Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Protests and strikes erupt against skyrocketing energy costs driven by US war against Iran
The consequences of the US-Israeli war against Iran, now in its seventh month, are erupting around the globe in the form of growing social outrage and strikes over rising energy prices and increasing costs of food and other necessities for billions of people.
News media in recent days have reported a series of demonstrations and strikes primarily in the developing countries of Asia and Latin America where taxi drivers and workers see no point in going to work when wages barely cover their fuel costs.
In Portugal, for example, drivers are honking horns and blocking roads in a slow drive to protest diesel prices which have reached a record high of more than $9 a gallon. Protests and strikes have also been reported in Syria, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
The impact of the war on world energy prices has been catastrophic for the working class. Brent crude oil, which hovered in the $65–$75 range before the war, surged to a peak of approximately $120 per barrel in late April before a brief, illusory lull following a ceasefire announcement in early May.
With the resumption of heavy US strikes on Iranian tankers in early September, prices surged back above $100. As of this writing, Brent crude is trading above $109 per barrel.
In the US, gasoline prices have risen approximately 39 percent since the war began on February 28. Diesel—the lifeblood of freight transport, agriculture and food distribution—hit an all-time average high of $6.31 per gallon on Wednesday. Jet fuel prices have followed a parallel trajectory, grounded low-cost airline routes and driven sharp increases in airfare and air transport of goods.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven the price of pump gasoline up more than 50 percent globally, while the price of staples such as tomatoes has risen nearly 40 percent and global inflation has reached 3.8 percent, its highest level since 2023. Brown University researchers estimate the war has added $100 billion to US energy costs alone, or roughly $763 per household, with that total rising by approximately $1 million every two minutes.
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On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched a massive, unprovoked assault on Iran without a declaration of war or authorization from the US Congress or United Nations Security Council. The war began with the targeted killing of Iran’s head of state and an immediate campaign of strikes against military installations, government facilities and energy infrastructure across the country and the wider Persian Gulf region.
Within days, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly 20 percent of all globally traded crude oil, equivalent to 17 to 21 million barrels per day, passes—and set off what the International Energy Agency (IEA) characterized as the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.”
Attacks on energy infrastructure struck Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and by September 11, the East-West Crude Oil Pipeline in Saudi Arabia was shut down entirely. To these disruptions have now been added the closure of the Bab al-Mandab strait by the Houthis through their control of the coast and occupation of key islands in the Red Sea route to the Gulf of Aden.
The combined result of the war disaster has resulted in a disruption of 39 percent of global trade and 31 percent of global shipments, according to current estimates. Refineries from Kharg Island to Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province have been hit. The head of the IEA has described the consequences as “the greatest global energy security challenge in history.”
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The World Socialist Web Site has, from the first hours of the war, insisted that what is unfolding cannot be understood as the product of the personal pathology of Donald Trump. It is the manifestation of the historic crisis of US imperialism and the drive to overcome this crisis by imposing a new colonial redivision of the world’s resources.
The seizure of Venezuelan oil, the assault on Iran, and the escalating confrontation with China are components of this process. They are fronts in a single global war being waged to reorganize the world under US hegemonic control and to crush any state that resists subordination to the dictates of Washington and Wall Street.
Iran was targeted because control of Middle Eastern energy resources is the key strategic lever in the broader conflict with China, which had been importing more than 70 percent of its daily oil consumption, with most of it coming from Iran.
As the WSWS warned immediately after February 28, 2026, “This war will not solve the internal social crisis of American society, nor will it reverse the protracted deterioration in the global position of US capitalism. All these contradictions, domestic and international, will be intensified. The war itself will inevitably escalate and engulf the entire planet.”
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While these contradictions are deepening, driving the major powers toward a new worldwide conflagration, they are also producing a movement of the working class. The protests now erupting from Damascus to Dhaka to Lisbon are the first tremors of that revolutionary eruption and they will intensify. The task before the working class is to unify these struggles under the banner of socialist internationalism and a conscious program that unites workers across borders in opposition not only to this war or these energy prices, but to the entire capitalist system that has produced both.
On Tuesday, at an event in Washington called the “Pro-Human Assembly” on AI, Senator Bernie Sanders, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten spoke from the same platform as the fascist ideologue and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, January 6 coup conspirator Amy Kremer and other representatives of the far right.
Under conditions of growing social anger and mounting opposition to Trump and the entire political establishment, Sanders, representing the supposed “left” wing of the Democratic Party, and the trade union bureaucracy are establishing a common platform with and politically legitimizing the fascist right. The aim is to disorient and demobilize this opposition, and to channel it in the most reactionary directions.
The event was billed as a means of bringing together “different political perspectives” to develop a common platform on the future of AI. It was invitation-only, convened at the Marriott Marquis, a few blocks from the White House, and carried live on C-SPAN. Along with Sanders, Shuler and Weingarten, the platform included SAG-AFTRA’s Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Democratic Representative Greg Casar.
From the Republican right came Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, who has pledged to deport immigrants “whether it takes planes, trains or starships,” and Representative Chip Roy, a leader of the House Freedom Caucus, who told the audience that “God gave us dominion over this planet.” Such is the “pro-human” front to which Sanders gives his political blessing.
The organizer was the Future of Life Institute (FLI), headed by MIT physicist Max Tegmark. FLI is a lobby funded by the same billionaires its speakers denounced as “oligarchs.” It was launched with $10 million from Elon Musk in 2015, and Musk sat on its board. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin gave it some $665 million in cryptocurrency in 2021. In 2022, FLI offered $100,000 to a foundation set up by Nya Dagbladet, a Swedish outlet that promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The assembly launched a “Pro-Human AI Coalition” of more than 50 organizations, aimed at the state legislative sessions in January, and a “freeze AI” campaign with a national walkout on October 20. Kremer’s Humans First, whose predecessor Women for America First organized the January 6, 2021 rally at the Ellipse, is running a 35-stop “Data Center Revolt” bus tour.
The program placed Sanders and Bannon back-to-back, and Tegmark, serving as MC, described both in nearly identical language. He presented Sanders as a man with “the courage to speak truth to power, even when it’s costly.” Minutes later he brought on Bannon as “a man who is not afraid of speaking truth to power, even if the powers that be really don’t like that.”
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Sanders was, in the language of the music industry, the opening act, warming up the crowd for the headliner. For his part, Bannon adopted Sanders’ vocabulary, declaring in his first sentence, “American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs anymore.”
