Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Twenty-five years since the September 11 terrorist attacks
The World Socialist Web Site stated on September 12, 2001, in an analysis published while the fires at ground zero were still burning, “It is the policies pursued by the United States, driven by the strategic and financial interests of the ruling elite, which laid the foundations for the nightmare that unfolded on Tuesday.” The statement noted that “the United States has been bombing one or another Middle Eastern country almost continuously since 1983.”
And the WSWS warned, in a sentence that has defined the two and a half decades since, that “the escalation of US militarism abroad will inevitably be accompanied by intensified attacks on democratic rights at home.” This statement, along with many others, is included in a special exhibit on the record of the WSWS on 9/11, its origins and consequences.
The attack was immediately described as the greatest “failure” of the US intelligence apparatus in the history of the country. Yet despite saturation media coverage, the investigation by the 9/11 Commission and countless congressional hearings, the American people know little more about the organization of this crime today than they did the day after it happened.
Moreover, not a single person was fired, demoted or held in any way responsible or accountable for this disaster. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, several Navy admirals and lower-ranking officers lost their jobs. Nothing of the kind followed in the wake of September 11.
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The Al Qaeda organization was well known to US intelligence agencies. Its founder, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi construction multimillionaire, had been financed by the American CIA as part of its effort to build an anti-Soviet paramilitary force in Afghanistan to provoke the 1979 Soviet invasion. The goal, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Democratic President Jimmy Carter, was “giving the USSR its Vietnam.” It was only after the US mobilization of 700,000 troops in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, most of them based in Saudi Arabia, that bin Laden turned against his American backers.
Whatever the specific elements of the still unexplained conspiracy, the real political significance of the attacks is how they became a turning point in both the foreign and domestic policy of the American government. The “war on terror” became the all-purpose pretext for an unprecedented campaign of international aggression and domestic repression. These measures had long been prepared, and awaited only a suitable pretext, supplied by 9/11.
Within weeks, Congress passed, with the near-unanimous support of Democrats and Republicans, an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It was first invoked by the Bush administration as the basis for invading Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his main base. However, the AUMF was repeatedly invoked as the basis for further military operations in at least 22 countries, including drone strikes and Special Forces attacks from Pakistan to Syria to Libya and across North Africa, by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. It remains in force today, 15 years after the killing of bin Laden. Meanwhile, when it suits the policy of Washington, a Syrian regime clearly linked to Al Qaeda is welcomed as an ally when it agrees to serve US foreign policy goals.
While a separate AUMF was the legal basis for the war in Iraq, the Bush administration cited a nonexistent connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda (in reality bitter enemies) as one basis for obtaining the second war resolution. The other lie was the claim that Iraq was in possession of “weapons of mass destruction” and might supply a nuclear bomb to Al Qaeda for use against the United States. As Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice declared in 2002, dismissing the need for proof that Iraq was a threat to the US: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Domestically, the impact of 9/11 was perhaps even greater. The country was placed on a war footing, with internal military-police measures on a massive scale. Congress passed the Patriot Act by 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to one in the Senate.
A new federal department was created, the Department of Homeland Security, merging 22 agencies and housing the newly established Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has become the spearhead of Trump’s police-state operations. Torture became a standard practice at secret CIA prisons around the world, as well as at the main detention center at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Justice Department memos justified waterboarding prisoners in the name of preventing “another 9/11.”
The Democratic Party was a full participant in the “war on terror,” repeatedly voting to fund Bush’s wars, then continuing and expanding them under Obama, who launched the US-NATO bombing of Libya and US-backed wars in Syria and Yemen. It was Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, who concocted the legal basis for drone missile assassinations, including of US citizens without due process, and spearheaded the persecution of courageous whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who exposed US war crimes and illegal mass surveillance.
The corporate media were enthusiastic cheerleaders for the attacks on international law and the Constitution. Every shred of media independence was discarded, with the New York Times, the principal mouthpiece of Democratic Party liberalism, leading the way.
The role of the World Socialist Web Site stood in the sharpest contrast to the subservience of the corporate media. From the day of the attacks, the WSWS denounced them as reactionary acts of mass murder, while warning that they would be seized on by US imperialism as a means of carrying out long-planned military attacks and the destruction of democratic rights at home.
