Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: December 22-28
- 25 years ago:
Fire kills over 300 people in China
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
US pledges to finance France’s colonial war in Vietnam
100 years ago:
2. Musk’s wealth surges to $750 billion after court grants him $150 billion payday
On Friday, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that Tesla CEO Elon Musk should keep a 2018 pay package valued at $150 billion despite deliberately misleading shareholders and violating securities laws in obtaining it.
The ruling sent Musk’s wealth surging to $749 billion, putting him three-quarters of the way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. According to an estimate by Forbes, Musk’s net worth stood at $195 billion at the start of 2024, meaning that he has appropriated half a trillion dollars in just two years—a figure larger than the GDP of Vietnam, the Philippines or Malaysia.
The ruling marks yet another breakdown of legality in the US under the pressure of vast and soaring social inequality. None of the institutions of the state, whether legal or political, are capable of restraining the parasitic wealth and criminality of the financial oligarchy that Musk embodies.
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The decision comes just weeks after Tesla shareholders approved an even larger compensation package for Musk, potentially worth $1 trillion over the next decade. The scale of Musk’s compensation defies comprehension. At $100 billion per year under the new package, Musk would earn roughly $50 million per hour—a sum approximately three million times greater than the $18-per-hour starting wage at a Tesla factory.
This staggering transfer of wealth to a single individual takes place amid a social catastrophe for tens of millions of American workers, fueled by falling real wages and the worst series of mass layoffs since at least 2020.
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Tesla embodies the speculative mania gripping the American stock market. On December 16, the company’s stock closed at an all-time high of $489.88. There is an inverse relationship between Tesla’s share price and its sales. US sales are on track to fall 9 percent this year, and fourth-quarter sales have plunged 22 percent compared to the same period last year—yet its share price hit a new record this week.
Musk is the representative figure of an entire social layer—the financial oligarchy that has accumulated unprecedented wealth over the past four decades and now dominates every aspect of American political life. The courts defend Musk because to challenge his fortune is to challenge the legitimacy of the system that produced it.
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The Delaware ruling arrives as President Donald Trump—himself a billionaire who assembled the leading figures of this oligarchy at his January inauguration—has consolidated executive power to an unprecedented degree. The Trump administration is, in the most direct sense, a government of the oligarchy, by the oligarchy and for the oligarchy.
The New York Times observed this week that Trump has established “a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency,” and noted that “nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch.”
This observation embodies the fact that the political forms of American society are being brought into alignment with its social reality. The return to monarchical, aristocratic modes of rule is not an aberration—it is the political form in alignment with a society in which wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a tiny oligarchy to a degree not seen since the age of kings.
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The massive consolidation of wealth in the hands of the financial oligarchy is the social basis of the drive toward dictatorship. Inequality this extreme cannot be maintained through democratic means—there is immense popular opposition to a social order in which one man accumulates $500 billion in two years while tens of millions skip meals and medical care. The ruling class knows this, and responds by dismantling the democratic structures that might serve as a check—however minuscule—on its power.
The Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling demonstrates that the struggle against social inequality cannot proceed through the courts or the Democratic Party or any institution of the capitalist state, which have been completely subordinated to the predations of the financial oligarchy.
The solution lies not in appeals to the courts but in the independent political mobilization of the working class. The vast fortunes accumulated by Musk and his fellow oligarchs must be expropriated, and the commanding heights of the economy—the banks, corporations and major industries—placed under public ownership and democratic control. Only through such a transformation can the productive resources of modern society be directed toward meeting human needs rather than enriching a handful of billionaires while millions struggle to afford food, housing and medical care.
3. Trump announces creation of the “Trump Kennedy Center” in latest assault on democracy and culture
Any institution or building with the words “Trump” and “arts” included in its name is burdened with an oxymoron, and a ludicrous one at that. Trump, a fascist, stands for the extirpation of culture, the plunging of humanity into barbarism. As we noted recently, “the real ‘garbage’ is in the White House. Trump, a real estate swindler and racist demagogue ... is the embodiment of the rot of American capitalism.”
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Cancellations at the Kennedy Center include productions and artists such as the Broadway musical Hamilton, actress and producer Issa Rae and Grammy Award‑winning artist Rhiannon Giddens, among others. Television producer Shonda Rhimes resigned from her position as board treasurer. No artist with any self-respect will have anything to do with the Trump-run center.