Bannon then launched into a racist tirade against China. “We should take all Chinese nationals and get them out of the labs and get them back to mainland China,” Bannon declared. “We can shut it down in 72 hours,” by “executive action” rather than legislation. This is a call for the mass expulsion of all Chinese immigrants by presidential decree. Sanders, who had just left the stage, said nothing then and has said nothing since.
Bannon explicitly praised Sanders, declaring, “I think Senator Sanders did a very good job of summarizing the risk... I don’t think you could find any two harder partisans than Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right... we have to rise above it.” Sanders had said as much to the Wall Street Journal two weeks earlier: “Politics is always a situation where you make strange coalitions... many of the right-wing people have the same concerns that I have.”
This is the man who organized the January 6 coup from his War Room podcast, called for the heads of government scientists to be put “on pikes,” and who, according to his ex-wife, said he did not want his daughters “going to school with whiny Jews.” But what is a little racism, antisemitism and fascism among friends and political allies?
The union officials supplied the “labor” wing for this festival of reaction. AFL-CIO President Shuler told the audience that “the labor movement stands ready to work with all of you.” AFT President Weingarten said that after the midterms, “Republicans and Democrats and Independents alike” must “get our act together.” Kremer, the founder of Women for Trump, closed the day: “This is not a left versus right fight.”
The political significance of the event can be summarized in two respects.
First, in relation to AI itself, there is a systematic campaign to disorient and manipulate broad concerns about the dangers of AI in the hands of private corporations and the financial oligarchy, and to direct these concerns behind a nationalist campaign against China.
Not one of the proposals advanced on Tuesday, from a “freeze” to a “superintelligence” ban to a data-center moratorium, touches the fundamental issue, namely control of these technologies by the oligarchy. Sanders’ own “sovereign wealth fund” proposal would have the state take a 50 percent stake in the AI companies, in a public-private partnership to bail out the tech giants. Tech oligarch Sam Altman offered to help promote it.
The question of who controls AI can be resolved only through the establishment of social ownership and democratic control over the technology by the working class, internationally.
Second, the broader political realignment. With regard to Sanders, he is a man devoid of any principles. In November 2016, Sanders demanded that Trump rescind the appointment of “a racist individual like Mr. Bannon.” Ten years later he opens for him.
What is involved, however, is not only the skullduggery of an individual. There is a social and political logic at work. In the developing alliance of the trade union bureaucracy, the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez faction of the Democratic Party and sections of the Democratic Socialists of America with the fascist right are the outlines of a new American “national socialism.”
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The decisions about AI, as about war and dictatorship, must and will be made by the working class, in the United States and internationally—in a ruthless opposition to the oligarchy, its parties and the political dregs assembled in Washington.
3. Top US Republican says Australia would join war with China
A senior Republican congressman has declared that Australian participation in a US war against China is “obvious,” called for nuclear-armed American submarines to operate from Western Australia and stated that the country is already “a target” in the event of a conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
The unusually forthright statement of Australia’s central role in aggressive US-led preparations for war with China was made by Michael McCaul and reported by the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.
McCaul is not a marginal figure. He is the co-chairman of the Congressional Friends of Australia caucus and has previously served as chair of powerful house committees on foreign affairs and homeland security.
McCaul made the comments immediately upon returning to the US from Australia, where he engaged in backroom discussions with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other government leaders.
As per the Herald, McCaul “said it was ‘absolutely critical’ that Australia joined the US in any conflict with China over Taiwan, and had no doubt Australia would do so. ‘I don’t think it was even questioned. It’s just obvious,’ he said.”
Taiwan has deliberately been transformed into a flashpoint for a potential war by successive US administrations. They have undermined the previous One China policy, under which the US de facto acknowledged Beijing as the government of all China, including Taiwan.
Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden have encouraged Taiwanese separatism while expanding military and diplomatic ties with Taipei. Senior US government and military figures have repeatedly “predicted” a war with China over Taiwan by the end of the decade. McCaul and the congressional delegation of which he was a part visited Taipei to further that push immediately before coming to Australia.
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When Australia signed on to the US “pivot to Asia” in 2011, one of the first components of that vast military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific was the establishment of a “rotation” of US Marines in Darwin. The contingent has grown from 200 then to over 2,000 now.
They constitute an increasingly self-contained, all-round combat force, incorporating command, infantry, aviation and logistics components. In 2026, the rotation was formally certified for the first time as a Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force, capable of deploying from northern Australia for combat operations across the Indo-Pacific, including the seizure of airfields and establishment of expeditionary bases.
In a rare public intervention, Colonel Paul Gillikin, a top US marine officer, published an opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review on September 15, outlining what he insisted was the next stage in US-Australian military cooperation, which he explicitly presented as a preparation for war with China.
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What Gillikin was outlining—the development of a vast joint logistics network for war with China, spanning the entire continent—is already far advanced. Last week, the Guardian published a report based on research by the Nautilus Institute, showing that the US controls more than 17 defense facilities in Australia and have access to another 75 Australian installations.
In addition to forward-deployment facilities in western and northern Australia, and extremely powerful spying and targeting centers such as Pine Gap in central Australia, the US military presence includes the development of weapons storage and logistics facilities, including in close proximity to major population centers.
The extent to which Australian imperialism is already integrated into the US war machine means that whatever assurances and guarantees have been provided by the Labor government simply formalize a situation that is already locked in on the ground, i.e., that Australia would be automatically involved in a war with China.
The reality that this is part of a developing global war was underscored by another unusual article in the Herald over the weekend, which also canvassed the issues of Taiwan and the prospect of a US conflict with China. It was headlined, “Are we in World War III, and just don’t know it?”
The article cited academics, including American professor Robert Pape, who described it as a “fair question” given the major wars that are already underway—the illegal US assault on Iran and the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The Herald added “And watchers of history, he says, know how unexpected events can suddenly spark a massive escalation, and unforeseen devastation within existing wars.”*****
The sudden interest from a corporate media that has persistently covered up the threat of such a conflict is a warning of how advanced the military preparations are, and of the urgent necessity to build a socialist and international anti-war movement of the working class to halt the descent into barbarism.
4. No police, no dogs, no undercover agents in our plants!
A statement from the Rouge Workers Rank-and-File Committee opposing the security sweeps at Ford and other auto plants:
Brothers and sisters,
What began in January 2025 as a police raid on Michigan Assembly Plant (MAP) has metastasized into a permanent police-state regime inside Ford Motor Company and across the auto industry. Tracking dogs, undercover security agents and warrantless searches are now daily reality for autoworkers from the Rouge to Sterling Heights Assembly and Kansas City Assembly. The UAW bureaucracy is not merely standing by. It is an active participant. In July 2026, Ford launched a 90-day “pilot program” at MAP, stationing dogs trained to detect firearms and explosives inside the factory.