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The 25 years which have elapsed since 9/11 have discredited the propaganda lies and demonstrated the deepening crisis of American imperialism. The Afghanistan war resulted in a debacle, with more than 100,000 Afghan dead, as well as 6,000 Americans, in a 20-year conflict that ended with the return of the Taliban to power. The war in Iraq was an even greater bloodbath, with an estimated 1 million Iraqi dead, along with 7,000 Americans. The US is now at war with Iran, while Saudi Arabia, which supplied most of the attackers and actually supported some of them financially, enjoys even closer ties with Washington.
Its response to 9/11 revealed the absence of any support for democracy within the American ruling class. Since then, the intensification of internal police powers—surveillance, police killings, mass detentions—has proceeded by leaps and bounds. Were another such attack to take place—or be staged, on the model of Hitler’s Reichstag fire—the response of the capitalist state would be even more unrestrained. There would be troops on the streets, mass arrests, and full-scale police-state methods.
But the working class has learned bitter lessons as well. There is no support for the “forever wars” conducted by Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again. Few take seriously the pro-war propaganda of the military-intelligence apparatus and its media mouthpieces. The police murder of George Floyd produced massive public protests in 2020. The restored Trump administration has faced the largest opposition demonstrations in US history, in the “No Kings” protests. Workers are increasingly turning to methods of class struggle, where they immediately encounter the opposition of the trade union apparatus.
The task now is to draw the political lessons of the past quarter century—and more—and build a powerful mass movement of the working class against capitalism, based on a political break from the corporate parties, Democratic and Republican alike, and advancing a revolutionary socialist program.
2. The Socialism 2026 conference and the pro-war politics of the Democratic Socialists of America
The Socialism 2026 conference was held September 4-7 in Chicago organized by Haymarket Books and prominently endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Its panels promised to discuss the fight for “revolutionary socialism,” “anti-imperialism” and anti-colonialism.
Most of the roughly 190 sessions dealt with the concerns of the middle-class pseudo-left: racial identity politics, gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality. But the central political axis of the conference was expressed in its panels on foreign policy, which presented support for the US-NATO war with Russia and the US conflict with China as “anti-imperialism.” Behind the invocations of “anti-imperialism” and “socialism” stood the pro-war foreign policy of the Democratic Party.
At these panels, speakers denounced Russian and Chinese “imperialism,” whitewashed the Ukrainian government’s granting of state honors to perpetrators of the Holocaust, attacked China’s zero-COVID policy and echoed the Trump administration’s talking points about China’s “concentration camps” for the Uyghur minority.
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The context of the conference was a shift to the left among broad sections of workers and young people, triggered by the eruption of imperialist war and the imposition of dictatorship all over the world. This change has led to an increase in the membership of the DSA, which announced in July that it had passed 120,000 members.
These layers were overwhelmingly directed to the larger panels, where [Hasan] Piker and [Amy] Goodman drew audiences in the hundreds. Jokes, banter and pop-culture references gave these sessions the feeling of a stand-up comedy night, while the political discussion was devoted to electoral maneuvers.
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Never addressed in these sessions was the fact that the DSA backs and endorses the rapidly escalating US war with Russia. Its two members of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, voted for the $40 billion Ukraine war package in May 2022 and the $61 billion package in April 2024.
This is the politics of the Democratic Party. The DSA is a faction of that party, and the line laid down in Chicago’s breakout rooms is the line of the party that funded the war.
The DSA is the political descendant of Max Shachtman, who broke with Trotskyism in order to make his peace with American imperialism. In 1940, with Europe at war, Shachtman and James Burnham led a minority out of the Socialist Workers Party, the American Trotskyist party, refusing to defend the Soviet Union against imperialist attack.
Leon Trotsky answered them in In Defense of Marxism, writing that the minority “is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency” that had capitulated to bourgeois public opinion. He insisted the theoretical capitulation would be followed by a political one.
Shachtman dissolved his Independent Socialist League into the Socialist Party in 1958, backed the CIA’s invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and championed the war in Vietnam. He steered his followers into the Democratic Party under the strategy of “realignment,” and his acolytes ended up in the neoconservative movement.
His protégé Michael Harrington founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1973 and merged it with the New American Movement in 1982 to form the DSA. Two other Shachtman disciples ran Washington’s instruments of regime change: Carl Gershman as president of the National Endowment for Democracy and Tom Kahn as director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department.
In his Letters from Afar of 1917, Lenin called the world war a great stage manager that put every political tendency in its place. The four days in Chicago were a demonstration of it. Workers and young people entering into struggle must be warned about the warmongers and reactionaries who staff the upper echelons of the Democratic Socialists of America and determine its politics.