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Trump is echoing Adolf Hitler’s crusade against modernism and the “Jewish‑Bolshevik mockery of art,” as he seeks to construct a patriotic, national art that glorifies American capitalism and erases all traces of class struggle. The administration is consciously imitating the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung—deliberate action to bring the entire cultural sphere under state subordination to fascist aims.
It is not accidental that the Nazis, immediately after their seizure of power in 1933, began renaming squares, avenues, stadiums, bridges and buildings to honor the new chancellor, Hitler.
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The ideological content of the Trump administration policy is deeply hostile to genuine artistry, in fact, it is its opposite—the latter by its very nature strives to reveal the truth about social life and inevitably contains the element of protest against existing conditions.
4. Two-thirds of South Africa’s population in absolute poverty, with one third unemployed
Statistics South Africa’s latest Poverty Trends report covering the period from 2006 to 2023 reveals the scale of social devastation in South Africa, underscoring the failure of a capitalist system administered by the African National Congress (ANC) for over three decades.
Absolute poverty has risen to 40.8 million people, nearly two-thirds of the population. The human cost is visible above all in mass unemployment, officially measured at 31.9 percent, with millions more pushed out of the labor force or confined to insecure and low paid work.
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Since 2024, South Africa has been governed by the Government of National Unity (GNU), where the ANC rules alongside the pro-business, right-wing Democratic Alliance, Zulu ethno-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the anti-immigrant Patriotic Alliance (PA), and the right-wing white-Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus (FF+).
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The desperation of workers will worsen with the planned termination of the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) which supports the unemployed who have no other sources of income or social assistance. The SRD provides those who qualify with R370 ($22) a month, which is below Stats SA’s Food Poverty Line of R794 ($47). Those who fall beneath this line cannot afford enough food to meet the minimum daily energy requirement for adequate health.
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It is now more than three decades since ANC leader and South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, proclaimed at his inauguration in 1994: “We have, at last, achieved our political emancipation. We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.”
The social reality revealed by Stats SA exposes this promise as a lie. The South African working class remains trapped in mass unemployment and deepening poverty.
This vindicates the Trotskyist perspective of Permanent Revolution, which rejected the claim advanced by the ANC and rationalized by Stalinist and pseudo-left organizations that the coming to power of a black majority government within the framework of capitalism would lead to prosperity and social justice.
Permanent Revolution insists that in countries of belated capitalist development, the tasks historically associated with the bourgeois-democratic revolution—ending mass poverty, securing genuine equality, and achieving real national independence—cannot be carried out by the capitalist class. Bound by its dependence on imperialism and its fear of the working class, the bourgeoisie is incapable of resolving these contradictions. These tasks can only be realized by the working class taking power, expropriating the major banks, mines, and industries, and linking this to the international fight for socialism.
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The ANC’s role is the culmination of the class function it performed during the transition from apartheid. During the 1980s, the apartheid regime was confronted with an intensifying economic crisis and a mass uprising of black workers that threatened to slip beyond its control. Township revolts, strikes, and political radicalization among the working class placed the apartheid regime on the brink of collapse. A state of emergency was imposed as the government lost control over large sections of the townships.
Under these conditions, South African and international capital concluded that the ANC, and Mandela in particular, were the only forces capable of containing a revolutionary upheaval. His release from prison was a calculated intervention aimed at stabilizing capitalist rule. Drawing on the immense prestige he had acquired through decades of struggle and imprisonment, coupled with the socialist rhetoric he was trained in by the South African Communist Party, the ANC moved to restrain and demobilize a mass movement, subordinating it to a negotiated settlement with the white South African ruling class that preserved the wealth and property of the mining houses, banks and multinational corporations.
Even before assuming office, Mandela and the ANC abandoned key elements of their own program, especially those calling for public ownership of the banks, mines and major industries. They signed a secret letter of intent with the International Monetary Fund pledging to implement pro-business policies, including austerity measures, high interest rates, and the removal of barriers to the penetration of international capital.
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What is required is a genuine socialist alternative that identifies capitalism as the root cause of poverty, unemployment and inequality. The International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site are working to build an independent movement of the working class, free from all factions of the bourgeoisie. Such a movement must unite with workers across Africa and internationally, in a common struggle against austerity, repression, war, and exploitation. Only through this internationalist and socialist perspective can poverty be eradicated in South Africa and beyond.
5. Storm Byron compounds catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza
Just when it seemed that living conditions in Gaza could not get any worse, Storm Byron, with its biting winds and twice the average rainfall for the time of year hit, causing death, destruction and havoc.
