Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Is the world on the brink of nuclear war?
Russia declared this week that it is ready to use nuclear weapons if NATO moves to blockade Kaliningrad, the Russian territory on the Baltic between Poland and Lithuania. The warning was issued through Russian embassies in Belgium, Britain and Ireland on September 28 and 29, and in a diplomatic note to NATO.
Stating that NATO was preparing an “air and naval blockade” of Kaliningrad, the Russian embassy in Ireland stated, “There should be no mistake — Russia would be ready to use all its arsenal, including nuclear weapons, to defend its territory if NATO countries try to isolate Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country.”
NATO spokesperson Allison Hart responded on Tuesday, stating, “NATO is a defensive alliance and none of our activities or exercises pose a risk to any part of Russia” and denounced “the threat of force, including any irresponsible nuclear rhetoric.”
This statement is flatly false, as the NATO alliance is arming and guiding Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia. NBC News reported in October 2025 that the Trump administration would provide Kiev intelligence to help it “strike at oil and gas facilities inside Russia.” On July 30 the European Commission paid Kiev €3.47 billion, including funding for “long-range jet-powered drones.” On the night of September 19–20, Ukraine launched its largest drone attack of the war on Moscow and the surrounding region. On August 28, Ukrainian forces struck a Tu-95 strategic bomber, part of Russia’s nuclear forces, at Engels air base.
Moreover, NATO’s “activities and exercises” are directed at Kaliningrad itself. In mid-August, according to a Western military source cited by Reuters, dozens of NATO aircraft flew an unannounced operation around the enclave. The operation showed they could cut off its radio and radar links and its air defenses. Since January, 14 European states have treated Russian-linked tankers that change flags or switch off their transponders as “stateless vessels” open to boarding, and Sweden seized one in March.
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The logic is one of relentless escalation. The European powers have tied their policy to a Ukrainian victory. “Putin needs to feel that war is coming to Russia itself,” EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius declared Wednesday.
Ukraine’s military position, meanwhile, is deteriorating. In July it intercepted just 29 of 195 Russian ballistic missiles, and it enters the winter without the air defenses it needs to protect its power grid. Each further setback will be met by further escalation: the introduction of ground forces, or the opening of new fronts, including Kaliningrad.
The stakes for Moscow could hardly be higher. Kaliningrad is to the Baltic what Crimea is to the Black Sea. It is the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet and the base of Russia’s nuclear-capable Iskander missiles. Since Finland and Sweden joined NATO, it has been surrounded by the alliance on land and sea.
In one respect the exclave is more sensitive than Crimea. Its status has been internationally recognized since the Potsdam Conference of 1945 transferred it to the Soviet Union. Action against Kaliningrad would be an attack on territory that no government disputes is Russian. Russia’s nuclear doctrine permits a nuclear response to conventional aggression that creates “a critical threat” to its territorial integrity.
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A blockade of Russia may be “just below the level of war in European calculation,” but by international law it is an act of war. The definition of aggression adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 includes “the blockade of the ports or coasts of a State by the armed forces of another State.”
Given the risks, it is staggering that there are no calls for negotiations and no talk of a settlement. The only debate in the European capitals is over how far and how fast to escalate.
This is the recklessness of imperialist powers beset by a deepening social, economic and political crisis, pressing the war forward with no regard for where it leads. The Putin regime, which speaks for the capitalist oligarchy and is incapable of making any genuine appeal to the international working class, answers with nuclear threats.
The contrast with 1962 is stark. When the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink over Soviet missiles in Cuba, the danger was openly acknowledged. President John F. Kennedy announced the crisis on national television on October 22, and for the following week the world followed every development. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev exchanged letters, and the two governments, fearing the consequences, negotiated through back channels until they found a way to step back. Today there is neither acknowledgment nor negotiation.
There is a vast chasm between the scale of the danger and the public’s awareness of it. Millions sense that something is deeply wrong but cannot believe their governments would gamble with nuclear war. To the extent the danger is presented at all in the media, it appears as the inexplicable menace of the Russians, Putin’s “nuclear rhetoric” and “hybrid warfare.” It is never presented as a response to what the NATO powers are doing.
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The war in Ukraine, provoked by three decades of NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, is part of a struggle for global dominance being waged on every continent. More than four years into the war, a new and catastrophic stage is being prepared behind the backs of the population. The working class, which will pay the price, must be alerted. The governments cutting jobs and social programs to finance rearmament are the same ones leading toward a war that could turn nuclear.
The fight against war must be connected to the class struggle that is already developing. The same crisis that is driving the ruling class toward war is driving workers into struggle against layoffs, against the destruction of social programs and against attacks on democratic rights.
The working class is the only social force capable of stopping it, but it can do so only if it understands what is being prepared and fights consciously against the war and the capitalist system that produces it. The first task is to break the silence on the danger. We urge our readers to circulate this statement as widely as possible.
Nearly 1,000 armed private security guards are being deployed into United States Postal Service facilities in the final weeks before the November 3 midterm elections. Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Raw Story that the union had been notified of about 39,000 work hours per week for 972 full-time armed guards across 54 USPS facilities, including 18 that previously did not have them.
Asked to explain the purpose of the operation, Brian Benson, a Postal Inspection Service spokesman in Denver, was unusually blunt. The guards, he said, are deployed “to provide security and act as a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the mailstream.”
The guards arrived at Colorado’s largest sorting complex less than a week after the Supreme Court refused to allow the Trump administration to enforce a new Postal Service rule imposing restrictions on mail ballots before the midterm elections, and less than two weeks before more than 4 million Colorado ballots were to be mailed out.
