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The Venezuela’s government delivered 87 new homes in Caracas to families displaced by the devastating double earthquake of June 24, reaffirming its commitment to provide 4,000 houses before the end of 2026.

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On this Monday, Acting President Delcy Rodriguez presided over the official handover of residences in the Simón Rodríguez complex, located in Fuerte Tiuna, Caracas.

The initiative forms part of the Venezuela Rises plan, a national program designed to rebuild communities and restore dignity to families affected by natural disasters.

RELATED: Venezuela Unveils Power Plan After Quakes and El Niño

“What we are doing in this process of recovery and construction is to bring hope to families who were victims of the double earthquake. Our greatest objective is to provide happiness to those affected. You are not alone,” Acting President declared, emphasizing the government’s mission to transform temporary shelters into permanent homes.

The latest allocation raises the total number of homes delivered to 336 since the June seismic event. Authorities confirmed that additional projects are underway, with the Presidential Commission for Housing Habitability currently evaluating new land plots for construction.

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The housing program has been reinforced by recent legislative reforms. Acting President Rodríguez expressed gratitude to the National Assembly for approving changes to the Special Leasing Law, which is expected to impact nearly 400,000 homes across the country. The reform aims to unlock properties previously frozen in the rental market, creating a “win-win” scenario for both owners and tenants.

“This law allows many apartments that were paralyzed to reenter the housing market under fair conditions,” Rodríguez explained. The measure is seen as a critical step in expanding access to housing while supporting the government’s broader reconstruction agenda.

A National Commitment

The government’s stated goal of delivering 4,000 homes by year’s end underscores the scale of its commitment to disaster recovery. Beyond physical infrastructure, the initiative seeks to restore confidence and stability to communities shaken by the seismic tragedy.

Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez framed the housing program as a symbol of solidarity, stressing that national, regional, and local authorities are working in coordination to ensure that no family is left behind. “This is about guaranteeing a future for children, ensuring that every family has a home to call their own,” she affirmed.

Photos: Venezuelan Presidential Press

With hundreds of homes already handed over and thousands more planned, the Venezuelan government continues to position housing as a cornerstone of its social policy, aiming to transform adversity into resilience and hope.

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Symbioses between plants and fungi are essential for most plants. Fungal structures known as mycorrhizae extend the area from which plants can draw water and nutrients from the soil. In return, plants supply the fungi with carbohydrates produced through photosynthesis. Although the importance of this symbiosis has been known for decades, researchers have not previously been able to study the underground network in its natural structure.

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Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) said on Monday that "every single cent" of the refunds for President Donald Trump's illegal tariffs should go to consumers who bore the brunt of the financial strain rather than the large corporations currently receiving them.

"Apple got a $2.2 billion tariff refund. Amazon got $600 million," Casar wrote in a post to social media. "Trump is sending the 'refunds' to the companies, not working people."

The Supreme Court struck down many of Trump's sweeping tariffs in February, ruling that he could not impose them unilaterally using powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

A group of 25 Democratic states sued the Trump administration on Monday for once again attempting to reimpose the tariffs under a different law, the 1974 Trade Act.

According to the Congressional Budget Office report from February 2026, about 70% of the tariffs were being passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices, while businesses absorbed about 30% of the cost.

Companies were able to pass on even more of the costs to consumers by hiking prices of domestic goods as well, meaning ordinary people were forced to swallow about 95% of the overall cost.

Yale's Budget Lab estimated that Trump's full tariff regime was costing the average household about $2,400 annually. Even after the Supreme Court rolled them back, the Budget Lab estimates that households will pay an extra $1,100 per year.

But the system for refunding the approximately $166 billion taken as part of the unlawful tariff regime allows only "importers" to apply for reimbursement, meaning the refunds have largely flowed to big companies who get to decide how much, if any, of the windfall they want to trickle down. So far, it does not seem to be very much.

Amazon disclosed on Thursday that it was participating in the refund process and that it had received over $600 million from the federal government in quarter two.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, said there was a "limited set of circumstances” in which the company could find examples of it directly passing prices along to consumers, since third-parties are the importers for most products, but said it would refund them when they could be identified.

He added that the refunds would also be invested in “low prices for customers," though he provided no details on how that would work.

Apple, meanwhile, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the refunds. In a press release on Thursday, the company celebrated that the tariff refunds on their own were worth “2 percentage points” of its 50.1% gross margin, which AppleInsider calculated put the total refund at about $2.2 billion, though its most recent earnings report did not disclose the full amount.

But there's no indication that any of that windfall will be seen by consumers, even through lowered prices, let alone through any sort of reimbursement program.

"While Apple is celebrating its margins, it won’t stop your next MacBook Air from becoming more expensive and more scarce," wrote Kyle Barr on Monday for Gizmodo. "Last month, Apple increased prices for practically all its various products."