The worst affected areas of Gaza are those that suffered the greatest damage in the war.
Heavy rains flooded the tents of people living in more than 200 displacement sites—nearly 900,000 Palestinians are living in flimsy tents—while high winds swept away or tore them apart, affecting about 55,000 families. At least 13 damaged buildings, where thousands were sheltering from the harsh weather, have collapsed and many more could collapse at any moment due to rain and strong winds.
The floods have turned torn-up roads to mud and brought sewage onto the streets, overwhelming the already badly damaged sanitation system. With electricity in short supply, only limited fuel entering Gaza and much of the public infrastructure in ruins, waste collection has fallen, toilets are few and far between and water supplies are contaminated, threatening the rapid spread of disease.
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Children, who account for around one third of the 70,000 killed since the start of Israel’s genocidal war more than two years ago, with thousands more missing and presumed dead, are the most at risk. According to UNICEF, 9,300 children were treated for acute malnutrition in October.
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In contrast, while Storm Byron caused severe flooding in Israel, bringing down trees and flooding roads and leading to the deaths of three people, there was little or no structural damage. The government had placed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on high alert and issued public safety instructions and warnings of “unprecedented rain” as the storm approached. It had prepared emergency teams and launched search and rescue operations, including a search for four Israelis missing on a yacht en route to Cyprus and multiple rescues of flooded vehicles and missing persons and treatment of hypothermia cases.
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Despite the supposed ceasefire agreed at Sharm el-Sheikh on October 10, there had, according to Al Jazeera, been 738 Israeli violations up to 17 December 2025, with least 394 Palestinians killed, 1,075 more injured and 43 detained. There were 205 shootings at civilians, 37 raids beyond the yellow line, 358 bombings/shelling and 138 property demolitions. The Trump administration insists that the “ceasefire” is holding.
While the ceasefire stipulated that “full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip”, only half the required food aid is currently reaching the enclave, according to the World Food Program (WFP), with Palestinian relief agencies saying that no more than one quarter of the agreed aid is entering. Between October 10 and December 16, only 8,521 trucks reached their intended destinations, with truck drivers and aid deliveries facing significant delays due to Israeli inspections taking much longer than expected.
Less than half (around 39 percent) of the 37,200 trucks waiting to enter Gaza were able to enter the enclave over the same period. According to the Gaza Government Media Office, over a 62-day period just 14,534 trucks entered Gaza out of 37,200, averaging 234 trucks per day. The UN says it has tents, blankets and other essential supplies ready to enter Gaza, but the Israeli authorities have denied its trucks entry.
Israel has blocked essential and nutritious foodstuffs, including meat, dairy, and vegetables, while greenlighting ultra-processed foods such as snacks, chocolate, crisps, and soft drinks.
While the cost of food has fallen for many items, following two years of hyperinflation, they remain unaffordable for most Gazans who have been without work, income or support from overseas remittances, thanks to Israel’s destruction of the banking infrastructure, cash shortages and the freezing of accounts by international payment platforms.
On Friday, the UN warned that levels of hunger and the humanitarian situation remained critical. The threat of famine, first declared in August after Israeli restrictions of food aid into the territory led to mass starvation, with at least 450 people starving to death, had eased somewhat now that humanitarian aid deliveries were trickling into the territory.
The UN said that almost one in eight people still face food shortages, with persistent hunger made worse by the flooding and cold weather. The situation remained dire, with “the entire Gaza Strip classified in emergency”. This is just one step below famine and occurs when households have “very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality” due to lack of food.
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Israel intends to retain control of Gaza, pushing its people into ever smaller areas of the enclave—internment camps reminiscent of the worst excesses of the colonial era and World War II—that will be controlled by the IDF. At the same time, the IDF is carrying out provocations, including the assassination of dozens of senior commanders of Hamas’s military wing, with the aim of inciting a direct confrontation that will enable it to evade the second stage of the illusionary ceasefire.
6. Science vs. suspicion and fear: An Open Letter to a critic of Socialism AI
In the United States, the first year of the Trump regime—which has brought the criminal dregs of the ruling class to power—has exposed the political and intellectual bankruptcy of not only the Democratic Party but also of the middle-class tendencies and organizations that orbit around it. For decades these warriors of protest politics have waged war against Marxism, especially from within the academy. But they are paralyzed and impotent when confronted with the open emergence of a serious threat of fascism. The pathetic pilgrimage of Zohran Mamdani to the White House, where he embraced Donald Trump, exemplified the utter worthlessness of American pseudo-leftism.
