1. Labour Party suffers Gorton and Denton by-election wipe out by Greens
A leadership challenge to Keir Starmer is ever more likely after May’s local elections, which Labour is also expected to lose heavily.
2. Canada’s Defense Industrial Strategy and the militarization of Canadian society
When Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled Canada’s first ever Defense Industrial Strategy (DIS) on February 17, he spoke bluntly about the aims of the Canadian ruling class. The “assumptions that shaped decades of Canadian defence and foreign policy,” he declared, “have been completely upended.” Canada now confronts a “more fractured and darker” world in which conflict is moving closer to home. Ottawa must ensure it is never again “hostage to the decisions of others.”
The MPs responsible for the DIS, including Defense Minister David McGuinty and Minister of Industry Melanie Joly, reiterated Carney’s themes in an introduction to the document, citing the NATO-instigated war in Ukraine and the global trade disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic in particular. They noted, “Long-held assumptions have been upended—about the end of imperial conquest, the durability of peace in Europe and the resilience of old alliances. In this uncertain world, it is more important than ever that Canada possess the capacity to sustain its own defense and safeguard its own sovereignty.”
The strategy translates this diagnosis into policy, marking the most far-reaching attempt in decades by the Canadian ruling class to reorganize the economy, state apparatus and labor force to equip itself as an imperialist power to participate in the violent redivision of the world that is already well underway. Its aim is to lessen the dependence of Canadian imperialism on its long-time partner in the United States amid a growing breakdown in relations between the two—as expressed in President Donald Trump’s trade war measures and annexationist threats, and Canada’s counter-tariffs.
The DIS codifies themes Carney advanced earlier at the World Economic Forum, where he warned of a “rupture of the world order.” Trade, finance, supply chains and technology, he said, are now weapons wielded by rival powers. Canada’s procurement policy, industrial investment, research funding and labor planning will be reorganized accordingly.
At the strategy’s core lies a commitment to raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035, aligned with NATO demands. The DIS notes that this will be a historic level of funding. It would in fact constitute the largest sustained militarization of the Canadian economy since the Second World War.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a two-day visit to Israel this week, choosing to further elevate India’s “strategic partnership” with Israel at the very point that Washington and Tel Aviv are poised to launched a criminal, unprovoked war on Iran.
4. Teachers face illegal reprisals over support for student walkouts against ICE
Across the US, teachers and students who join or support anti‑ICE walkouts are being investigated, disciplined and even criminally threatened.
5. Argentina’s labor bill vote and tire factory shutdown expose pseudo-left unionism
As Argentina’s Senate approved fascist President Javier Milei’s Labor Modernization bill, pseudo-left unions promoted nationalist appeals to the Peronist bureaucracy, repeating the betrayals that paved the way for the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
6. New Zealand: Union pushes through pay cut for 12,300 health workers
The two-year agreement follows a similar sellout by the secondary teachers’ union, with both deals aimed at imposing the right-wing coalition government’s austerity agenda.
7. Australian logistics software maker WiseTech announces 2,000 AI-driven job cuts
“The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over,” according to WiseTech CEO Zubin Appoo.
8. FBI raids LAUSD headquarters and superintendent Carvalho’s home
While the DOJ has cited possible corruption, it is likely that Carvalho was targeted for his criticisms of ICE raids targeting immigrant children.
9. Australian housing crisis: Unaffordability at record levels
The Labor government’s expanded “first home buyer” schemes have not provided relief for workers and young people but rather have inflated prices and further enriched banks, developers, and existing property owners.
10. Mamdani’s decision to reopen New York City schools after blizzard angers teachers and parents
Tens of thousands of New York City teachers and parents opposed Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to hold in-person school on Tuesday as the city recovered from a historic blizzard.
The area was hit by 27 inches of snowfall last week, crippling the city and making transportation nearly impossible for millions. Most businesses and city services were shut down, and schools were closed on Monday. On Tuesday, millions of workers in the city and commuters in the suburbs were unable to dig their cars out of the snow. Public transportation was unreliable and often unavailable from many areas.
Mamdani, nevertheless, declared that school buildings would be open and teachers and students expected to attend, even though much of the rest of the city was closed.
Attending school was impossible or, in many cases, dangerous, for children and their teachers. Many streets were not fully plowed or sidewalks not cleared. Only 60 percent of students were able to get to school and over 20,000 educators were unable to come in.
11. Mamdani embraces Trump: Collaboration with fascism from the DSA mayor
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s secretly organized meeting with Donald Trump in the White House, where he posed alongside the fascist president in the Oval Office, is an act of treachery aimed at forging an alliance with the far-right.