Other companies have also received or are expecting refunds in the billions or hundreds of millions, including Ford, General Motors, UPS, Nike, and Walmart, though only some have indicated plans to pass on even part of the savings to consumers.

Rep. Mark Pocan said it was "just another transfer of wealth from everyday Americans to mega-corporations."

Several pieces of legislation have been introduced in Congress aiming to provide tariff relief for consumers.

One bill introduced by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Frank Mrvan (D-Ind.) would require companies to reduce prices in accordance with the size of the refund they receive. Another from Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) would create an individual tariff refund tax credit and tax corporations unless they absorbed tariff costs rather than passing them to consumers.

None of these bills have advanced out of committee or received a floor vote.

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US President Donald Trump on Monday said Iran was facing its “last chance” to reach an agreement with Washington to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the five-month-long war. “This is a last chance for them to sign a good document,” Trump said at the Oval Office in the White House. “I want to give them every last chance before decapitation.” He also claimed that negotiations with Tehran are “going on right now” despite Tehran’s insistence that no direct talks were under way. “We are talking,...

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Deep in the world's oceans, large male sperm whales emit slow, low-frequency clicks with the highest source levels of any animal communication sounds. These slow clicks are not the echolocation clicks the whales use to locate prey, but loud, low-frequency communication signals.

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The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA – Tehran) published the following press briefing on Aug. 3, 2026. Iran Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei. Credit: IRNA Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei says continued U.S. attacks, sanctions and intimidation targeting Iranian commercial vessels show that Washington is still pursuing a policy of . . .

Continue reading Iran: Harassment of commercial shipping shows U.S. is still pursuing confrontation. at Workers.org

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Consumer and environmental advocates on Monday called for the Securities and Exchange Commission to end its push to rescind rules requiring companies to disclose risks related to climate change.

The SEC first adopted the climate disclosure rules in 2024, with the commission describing them as a response to "investors’ demand for more consistent, comparable, and reliable information about the financial effects of climate-related risks on a registrant’s operations."

But in June, the SEC—now under the leadership of President Donald Trump-appointed chair Paul Atkins—proposed scrapping the rules, which the commission described as "an overreach of statutory authority and unsound policy."

Elyse Schupak, climate policy advocate for Public Citizen, said that ending the disclosure rules would reflect "the desire of Paul Atkins’ SEC to ignore growing financial risks from climate change and to deprive investors of essential information."

"For polluting industries that seek to downplay their role driving the climate crisis and their exposure to related risks, finalizing the proposed rule would be a victory," said Schupak. "The SEC should withdraw this proposal as it contradicts the commission’s responsibility to facilitate transparency for investors and promote well functioning capital markets."

Alex Martin, climate finance policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, noted that many investors spoke up in favor of the disclosure rules when they were first proposed because they saw climate risk assessment as a valuable information to have before making major financial decisions.

If the new proposal is finalized, Martin added, it "will hurt workers saving for retirement by depriving people of information needed to assess companies' financial risks due to climate change—and by endangering other critical disclosures as well."

Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy for Better Markets, similarly argued that scrapping the SEC rules "will deprive investors of material information essential to making informed investment decisions."

"There can no longer be any serious dispute that the climate-related risk companies face matters greatly to their future prospects," Schiffrin emphasized. "An SEC that was serious about protecting investors would be facilitating investors’ access to this information, not preventing them from understanding how climate-related risks are impacting the companies in which they invest their hard-earned money."

Janet Ranganathan, managing director at the World Resources Institute, said repealing the rule was particularly nonsensical at a time when the country is dealing with multiple climate-related disasters, including wildfires in the Pacific Northwest.

"Rescinding the rule would not eliminate climate risk from the market—it simply blindfolds investors to it, at their own expense," said Ranganathan. "Climate risk should not become the exception to smart financial management simply because it has become politically contentious."

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Why is recycling waste or switching off the lights sometimes perceived as more effective for the climate than giving up air travel? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) surveyed nearly 3,000 people and identified key psychological mechanisms underlying these misperceptions. Their findings pave the way for more effective communication strategies that encourage behaviors with the greatest potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The study is published in Nature Sustainability.

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Early in the Michigan Senate Democratic primary, Erin Mallen sent $10 to State Senator Mallory McMorrow. Mallen, a mom who runs an Etsy shop near Traverse City, a liberal bastion in northern Michigan, liked McMorrow — she is young and a break from the Senate’s establishment who occupied a middle lane between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, Mallen said. Lagging in the polls…

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Palestinian resistance factions The Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas, posted the following statement on July 31, 2026, at the Hamas Movement’s official website: https://t.me/kUoQCMfm8bI1NWE0 The Hamas Movement, along with the Palestinian factions, has approached the negotiation process and the mediators’ proposals for the full implementation of the second phase of the . . .

