in direct opposition to the evidence base. No scientifically validated study has established a causal relationship between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and neurodevelopmental disorders. Their claim relies on a handful of observational studies showing modest statistical associations, none of which withstand more rigorous analyses.
This distinction between association and causation lies at the core of scientific reasoning. An association simply means two factors occur together—for example, women taking more pain relievers during pregnancy may also experience higher rates of fever, infection, or inflammation, each of which can influence fetal development. Causation, by contrast, implies a direct, mechanistic link where changing one factor changes the outcome. Establishing causation requires evidence that rules out alternative explanations, confirms time sequence, and demonstrates a plausible biological mechanism. Absent these criteria, asserting causation is speculative at best and deceptive at worst. In the Tylenol debate, no experimental or longitudinal evidence demonstrates a causal pathway between acetaminophen and autism; only weak correlations that vanish when examined under more rigorous designs.
The history of smoking and lung cancer offers a vivid example of how science progresses from correlation to causation. When early studies in the 1950s observed higher lung cancer rates among smokers, tobacco companies dismissed the findings as mere association. Over the next decade, researchers documented dose-response relationships, consistent results across populations, and biological mechanisms linking tobacco smoke to carcinogenic mutations. By the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, the evidence had crossed the threshold from association to causation—prompting sweeping public health reforms. That transformation was not political; it was empirical, grounded in converging data and the deliberate pace of scientific validation.
Kennedy and Trump’s declaration that Tylenol causes autism has essentially reversed the logic of the scientific process. Instead of letting evidence build toward causation, they begin with a predetermined causal claim and retrofitted selected data to support their preconceived illusions. Such inversions represent the process by which science becomes politicized, where consensus and objective scientific truth are disregarded and treated as conspiracy and heresy. Such distortion not only erodes public confidence in science but also endangers lives by replacing evidence-based caution with ideological certainty. Science, by its nature, draws a firm line between what can be observed and what can be known. Crossing that line for political gain transforms the scientific method into spectacle and leaves public health and all of society as collateral damage.
15. Historic protests in Spain oppose Gaza genocide
An explosive conflict is emerging between the working class and the capitalist political establishment, including pseudo-left parties complicit in Israeli attacks on Gaza.
16. Without membership vote, New York City government unions approve massive healthcare cuts
A consortium that includes the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), along with Silver Lake and Affinity Partners (wholly owned by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law), announced September 29 it would be acquiring video game giant Electronic Arts (EA). The $55 billion leveraged buyout (LBO), the largest in history, is targeted for completion by June 2026.
The deal is the second largest purchase of a video game firm, after Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard in 2022 for $68.7 billion.
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The Saudis’ deeper involvement in video gaming comes on the heels of the regime’s mostly successful efforts to draw in the world’s leading comedians to the Riyadh Comedy Festival, running from September 26 to October 9. The festival featured some of the biggest names in the field, including Mo Amer, Aziz Ansari, Wayne Brady, Bill Burr, Jimmy Carr, Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Whitney Cummings, Pete Davidson, Kevin Hart, Gabriel Iglesias and Chris Tucker.
Critics contend the festival and its celebrity participants are being used to deflect attention from the Saudi authorities’ brutal suppression of free speech and innumerable human rights violations.
The comedy festival brought mostly bad press as a number of comedians, such as Shane Gillis, Atsuko Okatsuka and Stavros Halkias, refused to participate altogether, while others like Nimesh Patel dropped out of the event. Social media posts have called for a boycott of those accepting the invitation to perform in Riyadh.
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Amnesty International reports that Saudi Arabia executed 345 people in 2024 (mostly by beheading), the highest figure ever recorded by the organization. The reinstatement of the death penalty for drug offenses helped drive the increase. Saudi authorities carried out 122 executions for drug-related crimes, a sharp rise from just two in 2023. One hundred thirty-eight of those executed in 2024 were foreign nationals. More women were also put to death in 2024 than in previous years, four of them Nigerians. Rigged trials often depend on “confessions” extracted by torture. The Berlin-based European Saudi Organization for Human Rights suggests the actual number of executions is much higher.
