Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The New York Times fabricates a “Russian sabotage” narrative
The New York Times published a report on its front page Friday, under the headline “Dangerous Pattern of Russian Sabotage in Europe Risks Clash With NATO,” asserting, without substantiation, a “spate” of “plots” by Russia to carry out attacks on NATO members.
This “spate” of “plots” has somehow managed neither to hurt anyone nor to leave any tangible evidence of its existence, beyond the claims of government officials and their media spokesmen braying for an escalation of the war with Russia.
They are, in other words, a total fabrication, concocted as part of a relentless propaganda campaign by the American and European ruling classes to justify the escalation of war between NATO and a nuclear-armed state.
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The Times builds Friday’s report, by Michael Schwirtz and Adam Goldman, around allegations of a Russian drone attack on a Ukrainian cargo plane parked at Leipzig/Halle Airport, a NATO military airlift hub. The allegations rest on a drone found at the airport on August 4, which the German government has claimed, without substantiation, was Russian.
The newspaper alleges that the supposed event in Germany is “the most dramatic in a spate of such attacks that includes plots to place incendiary devices aboard DHL cargo planes, blow up railroad tracks in Poland, and burn down warehouses and shopping centers all over Europe.”
The Times cites German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, who said Tuesday that the drone operators worked “on behalf of Russian state entities.” Neither he nor the Times have presented any proof. The Danish intelligence service, PET, is quoted as saying that “Russia is both planning and carrying out acts of sabotage against defense companies and the defense industry in Europe.”
The article goes on and on like this, unsubstantiated claim after unsubstantiated claim, not accompanied by a single fact. And nowhere is the total lack of evidence of this “sabotage” campaign contrasted with the fact that, at this very moment, missiles produced by NATO countries and guided by their targeting data are raining down on Russian cities.
The purpose of the allegations in creating a casus belli is stated by Julianne Smith, the former US ambassador to NATO: because Russia has “not been adequately deterred and Moscow has not paid a price, Putin is interpreting that as a signal to keep going.”
The Times asserts that Russian attacks in Europe “began occurring shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.” Yet, critically, the article ignores the most destructive attack on European infrastructure in those four years, the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany on September 26, 2022.
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The Times cannot mention Nord Stream because it would expose the claim of four years of Russian attacks on Europe as a lie.
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The World Socialist Web Site asked on September 28, 2022, two days after the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines: “Cui bono? Who benefits, and who had the motive to carry it out?” The same question applies to the “spate” of “plots” the Times now alleges. The question must be asked: Who benefits from the escalation of the conflict between Russia and NATO?
For four years, the Kremlin has allowed NATO to cross one red line after another: Western tanks, then a Ukrainian ground invasion, using NATO hardware, of Russia’s Kursk region in August 2024; then American and British missiles fired into Russian territory; and now daily long-range strikes on Russian refineries and power plants. Russia’s policy has been to avoid a direct collision with NATO.
It has been, on the other hand, the policy of the NATO powers to pursue the maximum possible escalation of the war, seeking, through the subjugation of the former Soviet Union, a means of offsetting and counterbalancing the crisis of both American and European capitalism.
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The lies that sold the invasion of Iraq were exposed after the invasion. The lies now being told about Russia are meant to serve the same purpose, and this time the war they are preparing is between nuclear-armed powers. They must be exposed before they have done their work, and the only force with an interest in doing so is the working class, in the United States, Europe, Russia and Ukraine. Opposition to war will not come through any section of the political establishment that is organizing it. It requires the independent mobilization of workers against their own ruling classes and against the capitalist system that produces war.
2. United States: Millions purged from US food stamp rolls, as Wall Street demands more cuts
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) puts the decline at roughly 5 million people, or 12 percent, since the law’s enactment. According to US Department of Agriculture figures, 36.6 million people are now receiving benefits, down 5.7 million from May 2025, below the pre-pandemic level and the lowest number enrolled in 17 years.
Children have borne the heaviest share of the cuts. In the 25 states that report data on children, 1.2 million have been cut off since July 2025. Refugees, people granted asylum, survivors of trafficking and domestic violence—all lawfully in the US—have been stripped of eligibility outright. Undocumented immigrants have never been eligible.
This is a deliberate, bipartisan policy of the ruling elite. While hundreds of billions are appropriated for war, this policy attacks nutrition, promotes hunger and disease, and takes food out of the mouths of workers and their families. The average benefit in fiscal 2025 was $187.94 a month per person, or about $6.26 a day. Even this paltry sum is considered excessive by the financial oligarchy.
The ruling class has been explicit about what it wants. Under the headline “The Food Stamp Reform Is Working,” the Wall Street Journal celebrated the SNAP cutbacks in an editorial Wednesday, writing, “As always, the political left is spinning these declines as a human tragedy. Not so. Republicans have merely ended the literal free lunch for able-bodied beneficiaries and states.” The editorial concluded, “Washington’s welfare buffet is fiscally unsustainable and promotes dependency.”
The main mechanism of the cuts is stringent new work rules for recipients. The Congressional Budget Office had estimated that these work requirements could remove 2.4 million people from SNAP in a typical month, but by May enrollment was already about as low as it had been forecast to go in 2030. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called the results “a pretty big win” for those wielding the ax to the program.
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As hunger has grown, the government has responded by destroying the means of tracking it. The US Department of Agriculture announced in September 2025 that it would stop producing the Household Food Security Report, the country’s primary instrument for measuring hunger for more than three decades, calling it “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.” The last figures available showed 47.9 million Americans, including 14.1 million children, in food-insecure homes in 2024.