Under these conditions, the launching of Socialism AI, which can help a worker, at any time of day, in any part of the world, explore Marxist-Trotskyist theory and politics, clarify concepts, connect past struggles with present events, and do so interactively and in accessible language, is not a marginal technical curiosity. It is a historic advance in the means of socialist education. It opens up the possibility of breaking the stranglehold of the ruling class over an extraordinarily powerful new technology by adapting it, to the greatest extent possible, to the interests of the working class.
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Augmented (a more precise term than “artificial”) Intelligence is already a major factor in how people obtain and process information. Surveys indicate that roughly a quarter of news users now turn to generative AI assistants at least weekly, and weekly use for “getting information” has more than doubled within a year, overtaking purely creative use cases. Industry analyses estimate that a single platform such as ChatGPT has reached on the order of hundreds of millions of weekly active users and around a billion searches per week, with roughly a third of consumers using such models daily or near‑daily as an information tool.
Traffic studies show that the ten largest chat‑based systems have recorded tens of billions of visits in a year. Within news production, more than four‑fifths of North American newsrooms now employ AI in some form, up from little more than a third a few years ago, including for automated article generation, data analysis, headline testing and content discovery. Major agencies such as the Associated Press already rely on AI systems to automatically generate tens of thousands of corporate earnings reports annually, while surveys of journalists in the Global South suggest that a large majority use AI tools in their work. Under these conditions, for the socialist movement to ignore or abstain from this technology would be a profound strategic error. It would amount to conceding an entire, rapidly expanding sphere of intellectual life to the unchallenged domination of capitalist and bourgeois ideology.
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Artists may also feel personally vulnerable at the thought that algorithms could somehow “replace” their creativity. History shows that every major technical innovation—photography, sound recording, cinema, digital editing—has forced artists to grapple with new conditions and possibilities. What is crucial here is to understand that Augmented Intelligence does not “think” and “create” in the way human consciousness does. It can, perhaps, produce a sophisticated imitation or even an effective enhancement of the style of a Hemingway, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Bellow or Roth, because it can model patterns in existing texts. But it cannot anticipate, or “know” in an artistic sense, how these writers would have responded to future experiences, love affairs, the deaths of friends, the outbreak of wars, new eruptions of class struggle, and other unforeseen changes in the social and intellectual environment. Those leaps—into new forms, new sensibilities, new historical insights—remain bound up with living human experience and consciousness. It is likely that writers, including the greatest ones, will come to use Augmented Intelligence as one tool among others in their work, but they will interact with it in a way that is creative: as an aid to formulation, exploration and revision, not as a substitute for their own artistic judgment and vision.
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... Should the working class, which is being asked to navigate a world of immense complexity, rely only on pre‑digital methods of learning and communication, while the ruling class systematically exploits every modern tool of analysis and prediction? Is it really in workers’ interests to abstain from a technology that could help them study history, assimilate theory and coordinate internationally, simply because that technology has thus far been developed within capitalist society? Or is it more consistent with a socialist outlook to master that technology, understand it critically, and turn it into an instrument for liberation rather than oppression?
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... Socialism AI should be seen as an attempt—imperfect, evolving, but immensely important—to appropriate an advanced technological form for socialist ends. It does not replace thought, study or struggle; it is meant to assist and deepen them. It offers workers and youth a way to investigate the history and theory of the Marxist movement more systematically than would otherwise be possible under conditions of isolation, long working hours and the decay of traditional institutions of learning. Before rejecting it, the most reasonable and genuinely scientific approach would be to use it, explore what it does and does not do, and then form a judgment.
7. Russian court sentences members of Marxist circle to draconian prison terms
A Russian military district court in Yekaterinburg has convicted five members of a Marxist circle in Ufa to draconian sentences of between 16 to 22 years in prison and high-security penal colonies for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Russian government through terrorist means. The case marks a significant intensification of the crackdown on democratic rights in Russia and attempts to vilify Marxism and any left-wing opposition to the Putin regime.
The defendants were found guilty of having organized or participated in a terrorist association, having planned a violent seizure of power, of having seized weapons and explosives, as well as of having publicly justified or propagandized terrorism.
