Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Striking Kaiser healthcare workers denounce the ICE murder of nurse Alex Pretti
Thirty-one thousand registered nurses and other specialty healthcare professionals at Kaiser Permanente continued their strike across more than 200 hospitals and clinics in California and Hawaii.
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The Kaiser strike began only two days after the ICE murder of 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Pretti was murdered while attempting to help a woman being assaulted by agents. The murder has sparked nationwide outrage, with workers across the country supporting a general strike against the Trump administration’s rampage against democratic rights.
“It was murder. It definitely was a murder. He was just trying to protect those ladies from being pepper sprayed. He was just protecting them,” said one veteran Kaiser nurse in Downey, California.
“It was really sad because he was an intensive care nurse working in the VA [Veterans Administration] hospital. He was a VA nurse, an ICU nurse, which is the most noble profession, in my opinion, aside from being a nurse. He served the veterans who served this country.”
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Workers on the picket line reported they are not receiving strike pay, despite UNAC sitting on $28 million in assets. Over 100 bureaucrats are still drawing salaries of more than $200,000 a year.
Other expenses from public reporting sources include $186,540 spent on airlines, $1,031,569 on hotels, $135,743 on restaurants and bakeries, and $42,775 on one grocery store—all in 2024.
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At the Kaiser Oakland picket line, workers were indignant about the murder of Pretti, and many expressed support for a general strike. The picket line included occupational therapists, nurse midwives, nurse anesthesiologists, physical therapists, and other professions present.
On the question of a general strike, one physical therapist responded “Say when and where, I’ll be there!”
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Many strikers agreed that the union bureaucracy would not support a general strike and agreed that rank-and-file organizing was necessary to accomplish it. One worker noted that the UNAC/UHCP did not even call out its own members in support of other UNAC/UHCP members on a separate contract.
The UNAC/UHCP bureaucracy wasted no time attempting to use the strike to support the Democratic Party. At the union’s invitation, Democratic California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was given the floor at the Oakland picket line first thing Monday morning to stump for his gubernatorial campaign.
Thurmond has been superintendent since 2019. He has overseen numerous attacks on public education in California while serving under Governor Gavin Newsom. One of his earliest acts was to help shut down the 2019 teachers’ strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland. He also worked to negotiate a sellout contract for Sacramento teachers in 2022. He has also overseen a massive expansion of charter schools and the privatization of education across the state.
The intervention of the Democratic Party is aimed at containing the Kaiser struggle and isolating it from their class brothers and sisters in New York City and shutting down the strike as soon as possible.
The rank and file must not allow this to happen. The strike has intersected with broader struggles of the working class and the class nature of the state. The question of who determines staffing, wages and conditions is intrinsically bound up with the fight to defend democratic rights and against the efforts by Trump to set up dictatorship in the US.
Workers in California and Hawaii must hold mass meetings, elect rank-and-file committees composed of trusted nurses rather than bureaucrats and establish lines of contact with their class brothers and sisters in New York, Minneapolis and across the country and internationally.
2. Trump’s tactical retreat in Minneapolis: The danger of dictatorship remains
Over the past 24 hours, the Trump administration has been forced into a tactical retreat following the state execution of ICU nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. The retraction, however, is not an abandonment of its authoritarian course—It is a recalibration. The threat of dictatorship remains as present and grave as ever.
Facing a wave of public outrage and protest, the White House has sought to walk back the most inflammatory lies and attacks issued by Trump’s top officials in the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s killing. On Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, pointedly did not defend statements by Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who labeled Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who tried to “assassinate” law enforcement. Leavitt instead insisted that “we will let the facts lead” and claimed, in an obvious lie, that “nobody in the White House, including President Trump, wants to see people getting hurt or killed.”
At the same time, the administration removed senior Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino from Minneapolis, whose false claims about Pretti were among the first to circulate. Several agents are reportedly being withdrawn, and Trump’s tone has shifted—from blaming Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for “inciting violence” to hailing a phone call with him as showing they were “on the same wavelength.”
This shift is not the result of moral reconsideration or pressure from Democratic politicians. It is the outcome of mass protests, mounting popular anger and a growing movement throughout the country about the need for a general strike. The White House understands that the murder of Alex Pretti—coming just two weeks after the execution of Renée Nicole Good in the same city—has provoked the most serious political crisis of Trump’s second presidency.
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It is striking that amid all the initial cheering from the Democratic Party-aligned media about the supposed triumph of “democracy,” not one word has been said about the fact that Donald Trump, the orchestrator of this reign of terror, remains in office. No one has been held accountable. Alex Pretti’s killers remain unnamed and at large. The instigators of the crime—above all, Trump himself, along with White House adviser Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons, and FBI Director Kash Patel—remain in power.
Leading Democrats are moving rapidly to spread complacency, defuse popular anger and portray the situation as under control. On Monday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz described his phone call with Trump as “productive.” This is the same Donald Trump whom Walz had accurately described just 12 days earlier as carrying out “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota.” What changed?
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The consensus within the US ruling class on the need to try to shut down the protests in Minnesota was expressed in the decision of the Wall Street Journal to publish an op-ed column by Minnesota Governor Walz. The ultra-right newspaper, owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, has criticized Trump’s handling of immigration as unnecessarily provocative, editorializing that the killing of Alex Pretti “calls for rethinking how ICE conducts itself, especially in Minneapolis as tensions build.”
In his column, while reiterating certain criticisms of Trump’s methods, Walz maintained that Minnesota is in fact cooperating with ICE by handing over immigrant prisoners for deportation, and declared, “Everyone wants to see our immigration laws enforced.”