Over decades, the Democrats have denounced the cuts in words and ratified them in votes, laying the groundwork for the present assault. The three-month limit on food stamps for able-bodied adults without dependents was created by the 1996 welfare reform bill signed by Bill Clinton. In June 2023, Joe Biden signed the debt-ceiling deal raising the age for SNAP work requirements from 49 to 54, with 165 House Democrats and 44 Senate Democrats voting yes. Trump’s 2025 law then extended it to 64.
In negotiations on the farm bill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on July 20 he would oppose any farm bill without “more time for states and counties to prepare to shoulder the cost of SNAP.” Not one Democrat, however, has demanded that a single person removed from the rolls be restored to them. The continuing resolution the House approved Tuesday by 370 votes to 48 to keep the government running until December 11 does nothing to change the work requirements, the age 64 ceiling, the immigrant exclusions or the cost shift to the states, which are all permanent law under the OBBBA. The great majority of Democrats voted for it.
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On August 24, the Washington Post’s editorial board declared that “there’s no realistic path to solvency for the U.S. government without changes to the retirement state,” proposing that Social Security be reduced to “a tax-funded transfer payment as a floor, with means-tested benefits and compulsory private savings above that.”
The Social Security trustees reported June 9 that the retirement trust fund will be exhausted in late 2032, after which benefits would fall 22 percent absent congressional action. House Speaker Mike Johnson said June 8 that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have “to be adjusted and fixed,” adding, “We have a plan to do that next year”—after the November elections.
Democratic Representative Tom Suozzi of New York introduced a bill with Republican Tom Cole creating a Social Security commission modeled on the 1983 commission that raised the retirement age to 67 and taxed benefits. Democratic Senators Chris Coons, Jeanne Shaheen, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner cosponsored a bill creating a fiscal commission to recommend further cuts.
All of this comes as the House funds the Pentagon at $839 billion a year and the administration seeks $87.6 billion more, most of it for the Iran war. Global bond yields stand at their highest since 2008, while the markets demand that governments pay for war by cutting what remains of social programs.
The Democrats’ criticism of the food stamp cuts is confined solely to its timetable, and their criticism of the coming assault on Social Security and Medicare will be confined to the same. To fight the assault on programs and benefits the working class has wrested from the ruling elite in struggle, the working class must break free from the political straitjacket of the pro-capitalist, big-business parties and fight for a workers’ government based on a socialist program.
Between August 26 and 28, the commander of US Southern Command, Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan, traveled to Colombia and Ecuador to place the two countries’ armed forces under a permanent joint command structure with the Pentagon. Within days, US forces boarded and sank three artisanal fishing boats from the Ecuadorian port of Manta, carrying 53 fishermen.
These are not separate events. On August 27, Donovan met at San Lorenzo, on Ecuador’s northern coast, with Colombian Defense Minister Jorge Eduardo Mora, Ecuadorian Defense Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo, the military chiefs of both countries, and Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Jarrard, commander of the newly activated Joint Task Force–Western Hemisphere.
Southcom described the border zone as a corridor exploited by transnational criminal organizations and said the leaders met with elite forces from both nations “to refine a joint operational strategy.”
This represents a shift from episodic US-partnered missions to sustained combined operations. A binational Colombian-Ecuadorian military base was discussed, and El Tiempo reported plans to place radar at Tumaco on Colombia’s Pacific coast to track vessels and feed targeting data to Colombian units. Donovan closed the trip at Fuerte Militar Tolemaida, Colombia’s principal army base, discussing the rehabilitation of an air fleet in which 11 of 19 MI-17 helicopters are non-operational.
Southcom’s own statement names the objectives: to “defeat narcoterrorist groups, curb illicit migration, and counter malign influence.” Drug trafficking is one item on a list that includes stopping migrants and pushing back Chinese investment. That is the actual mission.
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In parallel, the US intelligence apparatus is refining its capabilities for transnational extrajudicial mass killings and disappearances. In August the Washington Post revealed the attacks against three Ecuadorian fishing vessels were run not by the Pentagon but under a covert CIA program based in El Salvador. The survivors were hooded and taken to El Salvador before being sent back to Ecuador.
The Manta prosecutor whose files included those attacks, Gloria Alexandra Bravo Cedeño, was shot dead with her sister on June 14. Moreover, those investigating the drug ties of the government itself have faced a similar fate. Monika Silva Koniuszek, who was documenting the Noboa family’s banana empire and its shipment of cocaine in banana containers, was found dead on June 8. On August 23, René Manuel Cobos Merchán, 49, a fixer who had worked for the BBC on organized crime in Ecuador and its control over the police, was killed at Yaguachi by roughly six hooded men in vests resembling security-force gear.
In Colombia the same apparatus is being installed by fascistic President Abelardo De la Espriella. In his first weeks in office, he has ordered that all illegal armed groups be classified and treated as terrorists and launched a massive bombing campaign. On August 30, the military bombed a camp at Miraflores, Guaviare, killing 23.
Days later, De la Espriella walked among the 23 body bags laid out on the floor of a military battalion before the cameras—a spectacle copied from El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Reportedly, the bodies included minors killed in the operation.
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All of this unfolds while western Colombia lies in ruins. The magnitude 7.4 earthquake of August 10 killed 331 people, injured more than 4,600 and left 240 missing. The United Nations estimates 1.2 million people need humanitarian assistance. Colombia’s Ombudsman reported that Chocó and Buenaventura lacked potable water, electricity, health services and adequate shelter, and the interior minister admitted Buenaventura’s hospitals were overwhelmed.
Under these conditions, not a step has been missed in building the apparatus of war and dictatorship.
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Venezuela has shown what disaster relief looks like for US imperialism, which has used the devastating June earthquakes as leverage for the Pentagon to expand its presence and even seize that country’s oilfields directly.