Then, of course, there is also the infamous murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
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In regard to its effort to reduce the dependence on oil revenue, as of 2022, oil was still responsible for 40 percent of Saudi Arabia’s GDP and 75 percent of its fiscal revenue.
The purchase of EA will only see a further escalation of the war being waged on video game workers. The number of jobs in the industry will continue to shrink, quality will go down and prices will continue to rise.
17. Trump threatens Venezuela with “fire and fury”
The Trump administration’s military escalation against Venezuela continued this past Friday with the Pentagon confirming the sinking of yet another vessel in the southern Caribbean and the threat by Trump to annihilate the country with nuclear weapons.
“Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth proudly announced in a video release that four passengers aboard the small boat were killed when it was struck by multiple missiles, part of a brutal and public spectacle of modern state terror.
This marked the fifth incident in recent weeks in which unarmed vessels alleged to be carrying drug traffickers have been attacked without warning, resulting in the deaths of at least 21 civilians. Investigations have revealed that many, if not all, of the victims were fishermen or migrants from coastal communities, far from posing any genuine threat to the US. Julie Turkewitz of the New York Times reported testimony from the wife of one victim, a fisherman from Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula, who “left one day for work and never came back.”
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Speaking at Naval Station Norfolk on Sunday, Trump thanked the Navy for “blowing cartel terrorists the hell out of the water,” adding ominously, “we did another one last night,” apparently mistakenly referring to Friday’s strike.
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He then shifted the battlefield focus, stating, “They’re not coming by sea anymore … now we’ll have to start looking about the land because they’ll be forced to go by land.”
These chilling remarks are aimed foremost at preparing or provoking the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom Washington accuses of leading the “Cartel of the Suns”—nonexistent, according to most experts. Addressing Maduro, Trump declared in a belligerent tone: “Every tyrant and adversary on the planet knows their choice is very simple: it’s leave America in peace, or be blown up in fire and fury never seen before,” echoing his nuclear threats from 2017 against North Korea.
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This explicit targeting of an entire nation signals the depths of imperialist barbarism in which mass murder is normalized as a policy tool. The willingness to contemplate the wholesale destruction of millions in Latin America parallels the genocidal campaign pursued under US auspices in Gaza. Such threats are not merely isolated rhetoric, but rather integral to an escalating framework of state terror aimed at crushing any resistance to America’s ruling oligarchy.
The significance of this buildup cannot be overstated. The southern Caribbean has become a flashpoint in the ongoing world repartition by rival great powers.
The Trump administration and the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in Washington view Venezuela—with the world’s largest proven oil reserves—and the vast natural resources and labor force across Latin America as a critical imperialist prize akin to Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria. This is seen as a stepping stone in Trump’s broader global strategy to wage war against Iran, Russia, and most decisively, China.
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In an unprecedented development, the White House sent a memo to Congress last week declaring that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels. This pseudo-legal declaration is part of Trump’s bid to arrogate to himself sweeping war powers, bypassing Congressional authority and muddling traditional distinctions between domestic law enforcement and military wartime operations, contravening the Posse Comitatus Act.
This latest maneuver opens the door to the use of military force both within US cities and abroad under the premise of combating drug trafficking.
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The Democratic Party’s response has been muted, largely limited to questioning the lack of Congressional approval while endorsing the expansion of the so-called war on drugs. The top Democrat in the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed, explicitly supported the war against drug cartels as a pretext for the violent reassertion of hemispheric hegemony.
Military analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimate that a ground invasion of Venezuela would require a minimum of at least 50,000 troops, far outnumbering the approximately 5,000 currently deployed to the southern Caribbean. Even so, the existing Navy and Air Force assets provide the strategic scaffolding for a rapid escalation. “With the assets in place today, US forces could conduct air or missile strikes against Venezuela from a sanctuary offshore—albeit diverting resources from the Indo-Pacific,” CSIS experts write.