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The protests of January 23, which brought over 100,000 people into the streets of Minnesota, were not organized by the political establishment. They arose from the working class and from the youth. The demand for a general strike is gaining momentum. In schools, hospitals, factories and warehouses, workers are discussing how to fight back.
This is the most significant development in American political life. What frightens the ruling class is not just the exposure of a crime. It is the emergence of a mass, working class movement that threatens the dictatorship not only in form but in substance—that is, the dictatorship of capital.
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The movement that has been set into motion must not stop. The demonstrations, strikes and mobilizations must continue and deepen. Preparations must advance for mass action, including a nationwide general strike. All the conditions that drove tens of thousands into the streets remain: ICE murders and raids, mass detention and deportation, the escalation of global war, the growth of fascism, and above all, the domination of society by a financial oligarchy that is incompatible with democracy.
This regime is not pulling back. It is regrouping. Its agenda remains: a police state at home, conquest abroad and the defense of obscene wealth and power through repression and violence. The working class must respond with even greater determination and clarity of purpose—through organization, unity and the building of a revolutionary socialist leadership.
3. Israel’s Palestinian citizens strike and protest against government-sanctioned crime epidemic
Last Thursday, more than 100,000 of Israel’s Palestinian citizens took to the streets of Sakhnin and Umm Al-Fahm, in the north of Israel, and other predominantly Arab towns and villages across the country, closing businesses and disrupting daily life. They protested the epidemic of organized crime, killings and violence in Palestinian communities in Israel that has gone unchecked by the Israeli authorities.
Demonstrators waved black flags and accused the openly racist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir of treating Arab lives as expendable. Some chanted slogans that drew clear links between the blind eye turned—even support offered—to criminal organizations and the genocidal war in Gaza and ethnic cleansing and oppression in the West Bank.
The near daily homicides, rampant extortion, protection rackets and violence in Palestinian towns and cities inside Israel is de facto Israeli government policy. At times tacitly encouraged lawlessness is seen as a means of pushing Palestinians to leave.
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Such was the strength of feeling that the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens—made up of Arab mayors, Knesset members and other community representatives, felt compelled to call a one-day general strike, observed in almost all the Arab towns and cities. It also called a mass demonstration in Sakhnin, where more than 50,000 people gathered.
The strikes and protests highlighted the widespread distress felt throughout the Arab community not just over the violence of criminal gangs—involved in protection, loan-sharking, drug trafficking and money laundering—but also deteriorating social and economic conditions. No one goes out on the streets after dark. Businesses are closing out of fear. Young people are leaving the towns.
In 2025, by far the deadliest year, 255 Palestinians were killed by gangs. Already this year, not yet a month old, 19 people have been killed in incidents linked to criminal networks. Just 10-15 percent of the murder cases are solved by the police, widely seen as reflective of deliberate state policy.
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Israel has enacted more than 60 laws entrenching the second-class status of its Palestinian citizens—those and their descendants who survived the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba in 1948, when more than 75 percent of the Palestinian population was expelled from their homes to make way for the Zionist state. In 2018, this second-class status was written into Israel’s Basic Law in its infamous Jewish Nationality Act.
Discrimination against Palestinian citizens has starved the municipal budgets of funds and pushed almost half of all families into poverty, while the unemployment rate has risen to 25 percent. These are the material causes driving young people into informal protection and extortion rackets, whose violence has been fueled by the 240,000 rifles that Ben-Gvir has made available to Israelis since the start of the October 7 genocide—many of which have almost certainly ended up in the hands of criminal gangs.
Last month, the government cut $68 million that had been allocated to social and educational programs for Palestinian citizens of Israel under its Five-Year Plan and transferred the funds to the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, and the police “for the purpose of combating crime in Arab society.”
In reality, these cuts will further exacerbate the inequality and economic conditions that fuel crime. As the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel said, “Diverting these funds to the Shin Bet and the police is part of a broader policy of militarizing and over-policing Palestinian communities, using high crime rates as a pretext rather than addressing the root causes of structural inequality.”
The authors of this move are the far-right National Security Minister Ben-Gvir and Social Equality Minister May Golan. Ben-Gvir, who has presided over the doubling of the homicide rate, has blamed “Arab culture” for the violence and accused local politicians of “turning a blind eye to criminal activity”.
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While the strike drew support from the Jewish-Arab NGO Standing Together, as well as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the participants in the strike and the mass rallies were overwhelmingly Palestinian.
Israel’s opposition party leaders—opposed to Netanyahu as an individual, and on a pro-Zionist basis—expressed sympathy for the demonstration. They criticized the government for failing to protect Israel’s Arab citizens from the protection racketeers. But they did nothing to rally their support base behind the protests.
It must be stated plainly: appeals to Netanyahu and the Zionist state for “increased public security” would, if heeded, result in the exact opposite of security and justice. What would follow is the expansion of police powers and the suppression of dissent, with the underlying social causes of gang violence left unaddressed.
Palestinian workers can only resolve the social, economic and political issues they confront by asserting their political independence from all the national bourgeois parties, whether Arab or Zionist, including those who promise “tougher public security”.
They must demand social, not merely punitive, solutions: mass jobs programs; housing; education, health and youth services; community policing democratically controlled by neighborhood committees; and the redirection of Israel’s military budget—a massive 17 percent of the 2026 budget, one of the highest percentages in the world—to social needs.
They must turn to Jewish Israelis whose social position is fast deteriorating—21 percent now live in poverty—amid Netanyahu’s genocidal war against in Palestinians in Gaza, the push to drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank, almost daily strikes on Lebanon and Syria, and threats of a renewed offensive against Iran.