US imperialism is building a hemispheric repressive apparatus that is distinctly fascist: fishermen killed or their livelihoods destroyed without trial, prosecutors and journalists murdered and bodies displayed as propaganda. The same methods are surfacing inside the United States, where federal agents shoot protesters and no investigations follow.
No section of the political establishment offers an alternative to the building of police state dictatorships and accommodation to the Trump administration. The defense of democratic rights and opposition to war relies entirely in the independent political mobilization of the international working class.
4. Essential, exploited and disposable: Migrant care workers in Labour’s Britain
Reports by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and UNISON trade unions have exposed the brutal exploitation of migrant National Health Service (NHS) and social care workers in Britain. They reveal a system in which internationally recruited workers are brought in to prop up a collapsing care sector, and are then trapped by employer-tied visas, debt, low pay, racism and face the constant threat of deportation.
The RCN analyzed 383 cases of internationally educated nursing staff in adult social care between 2023 and 2025. UNISON surveyed 3,306 migrant care workers between November 2024 and January 2025. Together, their findings indict a sector dependent on migrant labor while denying migrant workers elementary security.
The Health and Care Worker visa—introduced by the Conservative government in 2020 and maintained by the Starmer Labour government when it too office in 2024—ties a worker’s right to live and work in Britain to a single employer. It hands employers enormous power to alter contracts, withhold wages, demand inflated repayment fees, impose unsafe conditions and threaten workers who complain with dismissal, loss of sponsorship and removal from the UK.
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The message from Labour is that migrant workers can be recruited to keep hospitals, nursing and residential care homes and home-care services functioning, but they are to be denied economic security. The RCN and Unison reports provide evidence that migrant workers are welcomed as cheap labor for low-cost NHS providers—after jumping through many hoops—while being denounced as a burden when they demand citizenship, equality and a secure life.
Workers throughout the NHS and more broadly must oppose every move to scapegoat migrant workers. Skills for Care recorded 111,000 vacant posts in adult social care in England in 2024/25, a 7 percent vacancy rate—around three times the wider economy. International recruitment fell from 105,000 recruits in 2023/24 to 50,000 in 2024/25, while posts filled by British nationals fell by about 30,000. Migrant workers are not “taking jobs”. They are holding together a sector British capitalism has made intolerable for hundreds of thousands of workers.
Nor is this crisis temporary. Skills for Care projects that the sector will need around 470,000 additional posts by 2040 simply to keep pace with the ageing population. Age UK estimates that two million older people in England already have some unmet need for social care. The result is misery for workers and neglect for those who need care.
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Health and social care workers must demand an end to employer-tied visas, and oppose all deportation threats against those who speak out. Full citizenship rights must be granted to migrant workers, their pay raised, safe staffing levels reached as part of a fully funded public social care service run for need, not profit.
Workers hailed as “essential” throughout the pandemic must not be made disposable now. Their defense cannot be entrusted to Labour, the employers or unions who confine struggle to lobbying. It depends on the independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system that turns care into a market and migrant labor into a disposable commodity.
This is the fight being led by NHS FightBack, part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. We urge migrant workers and workers throughout the NHS to get in touch.
5. Burnham unveils Sainsbury’s “work experience” scheme: unpaid labor for UK employers
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has unveiled plans for Sainsbury’s, the UK’s second-largest supermarket chain, to use 10,000 young people as unpaid labour under the guise of “work experience”. The “Modern Work Experience Programme” will be launched in October, with Burnham calling on other companies to follow suit.
In a government press release announcing the program, Burnham declared, “The youth unemployment crisis has been ignored for too long. This government is making it a top priority and bringing back hope.”
A cringeworthy PR stunt featured Burnham visiting a local Sainsbury’s store in Nine Elms, south London, touting the scheme over the store’s PA system. Flanked by Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan—both decked in Sainsbury’s uniforms and name badges—Burnham joined the local store manager for a guided tour and posed for the cameras beside shopfloor workers.
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Burnham, barely six weeks in office, has managed to exceed Margaret Thatcher’s Youth Training Schemes and Tony Blair’s “welfare to work” program, which workers broadly detested as government-run cheap labor for employers.
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The fight against corporate restructuring to defend every job must be joined to the demand for genuine full-time employment for youth at Sainsbury’s and across all sectors and industries.
Retail—the largest private-sector employer in the UK economy, employing around 3 million workers directly—shed 74,000 jobs in 2025. A significant factor in this jobs cull has been the use of automation via AI marketing, stock-management tools and self-service checkouts.
The same technology weaponized under capitalism to maximize profits must be used to lessen the burden of work, reduce the length of the working day and provide the basis for secure and increased employment opportunities. This means democratic workers’ control of production as part of a broader reorganization of society on a socialist basis.
This is the perspective fought for by the Socialist Equality Party and the International Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, to provide workers and youth with the means to challenge the domination of the corporate oligarchy and its squandering of society’s wealth on the destructive purposes of militarism and war.
6. Australia: Victorian Labor government moves to ban independent workers’ organizations
On August 12, the Victorian Labor government introduced a bill aimed at banning the independent organization of workers outside the established trade union apparatus. The bill remains before parliament, with a single sitting week left before the November 28 state election.
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Australia’s draconian industrial relations laws, drafted and sharpened by successive Labor governments, in close collaboration with the union apparatus, impose tight constraints on the registration of unions. In most cases, unions have exclusive coverage over entire industries or occupations, meaning workers have little or no choice which organization represents them in enterprise bargaining and industrial disputes.
The proposed legislation is an attempt to eliminate workers’ groups that, already prohibited from holding official union status, seek to establish some sort of organizational stability by incorporating as an association.
