Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The Roman Space Telescope: The power of science and the bankruptcy of capitalism
Roman is part of an extended international effort to probe the very foundations of the structure and history of the universe. In the early twentieth century, the universe was discovered to be expanding everywhere, from a distinct origin now known to be about 13.8 billion years ago. From that discovery arose the question of its fate: Will the expansion continue forever, or will gravity overcome it and produce an eventual collapse?
Many surprising discoveries came from the pursuit of this fundamental question. Around 1970, it was found that galaxies are bound together by far more mass than that of their gas and stars, a “dark matter” of unknown composition that has mass and therefore gravity, but does not emit any sort of light. Studies of the most distant exploding stars, seen as they were in the early history of the universe, showed that the expansion is accelerating, driven by a repulsion operating on a cosmic scale, now termed “dark energy.”
One of the most perplexing aspects of both dark matter and dark energy is that they make up the vast majority of the mass/energy of the universe. Dark matter consists of about 27 percent and dark energy about 68 percent, with the remaining 5 percent being ordinary “baryonic” matter.
Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist, described the origins of the mission in a pre-launch interview on NASA’s Curious Universe podcast:
In the late 90s, we realized that the universe was behaving much more strangely than we imagined, and that instead of coasting out at the constant speed forever or slowing down, it in fact is accelerating. [It was a] huge, unexpected mystery. Many scientists wanted to figure out what can we do to take the next step to understand the fundamental nature of our universe?
A central task of the last few decades across both astronomy and physics has been to identify the concrete origins and character of these attractive and repulsive components that shape the evolution of the universe.
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The launch of Roman is testament to extraordinary developments in science, and to the technological foundations that make the mission itself possible (the semiconductor manufacturing behind its 300-megapixel infrared camera, the computing that will process and transmit 1.4 terabytes of data each day, the precision optics that can cancel the light of a star to reveal the planets beside it). All of this highlights all the more starkly the irrationality of the social relations that prevail on the world Roman leaves behind.
The rocket that lifted the telescope belongs to Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, a racist ignoramus whose diatribes against immigrants and refugees have been combined with political and financial support for Donald Trump, the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany and other fascist parties. SpaceX was built on public money via NASA and Pentagon contracts and now trades near a $2 trillion valuation, a massive vehicle for speculation and the enrichment of the oligarchy.
And as the Roman telescope climbed out of the atmosphere Sunday morning, rescue workers in Nepal were searching flooded Himalayan valleys, where 903 people were dead by Monday’s count and more than 4,000 were missing. The danger had been warned of for years. The Himalayas, warming faster than the global average, hold thousands of swelling glacial lakes above some of the poorest valleys on earth.
The satellite monitoring and valley-level warning systems that could have saved hundreds of lives are built on the same infrared and remote-sensing technologies that Roman carries into space, and cost a pittance beside any military budget. They were never built. Even now, a newly formed lake of loose debris hangs, unstable, above the rescue crews, and hundreds of workers are trapped in tunnels under the ground.
In the realm of public health, the United States has confirmed 2,777 measles cases this year, the most since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, and Pennsylvania recorded its first measles deaths in 35 years. Cases of the foodborne parasite Cyclospora have passed 17,000, roughly four times the recent annual count.
The response of the American government, and its counterparts internationally, to every social disaster has been to attack the underlying science and those who carry out the research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has cut its foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens to two. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose scientists model floods and forecast storms, fired more than 800 workers in February 2025. The Environmental Protection Agency has lost a quarter of its staff in a year and is now smaller than at any time since Reagan.
Roman itself was nearly killed four times. The first Trump administration proposed eliminating the telescope, then called WFIRST, in three budgets running, and in April 2025 a White House budget document proposed eliminating it again. At the same time, both the Republicans and Democrats have consistently voted billions to fund ICE and trillions for the military and corporate bailouts.
The knowledge, technique and organizational capacity plainly exist to contain the floods, provide universal vaccinations, rebuild infrastructure and replace coal and oil plants with renewable energy. It is the control of society’s resources by a tiny financial oligarchy, and the subordination of every social decision to profit and war, that hold that capacity out of reach.
Over the coming years, the Roman Space Telescope will map the universe. The task on Earth is to place the advances of science at the service of mankind: to take the oligarchy’s wealth into public hands, end the wars and turn the productive forces to human need.
Fernando Cerimedo, the Argentine political operative who served as top adviser to Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, is being held in preventive detention in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, accused of hiring gunmen to murder his former partner, Bolivian lawyer and activist Nadia Beller.
Beller, who is pregnant, was shot three times outside a hotel on the night of August 17 by two assailants dressed as delivery drivers. She survived. Cerimedo was arrested the next morning attempting to board a flight to Buenos Aires and has been ordered to remain in pre-trial custody for 180 days. Bolivian authorities have since granted Beller protected-witness status and are holding her at an undisclosed location.
Three further investigations have been opened against Cerimedo in Bolivia: for illicit enrichment, following searches that turned up an initial $40,000 in cash and, according to subsequent reports, as much as $500,000 in cash and suspect assets; for the protection of irregular flights out of the Beni municipality of Santa Ana, allegedly carrying illicit substances toward Brazil; and in connection with a case known as the “narcoencomiendas,” involving the irregular movement of 350,000 bolivianos with the participation of a pilot and three police officers.
On August 29, a Bolivian tribunal ordered a second preventive detention for Cerimedo on the illicit enrichment charge.
