SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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Trump gets hit by his own wrecking ball, but he will keep swinging it
Washington’s tariff policies become explicable in light of the US economy’s relative decline and the astonishing rise of China, argues MICHAEL BURKE
US President Donald Trump talks about transgender weightlifters as gives a commencement address at the University of Alabama, May 1, 2025
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
DONALD TRUMP was hoping to take a wrecking ball to the world trade system and other countries’ exports to the US. He swung it hard when he announced tariffs on US imports from the rest of the world on “Liberation Day” on April 2, but within weeks it had slapped him hard in the face.
Unfortunately, this humiliation does not mean that will not be the end of the matter — far from it. These are the actions of a reckless president, and a reckless administration. Once his motivation is properly understood, it seems inevitable that he will return with similar policies.
To put the current turmoil in perspective, there are two key trends in the world economy. The first trend is the relative decline of the US economy. The second is the extraordinary rise of China.
Clearly, the two trends are linked, but the US’s decline is not simply a function of China’s rise. The US relative decline has been taking place for decades. In the early 1950s the US economy accounted for 28 per cent of world GDP. By 2023 that proportion had almost halved, with the US accounting for just 15 per cent of world output.
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