3. Trump promises $5,000 checks if Republicans win midterm elections, claims Congress may not be needed
President Donald Trump opened the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, Texas Wednesday night with a nearly two-hour speech centered on himself, attacks on his Democratic opponents and repeated warnings of an alleged communist takeover of the United States. He concluded with an extraordinary promise: if Republicans retain control of both the House of Representatives and Senate in the November elections, he would give every adult American citizen a $5,000 payment.*****
Trump’s cash bribe raises a basic constitutional question. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution provides that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Trump has therefore proposed a payment potentially costing more than $1 trillion while simultaneously asserting that the executive branch could distribute the money without congressional authorization.
A bribe of $5,000 closely recalls the economic promises made by Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, the fictional presidential candidate at the center of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. The story depicts a fictionalized version of the US in which the fascist Windrip wins the 1936 presidential election in part by promising a $5,000 yearly stipend to American citizens.
Both demagogues, Windrip and Trump, are promising a large direct payment to Americans while at the same time presenting themselves, and their loyalists, as the only people who can restore the country’s “greatness.”
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The Republican convention continued Thursday in Dallas, with Trump scheduled to deliver another address on the second and final night of the event. One of the most striking moments of the first night, however, came not from a Republican but from a Democratic senator.
Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman appeared in a prerecorded video to introduce Republican Senator Dave McCormick, standing in front of a steel mill. Fetterman described McCormick as “a great American” and said he would work with Trump to “fight and defend the steel way of life.” He presented himself as a “common-sense Democrat” and said, “I’m always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life.”
McCormick thanked Fetterman for his “friendship” and “courage” following the video. The White House subsequently promoted the appearance on social media, describing Fetterman, in Internet slang popular among the extreme right, as “Based John Fetterman.” Fetterman later reiterated that he remains a Democrat and said he would continue to support the Democratic caucus if it wins a Senate majority.
Fetterman’s appearance is particularly notable given the support he received from the pseudo-left four years ago in his campaign. Fetterman had previously endorsed Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and during the 2022 Senate campaign Sanders returned the favor by actively soliciting contributions for Fetterman. Jacobin, the unofficial mouthpiece of the Democratic Socialists of America, published multiple favorable articles portraying him as a left-populist candidate and, in one headline, “the kind of political communicator the Left needs.”
Four years later, Fetterman was appearing at Trump’s Republican convention to introduce a Republican senator and denounce socialism. His message from the Republican convention was not a call for opposition to the administration, but a declaration that Democrats and Republicans could work together around Trump’s trade war agenda.
4. Germany’s 2027 budget wages war on 2 fronts: Abroad and at home
The budget pairs the largest military spending increase since Hitler with the deepest cuts to pensions, healthcare and social services ever seen.
5. In interview, German Foreign Minister Wadephul takes the war course against Russia to the extreme
An interview that Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul (CDU) gave to the Bild newspaper on September 8 underscores the aggressiveness with which the German government is pushing forward its war course against Russia.
6. Turkish government escalates its offensive of wage suppression and austerity
While minimum wage and public-sector pay increases in Türkiye remain tied to artificially low inflation targets, interest payments and military spending are soaring.
7. Ex-president Zuma’s son, Duduzane, auditions in front of South African big business
Duduzane Zuma’s boast that his father repeatedly “held back” revolt amounted to a personal political pledge. He was assuring his audience that, should the MKP enter government, he could perform the same function.
8. Two British ports turn away lifeboats with rescued migrants, amid far-right blockades
The obscene pushback of the lifeboats took place as Britain’s main far-right party, Reform UK, was holding its conference. The occasion saw party leader Nigel Farage and National Rally President Jordan Bardella to end small-boat arrivals from France "forever."
9. APWU bureaucracy enables Trump’s attack on mail voting
The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) bureaucracy is enabling the Trump administration’s anti-democratic attack on mail-in voting by refusing to mobilize the workers whose compliance the operation requires. Postal workers should organize independently of the bureaucracy, refuse to carry out the new ballot verification and rejection procedures, and defend any worker victimized for doing so.
For the second time in six years, Trump is attempting to steal a national election. After his defeat in 2020, he tried to stop the certification of Biden’s victory, culminating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol by far-right militias and other Trump supporters. He is now targeting mail-in voting, which accounted for about 30 percent of ballots cast in 2024, calling mail-in ballots “inherently corrupt” and saying, “Hopefully there will be no mail-in ballots.”