The self-proclaimed democratic socialist stood side-by-side with the would-be dictator who has the blood of thousands on his hands, and may soon have the blood of millions, as his war fleet assembles off the coast of Iran. Trump beamed as the Democratic mayor of the nation’s largest city paid him tribute—treating Mamdani as a useful prop he considers valuable, at least for the moment.
Mamdani did not stumble into this meeting. He sought it. He proposed the photo-op. It is a calculated effort by the New York City mayor and leading figure of the Democratic Socialists of America to establish close relations with a fascistic president who is escalating ICE terror, building a network of detention camps, preparing to rig the 2026 elections and driving the United States toward a catastrophic war.
12. Newly-elected far-right Japanese government prepares war measures
Following the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) landslide victory in the Japanese general election earlier this month, the far-right government of Sanae Takaichi is rapidly accelerating Tokyo’s remilitarization agenda in preparation for waging war abroad and war against the working class at home.
On Wednesday, the LDP’s Research Commission on Security panel approved a plan to lift nearly all restrictions on Tokyo’s ability to export lethal weaponry. The plan will be submitted to the government for additional revisions before going into effect. This significant change does not require parliamentary approval from the National Diet.
Under the panel’s recommendation, Japan will now will be able to export weaponry jointly developed with one nation to a third country. Exports to nations currently at war will also be allowed with approval by the National Security Council, which includes the prime minister and cabinet ministers. At present, exports will be limited to 17 countries with which Tokyo has military technology transfer agreements, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines.
Current restrictions date back to 2014 when the Shinzo Abe government scrapped a longstanding ban on military exports. The new policy allowed exports of so-called “non-lethal” equipment supposedly for use in rescue, transport, warning, surveillance, and minesweeping.
The government of Fumio Kishida further chipped away at the ban in 2023, allowing finished products to be sent to countries that held the item’s license. This paved the way for shipping Patriot missiles to the US to replenish Washington’s supply depleted by the arming of Ukraine in the US/NATO-instigated war against Russia, making Japan an indirect supplier of arms to Kiev.
The LDP and its similarly far-right, pro-war coalition partner, Nippon Ishin no Kai, view Japan’s export restrictions as an impediment to the expansion of Japan’s military industry and capabilities in preparing for war against a US-led China.
The ban was first implemented in 1967 and then strengthened in 1976 to supposedly align with Article 9 of the constitution, which makes it illegal for Japan to maintain a military or wage war abroad. The export ban was imposed as the government faced widespread anti-war opposition among workers and youth, though exceptions existed for things such as technology transfers to the US.
Furthermore, while Japan’s remilitarization has taken place under the framework of the US-Japan security treaty, Japan is also pursuing an agenda to assert its own imperialist interests.
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While the immediate lifting of the export ban is being discussed publicly, how it is carried out in the future will take place largely behind closed doors. The government will be under no obligation to explain to or seek approval from parliament for exports. In fact, senior government and Defense Ministry officials told the Asahi Shimbun that such a requirement would be “out of the question.”
The Japanese ruling class is terrified that any exposure of its pro-war agenda and the fraudulent claims that remilitarization is limited to so-called “defense” will spark opposition from the working class. Takaichi tacitly acknowledged as much when she stated after the election that her new government would enact “bold policies that could divide national opinion.” As war planning grows, oppressive measures will also be strengthened to clamp down on any opposition.
This is the purpose of another pro-war measure the government is pursing, the so-called anti-espionage bill and other changes to Tokyo’s intelligence gathering capabilities. Long sought-after by the ruling class, this would strengthen Tokyo’s spy agencies both domestically and abroad while making it more difficult for whistleblowers to expose the machinations of the state and for reporters to write about these exposures.
The Takaichi government intends to draft a “National Intelligence Strategy” for the first time within this year. Until now, intelligence has been included within the National Security Strategy, one of Japan’s primary military documents. The new strategy would centralize intelligence gathering and clarify the roles of new bodies dedicated to this purpose.
In particular, the Takaichi government intends to establish a National Intelligence Council to oversee a new National Intelligence Agency, both of which could be set up as early as July. Another agency for foreign intelligence gathering based on the US’s CIA is slated to be set up by the end of 2027.
For nearly a week, Shah Alam’s family searched frantically for him. They filed a missing persons report, canvassed local hospitals and detention centers, distributed flyers and worked with advocates to pressure agencies for answers. His attorney discovered on February 22 that he was not in immigration detention and alerted Buffalo police, exposing the fact that no one in government had told the family that he had been released at all.