The Inspection Service insists the deployment is part of a “multi-year” security plan unrelated to any specific threat. But when reporters asked to see that plan, Benson told them to file an open-records request.
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While there is no indication that the contract guards have been ordered to handle ballots or enforce election rules, their deployment nevertheless puts a new layer of private armed security inside facilities that will process millions of ballots. Meanwhile, the administration is pursuing other measures to expand federal involvement in election administration.
A postal worker and member of the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee in Springfield, Massachusetts, told the WSWS that empty rooms in the plant are under construction and are rumored to be “offices for the security employees and/or rooms to pat people down.”
They said that “the APWU has been extremely hesitant to talk about it with us and claimed to not have any solid information even though an article about it was published by Raw Story. … Apparently, they have done next to nothing to demand answers about this for the past two months.
“There is no clarification on the training and credentials of these individuals, who they answer to, how to report misconduct, or how they will interact with postal employees,” the worker said. A 2022 Inspector General audit found that 30 percent of sampled guards had worked without the required security clearances, and auditors could not verify required training for selected guards.
The worker continued: “In our location, management routinely violates employees’ Weingarten Rights with no accountability or pushback from the local branch of the APWU. It is very likely that postal management will use security to walk people out of the building without union representation as a form of discipline.”
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The expansion of private contract security comes after a long-term reduction in the Postal Police workforce. By 2023, only about 370 Postal Police Officers protected 33 postal properties nationwide.
In 2023, contract guards were generally unarmed. By July 2026, USPS was sharply expanding the use of armed contract security, with Raw Story reporting new armed coverage at 18 facilities. By September, the Postal Service acknowledged that both armed and unarmed contract guards were being deployed to “key facilities” around the country to augment Postal Police Officers.
The trade union apparatus has long since ceased to be an instrument of workers’ struggle and has become an instrument of class collaboration—disciplining the workforce, channeling its grievances into procedures that go nowhere and preventing any independent organization of the workers. In the face of major attacks on the right to vote, as well historic cuts to USPS being prepared early next year, the APWU and other unions have diverted workers into dead-end letter-writing campaigns to Congress.
The Democrats’ answer to the attack on the franchise is to wring their hands and file court lawsuits. They are more terrified of a mass mobilization of the working class than they are of a Trump dictatorship. At the same time, they fully agreed with the need for austerity at USPS in House and Senate hearings earlier this year.
The only force that can stop this is the working class itself, organized independently of both corporate parties and their enforcers in the trade unions. In its September 13 statement, “Postal Workers: Refuse to withhold ballots! Defend mail-in voting and the post office!” the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee called on postal workers to make clear in advance that they would not participate in any attempt to interfere with the delivery of ballots:
“Our answer is already given: We will not do it. We refuse to carry out any order to withhold, delay or ‘verify’ mail-in ballots. We will not be the instrument of the disenfranchisement of the American people.”
The statement concluded that this fight cannot remain confined to the Postal Service: “We must link up with workers in every city and neighborhood where we make deliveries—federal workers, teachers, industrial workers—to build a unified class movement against dictatorship.”
3. Australia signs security pact with Ukraine, backs NATO war against Russia
While in New York last week for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a far-reaching security pact with Ukraine and announced another military contribution to the US-NATO war against Russia.
Beyond the immediate significance of those commitments, Albanese was signalling his support for the broader transformation of the UN meeting into a festival of militarist reaction.
The leaders of the European powers frothingly denounced Moscow and deepened their support for a war that is aimed at inflicting a decisive defeat on Russia. US President Donald Trump repeated his genocidal threat to “annihilate” Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bragged about his government’s onslaught on the Palestinians and its rampage throughout the Middle East.
Albanese responded by boasting of his “very good relationship” with Trump. He posted a selfie with Trump, just hours after the latter had again declared that the US military might drive Iran, a country of more than 90 million people, “into hell with no chance of survival.” The unprovoked US war that is already underway is completely illegal, and such threats of mass destruction by a head of state are themselves a war crime.
“Always good to catch up with @POTUS,” Albanese captioned the picture of himself and Trump grinning together.
Two days later, during a press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Albanese piously intoned: “This is an issue for the world, because if a large, more powerful country in Russia is allowed to profit from breaking the international rules of law with its illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine, then that sets a bad precedent for the entire world.”
The Australian media reported those comments uncritically, including with reference to Albanese’s “emotional” tone while delivering them, without a hint of the staggering hypocrisy.
4. US government charges ICE victim Garces Perez, refuses medical care
Eight days after shooting Wilber Garces Perez in the back, the US government has charged him with one count of assaulting, resisting, interfering with and impeding a federal officer. The government denied him bond during a hearing on Wednesday.
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The prosecution of Garces Perez unfolds amid a broader offensive against the ability of immigrants to challenge their imprisonment and against judges who object to the government’s defiance of court orders.
On Wednesday, the Trump Justice Department filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Minnesota federal judges who spoke to the New York Times about Operation Metro Surge. The complaint targets Patrick J. Schiltz, John R. Tunheim and five judges who spoke anonymously. It demands an investigation and their recusal from pending and future cases involving the Department of Homeland Security.
At a Wednesday press conference, Attorney General Todd Blanche denounced the judges’ comments as “overtly political” and evidence of “obvious bias.”
Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee who keeps signed photographs of conservative Supreme Court justices John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in his chambers, said the government’s conduct “created a grave threat to the rule of law.” He described the events in his court from January through March of this year as virtually unprecedented since the Civil War.
