Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. This week in history: January 19-25
- 25 years ago:
Philippine President Joseph Estrada unseated in judicial coup
50 years ago:
75 years ago:
US napalm bombings kill hundreds of South Korean civilians
100 years ago:
2. No troops in Minneapolis! For a general strike against Trump’s coup!
Less than three weeks into the new year, 2026 has already witnessed an extraordinary escalation of violence and criminality by the Trump administration, both internationally and within the United States.
The year began with the illegal invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro—a naked act of imperialist aggression aimed at seizing control of the country’s oil resources. This was swiftly followed by threats to bomb Iran, renewed threats to annex Greenland by military force, and increasingly belligerent rhetoric directed even at traditional allies of the United States, including most recently Canada.
Now, the Trump administration is turning the apparatus of violence and repression inward. Over the weekend, the Pentagon confirmed alerting 1,500 soldiers of the Army’s 11th Airborne, which is based in Alaska and is well-prepared to operate in the deep freeze of a Minnesota winter. In a statement emailed in response to press inquiries, spokesman Sean Parnell wrote, “The Department of War is always prepared to execute the orders of the commander in chief if called upon.”
The Trump administration is, in effect, declaring war on the American people. The planned deployment of the military against the population of Minneapolis, along with Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, is a vast escalation of the ongoing conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship.
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FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche visited Minneapolis on Friday, amidst press reports that Patel has appealed to FBI agents nationwide for volunteers to transfer temporarily to Minneapolis.
In an extraordinary statement, Blanche claimed last week that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (the former vice presidential candidate) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, were guilty of “terrorism,” declaring, in a message to Walz and Frey, that he was “focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary.” The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into both on the charge that they have “interfered” with federal immigration enforcement.
Appearing on several Sunday morning interview programs, Frey said that Trump was deliberately provoking violence, hoping to use it as a pretext for military occupation of the Twin Cities. He told CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper, “The fact that we’re saying this out loud, Jake, is bizarre. I never thought in a million years that we would be invaded by our own federal government.”
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The call for a one‑day, city‑wide strike on January 23 by a coalition of local trade unions and community organizations in Minneapolis comes in response to growing pressure from workers, young people and broad layers of the population for mass action against the federal ICE occupation.
However, the major trade union federations—including the Minnesota and national AFL‑CIO—have refused to endorse strike action, and many local union leaders are working to counteract growing sentiment for a general strike.
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While Walz and Frey have issued warnings about the occupation of Minneapolis and the danger of civil war, the Democratic Party as a whole is doing nothing to stop the Trump administration’s accelerating coup. Terrified above all by the emergence of mass opposition from below, they are working to channel outrage over Trump’s actions into the dead end of electoral politics.
In a recent video statement, Senator Bernie Sanders, who represents the supposed left wing of the Democratic Party, admitted that the United States is witnessing an “unprecedented and dangerous moment” and that Trump is “moving us toward an authoritarian society.” Sanders, however, said nothing about the one-day general strike called in Minneapolis for January 23. Instead, he reverted to the standard Democratic Party script: empty appeals for “immigration reform” and, above all, a focus on the 2026 midterm elections, which are 10 months away.
There is, however, no basis for assuming that elections will even take place in 10 months, or that, if they do, they will occur under conditions that bear any resemblance to democratic norms. The administration is assembling the legal, police and military infrastructure to intimidate voters, criminalize opposition and deploy armed forces domestically under the pretext of “insurrection” and “terrorism.”
The Socialist Equality Party calls for the widest possible mobilization of workers and young people on January 23. The preparations to invoke the Insurrection Act and send active-duty soldiers into a major American city represent a historic escalation of the drive toward dictatorship. They must be answered through the mass, independent action of the working class and the development of a genuine general strike movement, in Minneapolis and throughout the country.
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The mobilization now developing in Minneapolis must become the starting point for a nationwide movement of the working class, uniting every section of workers—industrial, public sector, transport, education, healthcare—in a common offensive. The mass industrial mobilization of workers and the development of a general strike must be connected to the independent political movement of the working class, directed against dictatorship, war and the capitalist system itself.
3. US appeals court overturns judge’s ruling that blocked arrest and deportation of Mahmoud Khalil
In a 2-1 ruling on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit struck down the injunction protecting Palestinian and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil from deportation.