Cerimedo has wept publicly at several of his hearings, complaining at the most recent that his life had been ruined. What is being ruined is something larger. The man behind digital publicity operations of Trump’s allies throughout the region is now in the public eye, and the material emerging from his telephone threatens to bring down entire governments.
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What this case exposes are the anti-democratic mechanisms through which Washington has reshaped the hemisphere. Vast sums—their ultimate sources still unestablished—have been channeled into bot farms, disinformation networks and micro-targeting operations to manufacture public opinion and install governments that function as instruments of US policy.
3. Hundreds of workers trapped in flooded tunnels, as Nepal deaths near 1,000
Hundreds of workers remain trapped in the flooded tunnels of Nepal’s hydropower plants after a wall of glacial debris tore through the country’s northern valleys, and rescue crews from Nepal, India and China are drilling, digging and blasting to reach them.
Five days after a glacier-triggered landslide and flash flood devastated Nepal’s border region, the country’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority reported 939 confirmed deaths, 1,473 injured and 3,925 people missing or unaccounted for as of Monday.
The fast moving, dense slurry—a churning mix of meltwater, glacial ice, rock, boulders, mud and uprooted material—behaved like wet concrete racing downhill and destroyed settlements, transport links and hydropower sites across the Himalayan watershed last Wednesday morning.
Across the border in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, authorities had reported at least 16 additional deaths and 546 missing people.
The hydropower sector has emerged as one of the hardest-hit parts of the disaster. Authorities said 639 hydropower workers from sites across Nepal were missing as of Monday, while the Independent Power Producers’ Association had previously put the number of missing or unaccounted-for people connected to the sector at about 933.
The most difficult operation involves workers trapped in hydropower tunnels after the flooding. Nepal’s Prime Minister’s Office said 350 people had been rescued from a tunnel, but more than 100 remained trapped as operations continued; another 533 residents had been moved to safety from flooded areas.
At the Trishuli 3A plant in Rasuwa District, army rescue teams drilled into the upper section of the mud-choked tunnel on Saturday evening, pumped in air and lowered a camera to search for survivors. On August 29 alone, 208 workers were brought out of a third Trishuli project, 43 of them foreign nationals, including 38 Chinese and five Indian workers. India and China have sent specialist rescue teams and equipment to support the operation.
Rescuers face a hazardous underground environment as tunnels can be blocked by sediment and debris, flooded by seepage, damaged by shifting rock, or cut off by collapsed entrances and destroyed roads. The situation also limits the use of heavy equipment and makes ventilation, communication, lighting, food, water and medical care urgent operational concerns. The BBC reported that a controlled explosion was detonated as part of attempts to reach the trapped workers.
The rescue effort has resulted in a substantial number of evacuations. Nepal’s disaster-response agency said more than 7,500 people had been rescued since the flood struck on August 26.
The sharply rising scale of the human devastation reflects the difficulty of compiling a reliable count in remote, mountainous terrain where roads, bridges, communications infrastructure and work camps have been swept away.
Earlier in the response, Nepalese authorities said hundreds of tourists, including large numbers of foreign nationals, had been cut off or unaccounted for. The numbers are escalating as officials receive reports from isolated villages and industrial sites.
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Scientists from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, based in Kathmandu, and climate specialists said an avalanche from a glacier was the likely cause of the release of the destructive mixture into river valleys.
Scientists warn that a warming Himalayan environment raises the probability of cascading hazards. Rising temperatures can destabilize glaciers and slopes, alter snow and ice melt, expand or create glacial lakes, and increase the danger that an avalanche, landslide or lake outburst will transform into a fast-moving flood. The Himalayan region is warming faster than the global average and is particularly exposed to rainfall-driven floods and landslides.
Nepal’s foreign minister called for a global effort to tackle climate change, arguing that Nepal is among the countries suffering acutely from rising temperatures despite its relatively limited contribution to global emissions. The statement framed the catastrophe not solely as a national emergency but as evidence of a shared global climate problem requiring international action.
A second emergency is still developing upstream as the landslides and debris have blocked river channels, forming barrier lakes. These temporary lakes can become highly dangerous when water accumulates behind unstable natural dams, because a breach can send another sudden surge downstream.
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Nepal’s flood catastrophe cannot be understood as an unavoidable “natural” disaster solely caused by the glacial collapse which triggered the raging deadly torrent. The scale of deaths, displacement and infrastructure loss is directly attributable to capitalist-induced climate change, resulting from decades of neglect internationally by a social system that places profit and austerity above public safety and preparedness.
A primary role has been played by the major imperialist powers, especially the US, in the criminal neglect of the climate crisis that is having a disproportionate impact on billions of working-class and poor people around the world. Fragmented national responses to the crisis are incapable of addressing cross-border climate hazards, which are impacting every country in the world.
4. New Zealand hospitals in crisis amid surging winter illnesses
Nurses at New Zealand’s North Shore Hospital in Auckland last month declared a “state of emergency,” saying chronic understaffing and severe overcrowding are putting patients at risk.
About 120 nurses, healthcare assistants and other staff signed a letter, which was sent by the NZ Nurses Organisation (NZNO) to Health NZ chief executive Dale Bramley declaring they could “no longer remain silent” about the appalling conditions. It explained that the Emergency Department (ED) is staffed for 40 patients but is operating at twice that, while running at 200 to 300 percent over capacity at critical times. Patients are left sitting in their own waste and being treated in corridors.
“We will not accept the normalization of preventable harm or the continued degradation of our public health system,” the letter said. The NZNO, however, has not announced any industrial action.