What is needed is the construction of democratic, rank-and-file committees in workplaces and working-class neighborhoods that cut across religious and ethnic divisions. These can organize to defend community safety, provide aid, conduct inquiries into murders and rackets, and prosecute corrupt individuals who profit from gang activity. They can organize coordinated strikes to combat the arms industry and secure resources for public services.
As well as raising concrete demands for jobs, housing and services, this struggle must be linked to the broader international issues: militarism, war and the interventions and malign influence of imperialist and regional powers.
Jewish and Arab workers must forge their unity in a struggle to overthrow and replace the Zionist state and the various Arab bourgeois regimes and forge the United Socialist States of the Middle East. The decisive political task is to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Israel/Palestine and across the region to lead the working class in this struggle.
4. Mass arrest of protesters outside British hunger striker’s prison
On Saturday night, the Metropolitan Police violently arrested at least 86 protesters outside Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London. They had gathered peacefully in solidarity with Umer Khalid, a pro-Palestinian activist on a hunger and thirst strike whose life now hangs in the balance.
The demonstrators were demanding that prison governor Amy Frost put into writing and act on promises she had made regarding Umer’s treatment. He has suffered solitary confinement, censorship, denial of access to his prayer mat and the Quran.
According to the Prisoners for Palestine organization, Frost assured Umer that his “health is their priority and that he will be hospitalized should his health deteriorate,” and that he would have daily meetings to discuss negotiations.
Umer suffers from limb-girdle muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder that causes progressive muscle weakness and wasting. His mother, Shabana Khalid, said his health was rapidly deteriorating and that he was increasingly fatigued and weak.
Doctors have warned that he may die within days. In a statement to Prisoners for Palestine, Dr Rupa Marya warned: “With no fluid intake, typically people die of acute kidney failure and other derangements within three to four days. With Khalid’s underlying health condition, he is at increased risk of death even sooner.”
Dr Marya herself, a longtime professor, was suspended from the University of California, San Francisco, for speaking out against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
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Videos from the scene show officers violently dispersing the crowd, including pensioners who were punched, kicked and restrained face down on the floor by police. Officers are seen shoving demonstrators to the ground, handcuffing them and forcibly removing people whose only “crime” was expressing solidarity with a political prisoner facing death.
Part of the police operation involved the kettling of protesters at around 10pm on Saturday, preventing them from leaving the area. Among those arrested was Canary website videographer Ibrahim Abul-Essad, who was at the protest working as a journalist.
The Canary reported that its “sources on the ground say police then started picking off protesters one by one. Cops were heard saying ‘arrest now, find evidence later.’”
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The mass arrests demonstrate once again the Labour government’s commitment to suppressing protests against Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinians.
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Umer is the last remaining participant in a rolling hunger strike launched in November by activists linked to Palestine Action. He and seven others stopped eating in protest against their denial of bail, censorship in prison and the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation.
The last three participants—Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed and Lewie Chiaramello—ended their strikes on January 14 after going without food for 73 days and 65–66 days, and in Lewie’s case 46 days of intermittent fasting.
They ended their strike stating that it had played a part in the Ministry of Defense’s decision not to award a £2 billion contract to Elbit Systems UK, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.
Four of the original hunger strikers—Qesser Zuhrah, Heba Muraisi, Teuta Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed—are facing trial as part of the Filton 24 case for involvement in an August 2024 action against Elbit in Filton, near Bristol. Before its proscription, Palestine Action demanded the closure of Elbit’s facilities in Britain.
The latest brutal mass arrests reflect the authoritarian character of the Starmer government, which has made solidarity with the Palestinian people a quasi-criminal activity.
So draconian was the July 5, 2025 proscription of Palestine Action—the first time a peaceful direct action group had ever been banned—that it was condemned by the United Nations.
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If Umer Khalid dies in prison, it will not only be a tragedy but a political crime, exposing the brutality of a system that defends imperialist interests at the expense of human life. Workers, students and youth must demand his release and an end to the prosecution of pro-Palestine activists. This struggle must be linked to opposition to Britain’s support for Israel and to the broader fight against imperialist war and the onslaught on democratic rights.
5. Driven by climate change, devastating winter storm kills at least 29 across the US
A massive, coast-to-coast winter storm has killed at least 29 people and plunged hundreds of thousands into darkness and cold, leaving a trail of destruction from New Mexico to New England. The storm has been characterized by meteorologists as the worst ten days of winter in 40 years.
Beginning on Friday, the sprawling winter storm blanketed more than half of the continental US in snow, ice and freezing rain, impacting hundreds of millions of people. Snow was reported on the ground across about 56 percent of the lower 48 states, with at least a foot of accumulation recorded in 18 states from New Mexico through the Midwest and into New England.
The system drove bitterly cold air deep into the eastern two‑thirds of the country, keeping temperatures below freezing in large parts of the South and Central US. Ice accumulation—explicitly called “catastrophic” in advance by the National Weather Service—proved especially devastating in the South, coating trees and power lines with up to half an inch of ice across at least a dozen states.
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As of this writing on Monday, at least 29 deaths had been officially attributed to the storm and the associated cold, a figure that is certain to rise as authorities assess remote and impoverished areas and as delayed health impacts become apparent. Initial reports document the grim conditions facing a cross‑section of the working class and poor.
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These deaths are the predictable result of a system that treats shelter, warmth and safe infrastructure not as basic social rights, but as circumstances contingent on profit and austerity.
The worst immediate impacts have centered on ice‑buried regions of the South and snow‑choked regions of the Midwest and Northeast, where power outages have overlapped with dangerous cold.
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Meteorologists have emphasized that the storm was the product of a volatile interaction between abundant subtropical moisture from the Southwest and Gulf of Mexico, and a distended polar vortex that drove Arctic air deep into the continental US. The result was a sprawling, slow‑moving system capable of producing, in the words of experts, damage comparable to a major hurricane across landlocked regions.