The Justice Department’s complaint claims that any violations of court orders by DHS were the judges’ fault. Its complaint blames their legal rulings for a flood of habeas petitions and the resulting strain on government resources, and asserts that the administration’s noncompliance was a consequence of judicial error.
Schiltz’s defense of the courts expresses the concerns of a section of the ruling establishment over the erosion of its own institutions. The appearance of equality before the law is essential to sustaining the fiction that the capitalist state and its institutions, including the courts and the police, stand above classes. Open executive defiance of judicial orders threatens to upend this charade.
The Trump administration is asserting that even these institutional restraints are intolerable. Judges who insist that the government obey court orders are themselves targeted for investigation. The aim is to subordinate the judiciary to the executive as part of the establishment of a presidential dictatorship.
5. Part 1: Democratic Party runs more than 60 military-intelligence candidates for Congress
Eight years ago, the WSWS first exposed and analyzed the remarkable and unprecedented influx of military-intelligence operatives into the Democratic Party, with dozens of former military officers, intelligence agents and State Department and National Security Council officials seeking Democratic congressional nominations.
Eleven of these candidates won seats in the House of Representatives, and in the three elections that have followed, in 2020, 2022 and 2024, that number has held roughly constant, as new candidates from a military-intelligence background have replaced those who have moved on, either to higher office, reelection defeat or retirement.
In the 2026 elections, the role of former military, intelligence and civilian national security officials within the House Democratic caucus is likely to vastly increase. A staggering 67 Democratic congressional candidates with a national security background, more than double the number who ran in any of the last four elections, are on the November ballot.
These 67 range from former flag officers (so-called because they rank high enough to have their own personal flags), who oversaw tens of thousands of troops, to commanders of combat units in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, to military intelligence agents, involved in the most sensitive secret operations, to former State Department and White House aides. A smaller number were rank-and-file soldiers, many of these are career soldiers with multiple combat deployments, and there are a few whose role in the military was medical only.
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If, as appears likely based on pre-election polling, the Democratic Party makes significant gains in November, the military-intelligence “caucus” inside the Democratic delegation could double or triple in size. They will vastly outnumber the relative handful of self-proclaimed “democratic socialists” to whom the corporate media has given so much attention, and whom pseudo-left groups cite as evidence that the Democratic Party can be pushed to the left.
Regardless of the outcome, the sheer number of military-intelligence candidates is staggering. There are 184 Democratic House members seeking reelection, including 10 from the military-intelligence apparatus. That means that 251 seats are open for Democratic challengers. Of these, 57 are being contested by candidates whose major credential is their national security experience, nearly one quarter. Of the seats that are genuinely competitive, the proportion is even higher.
6. Pacific defense ministers prepare to suppress civil unrest
The 11th South Pacific Defense Ministers’ Meeting (SPDMM) was held in Fiji from September 22 to 24. It included representatives of the regional imperialist powers Australia, New Zealand and France, alongside Chile, Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Tonga. They were joined by observers from Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Desna Solofa, Acting Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) also attended.
The SPDMM describes itself as “the premier defense ministerial dialogue in the South Pacific, enhancing cooperation and driving Pacific-led responses to shared regional security challenges.” Behind token statements about the need for “joint responses” to climate disasters, humanitarian emergencies and transnational crime, the organization’s real agenda is strengthening the web of imperialist alliances preparing for a US-led war against China.
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A key decision at the 2025 SPDMM was to transform the Pacific Response Group (PRG), a regional military disaster response group formed in 2004 ostensibly to develop a more coordinated response to natural crises, into a taskforce that could conduct “stabilization operations” for Pacific nations to deal with civil unrest.
The imperialist powers anticipate that soaring social inequality and economic breakdown—intensified by the US-Israeli war against Iran—will produce social explosions across the Pacific. In 2024, riots erupted in PNG over poverty, and France deployed troops to suppress an uprising by Kanak youth in New Caledonia.
The aim is to create a mobile military force, alongside the Australian-led Pacific Policing Initiative, that can intervene rapidly anywhere in the region. Expanding the remit of the PRG to deal with civil unrest topped the agenda at this year’s SPDMM.
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Many Pacific countries, including Naoero (formally Nauru), the Solomon Islands and Kiribati, do not want to alienate Beijing as it provides significant development aid and loans. Increasingly, however, they face demands from Washington, backed by Australia and New Zealand, for complete and unwavering alignment with their war plans.
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“Pacific-led” security is fraudulently deployed by Canberra and Wellington to embed their own neocolonial domination over the region, which they regard as their own “backyard,” and counter any Chinese influence. The 2000 Australian Defense White Paper enunciated an explicit interventionist doctrine laying the basis for military interventions to “foster the stability, integrity and cohesion of our immediate neighborhood.”
One thorny issue concerns the legal immunity necessary for military personnel deployed to other countries in the region. According to JHOPS, Pacific sovereignty would purportedly be safeguarded by the principle that deployments “would only be triggered by a formal request for assistance by a member.”
Such “requests” are however easily manufactured in the heat of a crisis, particularly given the level of political and military interference across the Pacific from Washington, Canberra and Wellington.
There is no shortage of precedents for military interventions to enforce colonial domination, including the French military-police crackdown used to suppress the New Caledonia uprising. Australia and New Zealand have repeatedly dispatched troops to Pacific nations under the banners of “peacekeeping” and “restoring order”—including deployments to East Timor, Tonga and the Solomon Islands. The latter country was effectively occupied by Australia and NZ from 2003 to 2017.