Under the Fourth Amendment, no government agency, corporation or individual has the right to conduct unreasonable searches and seizures of our property or persons. We do not surrender our constitutional rights when we pass through the factory gate.
There is a direct line from the Ford Service Department of the 1920s and 1930s to the Global Security Task Force of 2026. The methods are updated—dogs, undercover agents, secret surveillance—but the class relationship is unchanged. The Service Department’s methods were murderous. In 1932, when unemployed workers organized the Ford Hunger March to demand jobs and relief, Harry Bennett’s goons and the Dearborn police opened fire on the unarmed marchers, killing five workers and wounding dozens.
The history runs deeper. Henry Ford was the single largest financial supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published “The International Jew,” reviving the Czarist forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Ford’s relationship with the Nazi regime was also financial and operational. Ford-Werke, its German subsidiary in Cologne, was never confiscated, and throughout the Third Reich the plant produced army trucks using slave labor. Ford was among the greatest beneficiaries of the Nazi forced-labor system.
The close relationship between Bill Ford, Jr. and Donald Trump is not political convenience—it is the contemporary expression of the same class alliance that bound Henry Ford to Hitler. This was on full display at the Rouge in January 2026, when Trump and Bill Ford, Jr. toured the factory together, plotting the transition to military production. TJ Sabula, a UAW Local 600 assembly worker, denounced Trump to his face as a “pedophile protector”—a reference to his association with Jeffrey Epstein—and Trump responded with rage, cursing and raising his middle finger as he walked away. Within 24 hours, GoFundMe pages set up by co-workers to defend Sabula, who was suspended without pay, received more than $800,000 from over 30,000 contributors. The outpouring of support forced the company to reinstate Sabula despite the refusal of the union apparatus to lift a finger in his defense.
When police first swept through MAP in January 2025, UAW President Shawn Fain said nothing, and is silent still. Scott Elliott, shop chairman of UAW Local 900, has publicly backed the company’s crackdown from day one, distributing a memo in July 2026 supporting the searches. He speaks for Ford management, not for the men and women who work the line.
This is the real face of the UAW apparatus. The bureaucracy that presents itself publicly with “Eat the Rich” slogans is, inside the plants, working hand in glove with Ford’s spies and the police to intimidate, discipline, and fire workers. Where Bennett’s Service Department used brass knuckles, the UAW bureaucracy today uses contract language, zero-tolerance policies, and collaboration with corporate security and police dogs—modernized methods for the same end: suppressing independent working-class organization. The clubs and brass knuckles are being held in reserve.
This summer, parts workers at Nexteer, Dana, American Axle and other companies fought back to reverse decades of cuts in wages, health benefits and pensions. They rejected sellout tentative contracts pushed by the UAW bureaucrats and voted overwhelmingly to strike. The union officials refused to call strikes except at American Axle in Three Rivers, where they isolated the workers, called off the strike after 10 days, and pushed through a pro-company deal.
UAW President Shawn Fain has entered a de-facto political alliance with Trump, endorsing his tariff program—an instrument of economic nationalism subordinating the working class to the needs of American imperialism as it erupts in world war. This is the political counterpart to the police-state measures inside the plants. A workforce searched at will by dogs and undercover agents is a workforce that can be forced to produce weapons of imperialist war. Ford does not care about worker safety. It cares about suppressing worker resistance.
At the UAW Constitutional Convention in June, Mack Trucks worker and socialist Will Lehman was nominated for UAW president on a program of abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to rank-and-file committees. Ford and the other automakers see this militancy and they are afraid: the dogs, the undercover agents, the zero-tolerance firings are the response of a ruling class that knows the working class is stirring and means to crush that movement before it grows.
The UAW apparatus will not defend us. It is part of the apparatus of repression. We must defend ourselves. The Ford Rouge Workers Rank-and-File Committee declared in its February 2025 founding statement: “We are not going back to the conditions of industrial slavery, enforced by Ford’s Servicemen goons, that existed before our fathers and grandfathers built the union.”
We demand:
- Immediate removal of all tracking dogs, K-9 units, and undercover agents from every plant—MAP to DTP, SHAP to KCAP, Chicago to Kentucky Truck
- An immediate end to all warrantless searches
- Disbandment of Ford’s Global Security Task Force
- Reinstatement of every worker fired under these unconstitutional measures, with full back pay
- No collaboration with ICE. An injury to one is an injury to all
- No conversion of auto plants to war production. Conversion instead to socially useful production under democratic working-class control
- Build rank-and-file committees in every plant, independent of the UAW apparatus, to control shop-floor conditions and mobilize the working class
These demands cannot be realized through the union apparatus. They require a new organization of the working class, built from below on the basis of international solidarity within the framework of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
This fight is not a local grievance. It is a fight against the drive to dictatorship and world war, winnable only through the independent mobilization of the rank and file, united across national boundaries, on a socialist and internationalist program.
Take up the fight! There is no time to lose!
Abolish the union bureaucracy!
Join the Ford Rouge Workers Rank and File Committee!
Build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees!
Workers of the world, unite!
5. Huge public sector strike votes in Ireland
Over the last few weeks, around 200,000 public sector workers in Ireland have registered a series of near unanimous votes supporting industrial action in pursuit of improvements in their pay and conditions. More are anticipated in the weeks ahead, reflecting sharply escalating class tensions on a global scale.
The votes were triggered by failure of the government and trade unions to find a working framework for a new, multi-year pay deal, to replace the 30 month Public Service Agreement, which expired in June and gave 9.6 percent pay rises over its duration, barely above inflation.
At the end of the last month, SIPTU members in the public sector, including health, local government and workers in state agencies, voted by 97 percent for strike action. SIPTU has 75,000 public service members. Unite the Union reported that its membership across the public sector voted, “overwhelmingly” for industrial action.
September 1, the Fórsa union, with over 100,000 public sector members, announced that 96 percent of nearly 65,000 who voted supported industrial action. General Secretary Kevin Callinan said the result was the largest every trade union ballot for strike action in Irish history and predicted a “very long dispute.”
A few days later, 99 percent of members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) who participated supported industrial action. INMO general secretary, Phil Ní Sheaghdha, said “Members on the ground, who are working in extremely challenging conditions due to overcrowding and understaffing, have made it clear that they are dissatisfied with the lack of urgency surrounding the cost-of-living pressures they are facing.”