The deployments—costing hundreds of millions daily—create an inevitable momentum to make use of these forces. US officials cited by the Washington Examiner recognize that the pricey buildup in the region is already enough to seize control of key strategic assets like ports or airfields.
Coupled with punitive tariffs—such as the staggering 50 percent imposed on Brazil after the conviction of Trump ally Bolsonaro for a military coup attempt—this campaign constitutes a full-scale offensive by US imperialism to prepare fascist repression and reassert control over Latin America.
With the winter months approaching in the United States, millions of low-income households are in danger of being unable to pay for heating. In April, President Donald Trump fired all federal employees managing the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) energy assistance program. The program dispenses $4.1 billion annually in grant money to all 50 states.
LIHEAP was created by Congress in 1981. It helps older adults, families with small children, people with disabilities and other vulnerable households to afford their home energy bills. It keeps the heat on in the winter and cooling on in the summer for 6.2 million families each year. Without this assistance, struggling families would be unable to afford utilities, threatening countless lives.
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The LIHEAP program was never fully funded. Each fall, people would have to hurry to submit their applications to ensure some assistance before the funds ran out. Even those who received payments would often run out before the end of winter.
Trump has now further cut this program. There is around $378 million remaining in unreleased LIHEAP funds to distribute to states. Typically, these reserved funds are used for “energy emergencies,” usually for severe weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes.
But this money has been effectively “frozen” by Trump’s executive fiat. He has usurped the power of Congress over the budget by firing the entire staff required to dispense them.
While Trump’s mass firing of the entire LIHEAP staff threatens to turn off the power for millions of Americans, electricity bills are climbing nationwide, rising faster than inflation in many places, the explosive growth of AI and the massive data centers behind it are driving demand and straining the grid.
Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make huge factories look tiny by comparison. There is growing evidence that suggests the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech.
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AI and other tech companies, such as Palantir, a Denver-based software company co-founded by billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, are using artificial intelligence and data mining to identify, track, and deport suspected non-citizens. Palantir is slated to deliver a prototype of the ImmigrationOS platform by September 25, 2025, with the contract running through September 2027. ICE is paying Palantir $30 million for the platform.
Palantir’s systems pull data from across government databases, including passport records, Social Security files, IRS tax data, and even license-plate reader data. The goal is to create a comprehensive, AI-driven profile of individuals that agencies can use to carry out mass deportations.
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In sum, rising energy prices are a massive wealth transfer from the working class to big tech companies, and to make workers’ pay for the erection of a surveillance state.
19. Turkey: The Historical and International Foundations of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International)
The Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi – Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party – Fourth International), unanimously adopted this document at its founding congress on June 13–15, 2025. It traces the central historical experiences of the working class and Marxist movement in the 20th and 21st centuries, and establishes the principled foundations for the building of the Trotskyist movement in Turkey and throughout the region.
New sections of the document will be published in coming days. Here are the latest published sections of a total of 33:
16. Pabloite Opportunism and the Founding of the ICFI
17. The Democrat Party Period and the 1960 Military Coup
18. The SLL’s Defense of Trotskyism against the Pabloite “Reunification”
20. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Argentina:
Mass demonstration against President Milei’s attack on children’s health
Mass demonstration against President Milei’s attack on children’s health
Police escalate repression against retirees
Canada:
Alberta teachers begin provincewide strike
Alberta teachers begin provincewide strike
British Columbia government workers expand job actions
Ecuador:
National strike against Noboa administration expands
National strike against Noboa administration expands
Mexico:
Veracruz health workers protest
Veracruz health workers protest
United States:
Vermont dairy workers enter second week on strike
Pennsylvania nursing home workers set to strike eight Valley West facilities October 14
21. Demand the freedom of Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site have initiated a global campaign to demand the immediate release of Bogdan Syrotiuk. The fight for Bogdan’s freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