A surge of Influenza A is hitting New Zealand, with Auckland recording its worst week for flu-related hospitalizations in a decade. Radio NZ (RNZ) reported on August 14 that hospital admissions in the city doubled in the space of a week, rising to 3.781 cases per 100,000 people from 1.574 the week before.
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Starship Children’s Hospital is deferring less urgent cases to cope with a “flood” of very young children with flu symptoms. The St John Ambulance Service reported that in August it had its highest volume of emergency calls on record, with 2,562 in a single day, many of them for respiratory illnesses.
The North Shore Hospital staff letter said Health NZ had failed to plan properly for winter and had not hired the nursing numbers it had agreed to. It described patients taking 90 minutes to be triaged with some waiting more than 50 hours in ED to be admitted to hospital. Some missed essential medication while others had urgent heart scans delayed for hours. Charge nurse Jean Classey told RNZ: “It’s an absolute nightmare. It feels like we’re at war.”
Health Minister Simeon Brown has flatly rejected all the evidence, maintaining there is no crisis. In a statement, he falsely claimed the health system is improving: “More people are being treated, wait times for surgery are shorter, and patients are waiting less time in emergency departments,” he boasted.
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Public hospitals have for years been over-run due to chronic shortages of doctors and exorbitant costs of GP visits. Wellington Hospital’s ED went into its most critical code-red status on average twice a day between January and October 2025, as demand repeatedly outstripped available staff and beds. More than 3,200 patients, around 10 a day, left the department without being treated.
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The crisis has been worsening under austerity measures imposed by successive governments, including the last Labour Party government and the current National Party-NZ First-ACT Party coalition.
Last month it was revealed that more than 1,300 nursing positions remained vacant nationwide with full-time nursing roles increasing by just 54 between March 2024 and 2026. Only 47 percent of graduating trainee nurses (about 800) secured jobs at the end of 2025. Many are being forced to look for work overseas.
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The government’s 2025–26 budget allocated $NZ13 billion for the military over four years, but health increased by just 4.77 percent ($1.37 billion) amid high inflation—insufficient to address the crisis of unmet need. According to documents cited by the Post on August 25, a “headline” $96 million annual boost to GP practices, previously announced by Brown, is being funded by equivalent funding cuts for hospital and specialist services.
The government is exploiting the crisis of its own making to outsource thousands of operations to private hospitals. Health NZ recently announced $300 million in long-term contracts with private hospitals to treat backlogs of orthopedic patients. Boosting the private sector further entrenches the two-tier health system and serves as a wedge for a program of wholesale privatization.
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With a general election looming on November 7, the major capitalist parties are competing over who will impose the most brutal attacks on working people and the services they depend on.
On August 22, acclaimed novelist Richard Flanagan delivered a powerful 45-minute speech in Sydney condemning the escalating persecution in Australia of opponents of Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza. He called for a determined fight to defend freedom of speech and basic democratic rights.
Flanagan won Britain’s most prestigious literary award—the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. By winning the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for his book Question 7, he became the first and only author in history to win both Britain’s premier fiction and non-fiction prizes. The popular writer has just published Heresies, a collection of essays, articles and speeches.
Titled “The New McCarthyism: Gaza and Australia,” Flanagan’s speech, which was presented to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas and received a prolonged standing ovation from a sold-out audience of 1,000 people, systematically exposed the state-backed pro-Zionist campaign that falsely equates opposition to Israel’s war crimes with antisemitism. The address explained how this false claim, aided and abetted by the Labor government, is being used to unleash serious attacks on basic democratic rights.
Flanagan began his speech by reflecting on his upbringing in Tasmania, a society that, he said, was shaped by a “shrill, deafening silence” about its foundation as a convict slave system and the near-total genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines. This background, he explained, established his lifelong commitment as a writer: “To name, to point, to bear witness.”
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Flanagan’s speech follows similar warnings over the past two years by other prominent Australian writers and creative workers: two-time Miles Franklin Award and Stella Prize winner Michelle de Kretser and veteran publisher Louise Adler, the former director of the Adelaide Writers’ Week. Adler was forced to resign from the Writers’ Week over inviting award-winning author, leading Palestinian scholar and Macquarie University academic Randa Abdel-Fattah to speak at the prestigious event.
Flanagan warned earlier in his speech: “The guarantee of Australian democracy is not to be found in parliament nor with our elected representatives but in freedom of speech and expression and the right to protest.”
Towards the end, he declared: “We are free and we must not surrender that freedom. Yet, it is under attack, and we must now fight for it.” Flanagan warned that if the escalating attacks were not resisted, “all Australians would quickly understand that there is now a sphere of human life about which they must be silent—or risk being blacklisted. That’s the new McCarthyism.”
Mass opposition to the genocide and the related turn to authoritarianism, expressed in the statements of Flanagan and other courageous artistic figures, raises the question of how such a struggle will be developed, on what program and which class will take it forward.
6. Interest rate rises adding to surging US debt
There is growing concern, reflected in the rise of the yield on government bonds in the US and other major economies and in the analysis by some economic commentators, that the rise in interest rate payments is heading in the direction of a financial crisis.
Analysis by the Financial Times (FT), published over the weekend, found that since the increase in bond yields, which started with the US war on Iran in February, the “cost of borrowing for the world’s biggest economies [has risen] by tens of billions of dollars.”
The G7 economies have already taken a hit of $16 billion in additional debt financing costs since the war began and could be faced with a total of an extra $34 billion by the end of the first quarter of next year if the rise in yields persists.