The decision clears the way for the Trump administration to resume its vendetta against Khalil, who is a prominent and outspoken opponent of the US-backed genocide in Gaza. The court majority’s ruling that the federal district court in New Jersey lacked “subject matter jurisdiction” to hear Khalil’s habeas petition is a blatantly political decision.
It provides the Trump administration juridical cover for stripping Khalil of access to the ordinary federal courts and drives his case back into the immigration and deportation machinery run by the White House. If allowed to stand, the decision will be seized upon by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a precedent to target international students and non-citizen workers who speak out against the policies of the US government and violate their First Amendment rights.
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For Khalil, the ruling reopens the door to his being re-arrested and deported by the Trump administration, though the order does not take immediate effect and the administration cannot lawfully re-detain him until the appeals process is complete. His attorneys note that the opinion “does not weigh in on the core First Amendment arguments in his case,” but by stripping the district court of jurisdiction, it deprives him of the only judicial forum that had seriously engaged with those arguments and recognized the retaliatory character of the government’s prosecution.
Khalil remains in removal proceedings in the immigration courts, where a Louisiana immigration judge has already ordered him removable on a “foreign-policy” ground and, in a written opinion issued the same day as Farbiarz’s release order, added an adverse finding on the Trump administration’s fraud charge. The Third Circuit’s ruling sends a message to the administration that it may press ahead with this openly political deportation campaign under the cover of routine immigration enforcement, while it continues to denounce pro-Palestinian protests as a threat to “national security” and to US foreign policy.
From the outset, the Trump administration has treated Khalil’s case as a test to determine how many international students and immigrant workers can be arrested, detained, and deported for opposing the US-backed slaughter in Gaza or, for that matter, any policies of the government.
Khalil—a lawful permanent resident and green card holder—was seized by federal agents in front of his pregnant wife and dragged into ICE custody on March 8, 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials branded him a supposed “national security” threat, accusing him of contributing to the spread of “antisemitism” because of his leadership in demonstrations condemning the Gaza genocide.
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Khalil’s persecution is inseparable from his record as an outspoken defender of the Palestinians and a leader of campus protests since the onset of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. While a graduate student at Columbia, he helped organize encampments, rallies, and walkouts demanding an end to US military aid to Israel, divestment from companies profiting from the occupation, and accountability for war crimes. He denounced the role of both the Democrats and Republicans for arming and financing the onslaught.
These protests—part of a wave of demonstrations at universities throughout the US and internationally—were met with police raids, mass arrests, suspensions, and blacklists, as the political establishment and corporate media waged a hysterical campaign smearing student opponents of genocide as purveyors of “antisemitism.” Khalil’s arrest and the subsequent effort to deport him were celebrated by fascists and Zionists as a model for how the state could “deal with” non-citizen student leaders and silence opposition to the Gaza war.
4. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly: A veteran film star undergoes a crisis
The subject matter is intriguing and important on the whole. Filmmaking has been at the center of cultural and to a certain extent political life in the US for a century. Its vicissitudes reflect the general ups and downs of social life and struggle. One would be pleased to encounter a serious accounting of Hollywood’s recent decades in particular.
But Baumbach’s treatment is too tepid, too complacent. Not much is fully or convincingly carried through, or nearly fierce and angry enough.
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Discovering self-centeredness among film personalities, including genuinely talented and appealing figures, hardly breaks new ground. In any event, the individuals in question are not primarily responsible for this condition. Official society encourages and nourishes the egoism for its own purposes. The film and music industries create, market and make money out of prominent figures, by flattering and mythologizing them and serving them up to the public as demi-gods. In so many cases, the process proves disorienting and destructive to the artist him or herself. Hollywood history is full of sad life-stories and tragic fates.
Moreover, as conditions worsen for tens of millions, as social mobility declines and as real-life opportunities dry up, the need to live vicariously through celebrities—film stars, athletes, supermodels, etc.—grows exponentially.
Individual psychological flaws aside, is not such self-centeredness also in part the product of a distorted, one-sided relationship between the artist and his or her audience, between the artist and his or her work, with bourgeois society strenuously encouraging the notion that an important work of art is merely or primarily the result of unique genius or will?
5. Students and workers support call for a general strike to oppose federal occupation of Minneapolis
On a frigid and snowy Sunday afternoon in Minneapolis, Minnesota, hundreds of postal workers, residents and students held a rally and march opposing the ongoing federal occupation of the city and the murderous immigration Gestapo. The march and rally were warmly received by passersby and community members, many of whom honked horns and raised their fists in support.