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All of the defendants denied the charges. The prosecution heavily relied on testimony by a former member of the group, a native of Ukraine, who was working with the Russian secret service (FSB). The defendants claimed that the case against them was fabricated to “destroy Russian communist ideas,” that they had not engaged in any terrorist organization and that all their talk was “drunken chatter.” After the announcement of the verdict, they shouted “fascists” in the courtroom. All of them claimed to have been subject to torture and other forms of coercion.
The connections of these individuals to the Russian state and military and the KPRF, a right-wing state-embedded party, raise questions about the nature of this group and indicate that conflicts within the state apparatus may have played a role in this case. However, the media coverage and the extreme prison sentences make clear that the Russian state seeks to use this case, above all, to intimidate left-wing opposition to the Putin regime.
In the courtroom and media coverage, a heavy emphasis was placed on the fact that the defendants read classical Marxist texts by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin, the co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the Russian media coverage, the defendants were deliberately described as “Marxists,” creating the false impression, given the indictment, that Marxism is linked to terrorism.
Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable growth of youth groups and other circles that have expressly sought to study classical Marxist texts. While many—apparently such as the one in Ufa—have been under the dominant influence of Stalinism, others have been marked by an interest in the ideas of Leon Trotsky, the principal socialist and internationalist opponent of Stalin. The draconian prison sentences for the members of the group in Ufa were clearly meant to slander, criminalize and intimidate workers and young people involved in these circles and, more broadly, those interested in classical Marxism and, specifically, Trotskyism.
This included, most notably, the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), a Trotskyist youth group with members from across the former Soviet Union who have turned to the International Committee of the Fourth International. Its leader, the Ukrainian Trotskyist, Bogdan Syrotiuk, has been imprisoned in Ukraine on trumped-up charges of “state treason” because the YGBL took a principled, Marxist stance in opposition to the war in Ukraine, fighting for the unity of workers in Russia and Ukraine.
The significance of the case of the Ufa group can only be understood in the broader political context of an escalating campaign of censorship and historical falsification. Over the past year, in particular, the Putin regime has systematically intensified media and internet censorship, while continuing to promote Joseph Stalin, the “gravedigger” of the revolution, and undermining historical research into the Stalinist terror, when tens of thousands of revolutionaries were murdered.
Since the spring, there have been rolling internet blackouts in many regions of Russia which have resulted in people being cut off from the internet sometimes for weeks at a time. Many of the most important social media platforms that people in Russia use to learn about international developments and discussions and communicate with people outside of Russia, such as YouTube and WhatsApp, have been blocked entirely or partially. As a recent article on the World Socialist Web Site noted, Russian workers are deprived of almost any information regarding the reactionary policies of the Trump administration, which Vladimir Putin is praising regularly as he seeks to negotiate a deal in the Ukraine war with US imperialism.
While increasingly suppressing any means to access information from the outside world, the Russian oligarchy has also intensified its campaign of historical falsification and efforts to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin. Coinciding with the 108th anniversary of the October Revolution, Russian state TV released a major television series, entitled Chronicles of the Russian Revolution, which is filled with the most vile and outrageous historical slander and falsifications. Its principal funder and producer was Alisher Usmanov, one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs with an estimated net worth of $14.4 billion in 2023.
An overview by Memorial, the organization principally associated with research on the Great Terror which was banned in December 2021, found a noticeable growth in the erection of Stalin monuments in 2025. Thus, between January and November 2025, 17 new monuments and memorial plaques honoring Stalin were established, more than in all of 2024. According to Memorial, the Stalinist KPRF, which defends the Great Terror to this day and functions as a “loyal opposition” to the Putin regime, as well as veterans of the war in Ukraine, has been the driving force behind many of these initiatives.
At the same time, the Kremlin has moved to dramatically limit the ability of researchers, Russian and foreign alike, to access vitally important information about the history of the Communist International and the Great Terror. Thus, most archival holdings on the history of the Communist International, which include vast materials on the history of the workers’ movement in Asia, Europe and Latin America, have been re-classified as “state secrets” and are no longer available to researchers. The Russian state has also re-introduced an older rule, according to which the personal files on victims of the terror can only be accessed if a relative of that victim expressly agrees to it. In cases when there may be no living relatives at all or no known relatives, this rule makes it all but impossible to access archival material.
All of these moves are motivated above all by the fear of the Kremlin that, under conditions of the war in Ukraine and a growing social crisis in Russia and internationally, access to information about the situation facing workers abroad, as well as the historical truth about the crimes of Stalinism against the October Revolution, will provide the basis for the resurgence of the powerful internationalist and Marxist traditions of the Russian working class.