Members of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) union are also balloting. The union represents 21,000 teachers in schools and colleges.
The votes for strike action reflect the intolerable cost of living and deep frustrations at social inequality.
A 2025 Eurostat report noted that, while average wages in Ireland are relatively high, the country also had the second highest overall cost of living in Europe, only exceeded by Denmark. Costs are 38 percent above the European average. Tobacco and alcohol are 205 percent above the average, food is 21 percent higher.
Housing costs are among the highest, if not the highest in Europe. A recent report from Ireland’s Economic & Social Research Institute noted housing prices are 17 percent above what they would expect, given incomes, interest rates and population demographics. House prices have risen faster than incomes, mortgage rates have increased and there is an overall shortage of housing. This translates into a median house price of €475,000 in Dublin against a median annual wage of about €46,000 and annual private rental prices of €24,000.
The medians obscure tremendous differences. There are 11 billionaires listed as based in Ireland with a combined wealth of €46.3 billion while another recent ESRI report listed 200,000 children in households with incomes below the poverty line—defined as 60 percent of median household income.
Earlier this year, in the face of spiraling fuel prices triggered by the Trump administration’s attack on Iran, and the suppression of the class struggle by the trade unions, far right figures were able to come to head of a number of protests against escalating fuel prices which threatened to shut down oil supplies to much of the country.
Meanwhile, the Irish government is awash with tax receipts from the many transnationals, mostly US and European, including most of the world’s largest tech corporations.
In 2025 the government’s total tax income was €105 billion, of which corporation tax contributed nearly one third, €32.9 billion. Of this, as much as 87 percent of the government’s tax take was from foreign owned companies, and 11 of the largest contributed 56 percent. A budget surplus of €12.4 billion was recorded in 2025 with another €9.2 billion surplus anticipated this year.
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Despite the enormous majorities, only a single strike day has been declared. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) public sector committee (PSC), which embraces 19 unions with members in the public sector, announced a strike on October 14, with workplace picketing. All the unions that have held ballots by then will be involved. Kevin Callinan, who is also chair of the PSC said that “a further strike, if necessary, is also planned.”
This is the context of a loose “Affordable Ireland” campaign put together by the pseudo-left People Before Profit (PBP), in alliance with Sinn Fein, the Labour Party, the Irish Social Democrats, disability rights groups, student groups, the trade unions, the ICTU. Set up earlier this year, the campaign’s stated goal is to pressure the government into spending some more tax money to reduce the cost of living. A demonstration has been called September 19, weeks before the budget.
None of the parties involved have the slightest intention of fighting for any serious encroachment into the wealth of the transnationals, Irish based corporations or the oligarchy running them. Rather, the campaign’s purpose is to promote the credentials of an alternative “left” government around Sinn Fein, to defend Ireland as an investment platform in conditions of global crisis when the Fianna Fail/ Fine Gael coalition runs out of road, while channeling class tensions towards protests which the government can ignore.
Workers in Ireland seeking a way to take the struggle to defend their living standards out of the control of the pro-corporate trade union bureaucracy should contact the International Workers Alliance of Rank and File Committees to plan and coordinate such an offensive.
6. EU head Von der Leyen announces European security pact, including Canada and independent of NATO
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her annual State of the (European) Union address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg Wednesday to unveil plans for a European security bloc operating independently of NATO.
It was a declaration that the European bourgeoisie must act independently of the Trump administration to assert its predatory interests on a world scale, above all by waging war against Russia in Ukraine and a trade war against China. In a direct challenge to the US, this plan includes forming an economic and military alliance with Canadian imperialism.
Quoting Charles Dickens’ description of Europe during the French Revolution, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” von der Leyen declared, “The state of our Union is the strongest it has ever been” but also “as precarious as it has ever been.”
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“In the cold fragility of today’s world,” she insisted, “only Europe can provide true sovereignty to Europeans.”
That “rules-based system”—which the WSWS has analyzed as “a euphemism for the right of the imperialist powers to make war on whomever they choose”—was the post-war order established under American hegemony. Washington is now tearing that order apart. Only the day before von der Leyen’s address, Washington sent EU legislators a paper threatening to revoke “Buy American” waivers for 19 member states unless “European preference” rules favoring European arms makers are scrapped from a proposed €402 billion competitiveness fund. At issue is which ruling class will pocket the profits from Europe’s rearmament—a central plank of von der Leyen’s call, with the expansion of the war against Russia pivotal to her speech.
She described the discovery of a drone at Leipzig Airport, with no proof offered, as “an attack using military-grade material, carried out by Russian operatives on European soil.” Pointing to incursions on “our soil” in Denmark, Lithuania and Poland, she declared, “We should be under no illusions about what is happening here: hybrid threats facing Europe are less and less hybrid and less and less threats.”
In response “Europe will defend each and every single square meter of its territory,” von der Leyen vowed.
She then proposed a European Security Council, a leaders’ format “with partners like Canada, Norway, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and others involved.” It would be accompanied by an “Emergency Security Protocol” modeled on NATO’s Article 4—which allows allies to demand consultations when their security is threatened.
“We are strengthening our work with NATO,” she said. “But our doctrine, our institutions and our decision-making have not kept pace with the new reality.”
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The European powers are hellbent on escalating the conflict with Russia. Von der Leyen delivered the Ukraine war section of her speech in German. She pledged the “strongest-ever support to Ukraine over the toughest winter of the war.” She noted that for the first time, last week, “we approved the purchase of American Patriot air defense missiles”, declaring that “these must now be delivered urgently.”
However, this again exposed Europe’s continued military dependence on the US. In response von der Leyen insisted that “we must also jointly reduce our dependence on a single supplier.” Firstly, there would be the rapid development of “an affordable, modular missile-defense system with Ukraine.” Known as Freyja, this would “bring together the combat experience and innovation capacity of the Ukrainians with Europe’s technological leadership. And, of course, our substantial production capacity.”
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Trade war would accompany military readiness, with von der Leyen targeting China, who she declared was responsible for “industrialization in the industrial heartlands of Europe”. A €1 billion-a-day trade deficit with Beijing had reached a “tipping point” and was “unsustainable”.
With “dialogue with China to rebalance our trade” at an end, it was time for “results”. A new European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials would procure and stockpile rare earths—a trade war measure against Beijing’s dominance of supply. “Let me be clear: we will use all tools at our disposal to rebalance our relationship. Words are good. But deeds are better,” she threatened.