Ryan Maue, former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and now a private meteorologist, warned before the storm that “we are poised to see a potentially historic Arctic ‘polar vortex’ blast across North America into the end of January.” As the event unfolded, he cautioned that 230 million people could see temperatures of 20 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, with 150 million subjected to snow and ice.
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Judah Cohen, a winter weather specialist and research scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), explained that the distortion of the polar vortex was closely linked to ongoing changes in the Arctic, including record‑low sea ice and altered snow cover patterns in Siberia. Shifts in the Arctic and decreasing sea ice as early as October 2025 “essentially loaded the dice” for a major polar vortex event, he noted, under conditions shaped by global warming.
Meteorologists have stressed that this is not a simple “cold outbreak” contradicting climate change, but an example of how a warming Arctic is destabilizing the jet stream and polar vortex, increasing the likelihood of extreme winter events over the mid‑latitudes.
The human impact of the storm has been sharply magnified by the systematic dismantling of emergency preparedness and the decrepit state of basic infrastructure, above all the electric grid in the US. It is already clear that federal and state authorities were late and inadequate in providing information, warming centers, and coordinated assistance to millions in the storm’s path.
Local officials begged residents to prepare in the last days before the storm, but most working class families and the elderly lack the resources to stockpile generators, backup heating, or days’ worth of food and medicine. Instead of an informed and robust federal response, communities have been largely left to fend for themselves, with scattered shelters and ad hoc warming stations opening only after the full scale of the outages became obvious and dependent upon charity to fund their operations.
This is the direct product of the policies of the Trump administration as the Department of Homeland Security has slashed FEMA’s disaster response staff, even as extreme weather disasters multiply. Internal documents show that as 2026 began, FEMA abruptly notified dozens of disaster response and recovery workers—members of its temporary but critical “CORE” staff—that their contracts would not be renewed, effectively laying them off in the middle of winter.
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For years, climate and weather scientists have warned that global warming will intensify the scale and volatility of extreme weather, including heavy precipitation events, heat waves and, paradoxically, certain kinds of severe winter storms. The current event—combining a moisture‑laden storm track from the Southwest with a destabilized polar vortex and record‑low Arctic sea ice—is a real-time concrete expression of these warnings.
However, the Trump administration, embedded with the fossil fuel corporations and the financial oligarchy, has refused to take even minimal measures to reduce emissions, overhaul energy systems, or rebuild infrastructure under public ownership and democratic control. Instead, emissions continue largely unabated and public funds are channeled into war and repression.
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For their part, the Democrats have responded with complicity. While issuing empty statements about “believing the science,” they have accepted the basic framework of austerity and corporate profit, voting for military budgets and corporate bailouts while leaving the climate to “market forces.”
The response to this winter storm follows the same pattern that characterized the ruling class handling of the COVID‑19 pandemic and the ongoing global health crisis. In both cases, officials knew in advance what was coming. In both cases, they refused to act in time or at the necessary scale, prioritizing corporate profits and “market stability” over human life.
In a flagrantly anti-democratic decision, a Quebec court has found the radical journalist and anti-genocide activist Yves Engler guilty of harassment of a police officer and obstruction of justice after he sought to defend himself from a right-wing witch hunt, spearheaded by far-right Zionists and supported by the state and corporate media.
Engler was targeted for prosecution due to his vocal opposition to Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide of the Gaza Palestinians and the complicity of Canada’s Liberal government and political establishment.
Justice Karine Giguère found Engler guilty last Friday of obstructing a peace officer, obstruction of justice and harassment under the Criminal Code for having encouraged his supporters to send emails protesting his impending February 2025 arrest on “hate crime” charges by the Montreal Police.
The original “hate” charge was levelled against Engler in response to a criminal complaint made by the far-right Zionist provocateur Dahlia Kurtz, with the assistance of the Spiegel Sohmer law firm and one of its principals, the prominent Conservative Neil Oberman. In social media posts, Engler had challenged Kurtz over her enthusiastic endorsement of the genocide and anti-Palestinian racism.
So lacking was Kurtz’s complaint of any legal foundation, the Crown was compelled last July to drop the harassment charge that it had filed against Engler based on it.
However, in what is clearly a malicious, politically-motivated prosecution, the authorities decided to double down on the charges they had brought against Engler for having urged his supporters to call on the police to drop the discredited harassment/”hate” crime charge.
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The court has yet to sentence Engler, but the penalties he faces are potentially severe and grossly punitive. Under the Criminal Code those convicted of either obstruction of justice or harassment can be jailed for up to 10 years.
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The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns the kangaroo court conviction of Engler and calls on workers, students and all those who defend democratic rights to come to his defense and demand the immediate vacating of his criminal convictions. Engler is the target of a state-led campaign of harassment and intimidation, because of his vocal opposition to Israel’s genocide and exposure of the crimes of Canadian imperialism.
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The conflation of an email protest campaign directed at state officials with acts of vigilantism—“taking justice into their own hands” in the words of the court— sends an ominous signal.
Engler rightly noted, in comments with the leader of the Quebec Green Party Alex Tyrell, “Friday’s ruling is a blow for everyone who might disagree with a decision by the government or its representatives. The email campaign was not unlike petitions sent to all levels of government, reporters or corporate officials, which are generally lawful.”
Further, Engler explained, “The verdict also drew a distinction between email campaigns directed at police and those aimed at other public figures. It effectively creates a special category of protection for police officers, insulating them from coordinated public pressure. The ruling grants police broad discretion to define criticism of their actions as criminal interference and to define communication/pressure as ‘obstructing’ justice.”