The rally began at a local post office and ended in front of the memorial where Renée Nicole Good, a mother and wife, was murdered by Jonathan Ross, a Department of Homeland Security agent, less than two weeks ago. Signs carried by workers at the rally denounced Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for not doing anything to stop the ongoing attacks on the community.
The protest was organized by the Build a Fighting NALC (BFN), a faction of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). BFN organizers made clear to WSWS reporters that Sunday’s event was not in support of the proposed January 23 general strike and boycott that several unions have endorsed.
Instead, the demands advanced at Sunday’s event were narrowly focused on calls to prevent ICE agents from staging their vehicles on United States Postal Service (USPS) property before heading out on kidnapping operations. Other demands included calls for the prosecution of Ross for the murder of Good and for ICE agents to leave the Twin Cities and Minnesota.
However, in conversations with World Socialist Web Site reporters, many workers and residents said they would support postal workers, and every section of the working class, going on strike not only in Minnesota but across the country.
6. Trump, EU escalate tariff war as US-European conflict mounts over Greenland
Major political crises inevitably produce turning points in which essential conflicts and issues, long hidden, emerge. The Trump administration’s conflict with the European imperialist powers over control of Greenland is reaching this point.
For over a decade, a period that included Trump’s first term in office and his launching of a global trade war in his second, European powers have reacted to criticism from Washington by boosting their military power. They slashed social spending by hundreds of billions of euros, impoverishing workers to pour funds into European armies and the Ukraine-Russia war. European officials called to improve relations with the United States by ensuring Europe did a fair share of spending on the NATO alliance.
Trump’s demands for a US takeover of Greenland from its status as an autonomous region of Denmark—after his illegal January 3 invasion of Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro, and his threats to bomb Iran for regime change—is shattering this narrative. It is ever clearer that US-European relations are teetering on the brink of collapse, amid a deepening trade war that threatens potentially violent conflict between the NATO powers.
Last week, as Trump demanded US control over Greenland—supposedly to protect its strategic locations and minerals from Russia and China—seven European countries (Finland, France, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK) sent a few dozen soldiers to the island. The operation posed no meaningful threat to the United States and was accompanied by pledges of loyalty to “Euro-Atlantic security” and NATO. However, the operation did not reassure, but rather enraged the US president, who is seeking not an alliance, but world hegemony.
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Washington is far better armed than its European “allies” and can exploit the European powers’ economically suicidal foreign policy. They enthusiastically joined the Biden administration’s stoking of war with Russia in Ukraine in 2022. They thus cut off their access to Russian and Eurasian energy and raw materials and made themselves dependent on more expensive imports of US energy, even as Trump waged trade war against them.
However, the European imperialists are also well aware of key vulnerabilities of US imperialism: its industrial weakness; the indebtedness of the US government, which issues trillions of dollars in US Treasury debt; and its reliance on the US dollar’s global role to prop up its stock market.
Indeed, while Beijing has shifted out of the dollar and steadily cut its holdings of US Treasury debt, Europe kept adding to its Treasury holdings. Financial entities in Europe hold over $3 trillion in US Treasury debt, led by Britain ($865 billion), Belgium ($466 billion), Luxembourg ($421 billion), France ($376 billion) and Ireland ($340 billion). They thus are in the absurd situation of financing a government waging trade war against them and threatening to seize their territory.
Last year, however, key European banks like HSBC, Standard Chartered and BNP Paribas joined China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which lets them finance international trade via currency swaps, thereby evading the SWIFT system and the US dollar. There were also growing rumors of European threats to retaliate against Trump by dumping the dollar so as to trigger a sovereign debt crisis and a financial crash in the United States.
In December, in an article titled, “Is Europe ready to pull the trigger?”, India’s Economic Times reported: “European leadership has begun weighing what some describe as a ‘nuclear option’: the mass liquidation of US Treasury securities held by European governments.” Britain’s Express daily explained this “nuclear option” as follows:
European leaders are considering adopting extreme countermeasures … designed to unleash economic chaos in the US. The alleged plan involves dumping trillions in US government debt owned by European states. A rapid sell off would likely cause a crash in the value of the US dollar, create a liquidity crisis across the banking system and cause a huge spike in borrowing costs. It would also lock the American financial sector into a paralysis more severe than the 2008 crisis.