The most naked expression of the rift with Washington was the presence in the chamber of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who received a standing ovation.
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Von der Leyen directly addressed Carney saying, “Dear Mark, I said we must urgently reimagine our partnerships… so I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to being the first associate member of the European Union.”
She continued, “We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well”, bringing “the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible”. Underscoring the breakdown in the post-war order regulating global trade, no such associate status exists within EU treaties.
Von der Leyen made the fight against Russia and trade supremacy over China central to her call for closes ties to Ottawa: “We see the world with the same eyes: from AI to climate change, from the Arctic to geopolitics. And we have stood together: on Ukraine, on defence, on raw materials and on supply chains.” Therefore, “We will move from CETA [existing Canada/EU trade deal] to an Alliance for the Future… We will integrate defense industrial bases. We will work on energy, critical minerals and batteries.”
7. Four measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania; zero in the federal count
Pennsylvania has confirmed four measles-associated deaths in four weeks. The CDC lists zero for 2026, after changing the rule by which deaths are counted.
8. The closure of the Russian House in Berlin: A blow to culture in the service of war
“Мы закрыты—we're closed.” It is Tuesday, September 8. Every few minutes, a security guard turns away visitors hoping to look around the Russian House of Science and Culture on Berlin's Friedrichstrasse. Only the café serving Russian specialities is still open. Otherwise, the vast cultural institution in the heart of Berlin stands dark and empty.
It is a heavy blow to culture. The Russian House, founded in 1984 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, former East Germany) as the “House of Soviet Science and Culture,” and for decades a central hub of German-Russian cultural life, now faces closure. Even the institution's official website has since been taken offline.
On September 1, the German government terminated the 2011 German-Russian cultural agreement, thereby ending the treaty governing the operation of the Russian House as of June 2027. As a pretext, it cited the drone found at Leipzig Airport, for which it blames Russia without offering verifiable evidence. The accusation serves to further intensify the propaganda campaign aimed at rallying the population behind the war policy against Russia.
The Russian Consulate General in Bonn must also close by September 18. In 2023, the German government had already forced the closure of the four Russian consulates in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig and Munich. With all five consulates and the Russian House now closed, only a single official diplomatic link to Moscow remains: the embassy in Berlin.
Around 50 staff at the Russian House have been made redundant, including numerous teachers. Leading employees of Russian nationality, among them the acting director, have already left the country. The German authorities instructed them to pack up within a few days and leave with their families. Pavel Izvolsky, the Russian House's director since 2017, had already resigned and departed in May after German authorities declined to renew his diplomatic accreditation.
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Moscow responded by closing the German Consulate General in St Petersburg as well as all three Goethe Institutes–Germany's official cultural institutes–in Moscow, St Petersburg and Novosibirsk, effective September 13 this year. It marks the end of more than 30 years of German cultural and educational work in Russia.
The closure of the last major bilateral cultural institutions on both sides marks a historic rupture and a dangerous step in the escalation of the war in Ukraine. Berlin is provoking an ever more aggressive drive toward hot war with Russia and is severing all the diplomatic and cultural channels and connections built up since the Second World War.
The Russian House in Berlin-Mitte was one of the largest and most renowned Russian cultural institutions abroad. The massive building, built in the early 1980s to designs by GDR architect Karl-Ernst Swora, covers around 29,000 square meters across seven floors. An oversized bust of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, stands right in the entrance foyer. A statue of Lenin once stood there, but it was removed after the end of the GDR.
A small exhibition in the foyer, now dismantled, was devoted to the House's 40-year history. The cultural center had, its introduction stated, “developed into a bridge between the peoples of both countries” and played an important role as a “place of dialogue and understanding.”
Wandering through the now-empty Soviet-era building with its white frescoed walls, one reads the names “Chekhov Hall,” “Kandinsky Hall,” “Tolstoy Hall”—the names of the event rooms provide a reminder of the cultural program that has now come to an abrupt end.
Before the war in Ukraine, up to 400 events were held here each year. On the ground floor were a cinema, an art workshop and a reading lounge with a book exchange. Language courses, concerts, films, theatre performances, a ballet school, workshops for children, art exhibitions, a library, a café and other offerings drew 200,000 visitors a year, according to the institution. A piano recital by Russian pianist Nikolai Kuznetsov met with an enthusiastic response as recently as a few months ago.
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The closure of the House is a major loss not only for the German public but equally for the Russian-speaking community. According to estimates from before 2022, 2.5 million people in Germany speak Russian predominantly or in part, around 250,000 of them in Berlin. With the influx of thousands of Ukrainian refugees in recent years, these figures are likely to have risen further. According to the House's own figures, around 30 percent of participants in its children's courses in 2024 were of Ukrainian origin.
For the working class in Russia and Germany, forced to fight one another in two world wars, access to each other's culture and language was of enormous importance. After years in which the German population had been indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda against the “subhuman Slavs” and “Jewish Bolshevism,” a cultural exchange developed among students, schoolchildren, scholars and workers, who built close personal, intellectual and cultural ties with one another.
Particularly in the GDR, but also in the then West Germany, millions of people developed a passion for Pushkin and Chekhov, for Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, for the Russian language and art—and for the October Revolution of 1917 and Soviet and post-Soviet history.
Even though the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Social Democrats (SPD), with their capitalist “Ostpolitik,” exploited this cultural and educational exchange for their own political interests, German-Soviet—and later German-Russian—friendship, in whose name the Russian House was also founded, was never simply an empty phrase for the working class. It rested on a connection between the two cultures that had grown over decades and was sustained by a widespread anti-war sentiment: never again should the crimes committed in the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union be repeated, and never again should the peoples of the two countries be incited against one another as enemies.
The destruction of these cultural ties shows in brutal fashion just how far preparations for a direct war have advanced. To stoke the hostile image of the “evil Russian,” places associated with Russian literature and art must disappear from German public life, and the Russian language must be defamed as a disreputable “language of the enemy.” This logic of war policy is increasingly gripping culture and science as well.
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The legal basis for the activities of the Goethe Institutes and the Russian House was formed by two cultural agreements concluded after German reunification: one from 1993 and a second from 2011, signed by then-German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle of the Liberal Democrats (FDP) and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
Three years later, at the 2014 Munich Security Conference, the German government announced a return to an aggressive German great-power policy. The accompanying shift of course toward Russia was first put into practice in February 2014. At the same time, an offensive of historical revisionism began, aimed at minimizing the crimes of German imperialism in the First and Second World Wars.
