The head of SOUTHCOM, Admiral Craig Faller, told Pentagon reporters Wednesday that U.S. imperialism’s “competitive edge [in the region]…is eroding, particularly when it comes to the Chinese influence.”

An eyewitness has come forward to contradict official claims that Michael Reinoehl, a left-wing opponent of police violence who was killed in Lacey, Washington on September 3, died in a shootout with police.

The boycott by professional athletes of scheduled games and practices expanded on Thursday for the second day. The boycotts began yesterday with professional basketball players in protest against police violence and racism, in particular, the brutal shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Sunday.

The comparison between teachers and meatpacking workers is highly significant and must be taken as a sharp warning by teachers and all education workers.

The Trump administration is stepping up its unconstitutional moves toward dictatorial rule, tear gassing antipolice violence protesters in Portland, Oregon and announcing the deployment of federal police to three more cities—Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee—in addition to Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The ruling class, having worked out its strategic response to the pandemic in February and March, has carried out an unrelenting assault on workers ever since. The working class must respond with equal determination and ruthlessness. It must fight for the socialist overturn of the capitalist system, which threatens the lives of millions of workers and youth around the world.

This weekend, hundreds of thousands of workers and youth will protest the police murder of George Floyd, not only in the United States, but in Australia, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Brazil, South Korea and many other countries.

On Monday evening, President Donald Trump delivered a fascistic speech from the Rose Garden in which he announced the deployment of military forces in the capital and an escalation of police repression to end nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd one week ago.

The Pentagon deployed a new, smaller nuclear warhead aboard the ballistic missile submarine USS Tennessee as it sailed into the Atlantic last month in the midst of the spiraling crisis with Iran. The weapon, known as the W76-2 warhead, has an explosive yield of roughly five kilotons, a third of the destructive power of the “Little Boy” bomb that claimed the lives of some 140,000 people in Hiroshima in 1945.

New fires are expected to ignite, while strong winds are predicted to fan the hundreds of blazes that are already burning. Hundreds of thousands of people were urged yesterday to evacuate the most-at-risk areas.

Even before summer has begun, bushfires and toxic smoke have threatened the lives, health and homes of millions of people in nearly every Australian state and territory this week. The fire emergencies that first erupted two weeks ago in two states have spread across the country, worsened by dust storms, asthma alerts and electricity blackouts.

Pickets appeared at Chicago Public Schools city-wide Thursday morning as 32,000 teachers and staff struck for the first time since 2012. Educators are fighting for smaller class sizes and more nurses, librarians, social workers and other support staff, along with increased spending to improve conditions in all schools.

Since taking office in 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump has used his annual speech at the UN General Assembly to denounce socialism, promote nationalism and xenophobia, and bully and threaten the whole world.

Four million people participated in the global climate strike across every continent on Friday, many of them students who skipped school on that day. Demonstrations at more than 5,800 locations in 161 countries began in Australia and the Pacific, moved to Asia, Antarctica, Africa and Europe, and then to North and South America. This is the third such climate strike this year, following similar mass global demonstrations this past March and May, and the largest to date.

In response to the Wall Street decline, markets in Asia fell, with Japan’s Topix index down 1 percent while the Australian market dropped 2.9 percent, wiping $60 billion off share values. Markets in Europe also fell before recovering some of their losses later in the day.

In a massive display of social opposition, more than 50,000 teachers, school personnel, parents and students marched in downtown Los Angeles Monday on the first day of the strike by educators in the nation’s second largest school district.

Behind the backs of the U.S. and world populations, social media companies have built up a massive censorship apparatus staffed by an army of “content reviewers” capable of seamlessly monitoring, tracking, and blocking millions of pieces of content.

The eruption of U.S. imperialist violence in ever more bloody forms is a devastating indictment of all of those political forces which have sought over the past quarter century to portray Washington as the defender of “human rights” and “democracy.”