Trump’s March 31 executive order directed USPS to impose new conditions on federal ballot mail. USPS published a proposed rule on June 2 and a final rule on August 26. State and local election officials must submit voter and barcode data to a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal, then present outgoing federal ballot mail for verification before USPS will accept it. Mailings that fail the new requirements can be rejected and returned. The rule gives that campaign a federal choke point over ballots state officials have already decided to send.
In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the APWU warned that the final USPS rule could produce “catastrophic wholesale non-delivery” of mail ballots to hundreds of thousands of voters.
The courts have repeatedly ruled against the legality of the order. On September 4, US District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction against the order’s mandatory provisions for the midterms, and on Thursday the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction.
The administration has also asked the Supreme Court to lift it. That emergency application remains pending, with the government filing its reply Thursday as ballots are already being mailed in several states.
It is not outside the realm of possibility that the Supreme Court, stacked with a 6-3 right-wing majority, will rule in favor of Trump. It already lifted a lower court’s injunction in late August. But even if the Supreme Court rules against the administration, Trump is not playing by a normal constitutional framework. It is possible the fascistic president will attempt to enforce the executive order anyway.
The issue will be decided in struggle. Trump’s ability to sabotage the election and restrict the right to vote can be countered only through a mass movement, led and centered in the working class, against dictatorship.
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The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee, formed in 2023 to oppose corporate-style restructuring, is fighting to build a network of committees uniting workers across the postal system.
The very fact that Trump is back in the White House after the January 6 coup attempt shows that the existing political institutions, including both the courts and the Democratic Party, are incapable and unwilling to defend democratic rights. It falls to the working class, the vast majority to which both parties are hostile and which is the ultimate target of Trump’s plans, to play the leading role in the fight against dictatorship.
The US Post Office, first established in 1775 under Benjamin Franklin, was a major democratic achievement of the American Revolution, guaranteeing everyone access to information and the ability to take part in political life.
The use of the USPS to sabotage the midterm elections, by contrast, comes as Postmaster General David Steiner and Congress are preparing to carry out the deepest cuts in the agency’s history. Steiner has established January, the period following the midterms and the holiday peak season, to begin measures such as slashing working hours, consolidating routes, expanding subcontracting and other cuts. More extreme measures, such as cutting back from six-day-a-week delivery, abolishing the Universal Service Obligation and closing post offices, are also being considered.
The fight to defend the post office and democratic rights requires workers to prepare themselves to act independently of the union apparatus. The union officials cannot be counted upon to lead this struggle because they themselves run the unions as bureaucratic dictatorships integrated with management, routinely flouting or ignoring the democratic will of the membership.
The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU), for example, are moving contract talks to binding arbitration, denying workers the right to vote on their contract and freeing management’s hands to begin cuts.
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As the political establishment has shifted toward Trump, sections of the union apparatus have shifted with it, backing his economic nationalism or cultivating direct relations with his administration while turning to lawsuits when their own institutional interests are threatened.
The United Auto Workers leadership has embraced Trump’s tariff policy, declaring in August that it will “always support strategic tariffs,” including Section 232 tariffs on automobiles and heavy trucks. Teamsters officials have thanked Trump for particular tariffs and pledged to continue working with his administration on trade policy. International Longshoremen’s Association President Harold Daggett has called Trump a “hero” to the union and credited him with helping secure its contract settlement.
Postal workers should build rank-and-file committees and appeal to letter carriers, mail handlers, rural carriers, other federal workers and workers throughout private industry to defend anyone punished for refusing to participate in the destruction of voting rights. Management retaliation should be answered with demonstrations, workplace action and preparations for broader industrial and political mobilization. The defense of postal workers who refuse to help obstruct lawful ballot mail can become the starting point for a wider working-class defense of the right to vote against authoritarian rule.
10. University speakouts in Australia and New Zealand demand freedom for Bogdan Syrotiuk
“I think that Bogdan has definitely been wronged. He has just written his own truth, and the truth is not being accepted by Zelensky. After the Russian invasion, democracy has basically collapsed in Ukraine.”
11. Rubio advances continental Plan Colombia 2.0 in Latin America tour
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio carried out a whirlwind tour of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru from September 8 to 10, signing agreements that convert Washington’s year-old campaign of extrajudicial killings at sea into a permanent structure of military, economic and police integration across South America’s Pacific coast.