The lion’s share, some $10.6 billion, has been incurred by the US and it is set to face total additional costs of $21.6 billion by the beginning of next year.
Reporting on its findings, the FT said that while the additional amounts were “relatively small in comparison to overall public commitments,” they 'threaten to pile additional pressure on already stretched government balance sheets.”
And the effects may spread into the stock market and financial system more broadly.
7. One Nation victory in Western Australia underscores working-class discontent
This by-election is the first time that the far-right formation has won a seat in an Australian parliament at the direct expense of the Labor Party.
8. On the international class struggle and the building of the IWA-RFC
The fourth of six resolutions adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2–7, 2026.
1. The period since the Eighth Congress has seen a significant acceleration of the class struggle on every continent. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 458 strikes were recorded across just eight European countries, including five general strikes at the national or regional level: national general strikes in Belgium and Italy, regional general strikes in Andalusia and the Basque Country and a general strike in Northern Cyprus. A national general strike swept Argentina in February; some 1.7 million state employees struck in the Indian state of Maharashtra; and general strikes have swept Africa.
2. The class struggle is also intensifying in the United States. Sixteen major strikes erupted in the first five months of 2026, ahead of the pace of 30 for all of 2025. These included the strikes by 31,000 Kaiser healthcare workers, 15,000 New York City nurses, 42,000 University of California workers, 6,400 San Francisco educators, 3,800 JBS meatpackers and the ongoing rebellion among auto-parts workers in the Midwest, expressed in massive contract rejections at Nexteer, Dana and other plants. Alongside the strike movement have come the “No Kings” demonstrations involving millions and the mass protests against ICE raids in Minneapolis and other cities.
3. This Congress affirms the assessment made in the opening report to the 2026 International May Day Rally, that the first months of 2026 “mark the point at which the resistance of the working class has emerged as a global force, contending against the offensive of the oligarchy on a scale that places the fundamental questions of the epoch—war or peace, dictatorship or democracy, socialism or barbarism—directly on the historical agenda.”
4. These struggles are unfolding increasingly in direct conflict not only with employers and governments, but with the trade union bureaucracies that function as an anti-strike corporate police force. This Congress reaffirms the analysis developed in the 2018 resolution “The Resurgence of Class Struggle and the Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party” and the Seventh Congress resolution “Build the IWA-RFC in the United States!” (2022), which stressed that the nationally based, pro-corporate bureaucracies, whose degeneration is rooted in the globalization of production, are structurally incompatible with the defense of an internationally integrated working class.
5. Against the apparatus, this Congress advances the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), founded by the ICFI in April 2021. The IWA-RFC is based on an international strategy. Its purpose is not to influence the existing trade union bureaucracies but to organize a rank-and-file insurrection against them and to transfer power to the growing network of factory, shop floor and workplace committees. The rank-and-file committees assembled under the banner of the IWA-RFC are the fighting organizations and schools of revolution of the present period, as the committees of correspondence and safety were the schools of the American Revolution in 1773–76.
6. The strategy of the SEP proceeds from the understanding that the development of the class struggle creates the conditions for the growth of socialist consciousness, the building of revolutionary leadership and the conquest of power. There is no revolution without the entry of the working class into struggle. Conversely, the artificial suppression of the class struggle by the labor bureaucracy over the past 45 years has produced a massive reversal in the social position of the working class—labor’s share of GDP has fallen to the lowest level on record, going back to 1947—and created the conditions for the domination of right-wing politics and reaction. To this must be added the bureaucracy’s relentless promotion of economic nationalism and “buy American” chauvinism, which has fed directly into the poisonous atmosphere on which the far right thrives. The building of rank-and-file committees is aimed at breaking the grip of the bureaucracy and creating the means through which the enormous social opposition now developing can find a revolutionary expression.
7. This strategy is counterposed to that of the tendencies that rejected the fight for socialist consciousness in the working class and devoted themselves instead to the supposed reform of the bureaucracy. The Teamsters for a Democratic Union, founded a half century ago, is the model. Promoting one “reform” bureaucrat after another, it blocked the development of the political struggle of the working class at every point, even as the bureaucracy integrated itself into the structure of corporate management and the capitalist state. Fifty years later, these tendencies have themselves been absorbed into the apparatus they promised to reform, where they function as anticommunist defenders of war and of the suppression of workers’ democratic rights. TDU’s chosen “reformer,” Sean O’Brien, appeared on the platform of the Republican National Convention.
8. This Congress gives its strongest support to the campaign of Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist, for president of the UAW in the 2026 elections. In the 2022 elections, Shawn Fain was presented as a “reformer” by the pseudo-left organizations that operate in and around the apparatus and the Democratic Party, including Jacobin, the DSA, Labor Notes and others. Over the past three years, Fain has presided over the betrayal of tens of thousands of auto and auto parts workers, collaborated with the Trump tariff regime, preemptively shut down academic-worker struggles, and suppressed all opposition at the 2026 Constitutional Convention, while the court-appointed monitor recently documented a “toxic culture of division and retaliation at the highest levels of the organization.” The bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished.
9. The Lehman campaign’s program gives concrete form to the perspective of the IWA-RFC: the end of the dictatorship of the Solidarity House apparatus and the transfer of power to a network of rank-and-file committees on the shop floor; the replacement of nearly 50 years of pro-corporate policies with a strategy of class struggle; full recovery of wages lost to concessions and inflation, a zero-layoff policy, company-paid healthcare, and a 30-hour week with no loss of pay to stop automation-driven job cuts; the repudiation of the bureaucracy’s nationalism, counterposing an international strategy based on the unified struggle of American, Canadian and Mexican workers against transnational corporations; the defense of immigrant workers against the ICE raids and deportations; and the mobilization of the industrial power of the membership against dictatorship and war.