8. New evidence for the earliest intentional human fire-making
The controlled use of fire was a key part of the development of human technology with a range of uses that greatly expanded human cultural evolution. Although evidence at a number of archaeological sites suggests the use of fire dates back over a million years, it is unclear whether the fire at these sites were created by the intentional, controlled ignition by human ancestors, the occasional exploitation of naturally occurring fire, or merely a coincidental co-occurrence. Newly published archaeological research, conducted by a multi-national team, provides strong indications that at least one group of human ancestors possessed the knowledge and the technique to create fire as needed, 400,000 (400 ka) years ago.
The article, published in the journal Nature, “Earliest evidence of making fire” (December 10, 2025), reports on the discovery of a site, known as Barnham, in Suffolk, the UK, where fire-cracked flint hand axes were found along with two pieces of iron pyrite near a buried layer of heated sediments. Iron pyrite has in more recent times been used to create sparks when struck by a piece of flint in order to ignite a fire. Since geological investigation indicates that iron pyrite is rare in the site’s vicinity, the strong implication is that the pyrite was intentionally brought to that location in order to use in making a fire. The site dates to approximately 400,000 years ago. Previous substantial evidence of intentional fire making has been found at sites in France dating to around 50,000 years ago.
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The area of heated sediment is concentrated in one portion of the site, with indications of repeated heating, suggesting the creation of a succession of fires in a delimited “hearth” location. This contrasts with the pattern of naturally occurring fire, which would be expected to be more widespread.
The knowledge of how to produce fire when needed represents a key advance, on par with the development of stone tool technology, in human evolution. As in the latter, there is cognitive leap from simply exploiting unmodified elements of nature, such as using a large pebble to crack open a nut, to intentionally modifying a natural object for a preconceived later use. By contrast, reliance on random, naturally occurring fires would have been unpredictable and of extremely limited potential for further development.
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The benefits of being able to create fire as needed are many and varied. Prominent among these are cooking, warmth, protection from predators and the extension of activities beyond the end of daylight, among others. Cooking would have expanded the range of foods that would have been available and made more easily digestible. The availability of a source of warmth has obvious advantages, especially for occupation of colder regions. Furthermore, the ability to gather around a fire in the evening would have enhanced social interaction and cultural knowledge transmission.
9. Four immigrants die in four days in ICE private prisons
Four immigrants died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody during a four-day period last week, all of them in detention facilities run by private prison companies. Three died in prisons run by GEO Group and one in a prison run by CoreCivic.
The four were from four different countries: Jean Wilson Brutus, 41, from Haiti, on December 12; Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, 39, from Nicaragua, on December 14; Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, 46, from Eritrea, on December 14; and Nenko Stanev Gantchev, 56, from Bulgaria, on December 15.
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“Four detainee deaths in one week is a red-hot crisis,” Eunice Cho, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, told the Washington Post. “There is no question in my mind that this represents a clear deterioration of medical care and the worsening conditions in ICE detention.”
ICE recently claimed that “in-custody deaths this past year average less than 1%,” boasting that this figure was “the lowest in ICE history.” Given that the total number of migrants currently held in ICE detention facilities has now topped 66,000, the highest ever, the “less than 1%” boast means that ICE would be pleased if fewer than 660 migrants died this year.
Both the statistic and the boast are indications of the deliberate indifference to the physical survival of immigrant detainees that permeates the repressive apparatus of the US government, and is being whipped up further by the demonization of immigrants by Trump and top aides like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
At least 32 migrants have died in ICE custody so far this year, while several others have died while fleeing ICE agents or in facilities not run under contract to the agency. In December alone, seven migrants have died in ICE custody, making it the worst month for such deaths in recent history.
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The sadistic ill-treatment of migrants did not begin when Trump re-entered the White House in January. The American Civil Liberties Union called for the Biden administration to close the CoreCivic facility in Natchez, where Delvin Francisco Rodriguez died, as long ago as 2021, and sponsored a similar appeal for the shutdown of the GEO Phillipsburg facility in 2024.
Administration at the New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York City has launched a sweeping assault on its faculty and academic programs, targeting 40 percent of full-time professors for elimination under the guise of a “voluntary separation program.” In early December, 169 full-time faculty received letters offering buyouts and early retirement and giving them barely two weeks, until December 15, to respond.