The fresh military preparations take place against a backdrop of escalating social crises in every Pacific nation, involving deepening poverty, inequality and health disasters directly connected to the global capitalist crisis. The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, combined with the Trump administration’s shutdown of the USAID program and withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), have severely impacted dependent Pacific nations.
According to the WHO, PNG now has the fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the Asia-Pacific region, followed by Fiji. The Fiji government this month formally declared a national HIV emergency. Health Minister Dr. Atonio Lalabalavu confirmed that estimates indicated that one in every 60 adults in Fiji is living with HIV, connected with an epidemic of widespread drug use. Transmission between mothers and babies is on the rise, with 18 babies dying in the past year.
Major struggles will inevitably erupt as the imperialist powers and the local ruling elites turn to increasingly authoritarian measures to impose the full burden of the economic and social crisis. Working people in Australia, New Zealand and the wider Pacific must oppose the escalating neocolonial militarist operations and fight for the international unity of the working class across the Asia-Pacific.
7. Mamdani’s counterterrorism chief denounces “far-left terrorism”
At a September 9 press conference on security preparations for the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism Rebecca Weiner declared “far-left terrorism” a serious threat. Standing beside her as she spoke was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the most prominent elected member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The “socialist” mayor raised no objection.
Weiner claimed that the terrorist threat had geographically decentralized and diversified ideologically since 2001. She cited “a proliferation of threats coming from conspiracy theories, grievances, nihilistic violence, far-left, far-right, antigovernment, all of those things.” The designation of the “far left” as an object of surveillance was a political statement by the most powerful intelligence officer in the NYPD.
Weiner, an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, was personally responsible for coordinating police intelligence activities during the brutal police assault on Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment protest in April 2024. Following the line of Democratic Mayor Eric Adams and the Biden administration, she justified the crackdown by claiming that the protests were the work of “outside agitators”—the same McCarthyite slander deployed against every anti-war student movement since the 1960s.
Weiner is right at home in Mamdani’s NYPD, run by billionaire heiress and arch-Zionist Jessica Tisch. The mayor’s silence on Weiner’s comments leaves no doubt as to his endorsement of the program she laid out. The ruling class is alarmed by the growth of left-wing and anti-war sentiment among workers and youth, and the Mamdani administration is taking up the task of policing the growth of this left-wing radicalization to defend the capitalist state.
The DSA mayor was elected last year by over a million people driven by anger over soaring rents, record Wall Street bonuses, the threat of fascist dictatorship, war and genocide. Mamdani’s first acts as mayor were directed not against the corporate-financial oligarchy but at reassuring the capitalist elite of his loyalty to the profit system.
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Over the past two and a half years, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza has intensified, spread to the West Bank, and metastasized into a broader imperialist war across the Middle East, including a criminal war of aggression against Iran. Trump has declared that the United States and Israel will “clean out” the Palestinian population. The protest movement’s existing leadership, rooted in the middle class, has offered no way forward. Its strategy of appeals to the conscience of the ruling class and its political representatives was, and remains, a dead end.
Genocide, fascism and imperialist war cannot be opposed by pressuring the ruling class and its representatives in university administrations, the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy. That perspective leads, with iron logic, to Mamdani: a mayor who falsely claims to be a socialist, but who designates left-wing protesters as a threat. Students and young people looking for a way to fight must instead turn to the developing struggles of the working class.
8. A girl dies of measles in the Peruvian Amazon
The 16-year-old girl who died belonged to the evangelical Christian community of Alto Monte, in Ramón Castilla Province, which has become a focal point of transmission. Religious opposition to vaccination within the community has been identified as one obstacle to immunization. But Loreto regional health director Percy Vargas has stated that religious practices alone do not explain the outbreak, emphasizing a broader social responsibility for disease prevention and the importance of vaccination as measles spreads through the region.
Peru’s immunization programs suffer from longstanding structural problems, compounded by deficient decentralization and previous health crises. Infectious-disease specialist Dr. Juan Celis told Expreso that the Amazon contains pockets of native communities with low vaccination rates.
Another major obstacle is the region’s inadequate transportation and communications network. MINSA apparently does not maintain its own fleet of seaplanes or a radio network capable of reaching many isolated settlements. In the Amazon, rivers are the principal transportation routes, and tracking the geographical spread of measles therefore requires close attention to the river networks along which people travel.
Malnutrition represents a further risk. Measles can be substantially more dangerous among people suffering from chronic malnutrition and anemia, and Loreto has high rates of both.
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The outbreak has also reached healthcare facilities in Lima. In August, the Ministry of Health reported an outbreak among workers at Casimiro Ulloa Hospital, prompting strengthened isolation, surveillance and infection-control measures in public and private hospitals. Crowded urban environments provide favorable conditions for transmission of a disease that spreads directly from person to person.
The distribution of infections is not uniform. Cases are concentrated in specific pockets, particularly extremely poor communities located far from healthcare facilities. Peru has approximately 1.125 million unvaccinated children.
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The resurgence of measles is not confined to Peru. In the Americas, Peru has the fourth-highest reported number of cases, behind Mexico with 12,495, Guatemala with 6,655 and the United States with 3,659. Peru had recorded approximately 2,400 as of September 27.
With a population roughly one-tenth that of the United States, Peru’s caseload is equivalent, on a population-adjusted basis, to some 24,000 cases in the US—more than six times the number reported there.