As the World Socialist Web Site noted in 2024, there are “deep concerns within Canada’s national-security apparatus that unprecedented social inequality and growing economic insecurity combined with climate and technological change will fuel political and social upheavals that threaten bourgeois rule.”
These upheavals, and the state’s repressive response, are well underway. Canada’s ruling class united around a campaign of repression and slander against the hundreds of thousands across the country who participated in protests against the Gaza genocide. The spurious charge of “antisemitism” was used by state authorities, from the federal Liberal government on down, to justify police violence against protesters, mass arrests, and the censoring of meetings and artistic and cultural events.
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The defense of Engler’s democratic rights is a class question. The Canadian ruling class looks upon the quickening pace of the class struggle with horror, and is arming itself with the same repressive measures that are being adopted in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Australia and elsewhere. The working class must respond with a powerful political mobilization in defense of democratic rights, including the right to strike and the right to speak out without fear of reprisals against the many crimes of Canadian imperialism, including its complicity in the Gaza genocide.
7. New Zealand authorities seeking to cover up causes of landslide disaster
On Sunday evening about 200 people attended a vigil in Mount Maunganui to mourn the deaths of six people in a horrific landslide at the Beachside Holiday Park at 9.30 a.m. on January 22. They were among nine people killed in landslides and flooding during extreme storms that hit New Zealand last week.
Those who died in the campground disaster include two 15-year-olds, Sharon Maccanico and Max Furse-Kee, both students at Pakūranga College in Auckland; Lisa Maclennan, 50, a literacy tutor at Morrinsville Intermediate School; friends Jacqualine Wheeler and Susan Knowles, both aged 71 and from Rotorua; and 20-year-old Swedish citizen Måns Loke Bernhardsson. Work is continuing to recover the bodies buried beneath the landslide.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon attended the vigil alongside Emergency Services Minister Mark Mitchell and Tauranga Mayor Mahé Drysdale. Luxon told reporters: “It’s the most senseless tragedy… Kiwis [were] enjoying a classic Kiwi summer at a campground, a place of great fun, and the next minute something senseless like this happens.”
But the deaths were not simply the result of an unavoidable natural disaster. Questions have been raised about why the campground was not evacuated despite several warnings well before the deadly landslide.
This week, nursing staff, teachers and other public sector employees have once again been called on to participate in nationwide warning strikes and protests. After the second round of contract negotiations between the service union Verdi and the Collective Bargaining Association of German Federal States (TdL) also failed, a third round of negotiations is scheduled for 11 and 12 February.
For years, public sector workers have been fighting against catastrophic conditions in university hospitals and health authorities, in schools and universities, in cultural institutions, government agencies or public road construction, amidst falling real wages and exploding workloads.
It is a daily marathon without respite: wherever one looks—whether at hospital wards or in classrooms—chronic understaffing and constant cuts in personnel and equipment are forcing more and more workers into a vicious spiral of overtime and burnout. Many feel that their job consists only of managing shortages and averting a total collapse of the public service.
A public sector strike this year for higher wages and better working conditions does not just involve the usual collective bargaining dispute. Workers face governments at federal and state levels that are implementing the largest rearmament spending program since the Nazi era. The goal is to transform Germany into a great power again, which can fight its corner in the global predatory struggle for raw materials and spheres of influence.
The massive sums for the armed forces are to be recouped at the expense of working people, school and university students, pensioners and those in need.
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“We can no longer afford the welfare state,” was the declaration of war by Chancellor Friedrich Merz last year. Workers across Europe and worldwide are experiencing similar attacks on their social gains, wages and jobs—especially in the US, where the fascist Donald Trump is currently in the process of establishing a dictatorship and smashing everything to pieces in the education and health sectors.
Not a single social problem can be solved if the working class does not put a stop to the dangerous developments towards war with a comprehensive strike movement. For this, public sector employees must fight together with industrial workers, university and school students across sectoral and national borders.
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While the public sector continues to face one cut after another, and workers bear the burden of the economic crisis, they are also “thanked” with cuts in real wages. The increased prices of recent years have immediately eaten up every meagre wage rise contained in the 2019, 2021 and 2023 contracts.
Working class households are hit hardest by high inflation: a study by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) concluded in the crisis year 2022. After the start of the Ukraine war, the proportional burden on the lowest-income households was almost five times as high as that on the highest-income ones.
If the ruling class now points to the allegedly low inflation rate of 2.2 percent in 2025 to dismiss the workers’ demands for a significant wage increase as “unrealistic,” then this is pure fraud.
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What the unions want to prevent at all costs with this tactic of attrition and fragmented protests is the emergence of a larger strike movement that breaks out of the straitjacket of the bureaucracy and assumes a political character. But precisely that is necessary: the building of a strike movement that links the fight for wage increases with a fight against war and rearmament, a movement in which public sector workers ally themselves with industrial workers who confront a jobs massacre in the factories, with school students striking against conscription, and with their colleagues in the US and worldwide who are confronted with the same social problems as they are.
But this requires a break with the government partners in the trade unions: Verdi, GEW and dbb! The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) calls for the building of rank-and-file Action Committees that are independent of the pro-capitalist unions and parties, are democratically controlled by the workers themselves and are networked in the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) with colleagues in the US, France, Italy, Turkey and worldwide.
These committees must establish demands that are oriented not to the governments’ profit and austerity constraints, but to the interests and needs of the workers, including a significant wage increase, better working conditions, more personnel and above all the immediate end of the policy of rearmament and war. Not a cent for the Bundeswehr, no militarization of the infrastructure—instead, billions for schools, hospitals, universities and social programs!