10. The fear of the apparatus towards the rank-and-file rebellion embodied in Lehman’s campaign has now found expression in open death threats. On July 16, a high-ranking UAW official and prominent Fain supporter, until recently the assistant director of Lehman’s own region, posted a death threat on Lehman’s campaign page: an AI-generated image depicting Lehman bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked gunman aiming a rifle at his back. This Congress calls for the broadest campaign in defense of Will Lehman, demanding the public repudiation of the threat by the UAW. The defense of Lehman is the defense of the democratic rights of the entire working class against the gangster methods of the labor bureaucracy.
11. This Congress resolves to mobilize workers and youth behind the Lehman campaign and the campaign to defend him against the death threat issued by the UAW apparatus; to build rank-and-file committees in every factory, workplace, school, and neighborhood in which the party is active; to extend the IWA-RFC into logistics, healthcare, education and the public sector, and to develop its international coordination with the sections of the ICFI in the fight against the global assault on jobs and against war and dictatorship; to defend science and culture as social rights, connecting the struggles of educators, scientists and artists against censorship and the profit-driven assault on intellectual labor to the fight to make the cultural achievements of humanity accessible to all; and to recruit the most class-conscious workers into the SEP.
9. The deportation of Brian Morales García: The war on immigrants is a war on the entire working class
On his way to his job as a construction worker in April, Brian José Morales García, a 25-year-old from Austin, Texas, was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. He spent five days in the Gillespie County Jail, where agents berated him as a liar. Morales García had told the truth: he was born in Denver, Colorado, a native-born American citizen.
But he spoke no English, was denied a phone call to his family or a lawyer and was told he faced five years in federal prison for immigration fraud unless he signed papers consenting to his own “voluntary” departure. On April 7, under coercion, he signed papers containing fabricated details of an unlawful border crossing, which ICE then used to expel him to Mexico.
Only in late August did the Department of Justice, confronted with certified hospital records, Colorado vital statistics and witness affidavits produced by attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, agree to permit his return. The government has yet to admit wrongdoing, and litigation over his wrongful exile continues.
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The implications are sinister: if a certified birth record, a Social Security file and a prior lawful entry are insufficient, then no document is. Citizenship ceases to be a fundamental right and becomes a temporary privilege granted by law enforcement.
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The regime and its apologists present the deportation campaign as a targeted operation against “criminals” and “illegals.” The facts expose this lie: according to a ProPublica investigation, 170 documented citizens were detained in the first nine months of Trump’s second term; data from TRAC indicates that approximately 70 percent of individuals in ICE detention have no criminal convictions.
The state violence has already proved lethal: Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were shot dead by ICE/CBP agents during enforcement operations in Minneapolis; Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed during an immigration raid in Houston; and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed by federal agents during a raid in Biddeford.
As the resolution adopted last month by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party states, the war on immigrants is “the spearhead of a broader drive toward dictatorship.” A force that can, with impunity, seize a construction worker on his way to work, hold him incommunicado, coerce a false confession and expel him from the country of his birth is a force that can and will be turned against strikers, demonstrators and every form of working-class opposition.
Morales García's lawyer is right to warn of a malignant precedent. But litigation, legislative reform and statutory liability cannot stop what is being built. The state and all its agencies have spent decades dismantling the very accountability mechanisms on which such a strategy depends, while the Democratic Party stages performative 'no' votes even as it helps fund ICE and CBP to the tune of $69.5 billion through 2029 under the Secure America Act, on top of the $170 billion for the Department of Homeland Security in last year's One Big Beautiful Bill..
The defense of immigrants cannot be separated from the defense of the working class as a whole. The world’s wealth is produced by the collaborative labor of workers of all countries; the immigrant worker is the living embodiment of the international unity of the working class.
No worker, citizen or immigrant, should be subject to a regime of deportations. Workers must demand the immediate and unconditional abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol and the entire Department of Homeland Security; the release of every detainee; full rights for all workers regardless of where they were born. None of this can be accomplished outside the independent mobilization of the working class in a struggle for socialism.
10. The goon attack at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University—The BJP’s war on student dissent
A mob of Hindu supremacist thugs attacked students at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, West Bengal, on the night of August 19–20, just days after India’s far-right prime minister, Narendra Modi, called for left-wing opponents of the government to be “identified and isolated.”
The attackers—members of the ABVP along with outside goons—entered the campus through Gate 4 at approximately 12:37 a.m. on August 20. They vandalized university property, burned flags and posters of left-wing student organizations, and targeted students sheltering inside the Aurobindo Bhavan administrative building. Video footage shows fires, stone-throwing, and attempts to force entry into university buildings. Students were trapped inside as the mob attempted arson.
Jadavpur University is one of India’s leading public institutes of higher education, and has a long history of left-wing student political activity.
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Only after a public outcry did the university administration lodge a police complaint over the August 19-20 goons. Although the ABVP’s role in the attack was manifestly evident, Vice Chancellor Chiranjib Bhattacharjee’s complaint charged “unknown outsiders/persons” for rioting, vandalism and criminal intimidation.
As of last Friday, no arrests had been made. On August 26, some six days after the attack, police entered the university and took away CCTV footage.