Neither Trump’s plans for US global hegemony and conquest nor European imperialist plans for rearmament and global financial war offer anything to the working class, however. On both sides of the Atlantic, governments are pressing ahead with militarism, social austerity and repression in defiance of mass working class opposition. The decisive question is and remains unifying the working class in all the NATO countries and internationally in an international struggle against imperialist war and the capitalist system.
7. New York healthcare worker voices solidarity with striking nurses
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) spoke to a medical tech at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital about the ongoing strike of nurses at the facility and three other hospitals in New York. The worker, who wished to remain anonymous, described his own working and living conditions and the situation that has compelled the nurses to strike, as well as expressed his support for a united struggle of all healthcare workers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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WSWS: Is your salary suitable for living in one of the most expensive cities in the United States?
Worker: No! As a young person right now, the main thing I want is to be stable. That’s all I want. I want to be able to have my own place, to live and feed myself, and maybe even go out to eat one or two times a week and then go on vacation when I can afford it. Is that so much to ask for?
I know a lot of people my age that don’t have good jobs right now, that don’t really make ends meet. They’re around 25 and live in their parents’ homes. They even probably have college degrees, everything, and they can’t get a job.
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Other questions the worker answered:
Why are the nurses on strike?
What were your working conditions like before the strike started?
How are conditions in the hospital right now?
The New York State Nurses Association is not giving the nurses strike pay. Why is that?
What do the nurses need to win the strike?
What do you think about organizing techs, residents, doctors and physician assistants to come out and join the nurses?
8. Warning strikes for higher wages in Germany’s public sector
Public sector workers throughout Germany went on strike for higher wages January 13-14. In Berlin Mitte, about 5,000 strikers demonstrated, while at the university hospitals in Cologne, Bonn, Essen and Düsseldorf in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), nursing staff, laboratory workers and administrative employees staged a warning strike. The hospitals provided emergency service, while many surgeries and treatments were postponed. Employees of universities, colleges, state administration and the judiciary in NRW also walked out. Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site distributed leaflets and interviewed strikers at University Hospital Essen.
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It is a well-known spectacle in which all participants play their part. The government side openly represents the interests of the financial and corporate elites to trim the public sector even more strongly for profit. Union officials mime opposition and organize ordered warning strikes and noisy protests, staggered in time and isolated from one another, placing tight shackles on any movement from below.
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But the union ritual is taking place under completely changed political conditions. The new year will be characterized by explosive class struggles and the dangerous development towards a third world war. Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela and his threats against Greenland and Iran on the one hand, and the major nurses’ strike in New York on the other, are a foretaste of what lies ahead.
In Germany, hardly a day goes by without bad news about social cuts and mass layoffs. The consequences of the largest program of militarization since the end of the war are being felt everywhere: billions for the military budget are being paid for by cuts in the social and education sectors; conscription and war propaganda are raining down on school students, apprentices and trainees; and the country’s infrastructure is being prepared for war within the framework of “Operation Plan Germany.”
9. Strikers at University Hospital Essen speak about staffing crisis and the danger of war
At University Hospital Essen, about 230 employees took part in the two-day warning strike and met for a protest action at the rear entrance, where the service union Verdi provided loud music and advanced slogans calling for “perseverance.” The entire event lasted only from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., at a time when not many workers from other facilities and sectors could come to offer support.
Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke with strikers in Essen about their working conditions at the hospital, the development of war and the ongoing nurses’ strike in New York, which highlights the necessity of an international movement of the working class against the capitalist oligarchy.
10. Fascist run out of Minneapolis while attempting to lead pro-ICE, anti-immigrant hate rally
On Saturday in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, a pro-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and anti-Muslim hate rally organized by racist Jake Lang was abruptly aborted after Lang was swarmed by local residents and counterprotesters. The robust community response to the rally underscores the unpopularity of Trump’s “mass deportation” policies and attacks on immigrants.
Footage of the fascist being humiliated and driven out of Minneapolis quickly spread online and throughout the community. Residents of Minnesota’s largest city, currently under federal occupation by some 3,000 Department of Homeland Security thugs, have spent the last month and a half organizing and resisting the federal occupation through “ICE Watch” networks and daily protests outside the Whipple Building, the main base of operations for the immigration Gestapo.
Lang’s rally, advertised as the “March Against Minnesota Fraud,” was called in support of the Trump administration’s “big lie” that immigrants, especially Muslim and Somali Americans, are guilty of more than $9 billion in welfare and social services fraud. Prior to the event, Lang promised he would burn a Quran on the steps of Minneapolis City Hall, an action he said was part of stopping “the Somali invasion of Minneapolis.”