The timing of this legislation is revealing. Carroll’s installation as premier in late July was in no small part due to the perceived failure of his predecessor, Jacinta Allan, to deliver the spending cuts demanded by big business. Determined to rectify this, one of Carroll’s first acts is to launch this anti-democratic attack on behalf of the established unions.
Labor’s move is clearly motivated by recognition in the ruling elite of an upsurge in the class struggle, especially in opposition to Labor’s austerity agenda, and concerns that the trade union bureaucracy will not be able to keep it under control.
7. Videos show LAPD personnel beating handcuffed man before his death and fatally shooting another
Newly released video shows Los Angeles Police Department custody personnel repeatedly striking and smothering a handcuffed man shortly before his death and an LAPD officer fatally shooting another man during a separate encounter.
Jose Carlos Hoyos-Munoz, 58, died on July 15 after three recorded uses of force inside the LAPD’s Valley Jail Section in Van Nuys. Two weeks later, on July 29, an officer shot and killed 33-year-old Alejandro Luis Garcia beneath the Interstate 10 overpass on Normandie Avenue.
Hoyos-Munoz had been arrested on July 13 after police responded to reports that he had injured his mother and another family member with a knife. Following an eight-hour standoff, Special Weapons and Tactics officers used tear gas and took him into custody.
Police transported Hoyos-Munoz to a hospital for treatment following his exposure to the gas. He was subsequently released and taken to the Valley Jail Section for booking.
Video recorded early on July 15 shows Hoyos-Munoz initially walking calmly into the facility. Later, LAPD custody personnel entered his holding cell and pinned him to the floor after police said he resisted attempts to fingerprint him.
Personnel strapped Hoyos-Munoz into a five-point restraint chair and moved him to the fingerprinting area. During another struggle, they restrained him with their body weight and placed a “spit sock” over his head.
After returning Hoyos-Munoz to his cell, personnel entered again when he climbed onto a toilet while handcuffed. Video shows several of them forcing him face-down onto a bunk, kneeling on him and striking him with their knees and elbows while in handcuffs. After he was beaten unconscious, the police removed his handcuffs and he was then left lying in his cell for 20 minutes with the “spit sock” covering his head.
Officers later returned to his cell to find him unresponsive and not breathing. He was then pronounced dead at the scene and authorities have not yet released a cause of death.
To date, none of the guards who beat and killed Hoyos-Munoz while he was handcuffed have been identified.
On July 29, officers responded to reports of a man swinging an aluminum baseball bat at pedestrians and occupied vehicles near Normandie Avenue and Washington Boulevard.
Body-camera footage shows Alejandro Luis Garcia walking toward two officers beneath the Interstate 10 overpass while carrying the bat. The officers repeatedly ordered him to drop it. As Garcia continued walking towards the cops with bat in hand, one officer fired two rounds.
Garcia fell following the shots, dropping the bat. Officers provided medical assistance before Garcia was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The officer, who has not been identified, fired two shots at Garcia while busy LA traffic was driving under the Interstate 10 freeway underpass, potentially placing other nearby commuters in harm’s way as well.
The LAPD’s Force Investigation Division is investigating both deaths. The Los Angeles County district attorney and other outside bodies are also reviewing the incidents. As of September 2, no officers or detention personnel had been criminally charged or disciplined.
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The newly released videos showing police forces killing two men experiencing mental health breakdowns have aroused popular anger among the working class population within LA and more broadly.
Workers are not ready to accept the police agencies’ version of events, which proclaim that a “necessary use of force” was needed to protect police officers and the general public.
Crime in capitalist society is overwhelmingly the product of poverty, inequality, unemployment and social desperation. The victims of police violence are overwhelmingly impoverished, mentally ill, homeless and unemployed.
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According to the Urban Institute, state and local governments spent $135 billion on police in 2021, compared with $65 billion on housing and community development.
The state is not spending money to make communities safe; it is building an apparatus of occupation against a population that it fears.
The police do not combat crime or keep communities safe. Their role is to manage and repress the consequences of poverty, inequality and unemployment, and to prevent the working class from encroaching on the private property relations that entrench that poverty.
Meanwhile, the greatest crime of present-day society is the systematic theft of the wealth produced by the working class through the wage system, followed by the looting of society by the financial oligarchy. This enormous social crime goes not only unpunished but is legal under the entire framework of capitalism—and the police are armed and trained to defend its very existence.
The only force capable of ending police violence is the independent political mobilization of the working class, nationally and internationally, to dismantle the capitalist state, expropriate the ruling oligarchy, and reorganize society on the basis of social need rather than private profit. In a socialist society, where the conditions breeding crime are eliminated, the need for a standing body of armed men to repress the population disappears along with them.
Unifor, the union representing some 17,000 auto assembly workers across the Detroit Three’s operations in Canada, announced August 31 that it had reached agreement with General Motors management on a contract for some 4,600 workers matching the “pattern” set at Ford Canada this past July.
Canada’s largest private-sector union, with over 300,000 members, has been focused this bargaining round with the Detroit Three on finalizing new agreements well ahead of the September 21 expiration date to block any rank-and-file opposition amid a growing crisis driven by the global restructuring of the auto industry and the US-Canada trade war. Under these conditions, the bureaucracy is determined to preserve its corporatist relations with the auto bosses and federal and Ontario governments on the basis of Canadian nationalism. Unifor has extended its full-throated support for the Carney government’s retaliatory tariffs against the US and massive rearmament drive.
