Latest Updates

Israel’s bombing of Damascus International Airport Thursday night and Syrian army targets across Damascus yesterday morning are unprovoked and illegal acts of war, abetted by Washington and its European allies as part of their escalating campaign against Syria.

Russian media reported that 300 Syrian soldiers had been killed and hundreds more wounded in Sunday’s attacks alone.

Israeli forces effectively acted as air support for US-backed Islamist opposition militias around Damascus. The opposition Damascus Military Council issued a statement shortly after the bombings Sunday calling on its fighters to put aside their differences and mount focused attacks on Syrian troops.

The attacks come amid a debate in Washington over how the Obama administration should escalate its war in Syria, given the failure of its proxy forces to topple the Syrian regime. The New York Times on Sunday described this as “the most urgent foreign policy issue of [Obama’s] second term.”

The campaign to put D’Artagnan Collier on the Detroit mayoral ballot continued this weekend as campaigners in various locations in the city, including Eastern Market and downtown, collected more than the goal of 1,000 signatures. This is twice the required 500 signatures to be placed on the ballot.

Collier and the campaign teams stressed that Detroit was a model for attacks on the working class across the country and internationally. The appointment of Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to run the city is part of moves by the ruling class to impose the dictates of the banks and giant corporations, resorting to increasingly antidemocratic methods.

Workers in Detroit and the surrounding areas expressed alarm at the takeover of the city. Many who lived outside the city noted that the same measures could be taken elsewhere.

US stock markets surged Friday to new record highs as Wall Street traders seized on a tepid jobs report to engage in a fresh orgy of speculation.

The official line promoted by the Obama administration is that the United States is in the midst of an accelerating economic recovery. For the corporate and financial elite that runs America, and the section of the upper-middle class that hangs on its coattails, a soaring stock market is indeed what defines economic health. For the vast majority of the population, however, life five years after the Wall Street crash of 2008 is dominated by the daily struggle to make ends meet.

Official statistics—of poverty, unemployment, indebtedness, declining wages—give a glimpse of this social reality, which the mass media does its best to obscure.

One sobering statistic that emerged on Thursday points to the social reality that underlies the euphoria on Wall Street. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the past decade has seen a sharp increase in the US suicide rate.

Figures on the state of the European economy published over the past week are not only the expression of a deepening economic and social crisis. They have a profound historical meaning, pointing to the bankruptcy of the capitalist economic order.

In its latest economic forecast, the International Monetary Fund has predicted that the euro zone area as a whole will contract by 0.3 percent this year, with France joining Italy and Spain as the three major economies in recession. The contraction itself is significant, but the fact that it takes place some five years after the onset of the financial crisis points to the underlying processes that produced it. The European economy is caught in a deepening downward spiral.

Spain now has a Depression-level unemployment rate of 27 percent, with youth unemployment at 57 percent. More than six million Spanish workers are unemployed. In France the total number of job seekers who had not worked at all in the previous month rose to a record 3.2 million. Across the European Union 26 million people, representing 12 percent of the workforce, are unemployed.