9. Merz and Meloni forge a new Berlin–Rome axis
Shortly after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni smiled demonstratively for the cameras last Friday at the German-Italian government consultations, another resident of Minneapolis was killed in the United States by agents of the immigration enforcement agency ICE. The nurse Alex Pretti was effectively executed during a raid—another killing in the course of the escalating fascistic offensive of the Trump administration.
Neither the German government nor any other European government condemned this crime. This despite the fact that transatlantic tensions have recently escalated sharply, particularly in connection with the imperialist conflicts over Greenland and the Arctic. This silence is no diplomatic oversight. It is the expression of a profound political convergence.
On the one hand, the European powers are deliberately holding back criticism of Washington. They want to preserve the alliance with US imperialism for as long as possible, until they themselves are fully rearmed and able to play an independent role in the imperialist redivision of the world. On the other hand—and this is the more fundamental point—they share the core of Trump’s policy: militarism abroad, authoritarian rule at home and brutal repression against refugees.
This convergence was openly on display at the German-Italian government consultations.
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The new German-Italian axis is... a warning from a historical standpoint. On the eve of and during the Second World War, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy formed a close alliance. On November 1, 1936, Mussolini first spoke of the “Berlin–Rome Axis.” With the so-called Pact of Steel of May 22, 1939, both fascist regimes sealed their military cooperation and explicitly committed themselves to mutual support in wars of aggression. Subsequently, Italian fascism was a central ally in the Nazis’ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and in the persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews.
For all the differences, today’s alliance between Berlin and Rome stands in this continuity. Once again, it is about militarization, about imperial expansion through genocidal methods—as in the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza actively supported by Berlin and Rome—and about the construction of authoritarian forms of rule to impose this policy on the population.
Under pressure from their members, Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) trade union leaders threatened last week to call a strike if their demands are not granted before the scheduled break-up of the state-owned enterprise, which employs over 20,000 workers, into six new state-owned companies.
The same union officials shut down all workers’ actions four months ago, clearing the way for the government to finalize the CEB’s liquidation. They have now been forced to call for strike action as unrest has grown among employees over the uncertainty of their jobs and working conditions in the new companies.
The Power and Energy Ministry and the CEB had planned to complete the restructuring of this state-owned institution by the end of January and to begin operations of the six new companies on February 1. The restructuring is part of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) austerity program, which targets more than 400 SOEs for privatization or commercialization.
On January 20, leaders of the Joint Alliance of CEB Trade Unions (JACEBTU) held a media conference, warning that if Energy Minister Kumara Jayakody failed to meet and discuss their demands, “all employees of the Electricity Board will go on strike.”
The unions also called for the gazette abolishing the CEB, due to be issued at the end of this month, to be delayed. But they have yet to announce any date for possible strike action.
The JACEBTU consists of about 20 unions, including the CEB Freedom Employees Union (CEBFEU), Sri Lanka Electricity Technicians Association, CEB Engineers Union, Technological Engineers and Superintendents Union (TESU), Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya, Joint Electricity Workers’ Union and Samagi Sewaka Sangamaya.
The unions’ demands were first raised in September and included full payment of workers’ outstanding entitlements prior to the abolition of the CEB, with guarantees of existing rights—salaries, promotions, loans, pensions, leave, and the resolution of industrial disputes—in the new companies. These conditions were to be formalized in a collective agreement with the government.
On September 17–18, CEB employees participated in a union sick-note action and a work-to-rule campaign in their first major protest action against the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government. The union leadership, however, abruptly suspended the campaign, claiming that Minister Jayakody had agreed to their 24 demands at talks on October 13.
While the government addressed some issues related to the activities of the CEB, including outstanding payments, it ignored demands related to the new companies and continued its preparations to transfer CEB assets to the new bodies. This means the government will allow the new companies to abandon previous CEB working conditions and determine employment according to their own requirements.
While over 2,000 employees have applied for retirement under the CEB’s Voluntary Retirement Schemes (VRS), the Energy Ministry has not made the promised retirement payments. These delays and other broken promises have increased concerns and anger among workers, compelling the JACEBTU leadership to threaten strike action unless the planned breakup of the CEB is postponed, talks held and a collective agreement signed.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) warns workers not to be deceived by the JACEBTU’s empty rhetoric. As past experiences show, any action called by the union bureaucracy is designed to let off steam and allow it to negotiate a new trap. Even if a collective agreement is signed, it can be easily torn up.
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Sri Lanka’s 2022 financial collapse, amid a deepening global economic crisis, and its default on foreign debts meant the privatization of the country’s state-owned sector could no longer be delayed. Bailout loans from the IMF required the implementation of what its own officials described as a “brutal experiment,” with the Wickremesinghe government passing legislation to restructure and privatize the CEB.
Under pressure from its members, the CEB union alliance—then led by a JVP-affiliated union and headed by Ranjan Jayalal, one of its party leaders—called limited protests in January 2024. The government responded by invoking draconian Essential Services laws and suspending 62 workers.
In June 2024, the JVP trade union wing ordered all its unions to halt industrial action, declaring that this would damage the presidential election campaign of JVP/NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who falsely promised to “re-negotiate” the IMF program. The JVP-led CEB union obeyed the directive, with others following.
Once in power, Dissanayake dumped the promise to renegotiate the IMF program and swiftly moved to implement its dictates, including the restructuring of the CEB. A new Electricity Amendment Act was passed with cosmetic changes to the Wickremesinghe government’s Act. When CEB workers protested last September against the amendment, the JVP-led union openly opposed any action.
Dissanayake branded workers’ opposition as “reactionary,” hailed IMF austerity as a “progressive transformation,” and reimposed the Essential Services Act on the CEB, banning industrial action. Under these threats, the rest of the CEB union bureaucracy capitulated, entered talks with Minister Jayakody, and shut down all action in October.