That the comparison is unfavorable to Peru does not mean the United States is well protected. Under the phony banner of “Make America Healthy Again,” Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ordered investigations into reported post-vaccination adverse events and a review of the childhood vaccination schedule. He has overseen the reduction of staffing at the CDC by nearly a third and publicly promoted false claims critical of vaccines. The result is the worst US outbreak since 1991, with Pennsylvania the hardest hit.
The crisis extends far beyond the Americas. Bangladesh has reported more than 210,000 suspected cases and over 1,100 deaths since March, overwhelmingly among children, while India has reported 26,607 cases. Infections have also been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and across Europe. The United Kingdom lost its measles-elimination status in February 2026.
The World Health Organization reported that 14.3 million infants received no measles vaccine at all in 2024, and that global first-dose coverage stood at only 84 percent, leaving every region short of the levels required for elimination.
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The measles epidemic exposes a fundamental truth: under capitalism, the lives of the working class and poorest and most geographically isolated populations are expendable. Defending the right to healthcare requires the independent political mobilization of the working class in Peru and internationally, on a socialist program that subordinates production and the allocation of social resources to human need rather than to private profit and military expenditure.
Carney chose his words carefully. He stressed that an American attack was not his government’s expected scenario. But the fact that a Canadian prime minister considers it necessary to prepare for the possibility that the United States—Canada’s closest military ally for over eight decades and overwhelmingly its most important economic partner—could resort to force speaks to the historic breakdown of relations between North America’s two imperialist powers.
10. Congo Ebola epidemic passes 8,000 cases and nears 4,000 deaths as attacks on health workers mount
The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s National Institute of Public Health, established by ordinance in March 2023, recorded 8,116 confirmed cases of Ebola and 3,924 confirmed deaths as of September 27, the 135th day of the epidemic, across 63 of 167 health zones in seven provinces.
The bulletin for September 26 reported 78 new confirmed cases against 43 the day before, and 49 deaths against 19. Thirty-four of the dead had never reached a treatment center.
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“The outbreak is not shrinking; it is moving,” observed Anthony Kergosien, emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), on September 18.
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The World Health Organization gave its own assessment of the Ebola crisis on Tuesday. Dr. Janet Diaz of its Health Emergencies Programme told reporters in Geneva that many people are still dying at home or in their communities because they cannot reach a health facility in time, and put this down to delays in seeking care and to difficulties of access and referral. Placing a positive spin on the grave issues, she noted that treatment capacity has grown from a handful of beds at the start of the outbreak to more than 1,600 across 50 centers, she said, and nearly 400 health workers have been trained. However, oxygen, which she called decisive for the survival of the severely ill, remains unavailable or unreliable in many facilities.
None of this was unknown to the governments that gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly last week.
On September 23, the United States convened the foreign ministers of the world’s largest economies in New York to discuss stopping Ebola in the Congo. The Japanese foreign ministry records that the meeting opened at 3:10 p.m. and lasted about an hour. It produced roughly $700 million in fresh commitments, bringing the total pledged since the outbreak was declared to about $2.9 billion, of which the American share is $886 million.
Two days later, in the same building, those same governments refused to adopt a political declaration on pandemic preparedness. The document was not binding. It obliged nobody to spend anything. It was blocked all the same.
Erica Schwartz, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the session the text contained “divisive ideologies lacking definitional consensus” and did not say which. An early draft seen by the New York Times shows that Washington had asked to strike out the words “equity” and “solidarity,” and the commitment to “universal access to sexual and reproductive health care.” The European Union blocked it over intellectual property, objecting to a paragraph reaffirming the 2001 Doha Declaration, which holds that patent rights should be read in a manner that supports the right of states to protect public health.
The declaration they would not sign reports a $15 billion annual gap in preparedness financing, praises a WHO emergency fund that has received $5.4 million this year and is nearly empty, and commits governments to delivering vaccines within 100 days of a threat. The Congo is at day 135.
An hour of speeches about defeating Ebola were followed, 48 hours later, by a refusal to sign a statement that would have cost nothing, because it used the word equity and because it touched on patents and royalties.
That sequence is obscene, and it is also entirely consistent with capitalist medicine for profit. What was refused in New York was not money, which had already been found. It was the principle that a Congolese life has the same claim on the world’s medicine as any other. “Equity” was struck out because it implies an entitlement. The Doha language was struck out because it implies that a patent might one day be overridden to save a dying population.
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The capacity to end this epidemic and prevent the next exists now. But the current effort is organized around what can be taken out of the ground of eastern Congo rather than around the people who live above it. Until the pharmaceutical industry and the laboratories are taken out of private hands, and the resources now committed to extraction and to war turned toward the medical and sanitary infrastructure the Congolese population has been denied, every epidemic of this kind will end as this one is being conducted: not contained and not counted.
11. Judge denies bail, continues detention of anti-Zionist Hasidic father in bid to deport him to Israel
An immigration judge in New York City on Wednesday denied bond to Yehonatan Ovadia, a 35-year-old father of five from Rockland County who has been held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since August 28. Ovadia, an Israeli citizen, was taken into custody when he appeared for an immigration court proceeding in Manhattan and remains detained in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, while the Trump administration is seeking his deportation to Israel.
Ovadia’s detention is a retaliatory political attack on an anti-Zionist Jewish religious teacher whose opposition to the Israeli state and its genocidal war against Palestinians arises from his deeply held religious convictions. His case exposes the fraudulent charge of “antisemitism” against outspoken opponents of Zionism and the Gaza genocide.