After pledging to burn the Quran, Lang promised that he and his fellow fascists would march through the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, home to many immigrants. His fascist march never made it to the neighborhood. Fewer than a dozen racists joined Lang’s rally, while an estimated 3,000 people showed up to oppose the event.
Livestreams of the event show Lang being quickly surrounded by counterprotesters and forced to retreat. Protesters called for Nazis to leave the state, along with immigration thugs. At various points Lang was pelted with snowballs, water balloons, and silly string. Sometime during the fracas Lang received a laceration on his head, although it remains unclear how that occurred.
The fascist was driven into one of the window alcoves outside City Hall. With tears streaming down his face, he pleaded with the crowd to leave him alone. A terrified and tearful Lang was eventually escorted away from City Hall by counterprotesters, some of whom physically encouraged him to leave.
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While most Minnesotans expressed joy at Lang’s aborted rally, fascists around the world fumed that police did not do a better job of protecting one of their own and lobbied for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a threat he made last Thursday in response to community resistance to ICE kidnapping operations.
11. Australia: More than 10,000 health workers to strike in Victoria
More than 10,000 public sector health workers across Victoria, including orderlies, cleaners, kitchen staff, security guards, theatre technicians, and administration staff, will walk off the job on Tuesday in their second statewide strike in two months, and rally outside the Victorian Trades Hall Council building in Melbourne.
The workers are opposing ongoing poor working conditions and the Victorian Labor government’s efforts to impose further real pay cuts in a new enterprise agreement, part of a broader austerity agenda being spearheaded by Labor governments federally and in the states.
The Health Workers Union (HWU) has been compelled to call the strike after workers repeatedly rejected the government’s miserly pay offers and voted overwhelmingly for industrial action. But under the control of the bureaucracy, the strike will be nothing more than an exercise in workers letting off steam, while union leaders issue plaintive appeals to the Labor government to “come to the table” and negotiate.
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Prior to a last-minute change of venue this morning, Tuesday’s rally was to be held outside the newly constructed Frankston Hospital in Melbourne, timed to coincide with its official opening by state Labor Premier Jacinta Allen. The HWU had stated that the aim of the rally was to “disrupt” the opening, and that the new Frankston hospital means “BILLIONS for buildings. SCRAPS for the people inside them.”
By tying the strike to the opening of the hospital, the union is effectively pitting health workers against the broader working class, based on the bogus premise that any improvement to their wages and conditions must come through cuts to spending on new infrastructure or elsewhere in the hospital system.
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The HWU’s conduct is entirely in line with the state Labor government’s broader offensive against public healthcare. The Allen government, like its federal counterpart, has carried out a brutal attack on the state’s public health system, ordering hospital administrations to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from their annual operating budgets. Years of “efficiency dividends,” budget restraints, and staff reductions across hospitals have resulted in a deepening crisis in Victoria’s public hospitals.
This is not the result of a lack of money, but of the priorities of capitalism, a system which services the interests of corporations and big business, at the expense of workers and patients alike.
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To fight back, health workers must take matters into their own hands. The fight for decent wages, safe staffing levels and properly funded hospitals cannot be left in the hands of the HWU or any of the union bureaucracies that work to protect the interests of capitalist governments and the corporate elite.
This poses the need for the establishment of rank-and-file committees in every hospital and health facility—democratically elected bodies controlled by workers themselves, not union bureaucrats. These committees would unite nurses, doctors, cleaners, orderlies, and all other health employees in a common struggle, based on the needs and demands of workers, not what governments or unions say is “affordable.”
Workers must reject the line of the HWU that they should be forced to choose between new hospitals and fair pay. In fact, the struggle for decent wages and conditions for health workers is inseparable from the fight for a high quality public health system, freely accessible to all.
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The alternative is the fight for a socialist perspective. The vast wealth currently controlled by the corporate and financial elite must be expropriated. Hospitals and other vital public infrastructure must be placed under the democratic control and ownership of the working class, so that they can be operated in the interest of the needs of society, not to further enrich the wealthy few.
12. New Zealand “ManageMyHealth” hack exposes thousands of patients’ medical records
A ransomware attack on New Zealand’s “ManageMyHealth” (MMH) medical portal, disclosed on New Year’s Day, has exposed sensitive medical records of some 127,000 patients nationwide.