In 2022, the German government then used Putin's reactionary invasion of Ukraine to massively escalate military rearmament and unleash an unprecedented campaign against Russian art and science. The invasion was a crime of the Russian oligarchy, but it was deliberately provoked by decades of NATO's eastward expansion and the military encirclement of Russia.
The sanctions against Russia had far-reaching consequences in the cultural sphere. Cooperation between universities, museums and cultural institutions in both countries ground to a halt. The state agency Rossotrudnichestvo, which operates the Russian House, was also placed on the European Union's sanctions list—over alleged “hybrid influence operations.”
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Following the discovery of the drone in Leipzig in early August, candidates from the CDU, Greens and SPD called ever more loudly for the House's closure, claiming it supported a “hybrid war” against Germany. They seized on the unsubstantiated claim by the French Interior Ministry that the cultural institution was being used as “cover” by the Russian intelligence services.
These accusations are wholly dishonest. Neither the nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom Correctiv nor broadcaster rbb provided any hard evidence in their reports of supposed infiltration by intelligence operatives. They cited as suspicious indicators, for example, Russian diplomats or former employees of broadcaster RT registered at the House, an allegedly high energy consumption, and conspicuous phone and GPS signals—all of which, on closer inspection, turned out to be insignificant.
Just as the German government harnesses the Goethe Institutes for its cultural-political agenda, the Kremlin, too, has used the Russian House as a showcase for its nationalist politics. That is undoubtedly the case, but it changes nothing about the immense cultural work carried out here.
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The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) is the only party standing in the Berlin state election with a socialist program opposed to war propaganda and rearmament. Protecting cultural institutions such as the Russian House requires a political struggle by the working class against the war policy. We state in our election program:
War and militarism cannot be combated through pacifist appeals to the warmongers but only by stripping them of their power. The policy of war is not simply the result of wrong decisions by individual politicians. It stems from the deep crisis of capitalism, which, as in the 20th century, is once again leading to war and barbarism.
Workers have nothing to gain from war but everything to lose. We therefore oppose growing nationalism and war with the international unity of the working class.
9. United States: Smithsonian secretary steps down as Trump attacks persist
After more than a year of sustained attacks by the Trump administration, the secretary of the Smithsonian has announced he will step down.
Describing his departure as a retirement rather than a resignation, Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III has informed Smithsonian staff that he will serve out the remainder of the calendar year before moving on to a “new chapter” that will allow him to “continue to protect the integrity of the Smithsonian and to champion the importance of a history that illuminates and celebrates the complex story of our nation.”
Bunch has served as secretary of the Smithsonian since 2019. Prior to his term as secretary, he was the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and associate director for curatorial affairs at the National Museum of American History.
Far-right allies of the Trump administration were quick to celebrate the news of Bunch’s retirement. Republican Congressman Brandon Gill wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that “the days of using America’s museums to teach Americans to hate their own country are coming to an end.” Senator Josh Hawley wrote, “Good riddance. He should return his salary to the American people.” Writing in the Spectator, Roger Kimball invoked an anti-communist smear, complaining about Bunch’s “long march” through the Smithsonian.
Despite the right-wing campaign waged against him, Bunch insists that this pressure did not factor in his decision to step down. This seems unlikely. When PBS News asked Bunch about Trump’s criticisms just a week prior to announcing his retirement, Bunch sought to reassure his critics, saying,
The Smithsonian is not a place driven by left-wing crazy people. It's really a place driven by people who love a nation and who basically believe, like I do, that the great strength of a nation is that it's aspirational, and that, for me, Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is so powerful because it challenges us to live up to certain ideals.
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Bunch’s retirement will now be seized on as an opportunity for the Trump administration to press forward with its agenda for the Smithsonian. Attacking the institution in this way, Trump is walking through a door opened by the pseudo-left purveyors of middle class identity politics and their own distortions of American history exemplified by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a project which Bunch supported and helped to legitimize.
By depicting the United States as uniquely corrupted by the “original sin” of slavery, which supposedly lingers in the country’s “DNA,” the 1619 Project concocted an inverted American exceptionalism that Trump now opposes with his own American exceptionalism, one in which the United States can only be celebrated and the horrors of slavery minimized or erased. While posing as a defender of historical truth, the Trump administration is in reality carrying out a purge of the “un-American” from US history.
Only days after Bunch announced his departure, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to demand that the Smithsonian erect a 30-foot “Colossus statue” of George Washington outside the institution’s National Museum of American History and that the 11-foot bronze statue of Washington displayed at the Trump-sponsored Freedom 250 IndyCar race now be displayed at Flag Hall. That Trump would install his street-race Washington in a Smithsonian museum, plucked from an absurdly inappropriate and unserious commemoration of the United States’ revolutionary founding, indicates the degraded character the Smithsonian Institution would assume should the president acquire even more power over it.
What IG Metall union is touting as a “historic victory” is the beginning of the end for the factory in Wilchwitz.
11. Fed raises interest rate for first time in 3 years
The US Federal Reserve has lifted its base interest rate by 0.25 percentage points to take it to 4 percent in the first such decision since 2023.
In making its unanimous decision, the Fed’s policymaking body really had little choice. In the weeks leading up to it, financial markets had been demanding an increase and insisting that Fed chair Kevin Warsh back up his words about the determination to bring down inflation with action.
Financial markets had priced in a 90 percent probability of a rate increase amid warnings of instability if the Fed had decided to again stand pat as it did at its July meeting.
In his prepared remarks, and in answers to questions at his press conference, Warsh pointed to the “geopolitical landscape of shocks and uncertainty” and cited “geopolitics” as one of the reasons for inflation, without directly mentioning the war on Iran, no doubt with the aim of avoiding any hint of criticism of US President Trump.
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Warsh acknowledged that the decision would not affect any individual prices, whether it be oil or foodstuffs. The decision was aimed at ensuring that changes in relative prices “don’t broaden out, don’t have second and third order effects on the economy.” In other words, the effect of the increased rate would be to dampen demand in the broader economy and thereby bring some downward pressure on the overall price level.
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The Fed’s decision, which goes against the demands of Trump that interest rates be lowered, brought a predictable response from that quarter.
In a post on social media in response to the decision, Trump said: “Interest rates in the United States should be 1 percent, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the world—BY FAR.”
In his all-cap style, he continued: “Lower the interest rates for the United States of America, and fast.”
Trump had previously called former Fed chair Jerome Powell a “moron” and “stubborn mule” for not lowering rates, but did not call out his latest appointee, Warsh, by name. His position has been that Warsh wants rates to come down but has been hamstrung by a “political” Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s interest-rate setting body.