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At Wednesday’s hearing, the government identified Israel as the country to which it intends to remove Ovadia, according to Chris Godshall-Bennet, one of his attorneys. This prospect is especially vindictive given the administration seeks to expel a Jewish opponent of Zionism to the very state whose political foundations and military crimes he has publicly condemned.
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has explicitly made Ovadia’s political views central to its case. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a DHS spokesperson declared, “In violation of our nation’s laws, he overstayed his welcome and refused to depart. He will receive due process and remain in ICE custody pending the outcome of his immigration proceedings.”
The department added that residence in the US is “a privilege to be granted a visa or green card” and asserted that the administration had acted within its authority against “any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews, and steals property.” These allegations are completely made up by Trump’s DHS, since Ovadia has not done any of these things.
On Wednesday evening, attorney Eric Lee rejected the effort to depict anti-Zionist Judaism as antisemitism, saying, “The detention of Yehonatan proves the absurdity of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Democrats and Republicans alike have attempted to denounce opponents of Israel as anti-Jewish, but here Trump has detained a rabbi through the High Holidays for his attendance at an anti-Israel protest three years ago. It is necessary to mobilize the working class against the escalating attack on free speech.”
The federal lawsuit brought by Lee and Ovadia’s other lawyers argues that the administration has taken an official position favoring one religious tendency within Judaism while punishing a follower of another. The government’s action, the lawyers wrote, amounts to preferring “one religious position within Judaism and [penalizing] an adherent of another.”
That formulation identifies the central constitutional issue. The state is not merely enforcing an immigration technicality. It is using discretionary immigration powers to punish a religious teacher for professing anti-Zionist Jewish beliefs and publicly opposing a mass atrocity.
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The facts of this case expose the slander by the White House, Democrats and Republicans and corporate news media, who have all mounted a three-year, non-stop campaign to conflate the mass protests around the world in defense of Palestinian rights and against the Gaza genocide as “antisemitism.”
Workers at the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Monmouth, Illinois are speaking out over deadly conditions inside the facility following the September 14 death of 44-year-old Congolese immigrant Patou Mpinda. Smithfield, the world’s largest pork processor, is owned by the Hong Kong-based WH Group. Its Monmouth plant employs approximately 1,600 workers and slaughters an estimated 10,000 hogs per day.
Mpinda was killed while performing maintenance on machinery at approximately 2:30 a.m. Coworkers told the World Socialist Web Site that he had been assigned to work alone on a machine that required at least a two-person maintenance team or safety observer. According to workers at the plant, Mpinda was strangled after his sweater became caught in the machine and was pulled around his neck.
Around 100 workers walked out shortly afterward. Day-shift workers received a text message at about 5:30 a.m. announcing only a “late start.” When they arrived at approximately 7:30 a.m., hundreds of workers were gathered in the lunchroom, many learning only then that Mpinda had been killed. Workers described coworkers crying and confronting plant management, demanding, “Listen to your people! Why are we here? We shouldn’t be working!” After workers were told that production would resume, approximately 100 left the plant. The action was documented by workers on social media.
The walkout at Smithfield is part of a broader re-emergence of the class struggle in the United States and internationally, as workers are driven into conflict with the giant corporations by increasingly intolerable conditions of work and life.
In March, approximately 3,800 workers at the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado struck for nearly a month over wages, safety conditions and company retaliation, in the first strike at a US beef slaughterhouse in four decades.
In August, Tyson Foods abruptly closed its beef slaughterhouse in Joslin, Illinois, eliminating approximately 2,500 jobs with virtually no advance notice. Workers responded with protests demanding that the plant remain open and that Tyson provide full compensation and benefits to those thrown out of work.
Immigrant workers are playing a prominent role in these struggles, exposing attempts to scapegoat immigrants and pointing to the international dimensions of the struggles of the working class. A substantial portion of the Smithfield workforce consists of French-speaking immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo; African immigrant workers were among those who led the walkout. Across the US animal slaughtering and processing industry, 42 percent of workers are foreign-born, more than twice the national average.
The logic of these struggles requires independent rank-and-file committees, uniting workers across national and racial boundaries across the country and the world, to coordinate action over safety, jobs and the defense of immigrant workers.
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While Smithfield is being left off the hook for injuries and deaths at the facility, the immigrant workforce of the region is being viciously targeted by ICE.
In April, ICE agents arrested eight workers at two Davenport restaurants without advance notice to local police. Federal detention records also show 45 ICE detention stays at the Scott County Jail in Davenport between August 2024 and August 2026, with nearly all ending in removal.
ICE maintains a “hold room” at its nearby Rock Island office, with federal records associating at least 322 detentions with the site. Nearby Muscatine County Jail is under contract to house ICE detainees, an arrangement that has already generated at least five federal lawsuits.
Records from East Moline show that outside law-enforcement agencies searched the city’s network of license-plate cameras 146 times for immigration-related purposes in May 2025 alone, including searches explicitly labeled “ICE,” “ICE warrant” and “Immigration Enforcement.”
The impact on the region’s food-sector workforce has become serious enough that in 2025 the Chicago Region Food System Fund awarded the Quad Cities immigrant-support nonprofit Akwaaba QC $25,000 in emergency funding for workers affected by heightened ICE policing, detention and deportation. The fund said the sudden removal of workers was disrupting the food system and leaving workers and their families afraid even to leave their homes.
Under such conditions, the action by the immigrant workers in Smithfield not only showed tremendous courage. They raise the emergence of an independent movement of the working class defending democratic and social rights.