The cybercriminal group “Kazu” claimed responsibility for stealing up to 430,000 documents and demanding a ransom of $US60,000. The data breach affected 6-7 percent of the MMH platform’s 1.8 million registered users, who are locked into patient record systems of 60-75 percent of general practice (GP) clinics.
MMH, which is linked to the widely-used Medtech practice management system—owned by an Australian private equity firm—carries an array of patient information including test results, diagnoses, prescriptions, doctors’ notes and health histories. It has become NZ’s dominant tool for recording and managing interactions between health centers, GPs and patients. Intimate data threatened with exposure included mental health diagnoses, sexual assault documentation, medications and medical photographs.
The hackers claimed to have successfully extracted ransom money from healthcare companies in Asia and Africa. Samples of the NZ hacked data were initially published on the dark web but following the passing of a ransom deadline the information was removed from Kazu’s online presence after MMH obtained a High Court injunction preventing anyone from accessing or sharing the stolen data.
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Such incidents reveal far more than basic cybersecurity failures. They exemplify how decades of market-driven reforms, under governments of all stripes, have transformed essential health services into profit-making centers, placing working-class patients’ private medical information at the mercy of capitalist corporations which operate with impunity. The decades-long privatization of the health “industry” is a key factor in the austerity-driven underfunding of the public health system itself.
MMH owner and CEO Vino Ramayah admitted that the hackers had accessed the system “through the front door” using valid credentials. The security failure could have been prevented with elementary protections like mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA), but according to IT experts many health organisations have very poor security controls. Callum McMenamin, a web standards consultant, told RadioNZ he had called out MMH’s lax security six months earlier but the government was “failing to enforce what minimum standards it has.”
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Such environments are not confined to New Zealand. In September 2022, Australian telecommunications giant Optus suffered a cyberattack exposing the sensitive data of up to 10 million customers, potentially one-third of the population. Like MMH, the Optus breach involved basic preventable vulnerabilities. Both prioritized cost minimization over security while regulatory frameworks proved toothless. Their responses were characterized by opacity, delayed disclosure, and attempts to evade responsibility.
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Security breaches are just one of many class issues that define the [New Zealand]’s two-tier health system. More than 20 percent of healthcare services are private with over 1.4 million people, just under a third of the population holding private health insurance. Meanwhile most working-class New Zealanders depend on poor public and semi-public health infrastructure. Worst affected by the MMH breach were 86,000 patients and nearly 50 practices in Northland, one of the country’s most impoverished areas.
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The MMH scandal is not an aberration but the logical outcome of treating healthcare as a commodity and patients as profit sources. The solution to these systemic failures cannot come from within capitalism. Data systems must be removed from private hands.
As a basic social right all infrastructure including patient portals, electronic health records, and related systems must be operated by publicly accountable entities, determined by patient need and risk assessment, not profit calculations. That must form part of the socialist reorganisation of society as a whole.
13. Almost 7 million people threatened by deadly Australian bushfires, according to new climate report
A new report has been published by the Climate Council and Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA) in Australia titled “When Cities Burn: Could the Los Angeles Fires Happen Here?” Its primary findings are a sharp warning on the impacts of the climate crisis on exacerbating bushfires in Australia, a continent that already has a history of devastating fires in recent years.
Overall, the report estimates that there are 6.9 million people who live in regions that are the most exposed to deadly fires: the borders between the suburbs and the rural bushlands. At particular risk are those living on the outskirts of major and capital cities, including Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart. The populations of such areas have increased by an average of 65 percent since 2001.
The title of the report references the devastating January 2025 Los Angeles fires which killed 31 people and destroyed 16,000 buildings. Numerous climate experts warned in the aftermath of the LA inferno that a similarly extreme event could occur in Australia, which shatters any conception that large-scale fires are a purely rural concern.
The report highlights “climate pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas” as the driver of the LA fires. The greenhouse gas emissions caused by the burning of these fossil fuels is responsible for the increased warming of the earth, creating conditions of record dryness levels and high speed winds that exacerbated the LA wildfires. Adding to these conditions in LA were bushlands in close proximity to suburbs and homes and a prior history of destructive fires.
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It is not only climate factors that the report highlights, but social ones. It points out that contributing to the death toll in LA last year was the fact that many homes in the city had been built before fire-resilient building standards were introduced in 2008, and most had not been updated to modern standards since then.