The negotiations at Ford that set the initial pattern contract and the follow-on deal at GM concluded before the August 21 collapse of trade talks between the Carney government and the Trump administration. Washington’s escalation of the trade war threatens the doubling of the current 25 percent tariff on Canadian auto imports to 50 percent beginning on January 1, 2027, unless negotiations re-start and conclude with terms satisfactory to Trump. Already, statements from Carney showed that US negotiators were targeting the planned production of Super Duty trucks slated for the Oakville Ford plant in a late 2026 start-up and the Silverado currently produced at GM’s Oshawa facility. Any such move would eventually make production at both plants “uneconomical,” said Carney.
Trump’s “America first” program aims to crash the Canadian economy, including what remains of its auto industry, in order to reshore production to the US and subordinate Canada as a vassal state as US imperialism escalates world war. Trump’s agenda of war and dictatorship is bitterly opposed by millions of workers on both sides of the border, but this opposition finds no expression through the trade union bureaucracies. While Unifor champions Canada’s retaliatory tariffs and repeatedly invokes militarist language to describe a supposed “economic war” that Canadian workers should fight hand in hand with their bosses in “Team Canada” against the US, UAW President Shawn Fain has endorsed Trump’s tariffs and trade war as a boon for American workers.
The reality is that “America First” protectionism and “Team Canada” nationalism express the interests of competing imperialist powers, both determined to offload the costs of their conflicts onto the working class across the continent. The Canadian ruling class that Unifor backs does not disagree with Trump’s policies, large swathes of which they have adopted, but only on the fact that his “America first” program endangers the interests of Canadian imperialism.
Unifor and the UAW’s lining up behind their respective ruling classes in the trade war is the logical outcome of their promotion of reactionary Canadian and American nationalism since the 1985 split from the UAW by the Canadian Auto Workers, Unifor’s predecessor, and the defense by both the UAW and Unifor bureaucracies of capitalism.
9. Homeless man dies outside New Zealand government minister’s office
The death prompted an outpouring of angry statements from ordinary people about the country’s worsening social crisis.
A homeless man was found dead on the morning of August 28 outside the Auckland offices of three MPs from New Zealand’s governing National Party. This followed at least three other deaths reported in the past two months of people living on the streets of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
The cause of the latest death has not been reported and the man has not been publicly named. The building outside which he was found, in the affluent suburb of Epsom, houses the electorate offices of Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith and MPs Melissa Lee and Nancy Lu.
According to the Post, a worker at a neighbouring physiotherapy business said homeless people were regularly seen in the area and noted: “There used to be emergency housing on the street. That’s not there anymore.”
Auckland City Mission chief executive Helen Robinson described the death as a “tragedy” and pointed to the lack of services available to homeless people. She told the Post it was “incredibly distressing that this could have been avoided if we had adequate services to respond.”
Charities have reported a sharp increase in homelessness, driven in part by the government’s restrictions on access to emergency housing. Robinson asked: “How will ministers ensure that rough sleepers have genuine access to the services that they need, so that no other people die?”
Goldsmith issued a brief, cynical statement: “This will naturally be an extremely upsetting situation for anyone involved, and it would be inappropriate to politicise it, or to comment further. Our thoughts are with the family of the deceased.”
Goldsmith has been at the forefront of promoting draconian policies that treat homeless people like criminals. On May 14, he announced legislation empowering police to issue “move-on orders” against people for rough sleeping, begging or displaying “behaviour indicating an intent to inhabit a public place.”
10. The fight against the Alternative for Germany demands a fight against capitalism
On Sunday, voters in Saxony-Anhalt will decide whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) will, for the first time, provide the minister-president of a German federal state.
The consequences would be a surge in violence against migrants, Jews and the left, increased police surveillance and repression, a frontal assault on education and culture and the rehabilitation of the Nazi regime. Even the Bauhaus in Dessau, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, would not be safe from the rampage of these far-right barbarians.
How did it come to this? Without answering this question, the advance of the far right in Saxony-Anhalt and throughout Germany cannot be stopped.
The rise of the AfD is a symptom, not the cause, of the problem. It is riding a wave of right-wing sentiment that it did not set in motion but that has deep social roots.
A ruling class that mobilizes hundreds of billions for war and rearmament to make Germany “fit for war” again, after two catastrophic world wars in the 20th century, while robbing millions of workers of their jobs, wages, pensions and social benefits ultimately needs the fascists. This agenda cannot be implemented by democratic means. That is why all the established parties are strengthening the state apparatus, attacking democratic rights and intensifying the crackdown on refugees. In fact, the very same parties now canvassing for votes with the promise of stopping the AfD have paved the way for its rise and are preparing to collaborate with it.
When Donald Trump won the US presidential election for the second time in November 2024, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “He is not a political accident...the coming to power of a second Trump administration represents the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States.” The same applies to Germany and the rise of the AfD.
11. Tornado hits Detroit’s east side, as storms leave 250,000 without power in Michigan
Powerful thunderstorms sweeping across southern Michigan Thursday afternoon and evening spawned the first tornado to hit Detroit since 1997. The storms damaged homes and businesses, leaving more than 300,000 people at least temporarily without power across the state. As of Friday afternoon, 246,000 were still without power.
More than 450,000 people nationwide lost power across a large swath of the US extending from the Dakotas to Virginia, as storms generating winds of up to 75 miles per hour swept east, overwhelming antiquated power grids. Southeast Michigan has been hit by several rounds of severe thunderstorms in recent days, spawning multiple tornadoes.
This is the second major outage in the metro Detroit area this summer. Some 400,000 DTE Energy (Detroit Edison) customers lost power over the July 4 weekend. Three Detroit-area children died of carbon monoxide poisoning from generators their families hooked up after being forced to live without electricity for days.