Organizing rank-and-file committees at Monmouth and throughout the meatpacking industry would give workers a means to act collectively over safety and jobs, defend immigrant coworkers against persecution, and link their struggles with workers confronting the same corporations and conditions elsewhere in the United States and internationally.
13. Australia: ACT Labor government slashes school budgets across Canberra
Public schools across the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) face budget reductions for 2027, as the territory’s Labor government presses ahead with a “needs-based” funding overhaul that is, in reality, a zero-sum redistribution of grossly inadequate resources.
Data obtained by the Canberra Times reveals that 58 of the territory’s 94 public schools will see their funding fall, with 37 facing cuts greater than 5 percent. The figures expose a far more sweeping assault than the Education Directorate initially admitted. Last month, the directorate claimed just one college and 18 schools would face significant cuts.
The cuts are being imposed through a new Student Resource Allocation (SRA) model—a centralized funding system the directorate has labelled a “generational shift” away from school autonomy. In practice, it is a mechanism for rationing scarcity and pitting schools against one another.
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The specialist schools, which enroll students with the highest levels of disability, appear to be losing the most funding. An Education Directorate spokesperson claimed an additional $7 million would be allocated across specialist schools above their SRA funding, insisting that “no specialist school will have less funding than in 2026.” But this is an admission that the model itself is so destructive it cannot even be applied to the most vulnerable students without emergency top-ups, while mainstream schools with high-needs students receive no equivalent aid.
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Educators, parents and students must take matters into their own hands. They must build their own organizations—rank-and-file committees in schools, independent of the trade union apparatus. These committees would fight for an end to all cuts, the full restoration of learning support assistant positions, a massive increase in public education spending, and an end to the billions poured into corporate subsidies, war preparations and handouts to private and religious schools.
Through the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the rank-and-file educators network, and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), educators can link their struggle with those of their counterparts across Australia and around the world. The fight for public education is inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist system itself—a system that subordinates all human needs, including the education of children, to the profit demands of big business and the plunge into war.
14. Two years of JVP/NPP rule in Sri Lanka
It is now two years since the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Liberation Front)/National People's Power (JVP/NPP) came to power in Sri Lanka. On September 21, 2024, JVP/NPP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the presidential election with roughly 42 percent of the vote—a more than 12-fold increase from the 3.1 percent he had polled in the previous presidential contest in 2019. In the subsequent parliamentary election, held two months later in mid-November, the JVP/NPP, which had held just three seats in the outgoing parliament, captured a more than two-thirds majority.
Two days before the presidential election, the World Socialist Web Site denounced the JVP/NPP presidential campaign as “a trap for the Sri Lankan working class.” The JVP, it warned, was “a capitalist party, steeped in Sinhala chauvinism, and bitterly hostile to the working class” that had “long ago abandoned its socialist pretensions and over the past three decades ... completely integrated itself into the political establishment.”
Just two days after the election, on September 23, 2024, the WSWS warned: “Trading on its image as an ‘outsider,’ the JVP made limited promises of increased social spending, while railing against the manifest corruption of the traditional political elite…
“All of this was utterly disingenuous. The JVP is publicly committed to working within ‘the parameters’ of the IMF bailout negotiated by [former president] Wickremesinghe.”
The political analysis and warnings made by the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) have been starkly vindicated during the past two years. Jettisoning its election promises, the JVP/NPP government has ruthlessly escalated International Monetary Fund-dictated austerity, aligned itself with US imperialism and its allies, and unleashed state repression against workers and students who have increasingly come into struggle against the government’s attacks on their living conditions and cuts to education and other public services.
The JVP/NPP got elected by exploiting mass popular anger against the island’s traditional parties—the United National Party (UNP), Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), their now larger offshoots, respectively the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), and the Tamil and Muslim bourgeois parties. All these parties, either by heading successive governments or supporting them, have attacked the social and democratic rights of the island’s workers and toilers for decades.
Amid an unprecedented crisis of Sri Lanka capitalism and the collapse of popular support for its traditional governing parties, substantial sections of the ruling class turned to the JVP/NPP, which had never before held office, calculating that it could best enforce the socially incendiary austerity dictates of the IMF.
Two years earlier in 2022, bourgeois rule in Sri Lanka had been roiled by a mass uprising of workers, youth and rural poor, fueled by the unbearable economic and social conditions triggered by the Covid pandemic, the NATO-instigated war on Russia and the government’s default on the national debt. After more than three months of mass protests and strikes, President Gotabaya Rajapakse was forced to resign and flee the country.
The JVP/NPP proved—from the standpoint of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and world imperialism—its fitness for higher office by the role it played in derailing and suppressing the 2022 uprising. Working in concert with the main big business opposition party, the SJB, and with the assistance of the fake-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) and union bureaucracies, it politically harnessed the mass movement to the existing social and political order, calling for an interim capitalist government based on the cabal of right-wing parties in parliament.
When the ruling class moved to impose the inveterate right-winger and pro-US imperialist stooge Ranil Wickremesinghe as interim president by a vote of the very MPs whose sacking the masses had been demanding, the JVP/NPP helped legitimize this anti-democratic maneuver by standing Dissanayake as a candidate.
Taking advantage of the confusion among working people over the speed and ease with which their “victory” over the hated Rajapakse had been stolen from them, Wickremesinghe moved quickly to use repression to clear the streets and to negotiate, as the opposition had been demanding, an IMF “bailout.”
But the lull proved very temporary. With Wickremesinghe and his government facing mounting popular opposition and still facing the challenge of imposing the bulk of the spending cuts, tax increases, and privatization measures demanded by the IMF, powerful sections of the ruling class came to view the bringing to power of the JVP/NPP as their least-worst option in ramming through savage austerity and further integrating Colombo with the predatory agenda of US imperialism and its principal South Asian ally, India.
