Mask-off outbursts by Maga insiders and most strikingly, the destruction and reconstruction of the presidential seat, with a huge new $300m ballroom, means Trump isn’t planning to leave the White House when his term ends, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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Stefan Heym: a central witness to socialism
Fleeing the Nazis to become a best-selling author in the US, then forced by Mccarthyism to settle in the GDR in the '50s, he would go on to open the reunified German parliament in 1994. JOHN ELLISON remembers a remarkable leftist
After leaving the US in the 1950's, writer Stefan Heym returned to Germany, living — sometimes as a critic of the government — in the GDR until it was dismantled. He died in a reunified Germany in 2001.
BEN CHACKO speaks with Knesset member OFER CASSIF about rising political violence, the prospects for peace and his continuous ‘silencing by suspension’
The City is leaning on Rachel Reeves to cut welfare spending — when what’s needed is cuts to all the benefits given to the mega rich, corporations and banks to help them not pay or blatantly dodge their fair share of tax, explains BERNIE EVANS
The choice between two Blairites to revamp the tepid centrism of our ruling party doesn’t even come as cold comfort as we wander the city streets suffering from their third decade of austerity and the fifth of wage stagnation, writes MATT KERR
ANN HENDERSON looks at the trailblazers of the Women’s Trade Union League and their successful fight for female factory inspectors — a battle that echoes in today’s workplace campaigns
HENRY FOWLER puts the strike of public-sector workers in New Zealand in the wider context of deteriorating employment conditions throughout the world’s major economies
MAT COWARD looks back at a protest 105 years ago this month, whose reporting by the media bears uncomfortable similarities with demos today
STEFAN HEYM — journalist, novelist, essayist — and a lifelong socialist, died 20 years ago, aged 88, on December 16 2001. His unfading commitment to humanity through his writing and actions must be remembered and celebrated.
Born in 1913 into a prosperous Jewish family in the industrial east German town of Chemnitz, he was Helmut Flieg until he changed his name after fleeing to Czechoslovakia in March 1933, the youngest literary escapee from the newly installed Nazi regime. More than one change of country lay ahead for him.
The Flieg family’s textile business had no attraction for the growing Helmut. In September 1931, already anti-militarist, he produced a poem prompted by a newspaper report of German military officers being sent to China as instructors.
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