This follows the climate-driven severe weather that pounded Indiana in mid-August, leaving roughly 375,000 customers regionwide without power, including more than 38,300 homes and businesses in Gary alone. Some waited as long as two weeks for electric service to be restored.
While no deaths or serious injuries in metro Detroit have been reported so far, there were narrow escapes. A massive tree fell on a home on Detroit’s east side with a man and a three-week-old baby inside. According to Local 4 News, the tornado narrowly missed an after-school daycare packed with young children.
A daycare worker described the damage in the area as “surreal.” She said buildings were damaged on either side of the street. “Trees down. Some cars were damaged. It is amazing we did not get touched.”
Thousands of workers at the Stellantis Detroit Assembly Complex, near where the tornado hit, were told to shelter in place while the tornado warning was in effect.
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The service disruptions triggered by increasingly frequent severe weather events have had their greatest impact on poor and working-class residents, who are most likely to live in areas with aging power lines. Those who cannot afford a backup generator face losing a freezer full of food, and those who depend on electrically powered medical equipment can face life-threatening situations.
Prolonged outages are becoming a fact of life for workers in storm-prone areas of the US as the frequency and intensity of severe weather increase, while most power lines remain above ground and therefore highly vulnerable. Despite this, utilities have refused to upgrade infrastructure, as profits are directed instead to stockholders and executives.
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Michigan is hardly alone. According to the same report, the six largest private utilities in the US, from January through September 2024, “collectively increased shutoffs by nearly 21 percent, compared to the same period in 2023, disconnecting power to homes and businesses over 662,000 times — including during the hottest months of 2024’s record-breaking heat.” The six utilities took in $10 billion in profits over those nine months, a 21 percent increase over the same period in 2023. The report added: “Only 1.4 percent of the more than $6.8 billion the utilities spent on shareholder dividends from January through September 2024 would have covered the cost to prevent the more than 662,000 shutoffs they executed during the same nine-month period.”
Brothers and sisters,
More than 1,200 workers at National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario, the largest rail freight car manufacturer on the continent, have been on strike since August 12. They are fighting to abolish the piecework “incentive plan” that helped kill three of their fellow workers—Fraser Cowan, Collin Grayley and Quoc Le—between 2020 and 2022. The United Steelworkers bureaucracy is isolating the strike and starving workers on $425 a week in strike pay while owner Greg Aziz continues to make money from the cars produced for National Steel Car’s own leasing fleet.
In its September 2 statement, the National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee, formed against both management and sellout union bureaucrats, appealed to railroad workers in Canada and the United States to set aside every car marked NSCX, leave it empty and refuse to move it. The Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee endorses this call. Aziz has workers add NSCX cars to customer orders so that his leasing operation can continue generating revenue during the strike. Railroaders can strike directly at this attempt to profit from the isolation of the National Steel Car workers.
We call on railroaders in every yard, terminal and shop: Organize rank-and-file committees to enforce the refusal to handle NSCX cars! Do not wait for authorization from the BLET, SMART-TD or any other apparatus. The NSC workers have issued the appeal themselves. Our responsibility is to answer it with organized action.
The struggle at National Steel Car cuts directly across the national divisions that the corporations, governments and union bureaucracies are trying to impose on workers. The cars built in Hamilton move through a rail network spanning Canada, the United States and Mexico. The corporations organize production and profits across borders. Workers cannot defend jobs, wages or safety by allowing ourselves to be divided at those same borders.
The Trump administration’s trade war and the Canadian government’s retaliatory measures are being used to pit workers against one another. “Buy American,” “Buy Canadian” and “Buy Ontario” all subordinate workers to the corporations and governments in their own country. The USW bureaucracy in Canada has promoted this nationalist program while presenting NDP and other establishment politicians as allies of workers. The corporations use the trade war to threaten jobs and demand concessions in the name of competitiveness, while the union apparatuses block a common struggle by workers on both sides of the border.
National Steel Car workers face the same basic obstacle confronting railroaders in the United States: a union apparatus that works to keep every struggle within limits acceptable to management and the state. In 2023, the USW isolated the National Steel Car strike for 41 days, kept workers on $260 a week in strike pay and then gave them only days to vote on a contract that left piecework intact. The same apparatus is following the same strategy today. Across the Canadian rail industry, workers have encountered the same methods. CPKC signal workers rejected a company offer by 89.2 percent, only to be sent into binding arbitration accepted by the IBEW bureaucracy.
The problem extends across the Canadian labor movement. The leaderships of the USW, Unifor and the Canadian Labour Congress have lined workers up behind “Team Canada,” tying their interests to the Carney government and Canadian corporate competitiveness. Union officials who tell Canadian workers to rally behind retaliatory tariffs play the same role as the US union officials who line railroaders and other workers up behind “America First.” In both countries, the bureaucracy blocks the independent mobilization of workers and channels opposition behind the economic and political program of the ruling class.
Workers in Canada and in the United States need organizations controlled by the rank-and-file and independent of these apparatuses in order to organize a cross-border united struggle.
Railroad workers have used their strategic position before to defend workers outside their own immediate craft or workplace. In 1894, when George Pullman slashed the wages of workers building sleeping cars outside Chicago, Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union called on railroaders not to handle Pullman cars. The boycott spread across the rail system and paralyzed traffic over large sections of the country.
Debs built the ARU in opposition to the old craft brotherhoods, which divided engineer from fireman and brakeman from switchman and preached a “harmony of interests” between labor and capital.
The Pullman boycott showed the power that exists when railroad workers act as part of a single class rather than as isolated crafts. The government answered with injunctions, troops and the jailing of Debs. In prison, Debs studied Marx and emerged a socialist.