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Immediately after coming to power, the Dissanayake government jettisoned its election promise to renegotiate the IMF bailout agreement and instead pledged to global capital that it would implement it in full.
The budgets of the past two years, presented by President Dissanayake in his capacity as Finance Minister, have marked a dramatic intensification of the war on working people's living conditions.
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However, opposition to IMF austerity and its JVP/NPP state enforcers continues to grow. In the recent period, thousands of farmers have held protests demanding a higher guaranteed paddy price, subsidies and other facilities for cultivation. Early in September, around 5,000 university teachers engaged in a two-day strike, and there have been strikes and protests by railway and Sevanagala Sugar factory workers and by students opposing the government’s education cuts.
As a result of its record of ruthless assault on social and democratic rights of the working people, youth and rural poor, the JVP/NPP government is facing growing popular anger. According to the latest Verité Research “Mood of the Nation” poll, the government’s approval rating has sharply dropped to roughly 50 percent in July, down from a post-election high of 65 percent last February.
In an attempt to reverse the erosion of its support among workers and the rural poor the JVP/NPP has started a series of public meetings to mark the second anniversary of its coming to power. By the end of October, Dissanayake is to have addressed meetings under the slogan, “Two years of our government—Prosperous nation” in every one of the country’s 25 districts.
Unable to point to any improvement in the living conditions of the masses, Dissanayake is doubling-down on the JVP/NPP’s attempts to blame the crisis of Sri Lankan and world capitalism on the “corruption” of the handful of elite families who since independence have led the now deeply discredited traditional governing parties. Prior to the coming to power of the JVP/NPP, Dissanayake thunders, “Sri Lanka operated as a ‘Black State’ ,” but now this is supposedly changing because of the government’s “war on corruption” and enforcement of the “rule of law.”
According to World Bank estimates, close to 22 percent of the population is mired in poverty, while 10 percent of the population lives just above the poverty line. About 39 percent of households have inadequate diets, while nearly one-third of children under five suffer from malnutrition. Public sector wages have declined by 33 percent since 2022. A recent research report, based on International Labour Organization data, placed Sri Lanka 120th among 130 countries with lowest minimum wages, below Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
The bourgeoisie, for its part, can celebrate Sri Lanka as a “prosperous nation” under JVP/NPP rule. Top companies are continuously recording higher profits. John Keells Holdings, the country’s largest listed conglomerate, closed the financial year in March 2026 with a 143 percent increase in pre-tax profit. Commercial Bank, Sri Lanka’s largest private bank, reported a June-quarter 2026 profit of 17.49 billion rupees, up nearly 8 percent year-on-year.
The opposition parties all support the IMF austerity program. Their calls “not to put burdens on the masses” are a transparent fraud.
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The 2022 uprising revealed the enormous social power of the working class, which increasingly came to the fore and dominated the mass movement that toppled Rajapakse. But its fundamental lesson is the urgency of building a revolutionary leadership in the working class based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution to spearhead the fight to establish the working class’ political independence and hegemony, so it can rally all the oppressed against Sri Lankan capitalism and, in conjunction with workers around the globe, world imperialism.
Only through the development of such a vanguard party, can the working class impose its own socialist solution to the capitalist crisis—one that rejects its subordination to the profit imperatives of domestic and global capital.
The program and perspective on which to build such a party and mobilize the working class and oppressed toilers was elaborated in the main resolution, “The strategy and program of the SEP in the fight against the JVP government and capitalism,” unanimously adopted at the party’s 4th national congress last month.
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The SEP proposes the formation of action committees, democratically elected by workers in every workplace, plantation, and major economic center, as the basis for mobilizing workers' social power, opposing IMF austerity and building workers’ independent political strength.
The SEP emphasizes that there is no progressive solution for the working people within the framework of the capitalist system or the nation-state. We call for the establishment of a Democratic and Socialist Congress of Workers and Rural Masses based on independent action committees of workers and rural poor to formulate a program of socialist policies and develop the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government.
The SEP stresses the international character of the struggle, noting that Sri Lankan workers must unite with the international working class by coordinating their action committees with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and build it as the coordinating centre of a global fightback by workers.
The Congress was held amid a deepening political and economic crisis of global capitalism, marked by unfolding world war pushed by the imperialist powers and moves by the ruling class to impose austerity and dictatorial forms of rule, as well as the resurgence of class struggle globally.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka, the youth and student organization of the Socialist Equality Party, will hold a Zoom meeting on Tuesday, October 13, at 7:00 p.m., as part of the international campaign to secure the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Trotskyist socialist imprisoned in Ukraine.
The meeting will be conducted in Sinhala and translated live into Tamil. Register for the meeting here.
Bogdan Syrotiuk is a founding member and leading figure of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), a Trotskyist organization operating in Ukraine. On April 25, 2024, the fascistic Zelensky government had him arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on fabricated charges of “high treason under martial law.” The state claimed he was an agent of the Russian government—a libel for which, in more than two years of detention, not a shred of evidence was ever produced.
17. Stand up for the freedom of Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The World Socialist Web Site publishes the the text of an open letter to the leadership of the Left Party. It was sent on September 30 to Ines Schwerdtner and Luigi Pantisano, co-chairs of the Left Party, as well as to Heidi Reichinnek and Sören Pellmann, co-chairs of the Left Party parliamentary group in the Bundestag.
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.