Earlier, the Times of India had reported that the CCTV footage showed the mob entering without resistance, raising questions about whether individuals inside the university facilitated their entry.
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The Jadavpur violence must be understood in the context of the BJP’s “historic” victory in West Bengal’s May 2026 state assembly election, when it won 208 of 294 seats, ousting the 15 year-long Trinamool Congress (TMC) government and captured power in India’s fourth most populous state for the first time ever.
Immediately upon taking office, the newly installed Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari—a former TMC leader who defected to the BJP—unleashed widespread police violence against poor slum-dwellers, especially Muslims and other minorities.
The West Bengal BJP government is using its shock troops, including the ABVP and other Hindu supremacist groups, to suppress any form of opposition, most of all from the youth and the working class. The violent attack by the ABVP at Jadavpur is part of this pre-emptive strike against mounting social opposition.
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The attack at Jadavpur is not an isolated incident. Attacks on left-wing students and faculty—who are frequently derided as “anti-national”— have occurred throughout the BJP’s now 12-year-long national government.
Perhaps the most notorious case is that of the activist and student leader Umar Khalid. In 2018, Khalid was shot at by an unidentified gunman in New Delhi while attending a program titled “Khauf se Azaadi” (Freedom Without Fear) at the Constitution Club, organized to highlight the increasing attacks on minorities, students and rationalists. Khalid survived the assassination attempt. But in September 2020, under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), he was arrested for leading peaceful protests against the religiously discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Khalid’s continued incarceration remains one of the most abhorrent acts of the Indian state in targeting student and worker solidarity.
Just four days before the Jadavpur attack, on August 15, Modi used his Independence Day address to call for action to be taken against those he called “dimaagi Naxals”—“intellectual Naxals.” Modi boasted that the Indian state has largely succeeded in suppressing the armed Naxalite Maoist insurgency, but claimed that people with a “Naxal mentality”—that is, who oppose the government from a left-wing perspective—remain and must be “identified and isolated.”
The term “dimaagi Naxals” is deliberately vague—akin to the Trump administration’s targeting of the non-existent antifa movement—and is meant to legitimize state surveillance of, and vigilante attacks, on left-wing students, intellectuals and other political opponents. It echoes the BJP’s established use of “urban Naxal” as a label to criminalize dissent.
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The violence at Jadavpur University must be unequivocally condemned. Students, educators and workers have a common interest in defending freedom of speech, political association and education from the BJP’s authoritarian assault. But this defence cannot be entrusted to the Stalinist organizations or to any section of the Indian bourgeoisie. The CPM, the TMC and the Congress Party have all, in different ways, paved the road that led to the BJP’s ascendancy.
The fight against the Hindu supremacist right requires a decisive break with all forms of bourgeois nationalism and Popular Front politics. The working class must be mobilized as an independent political force, united across communal and caste divisions, on the basis of an internationalist socialist program. Only through the development of such a movement—fighting for a workers’ government and world socialist revolution—can the growing authoritarianism of the Indian ruling class be defeated and the democratic and social aspirations of hundreds of millions of workers and young people be secured.
11. At least 2 dead, more than 20 unaccounted for after Grand Canyon flash flood
On Saturday afternoon, a flash flood tore through Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, killing at least two people and leaving more than 20 missing or unaccounted for. At least 62 people were evacuated by helicopter from the Bright Angel Canyon and Phantom Ranch areas.
An estimated 0.84 inches (2.1 centimeters) of rain fell within a single hour, sending water, mud, boulders and other debris surging through the canyon.
The flooding was intensified by the burn scar left by last year’s Dragon Bravo Fire, which burned nearly 150,000 acres along the North Rim, including portions of the Bright Angel Creek watershed. By stripping the slopes of trees, brush and ground cover that absorb rainfall and hold soil in place, the fire left the terrain less able to contain the downpour, accelerating runoff, mudslides and debris flows into the canyon.
The flood destroyed trails and nearly every footbridge across Bright Angel Creek while damaging or destroying roughly 40 percent of the Transcanyon Waterline.
The 12.5-mile (20-kilometer) pipeline supplies potable water and fire protection to every facility on the South Rim and parts of the inner canyon. It serves millions of visitors annually, roughly 1,600 residents of Grand Canyon Village and as many as 2,500 residents across the broader South Rim and inner-canyon service area.
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Governments from Washington to Kathmandu have subordinated public safety to private profit. Nepal lacked adequate monitoring, warning systems and resilient infrastructure, while the Trump administration has fired park workers, weakened scientific agencies and delayed repairs to the Grand Canyon’s only water pipeline. Vast resources that could protect lives and eliminate dependence on fossil fuels are instead diverted to war and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
Humanity possesses the technology and productive capacity to provide safe infrastructure, clean energy and a high standard of living for all. Implementing these measures requires taking the energy corporations and banks out of private hands and reorganizing the world economy through socialist planning based on human need, not profit.
12. Detroit judiciary attacks public defenders’ right to strike
Two Detroit public defenders who faced criminal contempt charges and up to 93 days in jail for participating in a lawful strike had the charges dismissed Friday. The dismissal came only after Wayne County judges used the threat of imprisonment and $7,500 fines to intimidate legal services workers and attack the right to strike.
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Workers striking to preserve their healthcare and win wages that keep pace with inflation are not pursuing “lucre.” They are defending their living standards against an employer that pleaded poverty while paying managers $500-a-day bonuses to cross the picket line and proposed a 1 percent cost-of-living adjustment with inflation running at 3.5 percent. Giles’ interpretation of the oath, which is taken by individual lawyers on a personal level, implicitly attacks collective action by attorneys to fight for their living standards. Casting striking attorneys as “reject[ing] ... the cause of the defenseless or oppressed” while they had secured alternate legal coverage for their clients is deliberately dishonest.