Rubio stated the purpose of the tour in an essay published as the tour began, titled “A Hemisphere that Delivers.” Extra-hemispheric actors, “specifically from China,” enter the region with promises masking predatory practices, opaque contracts and unsustainable debt; when critical national assets fall under another nation’s control, countries lose the right to determine their own destiny.
This was written weeks after the Pentagon took an equity stake in Venezuela’s oilfields, following the January abduction of that country’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Washington’s objection is not to foreign control of national assets. It is to anyone else’s.
The same essay makes the transaction explicit: after the August 10 earthquake that killed at least 331 people in Colombia, the administration provided over $27 million in emergency assistance, and “in turn” Colombia adopted a new stance on border security and immigration. Disaster relief is stated openly as leverage.
In Barranquilla on Tuesday, President Abelardo de la Espriella asked Rubio to fund what he calls the “21st Century Patriot Plan.” The name is a deliberate reference. It is Plan Colombia 2.0, and it is being extended to the entire continent.
Plan Colombia was signed in 1999 by Bill Clinton and Andrés Pastrana as a counter-narcotics program. Washington poured in $2.8 billion worth of military aid between 2000 and 2005, later raised to $4.5 billion by the Pentagon, alongside aerial spraying of glyphosate over peasant crops and a vast expansion of the Colombian armed forces.
Cocaine production was never suppressed. What was built was a counterinsurgency machine aimed at the rural and urban poor. Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace found in April that at least 7,837 civilians were murdered by the armed forces between 1990 and 2016 and dressed up as guerrillas killed in combat—the “false positives”—to inflate body counts in exchange for promotions and leave. A total of between 450,000 and 800,000 people have died in the conflict and 8 million have been displaced.
De la Espriella’s proposal revives and revamps this operation with investments in drones, radar, aircraft, helicopters, air defense, cyberdefense, special forces and troop deployments and the reactivation of aerial fumigation. Rubio received it favorably.
Two memoranda were signed outright in Colombia, and neither concerns drugs. One covers critical minerals and rare earths, aimed at positioning Colombia inside US battery and high tech supply chains. The other covers civil nuclear cooperation. The two governments also opened talks on a joint military base, and De la Espriella confirmed Colombia has joined the Shield of the Americas alliance established by the Trump administration, whose regional headquarters will sit in Medellín.
Rubio then traveled to Quito, Ecuador on Wednesday. There he announced the modernization of the bilateral extradition treaty, while a “safe third country” agreement is near completion under which Washington would deport asylum seekers to Ecuador, replicating the arrangement with El Salvador. He designated the gang Los Tiguerones a foreign terrorist organization, pledged a 110-foot Coast Guard cutter and five interceptor vessels, and promoted investment by Google, Palantir and SpaceX—all contractors deeply embedded in the US military-intelligence apparatus.
Washington also sanctioned seven Ecuadorians for taking bribes from gangs: a former prisons director, several judges and a former assembly member. Every one is a former official.
The sanctions were an attempt at covering up the pervasive corruption and drug ties of the people Rubio was meeting, which expose any pretense that US military operations and flagrant electoral interference to help install these governments are aimed at combating narco-trafficking.
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Rubio’s tour coincided with the sixth US operation against Ecuadorian vessels in under two weeks. The method has changed: rather than incinerating boats with drones, troops now board them, detain the crews and sink the vessels. This is not humanitarian restraint, however. Boarding requires soldiers, and soldiers require basing and immunity.
Fishing families in Manta have contradicted every official account, insisting the “floating refueling stations” were their own boats, dedicated to fishing, not moving drugs. What is being rehearsed at sea is openly being planned for land operations, including the permanent US deployment along the Pacific coast, with local forces as auxiliaries.
This apparatus is not aimed at cartels. It is aimed at the working class of the entire hemisphere.
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Rubio travelled to set up the necessary political apparatus to defend bourgeois rule against opposition from below and advance the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts US dominance over the hemisphere as a theater of great-power confrontation with China. Latin America is being integrated as a front in an emerging third world war.
Rubio’s final stop was Lima, where he met President Keiko Fujimori—the daughter of the dictator in the 1990s who fused emergency powers, death squads and mass privatization.
The character of these partners disposes of the claim that any of this protects Americans or anyone from drugs. A lawyer for paramilitaries tied to organized crime, a banana dynasty whose containers carry cocaine and the corrupt daughter of a former dictator are being armed by Washington to bomb workers, peasants and fishermen.