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In opposition to the desperate political manoeuvres of these trade union bureaucracies, the SEP and the Collective of Workers Action Committees (CWAC) call for the independent mobilization of workers against IMF austerity and the JVP-led government.
From the outset, the SEP and CWAC have urged workers to form their own action committees, independent of the trade union bureaucracies and all capitalist parties. Such committees would allow workers to democratically decide their course of action and unite with workers nationally and internationally. Such organizations provide the only way forward for CEB workers fighting to defend their jobs, wages and hard-won conditions.
This struggle is bound up with the mobilization of the working class against privatization and for a socialist program and a workers’ and peasants’ government, in which all SOEs are placed under workers’ democratic control, all major companies, industries and banks are nationalized, and all foreign debts repudiated.
11. Trump National Defense Strategy calls for US domination of Western Hemisphere
The Trump administration released its 2026 National Defense Strategy on Friday, a 34-page document that openly proclaims American military domination of North and South America as a platform for global war. The strategy, issued by the newly renamed “Department of War,” is a blueprint for imperialist conquest.
The National Defense Strategy introduces the concept of “Homeland and Hemisphere,” effectively expanding the definition of the American “homeland” to include all of North and South America.
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“Homeland and Hemisphere” recalls the Nazi slogan “Heim ins Reich”—”Home into the Reich”—used to justify Germany’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Just as Hitler declared that German-speaking territories belonged to Greater Germany, the Trump administration asserts that Greenland, Panama, and the Gulf of Mexico are American possessions to be secured by force.
While proclaiming hemispheric domination, the National Defense Strategy claims the military will “no longer be distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building.” The document’s claim to oppose “regime change” is rendered absurd by the fact that it was released days after the administration carried out one of the most flagrant acts of regime change in American history—the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
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The National Defense Strategy makes clear that US domination of the hemisphere is not a retreat from global domination, but what the Trump administration sees as a prerequisite. It insists that “ours is not a strategy of isolation” but rather “one of focused engagement abroad.”
While claiming that “President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China,” the National Defense Strategy frames hemispheric domination as preparation for great-power war. It acknowledges that China is “already the second most powerful country in the world—behind only the United States—and the most powerful state relative to us since the 19th century,” adding that despite internal challenges, “the fact is that its power is growing.”
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On nuclear weapons, the document demands the modernization of US nuclear forces “with focused attention on deterrence and escalation management amidst the changing global nuclear landscape.” It declares that “the United States should never—will never—be left vulnerable to nuclear blackmail.” The reference to “escalation management” is military jargon for preparing to fight and “win” a nuclear war.
The document concludes: “We will restore the warrior ethos. We will refocus the American military on its core, irreplaceable goal of winning the nation’s wars decisively.”
The Democratic Party supports this military buildup. On Thursday, the House passed combined defense and consolidated spending bills by a vote of 341-88, with 149 Democrats voting yes and only 64 voting no. The $839 billion military budget—$8.4 billion above what Trump requested—funds the weapons systems, carrier strike groups and military infrastructure required for the wars outlined in the National Defense Strategy. Both parties represent the same ruling class, and there is bipartisan consensus for militarism and global domination.
12. Xi purges China’s top general Zhang Youxia
An investigation announced on Saturday into China’s top general Zhang Youxia, the senior vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), second in rank only to its chairman President Xi Jinping, again highlights sharp tensions within China’s military—the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—and the top echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime.
Also under investigation is another CMC member, General Liu Zhenli, the PLA’s chief of staff. While the two generals remain on the commission, their purge from military and party posts is all but a foregone conclusion. The latest disciplinary actions follow the expulsion of nine generals from the party last October including another trusted Xi ally, junior CMC vice chairman He Weidong, and the removal of another CMC member Admiral Miao Hua last June.
The CMC, which has overall command of the entire PLA, now consists of only two active members—President Xi himself and General Zhang Shengmin, who has overseen Mr. Xi’s military purges as secretary of the CMC Commission for Discipline Inspection. His career has been as a political commissar rather than a military commander. He was appointed as CMC vice chairman last October.
The purging of General Zhang Youxia will send shockwaves through the PLA and Communist Party itself. He has been widely regarded as a staunch Xi loyalist, with family connections to the president, who like Xi is one of the “princelings”—the sons of veteran CCP members. His father was a founding member of the Red Army, who like Xi’s father was purged during Mao’s so-called Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, and, on his rehabilitation, became a prominent PLA general.
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If it is the case that China’s top general and close presidential confidante passed vital military secrets to the US, it could not simply be a matter of one corrupt individual. It would indicate fundamental disagreements within the CCP and the PLA over China’s military and foreign policy under President Xi.
While not ruling out that possibility, the more likely explanation is that Xi had come to regard Zhang as a political threat that had to be removed. Zhang, along with Liu Zhenli, was one of the few PLA generals with actual combat experience. As a young officer, he had fought in China’s only relatively recent military conflict against Vietnam in 1979, and again in a border clash with Vietnam that erupted in 1984.
As a result, Zhang had considerable standing within the PLA that was only enhanced by his rapid promotion up the ranks of the military and the party under Xi. In 2017, Xi elevated Zhang to the Politburo—the second highest decision-making party body and installed him as CMC junior vice chairman. At the 20th Party Congress in 2022, Zhang was promoted to CMC senior vice chairman despite being 72—well past the normal retirement age.
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[President] Xi is presented in the Chinese and international press as a leader wielding absolute power. He is routinely referred to in CCP meetings and events as the “core” of the party, the font of all wisdom. He pushed through changes to the constitution removing a two-term limit on the presidency and in 2023 was re-elected unopposed for a third term.