The admin’s letter threatened “involuntary reduction” if faculty didn’t voluntarily accept termination, adding, “the severance package under an involuntary program would not be as substantial as the package offered through the voluntary option.” The voluntary severance package includes a payout of six months’ salary.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), of which NSSR faculty are organized under, has described this as the “largest attempted firing of faculty currently taking place in the nation.”
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The administration is justifying these “necessary” attacks with reference to a $48 million budget deficit. In a November email announcing the need for extreme austerity measures, President Joel Towers told the NSSR community that “every area of the university will need to prepare for changes.” Alternative economic proposals, without mass layoffs, submitted by faculty members and even multi-million dollar offers of donations to continue PhD programs, have reportedly been denied by Towers, who said this would only “kick the can down the road.”
Widespread opposition among students, faculty, and staff has erupted and a rally of several hundred was held last week before the end of semester. Many community members insist that the cuts strike at the very foundations of the New School as a haven for critical social research and thought. What was once the “University in Exile” for scholars fleeing fascism and political persecution in 1930s Europe is now a university where the well-paid administrators are exiling their own faculty out of their jobs.
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The World Socialist Web Site interviewed students at the New School outside the University Center on Wednesday about these issues.
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One student:
“People have to get mad enough. I think you can fight it with more knowledge, learning the information surrounding it. But in any revolution it has been people getting tired enough to actually do something. While marches and walks are effective in some ways—they bring visibility — I don’t think they can get further than that. I’m all for protests but it’s got to be everyone getting behind it, like ‘I’ll be willing to miss classes and do it’ and understanding the point of what they are doing.”
11. CDC-funded study in Guinea-Bissau exposes criminal character of Kennedy’s vaccine agenda
The recent award of a $1.6 million unsolicited, single-source grant to the Bandim Health Project for a clinical trial in the impoverished West African country of Guinea-Bissau marks a significant shift in federal research priorities, directing US public funds to investigators, who are deliberately withholding life-saving treatment from children.
The study is a randomized controlled trial that intentionally delays a proven, life-saving hepatitis B vaccine for newborns in a region with high endemic prevalence—estimated in some populations to affect up to one in five people—thereby exposing infants to a known and preventable risk. From the standpoint of medical ethics, it is more than dubious. It is potentially criminal.
The CDC’s unsolicited grant supports a five-year randomized controlled trial involving approximately 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau, comparing vaccination at birth with a delayed first dose at six weeks to assess purported “non-specific effects” on mortality and development. Critics, including virologist Angela Rasmussen, have described the award process as “blatant cronyism,” citing its circumvention of standard review mechanisms.
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Any claim of scientific validity is further undermined by Guinea-Bissau’s own policy commitments. The government has formally pledged to implement a universal birth-dose program beginning in 2027. Internal CDC communications have compared the study to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, noting the shared structure of government-funded researchers observing preventable disease in a vulnerable population while withholding an established intervention.
Dr. Robert Steinbrook, Health Research Group Director at Public Citizen, issued the following statement:
Everything is wrong with awarding this unsolicited single source grant, including the approval process, concerns about conflict of interest and the dubious ethics of the research. Newly born children, regardless of where they live, should be protected against hepatitis B by receiving the first dose of the vaccine within 24 hours after birth, as recommended by the WHO, leading medical professional organizations worldwide, and, until earlier this week, by the CDC. The benefits of the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine extend throughout life; they are not limited to five years after birth.
The CDC should not fund a study involving children in another country that would be unethical to conduct in the US. The award should be paused; the full study protocol should immediately be made public and receive independent scientific and ethics review in both Guinea-Bissau and the US. Bioethicists and medical professional organizations must demand that the CDC reconsider this outrageous grant award.
These events cannot be understood without reference to the ethical frameworks created explicitly to prevent such abuses. The Nuremberg Code (1947) established that human experimentation must be voluntary, scientifically justified and designed to avoid unnecessary suffering. The Declaration of Helsinki (1964) affirmed that the well-being of the research subject must always take precedence over scientific aims, forbidding inferior interventions when effective ones exist. The Belmont Report (1979) embedded these principles into US governance, warning explicitly against the exploitation of vulnerable populations for administrative convenience.
Under Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC is systematically dismantling these guardrails. The dismissal of the entire 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) panel and its replacement with figures hostile to a genuinely scientific framework institutionalized this shift.