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There is no way out of this within capitalist politics. Only the unification of workers across the hemisphere in an independent political struggle against imperialism and the profit system can stop the emerging third world war and the turn to fascism.
12. 10,000 New Zealand public servants hold nationwide strike
About 10,000 public servants in New Zealand took part in a half-day strike on September 9 against the National Party-led government’s moves to drive down wages. The government also intends to cut about 8,700 jobs across government departments—14 percent of the core public sector workforce.
Demonstrations were held in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and many other towns and cities. It was the biggest strike since last October’s “mega strike” by over 100,000 teachers and healthcare workers.
The strike involved workers from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the Ministry for Ethnic Communities (MEC).
The combined action was a significant expression of rising anger over the government’s austerity measures. The ruling elite is starving essential public services in order to funnel more money to the rich and to boost the military budget in preparation for war.
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The union leadership is preparing to sell these workers out. Its position is two-faced. PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons told a strike rally in Wellington: “We need bargaining-table offers that keep pace with the cost of living increases facing public servants.”
Later in the day she contradicted herself, telling Radio NZ (RNZ) that if the government made “the same offer that health and education workers got of 2.5 percent [in the first year] and 2 percent [in the second year] and lump sum payments and clear commitments to work constructively with the union, I think that would cut it.”
In other words, the PSA will pressure public servants to accept the real wage cuts that the unions imposed following last October’s strike. The PSA pushed through a below-inflation deal for 12,300 allied health workers in February.
13. Scientific study sheds new light on human evolution
A new study shows that modern humans (Homo sapiens) inherited DNA from two previously unidentified extinct populations for which there is currently no known fossil evidence. The remarkable discovery was made possible by the ability of scientists to identify complete human genomes and examine them in exquisite detail using advanced computational tools.
The results deepen our scientific understanding of how interconnected and complex human evolution was.
The research, led by Priya Moorjani’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley in the US, with graduate student Yulin Zhang and Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher Arjun Biddanda as co-first authors, was published in the journal Science on July 30, 2026.
It builds on more than a decade of prior genomic research establishing that the modern human genome contains DNA inherited from Neanderthals and Denisovans, our closest known extinct relatives, following landmark 2010 studies that first sequenced their genomes and proved ancient interbreeding had occurred.
Neanderthal are well known as the stockier cousin of modern humans. They lived in Europe and went extinct about 40,000 years ago.
Once thought to have disappeared due to lack of intelligence compared to Homo sapiens which outcompeted and even killed them, Neanderthal are now understood to have been highly complex socially and culturally. They were as technologically advanced as Homo sapiens of a similar age, and there is evidence that Neanderthal practiced burial rights and decorative crafts.
It is now believed that, rather than simply being wiped out by Homo sapiens, Neanderthal were outcompeted but also assimilated into the modern human population through interbreeding.
Denisovans, our closest relatives who lived in Asia, died out about 30,000 years ago. They too did not vanish completely, leaving traces of their DNA in modern humans, particularly those living in the Pacific Islands today.
The new study extends these established findings by showing this pattern of ancient mixing was even more extensive than previously known.
Analyzing genomes from 503 people worldwide, the researchers identified two previously unknown archaic hominin lineages that had interbred with the ancestors of modern humans.
The first, which the team calls a “ghost” lineage, split from the human line about 800,000 years ago and interbred with human ancestors in Africa at some point more than 50,000 years ago—before the major migration of Homo sapiens out of the continent. This ghost DNA is present in every population studied, comprising roughly 0.5 to 1 percent of the genome of every living person, comparable in scale to Neanderthal ancestry.
Yulin Zhang emphasized in a UC Berkeley news release that the ghost lineage “is in all modern humans, not only in Africans.”
The second, so-called “super-archaic” lineage that diverged some 1.8 million years ago, never interbred with humans directly. Instead, it mixed with Denisovans in Eurasia, who later passed a trace of that ancient DNA on to modern humans through further interbreeding, primarily detectable today in the genomes of modern Pacific Islander populations. Altogether, roughly 2 percent of the modern human genome now appears to derive from archaic hominins previously unknown to science.
The finding has been received with considerable interest, alongside calls for careful, ongoing verification.
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The human genome is a tangle of many family trees carrying within it a complex history of ancient mixing. The researchers built the computer program TRACE to comb through this genetic tangle and pick out the pieces that signal ancient lineages.