SMART-TD’s Summer 2026 article, “The Real Enemy,” dishonestly tries to cloak the bureaucracy in the legacy of Debs to justify their own support for the same forces whom Debs spent his life fighting against.
The article identifies the “group of people with money, power and control,” recounts the Pullman Strike and invokes Debs, but stops at the point where the history demands action. Instead of calling on workers to use their industrial power, it directs them to “vote for the candidates who truly stand with us.”
13. US to expand “force posture” at Australian bases
The US announced on Wednesday that it will “accelerate force posture initiatives at Australian bases,” a euphemism for the expanded stationing of troops and military assets. The declaration was made in the Pentagon’s official readout of a meeting earlier that day between US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles.The readout indicated that Marles had given his assent to the expanded basing. In a press conference afterwards, Marles confirmed that the “force posture initiatives” he had discussed with Hegseth were beyond those already publicly announced, but refused to provide any details whatsoever. There has been only limited media coverage of the announcement, none of it critical or probing.
That is all the more striking given the wide-ranging character of existing US basing arrangements. Hegseth and Marles boasted of those, and of the ever-greater integration of the US and Australian armed forces, in what is a massive military build-up in preparation for war against China.
They drew attention to the fact that US sailors have already begun arriving in Western Australia, where they are to be stationed permanently. The Labor government is undertaking a $8 billion expansion of HMAS Stirling Naval Base near Perth, which will become, in effect, one of the largest US bases adjacent to the Indian Ocean.
Beginning next year, US nuclear-powered submarines will “rotate” through Stirling. More than 1,000 US sailors and military personnel will be housed in Perth, as part of an American contingent that is predicted to number 2,300, including contractors and technicians.
That arrangement is part of the AUKUS pact with the US and the UK, under which Australia is also slated to acquire its own fleet of nuclear-powered submarines in the 2030s.
The expansion extends across the continent.
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Taken together, the existing US basing arrangements already form an interconnected network involving all military domains, with the purpose of the Australian continent serving as both a rear base for war against China, and a launching pad for aggressive military operations throughout the Indo-Pacific.
14. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
Sri Lanka:
To the Pervomaisk City District Court:
Forgive me writing in English as my Ukrainian is still underdeveloped. Having read the verdict against Bogdan Syrotiuk, convicted of treason against Ukraine, I would like to express my dismay and disappointment at the court’s action and at its legal and political logic. I write as a historian of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine and as an opponent of Putin’s regime and the Russian war against Ukraine (such that I have been placed by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a “stop-list” of scholars deemed “Russophobic” and banned from entry into the Russian Federation).
Sadly, the logic of your verdict, though perhaps technically allowable according to Article 111 of the Criminal Code (I am not a legal expert) is a mirror image of the political approach toward dissent by the Putin regime, which has branded Russian critics of the regime and the war as “foreign agents,” as members of “undesirable organizations,” or as treasonous, arresting and sentencing many to prison and forcing many others to flee the country.
I am not affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site or the Socialist Equality Party, nor do I endorse all their positions. But I cannot be silent when a country where I have lived (as a researcher) and care greatly about treats a person’s writings and opinions as sedition or treason. This has all the signs of a “thought crime” that does not call for violence. I strongly believe that ideas and opinions and communications of these, when they do not plan violence, has no place in a democratic society—not in the US (where we have our own threats for free thought and speech), not in Russia (which is no longer democratic), and not in Ukraine, which seeks to be a European country embracing European values and legal norms. What I have been able to learn about the case, mostly from the verdict itself – though it was a former student of mine who alerted me to the case – saddens me deeply.
Sincerely,
Mark Steinberg
Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois
On Sunday, 6 September, at 3 p.m., the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) will hold a rally at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin demanding the immediate release of 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and antiwar campaigner Bogdan Syrotiuk.
On 10 August 2026, he was convicted for “high treason.” The sole “evidence” presented against him consisted of articles he wrote for the World Socialist Web Site opposing war and nationalism and exposing the crimes of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine.
A wave of protest against the verdict is building around the world. In recent weeks, members and supporters of the SGP have distributed leaflets, put up posters and held discussions across Germany to publicize the campaign for Bogdan’s release.
In Berlin, the case is a central issue in the SGP’s campaign for the Berlin state elections. The party links the fight for Bogdan’s release to building a socialist movement against the German government’s war policy.
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The most vivid account of the situation in his home country comes from Ilja, a 22-year-old Ukrainian who fled to Berlin only a few days ago. Kiev, he said, is currently being “very heavily bombed,” with “shopping areas, ordinary markets, residential districts and civilian infrastructure” being destroyed. “It’s not true that only military facilities are being hit.”
Ilja described what mobilization means for young men in Ukraine: “People are simply abducted off the streets. They stop them, beat them and force them into vans for no reason at all.” Not even a disability protects them, he said.
“We are forced to flee our own country, the country where we grew up, where we lived and developed and where we wanted to build our future. We are simply forced to flee because we understand that in two years, we will be nothing but cannon fodder on the battlefield. Everyone gets sent to the front. If you don’t have connections or know anyone in the military apparatus, they can send you anywhere.”
The true numbers of dead and wounded were being concealed, he said: “Every second person is walking around with prosthetics by now. Some have lost their arms, some their legs. They tell at most 20 percent of the truth. So when they report, for example, that 15 or 20 people were killed overnight, that information is false.”
Ilja buried a classmate who had volunteered. His classmate was 19 years old. “Now all our friends are lying in the cemetery.” Of those his age who volunteered, he said, “almost all of them have died. Really, only a few people are left, and even they were very badly wounded.” Anyone who recovers even somewhat is conscripted again and sent back to the front.