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The posture of judicial concern for the “defenseless or oppressed” is grotesque coming from a court whose physical home, the Wayne County Criminal Justice Center, is a $670 million boondoggle that transferred prime downtown real estate into the hands of billionaire developer Dan Gilbert.
The contempt campaign was not the work of one impulsive judge. Two judges issued essentially identical show-cause orders against three attorneys, all striking workers at the same employer, within days of one another. This reflects the institutional character of the judiciary, which recognized the NDS strike as a threat to the smooth functioning of the carceral apparatus and moved to suppress it.
The strike threatened to reveal that the workers who staff the public defense system are themselves workers, share fundamental interests with the clients they defend and are capable of withholding their labor. The contempt threats were an attempt to deny this reality and insist that a lawyer’s duty to the court supersedes the right to defend their own living standards.
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The dismissals are a real, if limited, victory. Three workers faced the prospect of jail for striking and none will sit in a cell. Gokey and Eichinger have returned to defending their clients. “It’s small potatoes compared to what our clients are facing,” Eichinger said.
But the fact that two judges felt free to threaten imprisonment under these circumstances remains a warning. The contempt threat was itself a form of punishment. Its chilling effect did not require a conviction. It began the moment workers understood that a judge could threaten jail for walking a picket line, even after they had secured alternate legal coverage for their clients.
The attack on the right to strike is increasingly conducted through the courts and criminal law. When judges can threaten striking workers with jail through show-cause orders and then walk away without consequence, the working class is being told that its most fundamental rights exist only at the pleasure of the state.
The NDS strike was part of a developing national movement. Some 500 public defender workers walked out in July across New York, Michigan and Texas, including workers at Brooklyn Defender Services, NDS offices in Detroit, Harlem and San Marcos and the Bronx Defenders. They were fighting the same attacks: healthcare cuts, poverty wages and crushing caseloads.
The UAW bureaucracy, headed by President Shawn Fain, worked systematically to isolate these strikes from one another. On July 22, Local 2325 officials shut down the Brooklyn Defender Services strike with a tentative agreement. Two days later, NDS workers walked out alone. Three days after that, the Bronx Defenders did the same. The bureaucracy’s strategy, dividing each workplace and settling one at a time to prevent a unified walkout, is the same one it has applied to autoworkers, aerospace workers and every section of the union.
Fain’s visit to the Detroit picket line, where he theatrically peppered a social media video with cursing and told workers to “keep doing what you’re doing,” was the pretense of militancy by an apparatus whose actual function is to suppress it. His subsequent denunciation of the contempt cases as “unacceptable intimidation” did not alter the bureaucracy’s role in isolating the strikes. His threat that “UAW members remember at election time” pointed workers not toward independent class action but toward the dead end of the Democratic Party.
Will Lehman, the socialist Mack Trucks worker running for UAW president on a program of abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to rank-and-file committees, warned legal services workers of precisely this. He called for a unified walkout across the entire sector, the formation of rank-and-file committees with full control over negotiations and the rejection of any strategy that subordinates workers to the Democratic Party.
The capitalist courts are not neutral forums where workers can expect a fair hearing. They are instruments of class rule. The lesson of the contempt proceedings is not that workers should be more deferential to court schedules. It is that the working class cannot rely on the institutions of the capitalist state to defend its interests.
13. UK Prime Minister Burnham U-turns over Thames Water nationalization
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s abrupt abandonment of his flagship pledge to bring Thames Water into public ownership exposes the emptiness of his promises to “reverse Thatcherism.”
Last week Burnham backed down at the very moment the criminal pollution record and financial collapse of Britain’s most distrusted and environmentally destructive privatized utility demanded decisive action and the prosecution of those responsible. He now insists nationalization would be “too costly,” “too complex,” “too disruptive.”
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If anything commands overwhelming public support for nationalization, it is Thames Water — a company whose origins lie in the New River Company of 1617, created to supply fresh water to London. Its successor, the Metropolitan Water Board, became renowned for the vast Victorian‑era water and sewerage projects that transformed public health in the capital.
The scale of the disaster privatization has produced is staggering. Thames Water’s debt, approaching £20 billion, was engineered through leveraged buyouts, dividend extraction and financial engineering. Across the sector, an estimated £78 billion has been paid out to shareholders since 1989, while net debt has soared to more than £64 billion.
Since 2020, Thames Water has pumped at least 72 billion liters of raw sewage into the River Thames — the equivalent of 29,000 Olympic swimming pools. Across England, water companies were responsible for at least 3.6 million hours of raw sewage discharge in 2023, leading to thousands of reported illnesses annually from those swimming in the rivers, lakes and sea.
Thames Water has repeatedly polluted rivers with raw sewage, discharged toxic “forever chemicals,” and allowed its infrastructure to decay. It received a record £122.7 million fine for sewage‑treatment failures, with regulators concluding it had “failed to protect the environment.” It also loses around 570 million liters of water a day through leaks — more than any other water company — compounded by botched smart‑meter installations that caused thousands of household leaks and flooding.
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Burnham’s retreat confirms the real character of his government: a continuation of the profit‑driven order that has looted public infrastructure for decades. He embodies what every Labour government has represented since Blair — the imposition of austerity, privatization and war on behalf of the ruling class, wrapped in rhetoric cynically aimed at recapturing a working‑class vote that has deserted the party.