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The impact of such disasters has historically been borne most by the working class, and the poorest sections of those in rural areas. Compounding the immediate effects of the fires themselves is the economic impact which is even more dire due to the growing cost of living crisis. In the last 5 years, insurance premiums for those homes in the most high-risk bushfire areas have increased between 78 percent and 138 percent in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.
The report also includes modelling for a scenario of global warming by 3°C [37.4°F] since pre-industrial levels, which is what the world is currently on track for given inaction by governments internationally. In such a scenario, the areas exposed to catastrophic levels of bushfire danger would be three times as large as that which affected the 2009 Black Saturday fires. High-risk areas in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia could face temperatures as high as 48°C. [114.4°F]
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Despite these objective, science based warnings, federal and state policies remain shaped by the imperative of private profit. The Albanese Labor government’s 2035 targets announced just days after the NCRA report was released—a 62–70 percent reduction in domestic greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels— does not come close to matching the cuts scientists say are necessary. The federal government under Labor has approved dozens of new coal, oil and gas developments since taking office in 2022, while diverting hundreds of billions to military spending and corporate incentives rather than a rapid, planned transition away from fossil fuels.
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The descent into further ecological collapse can still be prevented with a global effort to systematically replace fossil fuel use with alternative, renewable energy sources.
But these demands cannot be won under capitalism. The pro-corporate Labor government, like the Coalition before it, will subordinate these necessities to profit. Only the international working class, independent of capitalist parties and mobilized for political power, can implement the comprehensive, rational measures required to safeguard lives, livelihoods and the natural environment.
14. Trump’s EPA places a zero-dollar value on human life and health
Air pollution from industrial facilities is a major source of ill health for people, especially the poor and working class who are forced to live in their vicinity. A prime example is what is known as Cancer Alley, along the lower Mississippi River, which has one of the highest concentrations of industrial facilities and airborne pollution in the US. The resident population experiences overall disease and birth‑defect rates up to seven times the US national average. Some communities suffer the highest industrial‑pollution cancer risk in the entire country. It is also an area of extreme poverty, with several parishes classified as “persistent poverty” areas—meaning 20 percent or more of residents have lived below the federal poverty line for decades. The long-term effects of industrial pollution on child health and development are especially pernicious.
In a major assault on human health, the Trump administration is changing the policy of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding the control of air pollution. A review of internal EPA emails conducted by the New York Times found that consideration of the impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone, two of the most prominent components of air pollution, would no longer be included as part of the evaluation of the effects of industrial air pollution on humans. A draft of the new regulation was released, signed by the EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, on January 9, 2026.
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The motivation is clear. As part of its general assault on all the gains made by the working class over many decades regarding conditions impacting life and health, and in the context of the rapidly deepening world-wide capitalist crisis, every effort is being made by the ruling class to smash all restraints on maximizing profit, no matter the consequences. The loosening or elimination of all forms of government regulation of industry is a component of that process. This includes a determined campaign to promote fossil fuels and against renewable energy sources. Trump and his EPA administrator Lee Zeldin have declared war on the very concept of environmental regulation. The latest change is only a step in this overall campaign.
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In evaluating proposed limits on emissions of pollutants, the previous EPA practice was to conduct a cost/benefit analysis, comparing the “value” that projected improvements to human health and lives saved with the cost to industry of tighter regulation. Over the roughly four decades during which this policy was in existence, various administrations employed different calculations of this macabre equation regarding the monetary value of human life and health. Of course, the balance was always weighted in favor of industry. Nevertheless, even minor impacts to profitability are anathema to business interests.
The Trump administration is now acting to eliminate even the pretense of concern with impacts on human health. In effect, this reduces the value placed on human life in the equation to $0. EPA has claimed that it will continue to evaluate health effects, which is difficult to take seriously under a capitalist system determined to maximize profits.
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The fundamental contradiction in evaluating the “cost” of industrial activities on the environment and human health, is that the effects of uncontrolled toxic emissions of all kinds are much more complex to evaluate than the cost of the running a particular industry. Effects are not always obvious and, therefore, require careful, scientifically controlled investigation, which takes time and expense. Furthermore, it is in the interest of capitalist-run industry to ignore or downplay the nature and extent of such effects. Even the limited efforts to identify and evaluate such impacts here-to-fore are now being abandoned, with devastating consequences for humanity.