The method was first tested against the known Neanderthal genome and Denisovan-linked regions, successfully rediscovering both, before being applied to search for entirely new, unknown lineages.
The study exemplifies how advances in computing power and genomic sequencing have transformed evolutionary science over the past two decades. Where earlier researchers were confined to whatever bones happened to survive and be discovered, geneticists can now look at hundreds of human genomes at the same time.
Through this remarkable capability scientists have inferred the existence, approximate age, and population history of two extinct human relatives despite possessing not a single fragment of their physical remains.
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The findings also add a new layer to the “Out of Africa” model of human dispersal.
From the 1980s until the 2010s, this model competed with a rival “multiregional” theory, which held that modern humans evolved simultaneously across Africa, Europe and Asia from earlier populations, rather than solely in Africa. Genetic evidence, beginning with the 1987 “Mitochondrial Eve” study, gradually settled this debate in favour of Out of Africa, which is now the accepted model.
The standard theory holds that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and later migrated into Eurasia around 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, encountering Neanderthals and Denisovans there.
The new study shows that even before that migration occurred, the population that would eventually leave Africa had already absorbed DNA from an unrelated, unknown hominin group within the continent itself.
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Taken together with two decades of fossil discoveries—the diminutive Homo floresiensis found in Indonesia in 2003, the genetically defined Denisovans identified in Siberia in 2010, and Homo naledi and Homo luzonensis unearthed in South Africa and the Philippines respectively—this research reinforces a fundamental shift in how scientists understand human evolution.
The old image of a single evolutionary ladder, with modern humans as its final, inevitable rung, has been replaced by something far more complex: a landscape in which multiple related human populations lived side by side for hundreds of thousands of years, repeatedly meeting, mixing and exchanging genes across vast stretches of time and geography.
14. Workers react to death of Montreal Airport ramp worker Oscar Robayo
Thirty-nine-year-old ramp worker Oscar Robayo was killed while performing a routine pushback of a passenger jet at Montreal Trudeau Airport (YUL) on August 24. Testimonies from several workers to the World Socialist Web Site show that Oscar was crushed by the landing gear of the plane because his employer, Samsic Assistance Canada, failed to provide him with an extension cable that would have allowed him to stand a safe distance from the aircraft.
The competition between subcontractors providing ground handling and other services at Canada’s airports is ruthless. Highly exploited workers face gruelling schedules to ensure flights leave on time, and dangerous conditions due to broken equipment and the systematic violation of safety procedures.
This system of profit maximization for operators like the multinational Samsic, which employs well over 100,000 people in 27 countries, is overseen by the federal Liberal government. In 2021, the Liberals entrenched the decades-old system of contract flipping, which allows airport operators to sever contracts at will and award a new contract to the lowest bidder, with a cosmetic reform of section 47.3 of the Canada Labour Code.
A Samsic worker in Montreal told the WSWS:
I would like to say a good 90 percent of our equipment is broken in some way (missing windows, doors, seatbelts), the brakes don’t work, the steering wheels are either rough or too loose and all of our equipment constantly needs charging.
Asked whether he had witnessed accidents on the job like the one that killed Oscar, he responded, “No other accidents during pushbacks, just close calls of the same manner that Oscar passed.” He added,
Third-party contracting is terrible, we are constantly overworked and in a rush to push planes out. Safety is often ignored and the company tries to cut corners whenever they can. We have been complaining for months and used to joke that it would take someone to die for things to change … working at the airport is only dangerous when SOPs (standard operating procedures) are not followed and they rarely are at YUL with the third-party companies.
15. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Kenya:
Morocco:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Tunisia:
Zimbabwe:
Belgium:
Prison warders strike over staff shortages and overcrowding
France:
Firefighters strike for increases in staffing and resources
Greece:
Thousands demonstrate in Thessaloniki against New Democracy government
Italy:
Rail workers’ stoppage in protest over poor pay and conditions
Domestic appliance workers strike against factory closures and job losses
Netherlands:
Transport strike and demonstration against government attacks on benefits and pensions
United Kingdom:
Aerospace workers at firm in Leicester begin indefinite walkout
Academic and administrative staff at Caledonian University Glasgow, Scotland, hold stoppage over job cuts
Further stoppages by holiday camp safety officers in Bognor Regis over pay and conditions
Middle East
Iran:
Ongoing protests by workers impacted by the country’s dire economic crisis
Iraq:
Protest and strike threat by oil production workers over terms and conditions
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