Family members have described “days and nights without sleep,” fearing he had fallen, been assaulted or succumbed to the cold, and denounced officials for leaving a disabled man to fend for himself without even a phone call.
On February 25, Buffalo police confirmed that the remains discovered on a downtown street two days earlier were Shah Alam, identified by the medical examiner using X‑ray comparison, and notified his relatives. He had been dead for hours when first responders arrived, and emergency personnel were unable to revive him.
14. The 2026 Winter Olympics: Remarkable athleticism poisoned by nationalist chauvinism
From a purely athletic standpoint the games saw several historic achievements. France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron secured a remarkably beautiful Ice Dance gold, while Brazil and Kazakhstan celebrated their first-ever Winter Olympic golds. Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won six gold medals, becoming the most decorated winter Olympian of all time.
But the realization of a genuine Olympic spirit is at direct odds with a global political order characterized by capitalist economic competition teetering on the edge of world war. For this reason, the games are used to promote the most filthy forms of nationalism, pitting nations against one another as bitter rivals rather than competing as equals in sport. The degeneration of the games has reached the point where the International Olympic Committee is little more than a direct tool of imperialism.
15. Hamnet, Hamlet and the demanding effort “to show the very age and body of the time”
Artists like Zhao and O'Farrell simplify matters for themselves by projecting into history their own middle class attitudes. To understand the present “all one has to do is to attribute the thoughts, feelings and motives of present-day men to the past.” (Lukacs) Everywhere one looks one finds the same reactions and emotions – ‘Mine and those of people like me!’ And that error in this case almost inevitably blends into a kind of self-involvement and self-pity on Agnes’s part, which hardly seem appropriate or likely.
There are more significant questions, which can only be touched on here.
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More generally, the notion that Hamlet or any significant literary or dramatic work is the product of personal grief or one tragedy alone is reductive and false, again revealing a contemporary, frankly philistine conception of artistic production as the result of purely private, personal joys and griefs.
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It is a terrible injustice to Shakespeare and Hamlet, and contrary to several hundred years of criticism and commentary, to view the drama in the O’Farrell-Zhao fashion. It ignores, first of all, what Hamlet himself says about “the purpose of playing,” whose aim, he suggests, is “both at the first and now … to show ... the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
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The death of a child is a terrible, devastating event. It may very well deepen an artist’s sense of the tragic side of life, its finitude, its enormous emotional demands and hardships. But it is not the source of a major artist’s work, it only strengthens its more humane and sympathetic qualities or sides. Great artists have a great cause. Shakespeare was engaged in revealing the likeness and complexion of his epoch and society, in remorselessly removing its veils.
Various harmful processes find expression in Hamnet: the “privatization” and “trivialization” of human behavior past and present; a subjective, “anything goes” attitude toward historical facts; the imposition on people of the past current motives and attitudes; and the more general retreat of affluent layers of the middle class into the family fortress-cocoon.
In regard to the latter, for some middle class layers the world is too much, too frightening, overwhelming. What do we have control (or apparent control) over? The family unit. That’s a would-be sanctuary for those who feel the earth moving beneath their feet. Zhao’s film is false because it attempts to foist this state of mind and emotion on the life and work of one of the most fearless writers of all time, someone who consistently took on the grandest and most towering questions of existence.
16. Trump blacklists Anthropic, orders all federal agencies to cease use of AI firm’s technology
The dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon unfolded rapidly this week and reveals growing divisions within the ruling class over the Trump administration’s reckless policies. Two days after being summoned to Washington on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a statement Thursday evening refusing to back down on their demands that the Pentagon not use their AI model for fully autonomous drones or domestic mass surveillance.
While this was presented in the corporate press as a courageous act of defiance against Trumpian authoritarianism, read in full, the letter is nothing of the kind. It is a full-throated declaration of support for US imperialism that repeats the Pentagon’s own talking points nearly verbatim, differing only on two narrow technical restrictions.
17. UAW tries to contain anger as Stellantis workers denied profit sharing checks
Workers at Stellantis reacted with fury to the formal announcement by Stellantis this week that the company would not issue profit sharing checks this year due to reported negative earnings in 2025, the first time this has happened since 2011. After years of concessions and substandard pay raises, workers count on the payouts to fill gaps in their budgets. Checks have ranged from $3,000 to as much as $14,000 in 2024.
Workers contacted by the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter expressed disgust with management as well as the UAW apparatus. A Jeep worker at the Toledo Assembly Complex said, “We were on emergency status, ten hours, six days a week. Then it went to critical status—seven days. We went all hard, and for what? We got no profit sharing. How much more can we give?
18. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
New Zealand:
Sri Lanka:
20. 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.
