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The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis released a report Friday showing that, after adjusting for inflation, the average US household has recovered only 45 percent of the wealth it lost during the 2008 crash. This undermines claims that the US is experiencing an “economic recovery,” and points to the vast effects of the collapse in home values, falling wages, and mass unemployment.

After noting that 62 percent of the increase in aggregate wealth since 2009 has come from increasing share values—which are overwhelmingly owned by the rich—the report notes with understatement, “Considering the uneven recovery of wealth across households, a conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified.”

A principal factor in the collapse of household wealth beginning in 2007 was the collapse of the housing market bubble. This particularly affected lower-income families, whose main asset is their home. While the stock market has soared back to record highs as a result of government policy, the housing market has remained stagnant.

On May 22, Ibragim Todashev, a key witness in events related to the Boston Marathon bombings, was killed by an FBI agent in his residence in Florida. Todashev, an alleged acquaintance of bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was unarmed and in custody when he was shot as many as seven times, including once in the head.

This extraordinary event, which has been largely buried in the US media, stinks of a cover-up, deceit and criminality. Four or five completely different accounts of the killing have been presented by the government in the space of little more than a week. None of these accounts can be believed.

The killing of Todashev occurred just over a month after two bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing 3 people and injuring 264. Within a short period of time, the public was told that the perpetrators had been identified. Soon after, Tamerlan, 26, was shot and killed by the police. His brother Dzhokhar, 19, was severely wounded while hiding unarmed in a boat.

The Socialist Equality Party held a public meeting Thursday at Wayne State University where D'Artagnan Collier, the SEP's candidate for Detroit mayor, reviewed the social crisis in Detroit and laid forth a program and perspective for the working class to fight back against the cuts and privatizations being carried out in the city. The meeting was well attended and included retirees, workers, students and youth from the metro Detroit area.

In his remarks Collier stressed that the official “debate” wholly excluded the needs and interests of the working class, focusing instead on tactical differences between the big business candidates over how best to make the working class pay for the bankruptcy of Detroit.

Spearheading these attacks, Collier noted, is Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, a literal dictator over Detroit, who has the backing of the Democrats, Republicans and trade unions. He is proposing to seize every resource in the city—from the Water and Sewerage Department, the Lighting Department and Belle Isle to the Detroit Institute of Arts—and sell it off to pay back the city's bondholders.

The US-backed proxy war aimed at ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is entering a new and dangerous phase. The possibility of a major international war, with incalculable consequences for the world’s population, is very real.

Yesterday, Lebanon’s Al Manar television quoted Assad as saying that Syria had “received the first shipment of Russian anti-aircraft S-300 rockets. All our agreements with Russia will be implemented, and parts of them have already been implemented.” These missiles, which Russia has pledged to deliver to defend Syria from possible US air strikes, have provoked an international crisis. Israeli officials have declared they will attack missile shipments.

If Israel acted on such a threat, Russian lives were lost, and Russia carried out retaliatory strikes on Israeli targets, the world would rapidly face a military confrontation between Russia and the United States—a situation that has not existed for more than a half century, since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.