Continue reading Hamas’ latest update on negotiations at Workers.org

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A member of the Spanish armed services watches over migrants crossing the border between Spain and Morocco on July 31, 2026, in Ceuta, Spain. Photo: Adri Salido/Getty Images

Over 50,000 people last week risked their lives to cross the border between Morocco and Ceuta, the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa, in the hope of making it to mainland Europe.

The vast majority have already been returned to Morocco; fewer than 2,000 refugees remain on Ceuta and are, according to on-the-ground reports, in urgent need of food and shelter. Over 80 people reportedly died during the crossings, most from drowning.

The crisis for those seeking to enter Europe through Ceuta last week, including those who have been sent back, has already been framed according to a putrid, far-right political fulcrum. As a wide array of responses to the situation on Ceuta make clear, a commitment to harsh border regimes is not the sole preserve of the far right.

Once again, liberals and centrists who claim to decry the right’s anti-immigrant stances are themselves treating immigrants as a threat to be secured against.

For the international far right, images of thousands of desperate young African men entering European Union territory — little matter that Ceuta is, in fact, not on mainland Europe — has been fodder for predictable racist fearmongering and calls for extremist border rule. Far-right leaders blamed the crossings of the left-wing Spanish government’s extremely reasonable plans to regularize over 1 million undocumented immigrants who have already been living and working in Spain for at least five months.

“It’s terrible. Remember that picture. That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” President Donald Trump told Fox News, in a groundless attempt to use the suffering on Ceuta to his advantage. A spokesperson for the White House decried Spain’s new immigration regularization proposal as “far-left, globalist policies.”

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Meanwhile, conservative and right-wing leaders across Europe and the U.K. echoed similar sentiments, conjuring the old lie of an “invasion” confronting the West. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni proposed Spain be suspended from the Schengen Area. A total of 22 EU leaders, including Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, wrote a joint letter to the European Commission expressing “serious concerns” about how Spain’s decision to grant legal status to immigrants served as a “pull factor.”

In response to these attacks and criticisms, several liberal and centrist politicians, institutions, and media organs have pushed back. Analyses in the New York Times and The Atlantic have stressed, for example, that not one of the people who crossed into Ceuta managed to make it to mainland Europe. These responses are framed as a counterpoint to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s right-wing critics.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also defended Sánchez against right-wing attacks, by praising the Spanish authorities’ “swift handling” in “successfully preventing illegal movement onwards to mainland Spain and Europe.”

Sanchez himself took a similar line.

“In less than 48 hours, my government has succeeded in fully restoring control over the border,” he wrote on Saturday in a response to criticism from other European leaders.

The mainstream defense against far-right fearmongering, then, was merely a regurgitation of the right’s anti-immigrant premise. Stopping immigrants who have been forced to take irregular routes, according to this logic, is a good thing. What the far right got wrong, by the lights of these centrists and liberals, was not their virulent racism, but rather that the claims of an “invasion” of Europe are not factually accurate.

“Spain and Germany’s centrist responses have been to ‘assure’ the E.U. that borders are fortified,” wrote migrant justice organizer and scholar Harsha Walia on Instagram. “This rebuttal simply buttresses the premise of border securitization.”

The reasons for the surge in crossings are not yet fully known; speculation abounds about the role of Moroccan and other state forces. A few things are, however, clear: Misinformation had spread in the preceding days on social media suggesting, falsely, that a recent Supreme Court ruling in Spain would prevent the Spanish authorities returning immigrants.

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Trump’s National Killer Police Force](https://theintercept.com/2026/07/24/trump-ice-deaths-mass-deportation/)

In a world of increasing and inevitable mass migration, it is a moral failure to treat the swift removal of immigrants as a victory. Such a framing is also a gift to the far right, who will continue to benefit within a political consensus that treats immigration as a bad thing.

Only a few voices on the European left have placed focus where it belongs: with supporting immigrants who remain on Ceuta.

“What is happening in Ceuta is not a natural disaster, but the result of political decisions,” said Clara Bünger, a member of Germany’s The Left Party. “Germany and the EU have a duty to help with providing for refugees and to take in those seeking protection.”

“People are fleeing war, poverty, and the climate crisis,” she noted. “Higher walls won’t stop them; they will only make the escape more deadly. The most important thing now is that no one else dies.”

The post Liberals Are Ceding Ground to the Far Right on Ceuta Border Crossings appeared first on The Intercept.

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Below is a speech, “Year of the Centennial of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz,” delivered by First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez. He was speaking at the closing of the 7th Ordinary Session of the National . . .

Continue reading Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel: ‘The path is difficult … but our will to overcome is unwavering. We will win!’ at Workers.org

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