In fact, the decision of the committee to back the rise was not due to “politics” but was the expression of demands in the financial markets. And there could be more. Trades in the market after the decision indicated a 90 percent chance the Fed will raise its rate at least one more time by the end of the year.
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An important question was raised on the reasons for the rise in long-term bond yields in the past few months.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, which, as Warsh pointed out, is the “risk-free asset upon which every price of virtually every asset in the world is related to,” has risen above 5 percent and stayed there for the first time since 2007, and the yield on the 30-year bond is continuing to rise.
Warsh gave what he said were “three leading explanations.” These were the economic strength of the US economy, competition for capital (particularly by so-called “hyperscalers,” who are increasingly issuing debt to finance their AI buildouts), and “geopolitics” in “hot spots around the world” which are driving up long-term yields.
In doing so, he carefully avoided the proverbial elephant in the room. This is the rise in US government debt to more than $40 trillion and the increasing interest bill running at around $1 trillion a year, threatening to become the largest item in the government’s budget.
This is being accompanied by concerns that US government debt is not “risk free” but could give rise to market turbulence, not least because of the increased involvement of hedge funds in the $32 trillion Treasury market, where their speculative activities are being financed by large amounts of debt.
Under these conditions, the response of the two key economic arms of the capitalist state—the Treasury and the Fed—is becoming increasingly chaotic as they pursue cross purposes.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has insisted his aim is to reduce the yield on long-term bonds. Earlier this month, he unveiled a program to increase Treasury buybacks of these bonds from $2 billion to $6 billion per operation.
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One of the aims of Bessent’s intervention is to shift investors in government debt to the shorter end of the market, where yields are lower, to lessen the interest bill for the US government. But these debts must be rolled over in a shorter period, and involve borrowings in a market where rates are rising and look set to continue to rise, on the expectation that the Fed is not done with increases in its base rate.
12. Three ferry disasters claim about 250 lives across the Asia-Pacific
Fire engulfed a Philippine ferry and two other passenger vessels capsized in Vanuatu and Indonesia over four days last week. At least 85 people are confirmed dead and more than 170 remain missing, almost certainly bringing the combined death toll to more than 250.
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Indonesia and the Philippines are vast archipelagic countries comprising approximately 17,000 and 7,641 islands respectively. Vanuatu consists of more than 80 islands. Ferries are an essential social service, transporting workers, students, families, vehicles, food and other goods between communities separated by water.
Between 2000 and 2014, approximately 70 percent of recorded ferry accidents and fatalities worldwide occurred in Asia. More than half of the accidents involved Bangladesh, China, Indonesia and the Philippines. Indonesia alone accounted for 27 of the 160 fatal ferry accidents recorded globally during this period.
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Every major disaster is followed by the announcement of an investigation, safety audit or criminal inquiry. Yet prosecutions are fragmented and rare, and senior corporate figures generally escape accountability.
After the Princess of the Stars sank in the Philippines in 2008, killing more than 800 people, criminal proceedings against a Sulpicio Lines executive dragged through the courts for 13 years before being dismissed in 2021. A civil court found the company negligent and awarded damages, but no senior company official was criminally convicted.
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The three vessels lost last week were operated by private enterprises of different sizes. PT Virgo Karya Shipping was reportedly a one-ferry Indonesian company. Tui Shipping Agency was a small Vanuatu operator that no longer possessed active registration. Atienza Interisland Ferries is a private Philippine regional carrier whose finances and ownership structures are largely opaque.
That some of these companies are little more than ramshackle one-vessel operations only underscores the irrationality of the system. An essential transport network, on which entire island communities depend for food, work and travel, has been entrusted to private businesses looking to scrape profit out of the needs of the working people who must rely on them.
The ferry fleets of Southeast Asia are stocked with the castoffs of wealthier countries. A Japanese development study found that every roll-on/roll-off passenger vessel serving major Philippine routes was second-hand, more than 95 percent imported from Japan, with an average age of 31 years.
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Age alone does not render a ship unseaworthy. But the trade reveals a global hierarchy in the value placed on human life: vessels retired in wealthy countries are sold on and worked for decades longer, carrying workers and the poor under safety conditions that would be unacceptable in the countries from which the ships came.
The risks of inter-island travel are divided along class lines. The wealthy fly; workers, drivers, small traders, students and poorer families endure long ferry crossings because fares are cheaper and because their livelihoods often require them to travel with vehicles and cargo.
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The class divide is brutally marked at Coron, one of the Philippines’ leading luxury-resort destinations. Affluent visitors fly into Busuanga and continue by private boat to island hotels charging hundreds or even thousands of dollars a night. Workers and ordinary families make the journey from Manila overnight in economy accommodation, aboard ferries carrying the trucks, motorcycles and food supplies on which the resort economy depends.
These deaths are not an unavoidable consequence of geography or foul weather. They are social murder—the foreseeable killing of working people through dangerous conditions that governments and operators know about but leave unchanged. Every investigation repeats the same findings: ageing ships, false manifests, inaccessible life jackets, inadequate training, delayed rescues and ignored weather warnings.
Inter-island transport must be removed from the profit calculations of private corporations and individual operators. It should be operated as a publicly owned and properly funded utility, with modern vessels, trained crews, enforceable safety standards and rescue services adequate to the lives of the millions of working people who depend upon it.
13. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling on Jackson: The courts formalize the right to poison the working class
A divided US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that the Constitution provides no right to clean drinking water and no right to accurate information from public officials. The full bench decision in Sterling v. City of Jackson affirms the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by residents of Jackson, Mississippi, who allege that officials deliberately allowed lead to contaminate the city’s drinking water. The ruling, written by Judge Kurt Engelhard, a Donald Trump appointee and joined by nine other Republican appointees, declares flatly that “the Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing.”
The essential meaning of this decision is unmistakable. It establishes as a matter of constitutional law that a municipality can supply its residents with water that poisons them, lie to them about it and face no liability whatsoever. The residents who drank lead-contaminated water, who bathed their children in it, who cooked with it have no recourse under the highest law of the land. The court’s answer to their suffering is an insult: They can file tort claims, Engelhardt suggests, or simply “elect officials who will better manage the water system,” as if the residents of Jackson, a city that has been without reliable drinking water for years, had simply failed to vote correctly.