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In sum, the Guinea-Bissau study functions not as a good faith search for knowledge but as a mechanism for deliberately manufacturing “doubt,” providing cover for dismantling public health protections at home. Children in Guinea-Bissau are being used as instruments to rationalize US policy reversals, most notably the abandonment of the hepatitis B birth dose.
By subordinating scientific infrastructure to a preexisting anti-vaccine ideology, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has transformed the HHS into an instrument of foreseeable harm. His policies invite the return of diseases once controlled and will predictably result in preventable illness and death. In this context, it is no exaggeration to describe Kennedy as a “secretary of sickness and death.”
12. Australia: Artists expose devastating impact of government funding cuts
Prolonged funding cuts and bureaucratic restructuring measures are systematically undermining Australia’s arts sector, devastating artists, and cultural institutions.
Maryland’s freezing Baltimore youth jail is emblematic of the brutal and neglectful conditions which the Democratic and Republican parties have imposed on the working population.
13. Trump approves largest-ever arms sale to Taiwan
The Trump administration last Thursday approved an $11.1 billion arms package to Taiwan—the largest single US weapons sale to the island in history. The package, the second since Trump was installed in office this year, is a calculated escalation in US imperialism’s war preparations against China.
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The latest US arms package is in clear breach of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act that has long provided Washington with a flimsy legal justification for selling defensive, but not offensive, arms to Taiwan.
Trump, following on from the Biden administration, is using arms sales as well as closer ties with the Taiwanese government of President Lai Ching‑te in a bid to heighten tensions across the Taiwan Strait and goad China into attacking Taiwan. Trump is well aware that China has repeatedly warned that it will reunify Taiwan by force if Taiwan ever declares formal independence.
While US naval vessels and military aircraft have not taken the step of visiting Taiwan, US warships provocatively transit through the Taiwan Strait with increasing frequency. High-level US political visits are also increasing. In August, US Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker made a trip to Taipei, which he used to push for joint US-Taiwan arms manufacturing in a bid to tie Taiwan’s economy and arms industry more tightly into US war planning.
The US is seeking to exploit Taiwan as a means of drawing China into a war that would significantly weaken the Chinese military and government of President Xi Jinping. It has pressed the Taiwan government to adopt a “porcupine strategy” of asymmetrical warfare to inflict maximum deaths and damage on Chinese forces.
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Under the guise of “military advisers,” the US is steadily building up a military presence on Taiwan and its outlying islets. Since 2021 when Washington first acknowledged that 30 US special forces troops were in Taiwan, the numbers built up to 200 “advisers” by early 2023 and by 2024 included elements of the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Group attached to amphibious bases on frontline Taiwanese islets such as Kinmen.
By this year, the scale of the US presence has grown again. In May, retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery testified that about 500 US military personnel are in Taiwan as trainers, more than 10 times the number previously disclosed. These forces are not simply teaching Taiwanese troops how to use and maintain equipment. They are engaged in exercises, operational planning, and the integration of HIMARS, drones and other systems into war plans against China.
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The ruling DPP is based on sections of the Taiwanese ruling class that regard the island’s ambiguous international status as a barrier to its economic ambitions. While the DPP in office has stopped short of declaring independence and directly provoking war with China, President Lai is aligned with the party’s more hardline, separatist layers.
The announcement of the latest US arms sales to Taiwan provoked an angry response from Beijing. Foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun urged the US to abide by the one-China principle and to stop the dangerous actions of arming Taiwan. He said that large US arms sales to Taiwan constituted a gross interference in China’s internal affairs, seriously undermined its sovereignty and security interests, jeopardized stability across the Taiwan Straits, and sent a wrong signal to the separatist forces in Taiwan.
The Trump administration, however, has not the slightest intention of halting its provocative moves. In October, Washington was forced to reach a one-year truce in its escalating economic war with Beijing when China imposed restrictions on the export of critical minerals to the US. The latest arms sale, however, makes it clear that US imperialism is continuing to accelerate its war planning against China, which it regards as the chief threat to its global domination.
14. Australia: NSW premier, police justify violent arrests in Sydney following Bondi shootings
The police operation was clearly intended by the NSW Labor government and the police to create an atmosphere of fear and send a political message about the police-state conditions being created in the wake of the Bondi Beach tragedy.
“It’s not a victory”, as the Unite union claims, “Nothing has changed”, tram drivers tell World Socialist Web Site reporters.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
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.