In reality, Xi is a Bonapartist figure precariously balancing between competing factions within the party, government and the military, between social classes amid acute social tensions, and on the international stage as the lawless aggression of the Trump administration has generated huge geopolitical uncertainty in every country. Xi cannot tolerate any potential threat or challenge to his position.
The most revealing accusation against Zhang was made in the military’s official newspaper, the PLA Daily, in an editorial published on Sunday. It declared both Zhang and Liu Pengyu had “seriously abetted political and corruption problems that affect the party’s absolute leadership over the military and endanger the foundation of the party’s rule.”
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Whatever the actual wrongdoings of Zhang and Xi’s motives for his removal, the ongoing purge of the Chinese military only underscores the fragility of the CCP regime, which has been intensified by the Trump administration. As Beijing understands very well, Trump’s ultimate target is China, the world’s second largest economy, which Washington regards as the chief threat to the global hegemony of US imperialism.
Trump reached a temporary truce last year in his economic war of tariffs and hi-tech export bans against China after Beijing imposed restrictions on the export of rare earths that had the potential to cripple key industries, including military production, in the US. He is due to meet with Xi in China in April. But Trump’s criminal actions against Venezuela and military threats against Iran menace two of China’s key suppliers of oil—in effect a continuation of the US economic war through other means.
In the face of steep US tariffs, China has found other markets for its exports but its economy is still plagued by high levels of debt and a crisis-ridden property market. Economic growth last year was officially 5 percent, but that figure is well below the benchmark 8 percent previously regarded as necessary for low unemployment and social stability. The huge social gulf between the tiny oligarchy of multi-billionaires that the CCP above all represents and the vast majority of the population is a continuing source of resentment, hostility and outright opposition.
The fact that Xi concludes that it is necessary to move against his closest ally in the military is not a sign of political strength, but rather presages political instability in his regime.
13. Crucial questions posed by Labor’s censorship and destruction of Australian writers’ festival
The exclusion of Randa Abdel-Fattah from the Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW), and the destruction of this year’s event—Australia’s most popular and longest-running literary festival—raises decisive questions about how writers, artists and other creative workers can fight government interference and political censorship.
In 2025, Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian-Australian novelist, academic and well-known opponent of the Gaza genocide, was invited to speak at this year’s AWW about Discipline, her latest novel—a fictional account of the silencing of Palestinian and Muslim voices in Australia during the May 2021 Israel–Gaza conflict.
On January 8, the Adelaide Festival Board, following demands by South Australian Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas and the Zionist lobby, cancelled her scheduled appearance. Citing the December 14 terror attack on Jews at Bondi Beach, the board claimed that the Palestinian-Australian author’s attendance would be culturally insensitive.
The blatantly racist ban sparked a boycott involving around 180 writers, leading to the resignation of four board members, including its chair, as well as Louise Adler, the AWW director. Adler denounced the ban, saying she would not be part of “silencing writers,” and warned that such anti-democratic attacks would intensify.
The following day, a newly appointed festival board issued an “unreserved apology” to Abdel-Fattah but, instead of reinstating her, cancelled AWW and issued a vague promise to invite her to next year’s event.
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The defense of artistic freedom and of democratic rights more broadly requires a new perspective. Such a perspective cannot be based on immediate or superficial impressions or on pragmatic calculations. It has to be derived from the lessons of history.
Leon Trotsky’s 1938 essay Art and Politics in Our Epoch, written one year before the outbreak of World War II and amid the systematic destruction of democratic rights and the subordination of all culture to state power in fascist-ruled Germany and Italy, is highly relevant for writers, artists and creative workers fighting government censorship today.
Trotsky wrote: “Art, which is the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the same time the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of bourgeois society. To find a solution to this impasse through art itself is impossible. It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology.
“Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably… unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character. For these reasons the function of art in our epoch is determined by its relation to the revolution.”
Trotsky could have been speaking of the situation today. Who can argue that serious art can coexist with a capitalist system that is hurtling towards the abyss and spewing up all of the horrors of the 1930s? In America, US President Donald Trump is carrying out a Hitler-inspired war on culture, as he seeks to erect a dictatorship in the center of world capitalism.
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Culture and artistic freedom must find a new social base of support. Serious artists will only find that in the working class.
The events of the genocide have underscored a gulf that exists, between the official political and corporate establishments in every country and working people. While the former have signaled there are no lines they will not cross, including supporting the mass slaughter of innocent civilians, among ordinary people a vast well of anti-war, humane and democratic sentiment has found expression.
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Just as the horrors of the 20th century are reemerging, so too will the basic reality that mobilizing the working class is the basis of any fight against inequality, war and authoritarianism. While the ruling elites, presiding over a social order, depend upon lies and falsification, the working class can only take forward its struggle through a scientific and true appraisal of contemporary society. Serious art can contribute to that understanding, which is why it is attacked during all periods of reaction.
Writers, artists, musicians, actors, and other creative workers cannot defeat government censorship and state repression through individual protests or moral appeals to governments and state-funded cultural institutions.
When creative workers link up with fellow workers in their own industries—audio, video and other technical workers, venue and gallery employees, administrative staff—and coordinate with workers in transport, logistics, and key areas of industrial production, they will constitute a powerful political and industrial force.
This requires the creation of democratically controlled rank-and-file committees of writers and artists of all genres, independent of the trade union bureaucracies. Such committees must take up the defense of all those targeted and victimised for their political views, exposing and combating the lies used to justify repression.
14. Co-workers, veterans at Minneapolis VA center honor Alex Pretti, denounce murder by ICE thugs
15. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
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.