What is most striking about the ruling is what it does not say. Nowhere does the majority engage with the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, the federal legislation that establishes binding standards for public water systems and mandates limits on lead and other contaminants. The court simply does not cite it, as though the statutory framework governing the very subject at issue in the case did not exist. This omission is not an oversight. It is the method of a judiciary that will not acknowledge any legal obligation of the state to protect the population it governs, because to do so would open the door to precisely the claims the ruling class cannot tolerate.
The Jackson catastrophe did not arise from natural causes. As the WSWS documented in September 2022, the city’s water and sewage system collapsed under the pressure of heavy flooding, leaving 150,000 people without running water in the wealthiest country on earth—even as Jackson sits on the Ross Barnett Reservoir, the largest source of drinking water in the state. The crisis was years in the making: A $90 million deal with Siemens produced a failed billing system and $43 million in unpaid bills; a $109 million contract with Veolia saw the company dump 4 billion gallons of wastewater into the Pearl River in violation of the Clean Water Act; and a decade of criminal neglect by local, state and federal governments left antiquated infrastructure to rot.
The Fifth Circuit’s ruling is reactionary not merely in its outcome but in its reasoning. Judge Engelhardt concedes that the residents have invoked a right to “bodily integrity” but declares that this right “applies in instances like sexual assault by a police officer and forced medication of prisoners,” while “mismanagement of a water system” is “wholly different.” This is the logic of a court that can conceive of the state harming an individual body but cannot conceive of the state poisoning an entire city.
The dissenting judge, Catharina Haynes, noted that the residents’ allegations “mirror in various ways one of the worst public health crises in recent American history—the Flint water crisis”—and observed that the Fifth Circuit “stands practically alone” in its refusal to even rule on the “state-created danger” doctrine. Her dissent, joined by four liberal appointees, is a reminder that the Democrats offer no fundamental alternative. Their objection is procedural, not principled.
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The ruling class’s view of water was given its most candid expression years ago by Peter Brabeck Letmathe, then the chairman of Nestlé, who declared that water is a “human right” only up to roughly 25 liters per person per day—enough for drinking and minimal hygiene—but “not a human right” for washing cars, watering gardens or filling swimming pools. This is the ideology of a class that weighs every liter of water against a balance sheet. And it is being implemented in practice. Across the United States, data centers are being offered municipal potable drinking water for their cooling systems, while residents of myriad cities endure boil-water notices, lead pipes, bursting mains and collapsing infrastructure. The indictment is of capitalism itself.
A system that subordinates all social life to private profit cannot provide clean water, because clean water for all is not profitable. The same ruling class that pours tens of billions of dollars into the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, that hands trillions to Wall Street at the first sign of trouble, cannot find the funds to replace lead pipes in Jackson. The courts, the legislatures, and the executives of both parties exist to enforce this order. The right to clean water will never be granted by the Fifth Circuit, by the Trump administration or by any representative of the capitalist social order. It can only be won by the working class, through the socialist reorganization of society to meet human needs rather than private profit.
14. Australia Capital Territory educators reject Labor’s pay offer
The decision, taken at a union members’ meeting on September 11, raises the possibility of further stoppages, following an earlier 24-hour strike.
15. Sri Lankan president addresses public rallies: A bid to stem falling popular support
Like all capitalist governments around the world, the ruling JVP/NPP, as it imposes austerity measures on working people, is now preparing the repressive apparatus to suppress the inevitable popular opposition.
16. National Lawyers Guild calls on Ukrainian court to free Bogdan Syrotiuk
The National Lawyers Guild, the oldest progressive bar association in the United States, has written to the Pervomaisk City District Court in Ukraine demanding the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk:
September 15th, 2026
Pervomaisk City District Court
18 Ivan Vyhovsky Street
Pervomaisk, 55200, Ukraine
inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.uaRe: Verdict of August 10, 2026 in the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk, Case number 484/5921/24
On August 10, 2026, the Pervomaisk City District Court sentenced Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old writer, to 15 years in prison for high treason under martial law. The court also ordered the confiscation of his property and the destruction of his political literature.
According to the public record, the conviction rests entirely on acts of expression: six articles published on the World Socialist Web Site, a speech delivered on May 1, 2023, and the defendant’s correspondence with the publication’s editors. The verdict cites as elements of the offense his “non-recognition of Ukraine’s legitimately elected political leadership and democratic processes,” his “comparisons with fascists and Nazis,” his “negative assessments of Ukraine’s Armed Forces,” and his “reinterpretation of national heroes and historical figures.”
This conviction cannot be reconciled with Ukraine’s binding legal obligations. Political speech—including speech that harshly criticizes a government, its armed forces, and its official historiography—lies at the core of the protection guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to both of which Ukraine is a party, as well as Article 34 of Ukraine’s own Constitution. Nothing in the published record indicates espionage, sabotage, the transmission of information to a foreign power, or collaboration with any armed force—the very conduct that treason statutes exist to reach.
The treatment of the expert evidence deepens our concern. A 65-page report by the criminologist Yuri Irkhin, submitted by the defense, found in Mr. Syrotiuk’s writings no “statements, phrases, sentences, or word combinations that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.” A further examination ordered by the court from the Odessa Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Examination likewise found no calls for the overthrow of the state, the seizure of power, or the alteration of Ukraine’s borders. A conviction returned against the uncontradicted weight of the expert evidence, in a prosecution built on protected expression, bears the appearance of a predetermined result rather than a judicial finding.
Those concerns are sharpened by the documented condition of the penitentiary system in which the sentence would be served. The Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture has reported ill-treatment of prisoners in Ukrainian penal colonies, intimidation and fear of reprisals among inmates who speak to its delegations, and the “unacceptable” delegation of order and security to so-called duty prisoners.
The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has documented arbitrary detention, torture, and ill-treatment of conflict-related detainees held by the Ukrainian authorities. And in August of this year, more than 160 prisoners in Ukrainian facilities—reportedly including the Mykolaiv pretrial detention center where Mr. Syrotiuk is held—began a hunger strike over compulsory labor exacted under threat of solitary confinement, beatings by staff, grossly deficient food, and the denial of medical care. For a chronically ill prisoner in such a system, a 15-year sentence risks becoming, in effect, a sentence of death.
We are aware that Mr. Syrotiuk’s case is pending before the European Court of Human Rights. We urge that Mr. Syrotiuk be released, that the orders of confiscation and destruction be vacated, and that he be provided immediately with the medical care his condition requires.
The world legal community is following this case. The standards applied to Mr. Syrotiuk will be understood as a measure of the standards Ukraine applies to all.
Respectfully submitted,
Suzanne Adely, President
National Lawyers Guild, U.S.A.
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