At the aluminum plant where Ilja worked until his departure, half the workforce quit within three months because workers were receiving “very little money” and their wages were constantly paid late. Ukraine’s average monthly wage of around €500 is not enough to live on.
Ilja rejected the entire war on principle: “I believe this war should never have happened. It feels as if everything was deliberately staged to, so to speak, tear the Slavic peoples apart.”
He concluded: “We are completely against the Zelensky regime and against the Putin regime. We are for peace. We are for peace across the whole world. We are young people. We want to develop, learn the language and work. War is not our profession.”
More and more young people in Ukraine think as Ilja does. Bogdan has given this resistance a conscious political orientation and a socialist program, which is why he has become a target of the Ukrainian government.
In his statement, Gabriel therefore appealed: “As the working class, we have to stand together and fight for Bogdan’s release. We cannot stand by and watch a man who opposes war and has fought for so much be tortured and, in the worst case, die. We have to fight against this, and every voice counts.”
17. Growing support in Spain for campaign to free jailed Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk
The international campaign for the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison for his political opposition to the NATO-Russia war, is winning growing support among socialist organizations, left-wing publications and antimilitarist groups in Spain.
Rebelión, one of the best-known left-wing news and commentary sites in the Spanish-speaking world, has repeatedly published material defending Syrotiuk. Resumen Latinoamericano, the Argentina-based left-wing news publication with a readership across Latin America and Spain, has taken up the campaign.
Revolutionary Left, Communist Revolutionary Organisation, Spanish Communist Workers' Party, Socialist Newspaper, Marx Spain, and the Valencian antimilitarist collective Grupo Tortuga, have all published statements or reports opposing Syrotiuk’s imprisonment.
These organizations have substantial differences with the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). They oppose Syrotiuk’s imprisonment because a socialist opponent of war has been sentenced to 15 years behind bars based on political articles and speeches calling for the international unity of the Russian and Ukrainian working class.
On September 4, Revolutionary Left published a lengthy statement, “Freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk now!” It described the 15-year sentence as one of the most scandalous examples of the intensifying repression carried out by the fascist Zelensky government amid growing opposition to the war.
It drew attention to the transparently political character of the prosecution, noting that Syrotiuk’s supposed “crime” consisted of writing articles criticizing the war, the Ukrainian government’s authoritarianism and repression, and the state glorification of Stepan Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalist forces that collaborated with Nazi Germany.
It called on workers, trade unions, students, youth organizations, anti-war and anti-imperialist movements and organizations defending democratic freedoms to adopt and publish resolutions demanding his release. “From Izquierda Revolucionaria Internacional,” the organization declared, “we demand the immediate and unconditional release of Bogdan Syrotiuk.”
Two days earlier, on September 2, Diario Socialista published a report, “Ukraine sentences a socialist to 15 years in prison for opposing the war.” Diario Socialista was launched in November 2024 as the official organ of Socialist Movement (Movimiento Socialista), a relatively new left current with its origins in the Basque Country.
Its report stated that the case against Syrotiuk did not rest on any act of espionage, sabotage or military collaboration, but on six articles published by the WSWS. The article’s tweet was viewed more than 21,000 times.
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On August 19, Spain’s Communist Revolutionary Organisation (Organización Comunista Revolucionaria), affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist International, published an appeal, “Ukraine: Marxist Bogdan Syrotiuk sentenced to 15 years in prison—a call for solidarity.” The article stressed that Syrotiuk had consistently condemned the Russian invasion and opposed Russian imperialism, while criticizing the Zelensky government and defending the interests of the working class. It rejected the attempt to equate political opposition to Zelensky with support for Moscow, describing Syrotiuk’s treatment as an example of how political opposition is silenced by branding critics traitors or collaborators.
Grupo Tortuga, a longstanding antimilitarist collective based in Spain’s Valencian Community, has backed the campaign and republished the WSWS statement on Syrotiuk’s conviction. The group is known for its annual reports identifying concealed military expenditure. Its latest calculation for 2025, published in 2026, estimates Spanish military expenditure at €66.7 billion, or approximately 4.1 percent of GDP, more than twice the €33.123 billion in “security and defence” expenditure claimed by the PSOE-Sumar government.
The Spanish Communist Workers’ Party (PCOE), founded in 1973 in a split from the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), has also defended Syrotiuk. The PCE now participates in the PSOE-Sumar government, which back the far-right Zelensky regime. In a statement on X, the PCOE placed Syrotiuk’s imprisonment within the broader repression of the Ukrainian left, writing: “Bogdan Syrotiuk is not the first political prisoner we find in the fascist Ukrainian state.” The statement pointed to the imprisonment of Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich, members of the Communist Youth of Ukraine, whose release the WSWS has called for.
The organisation declared that basic political, associational and free-speech rights in Ukraine had been under attack well before Russia’s direct military intervention in 2022. It referred in particular to the repression in the Donbas and the May 2014 fire at the Trade Unions House in Odessa, in which dozens of anti-Maidan protesters were killed.
On August 27, La Marx España, a tendency with roots in Argentine Morenism, posted a statement saying that it supports what it calls a Ukrainian “war of national liberation,” advocates the military defeat of Russia and vehemently rejects the WSWS analysis of the conflict. But the organization categorically rejected Syrotiuk’s imprisonment. “We do not grant any bourgeois state the right to imprison people for their political positions,” it declared.
The growing support in Spain forms part of an expanding international movement demanding Syrotiuk’s freedom. It stands in sharp contrast to the silence maintained by the major liberal outlets backing the PSOE-Sumar government, which has provided political, financial and military support to the Zelensky government while massively increasing Spain’s military expenditure.
18. 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.