Teachers at two primary (nursery to age 11) schools in Greater Manchester, England, are involved in a dispute over working conditions concerning pupil behavior, which they say constitutes a health and safety issue for staff and children.
NASUWT—The Teachers’ Union (originally the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers)—called its members out on strike at Lily Lane Primary School in Moston, Manchester, and Ravensfield Primary School in Dukinfield, Tameside, on January 6–8, again on January 13–15. Three days of strikes are planned for January 20–22.
Teachers face a gargantuan task. Public spending in education has suffered decades of austerity cuts, such that £4.2 billion is needed immediately to restore spending on schools in England to 2010 levels—according to campaign group Stop School Cuts.
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Every teacher, staff member, and child deserves a safe environment—an essential foundation for learning to thrive. However, understanding breakdowns in staff–pupil relationships requires placing them in context. At their root are decades of funding cuts and attacks on public education, often disguised as “reforms” implemented by governments across the political spectrum.
The media reported the strikes with superficial, sensationalised accounts. The BBC’s headline read: “Primary teachers strike over ‘knives and assaults’”. Left at the level of behavioural issues, such commentary serves to demonise young children and parents and obscures the real causes of the problems.
Deprivation is a major barrier to teaching and learning. The Moston and Dukinfield catchment areas for the two schools are marred by high levels of deprivation. Statistics for the Moston ward reveal that 60.2 percent of households suffer deprivation. Child Poverty Action Group figures for last March show 4.5 million children in poverty in the year to April 2024—an increase of 100,000 from the previous year.
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Teachers are expected to teach oversized classes of up to 30 and over, and with inadequate SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) support. Special needs has been starved of funds and is undergoing a major overhaul (with no extra funding) under the Labour government, to the detriment of the children as well as staff.
Many SEND children do not even have a school place, but the government plans to make the criteria for qualifying for SEND support even more stringent. Many children who need one-to-one support remain undiagnosed because of the shortage of educational psychologists.
Deteriorating conditions at work and an impossible workload have led to a major crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. The pressure on teachers is compounded by the stress of government education inspectorate Ofsted monitoring, which insists on proscriptive teaching to targets and tests and excessive planning in defiance of the science of pedagogy.
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During several decades of systemic government underfunding, the education unions—the National Education Union, NASUWT, and the school leaders’ unions ASCL and NAHT—have refused to mobilize their members in unified action in opposition.
Teachers’ pay has fallen in real value by 20 percent since 2010, as the National Education Union (NEU) and NASUWT pushed through substandard pay deals for teachers each year despite teachers consistently voting for strike action.
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For all their hand-wringing about health and safety, the education unions led the charge back into the classroom—backed by the then Labour opposition under Keir Starmer and the Tory government—while COVID was still spreading virulently. The virus remains a threat, spreading unchecked with little monitoring, and impacting growing numbers who will sicken and develop Long COVID.
The unions don’t even mention the fact that UV light technology could purify the air to kill all airborne respiratory viruses that plague schools—if only it were installed.
The recent perspective on the World Socialist Web Site, "The killing of Renee Nicole Good, the invasion of Venezuela, Trump’s conspiracy for dictatorship and the lessons of the American Revolution" asserts that the murder of the 37-year-old mother of three, the abduction and imprisonment in New York of the president of Venezuela and his wife
expose the Trump administration as a regime of fascist criminals that increasingly operates through raw force, dismisses legality as an inconvenience and regards the working population, domestically and internationally, as an enemy to be subdued.
The American Revolution "occurred as a consequence of the radicalization of broad sections of the population in opposition to the increasingly oppressive actions of the British monarchy and imperial administration. As repression intensified—through arbitrary executive power, punitive economic measures, the denial of basic rights, and the use or threat of military force—the conflict drove the development of mass resistance that could no longer be contained within established political channels." This description could now be applied to conditions within the United States itself, pitting the fascist tyrant and would-be dictator in the White House against the mass of the working class.
In January 1776, Thomas Paine's pamphlet, Common Sense, was published, igniting the revolutionary spirit of the common people, and remains a top-selling title of American literature. The fight today against tyranny and the Trump administration requires an educated working class. Steep yourself in the lessons of the American Revolution with titles available at Mehring Books.
Books available from Mehring Books, the publishing arm of the World Socialist Web Site, the most-widely read socialist publication worldwide, include:The Declaration of Independence and Other Great Documents of American History, 1775-1865
17. 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.