The WSWS has stressed that Burnham’s outlook is rooted in Blair’s “Third Way,” the doctrine that codified Labour’s repudiation of its old national‑reformist program and enshrined government–corporate partnership as the foundation of economic and social policy. His entire career is inseparable from New Labour: fast‑tracked into Blair’s machine, elected to parliament in 2001, and proudly declaring himself a “Blairite for Brown.” He backed the illegal Iraq war and voted to block any investigation into it. As Health Secretary, he drove National Health Service (NHS) privatization and earned the nickname “Flog ’em Burnham” for his authoritarian law‑and‑order stance. He supported 42‑day detention without charge and later abstained on the Tory welfare bill that stripped millions of support.
Thatcher once said her greatest achievement was “Tony Blair and New Labour.” Burnham is the embodiment of that boast. Blair himself reminded the public during Burnham’s Makerfield campaign that he was “an outstanding member of my government.”
Burnham’s “Manchesterism” and “Productive State” agenda — hailed by the Guardian as a challenge to Thatcherism — explicitly rejected nationalization. It proposed “public ownership with a commercial mandate,” the same Blairite public‑private partnership model that saddled the NHS and schools with massive debts. It insisted on strict fiscal rules and a “credible plan for engaging with bond markets” — in plain English, austerity.
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The working class cannot look to Burnham or Labour to resolve the crisis of Britain’s water system — or any essential service. Real change requires the independent mobilization of workers for socialism, the abolition of private ownership of essential infrastructure, and democratic control of society’s productive forces.
It also requires a struggle against the pseudo‑left — the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Corbynite Socialist Campaign Group and those around the Stalinist Morning Star newspaper — who claimed Burnham’s promises would “raise expectations” and that workers should “pressure” him to the left. The entire history of Labour refutes this. Every supposed “left turn” has ended in capitulation and betrayal.
Corbyn is the most recent example: he filled his leadership with Blairites, capitulated at every turn, and ended by founding Your Party whose only function is to channel opposition back into Labour and which has now all but collapsed.
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Workers must treat Burnham’s promises with contempt, reject the pseudo‑left’s pressure politics, and take up the fight to build the Socialist Equality Party.
The water companies must be taken into public ownership without compensation to the shareholders and creditors who have enriched themselves while running down the water and sewage system. Billions seized from the fortunes of the super‑rich must be used to rebuild sanitation and infrastructure. Essential services must be placed under the democratic control of the working class as part of the broader socialist reorganization of economic life.
14. Warmongering UK press demand Burnham delivers a war budget targeting Russia
Just six weeks since he took office, the major press mouthpieces of the ruling class have united to demand that Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham fund the rearmament of the military in preparation for war.
Last week, Burnham deepened Britain’s direct involvement in the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Britain had already supplied Kyiv with long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles used to strike deep inside Russia, but Burnham authorised arms manufacturer MBDA to release classified blueprints for British-made components, allowing Ukraine to build the weapon itself.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!Eugene Ulman:
As the tragically pointless Russia-Ukraine war drags on and on, with apparently no end in sight, destroying the lives of millions of people, we must condemn in the strongest possible terms the persecution of 27-year-old journalist Bogdan Syrotiuk, who was sentenced on August 10, 2026, by a Ukrainian court to 15 years in prison on charges of treason, essentially for six articles he wrote in which he called for solidarity between Ukrainian and Russian workers and youth against the war.
There has been not one word in any of his writings that supports the Russian regime, Putin or the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, there have not even been any allegations made against him of espionage, sabotage or collaboration with the Russian military.
As a socialist, Syrotiuk has consistently rejected any kind of nationalist position. Many people have argued that, because Ukraine is the victim of an invasion, criticism or opposition to the Ukrainian government should be deferred until after the war is over. However, anyone who genuinely values freedom and human rights must recognise this position as incoherent.
Of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a country at war would demand allegiance and loyalty from its citizens, but however much sympathy we have for the suffering of people in Ukraine, we cannot allow ourselves to ignore, excuse or minimise violations of their rights to freedom of expression and of the press.
Whatever one thinks of Syrotiuk’s politics, imprisoning someone for 15 years for expressing political views is fundamentally incompatible with any meaningful conception of democratic rights.
This case should concern everyone who claims to oppose authoritarianism and defend freedom.
Opposition to a government, criticism of its historical narratives and advocacy for an alternative political position do not become “treason” simply because a country is at war. Ukraine’s government cannot credibly invoke democracy as the justification for its struggle against Russia while imposing such a sentence on a young journalist for doing his job.
Syrotiuk’s writing might make some people uncomfortable, but that is precisely the point. Rights are sometimes uncomfortable, and that is all the more reason to defend them. If opposition to the government, opposition to the war and solidarity with fellow human beings on the other side of a national border can be redefined as treason, then the meaning of democratic freedom becomes very narrow indeed.
If the Ukrainian government wants us to believe that it values democratic principles at all, this is a perfect opportunity for it to demonstrate that. The grotesquely disproportionate sentence should be overturned, and we must call for Syrotiuk’s immediate and unconditional release.
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The World Socialist Web Site urges its readers to add their names to the petition for Bogdan’s freedom. Write to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua and the Nikolaev Court of Appeal at inbox@mka.court.gov.ua, with a copy to freebogdan@wsws.org, demanding that the sentence be thrown out and Bogdan be freed at once.
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.
