On Monday 9 May, dramatic events rocked Sri Lanka. After months of economic turmoil, and weeks of mass mobilisations on the streets, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa made a desperate gamble to establish order and save his own political skin. But his brutal crackdown backfired in dramatic style. By nightfall, Mahinda was hiding in a naval base, whilst dozens of MPs’ residences were in flames. By the end of the day, eight people were dead including one MP and two police officers, and the hospitals were flooded with the injured.

On April 25, Twitter announced that its board of directors would accept a $44 billion bid by Elon Musk to purchase the social media company. Pending shareholder approval, the deal is set to be finalized over the next three to six months. Musk, currently the richest person on Earth, with a net worth of $259 billion, would thus own one of the most influential social media sites in the world, used daily by over 200 million people.

Palestinian Al Jazeerareporter Shireen Abu Akleh, 51, was shot dead by the Israeli military early this morning, while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. This cold-blooded murder of a journalist – a war crime under the Geneva Convention – further exposes the brutality of the Israeli state, and lays bare the repulsive hypocrisy of its imperialist allies.

The latest forecasts from the Bank of England for the year ahead are for inflation to surge and the economy to contract: a dangerous double-whammy of ‘stagflation’. Workers must organise and fight back with militant action and socialist policies.

On 25 February 1986, the infamously corrupt and brutal dictator of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, fled the country with his family from a revolutionary mass revolt. Yet on 9 May 2022, another Ferdinand Marcos was voted in as president: the son of the senior Marcos also known as “Bongbong.”

On May 5, local elections in Britain provided a snapshot of the mood in society: one of anger and distrust towards the entire political establishment. Belief in bourgeois democracy is rapidly being eroded, paving the way for revolutionary explosions.

Sinn Féin has emerged as the first party in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections. With a remarkable 29% of the first preference votes to the DUP’s 21.3%, the gap was even wider than predicted. Within hours of the polls closing, #UnitedIreland was trending on Twitter. This is another devastating blow to the prestige of British imperialism and another tear in the fraying fabric of the so-called ‘United Kingdom’.

The following pair of articles, written at the end of April, discuss the dismissal of the editor of Cuban magazine Alma Mater. What were the reasons for it? And what have been the consequences?

The economic crisis gripping Turkey has pushed the Turkish ruling class into a political crisis. Splits and divisions are opening up in the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its electoral partner, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). These events are a harbinger of revolution.

Yet another unprecedented bombshell has rocked the already polarized world of American politics and class struggle. In a leaked internal memo drafted by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the majority of that reactionary body outlines its case for the judicial overturn of Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 decision that ruled that the US Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. Now, as part of the cynical maneuvering by a segment of the ruling class to divert the class war into the so-called “culture war,” what should be a fundamental democratic right is to be unceremoniously trashed.

Not long ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime was proudly flaunting its successes in containing the COVID-19 pandemic compared to much of the rest of the world. Now, however, one of its major economic centres, Shanghai, is suffering from a surge of the Omicron variant, made worse by bureaucratic blunders.

Comrades of the IMT participated in demonstrations, protests and other activities in dozens of locations across the globe for May Day 2022, raising the revolutionary banner of socialism as the only road forward for the working class! Given the dramatic events in world politics, and the increasingly unbearable burden on working people and youth, our ideas connected with the mood far more than in the past. We publish below highlights of our international May Day activities.

The IMT is delighted to present the following interviews with leading unionists in India, representing radical, casualised care workers and militant farmers. Workers and farmers: unite and fight!

13 April 2022 marked 80 years since the Dutch revolutionary socialist Henk Sneevliet, along with six of his comrades, were executed by the Nazi German occupiers. Sneevliet devoted his whole life to fighting for the interests of the working class of the Netherlands, as well as the oppressed in Indonesia and China.

Fifty years ago, on 29 April 1972, violence between Hutus and Tutsis broke out in Burundi. This was the latest round of ethnic conflict in the African Great Lakes region, and marked the beginning of a genocide of up to 300,000 people. Western imperialism bears direct responsibility for the horrors of the spring of 1972. They didn’t lift a finger to stop it, and in some cases, they actively supported it. Today, while western imperialists cry crocodile tears over Ukraine, they bury the history of the far greater abominations they perpetrated just 50 years ago.