The Socialist Equality Party will hold a special online event tomorrow, Sunday, June 15th:
Trump’s coup and how to stop it!
Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Stop the imperialist war on Iran!
On Thursday evening, under the cover of darkness, Israel launched a massive air and missile assault on Iran, striking air defenses, nuclear facilities, key military personnel and command centers.
At least 78 people were killed and over 300 injured in the largest attack on Iran since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Israel assassinated six nuclear scientists and 20 high-ranking military personnel, including the Chief of Staff of Iran’s military and the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns Israel’s illegal and unprovoked assault on Iran as a brazen act of imperialist aggression. The increasingly unhinged Israeli regime—already carrying out a genocide against 2 million people in Gaza—has now deliberately provoked war with a country 10 times its size, threatening catastrophic consequences for the entire region.
2. Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashes and explodes in India, killing at least 274
The crash is the worst involving a Boeing jetliner since the two crashes in 2018 and 2019, both involving a 737 MAX 8, which in total killed 346 passengers and crew. Boeing has since faced numerous investigations into the production of those aircraft, which found that Boeing executives were aware the planes were fatally flawed and pushed for their production and distribution anyway.
3. Sri Lankan government continues to ignore the rise of COVID-19 and other dangerous infections
COVID-19 infections have been increasing in Sri Lanka since May this year. With the complete absence of mass testing or disease monitoring, the extent of the spread is impossible to determine. However, the prevalence of the virus is now being demonstrated in a number of tragic deaths.
The increase of infections in Sri Lanka appears to be part of a broader regional trend. Recent media reports show COVID-19 is at high levels in India with its health ministry indicating active cases had risen to 7,121 with 306 new cases on June 12.
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Instead of investing billions in healthcare to save lives from COVID, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s government did the opposite. Less than a year after the pandemic began it demanded all employees return to work, abandoning the limited measures it previously adopted.
Like every capitalist government, around the world, Rajapakse, and his successor Ranil Wickremesinghe, embraced the anti-scientific “let it rip” agenda, allowing COVID-19 to spread freely. As a result, by April 12, 2024, some 16,897 people in Sri Lanka had died from COVID and 672,754 were infected.
4. US-China economic conflict goes up a notch
Meanwhile Trump officials claim there is some peaceful resolution to the conflict as they intensify the military preparations.
Returning from the London talks to give testimony to the US Senate, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said: “If China will course correct by upholding its end of the initial trade agreement we outlined in Geneva last month, then a big, beautiful rebalancing of the world’s two largest economies is possible.”
Bessent is either deluding himself or trying to fool others. The US demand for “rebalancing” goes far beyond the reduction of the Chinese trade surplus. It is nothing less than the subordination of China’s economic expansion to its demands.
But in many ways the horse has already bolted. As the WSJ noted China already has the “upper hand” in many essential sectors of the modern economy.
“The world’s second-largest economy accounts for around of a third of global manufacturing output, giving it a potential chokehold in auto parts, basic ingredients for drugs, key parts of the electronics supply chain and a host of other industry sectors.”
5. Australia: Fall of Tasmanian state government underscores political instability
Voters in the state are now headed for an election on July 19, the fourth in just seven years, with polls indicating that another hung parliament and minority government is the most likely result.
These developments are a further indication of the historic instability produced by the growing loss of support, not just in Tasmania but across Australia for the two main post-World War II parties of capitalist rule, Labor and Liberal.
6. Germany: SPD “Peace” Manifesto—an attempt to cover their tracks
While the media portrays the manifesto as a challenge to party chairman and Vice-Chancellor Lars Klingbeil and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, it is nothing of the sort. Published two weeks before the SPD national party conference, the manifesto is aimed at defusing the growing outrage over the party’s militaristic course, which resulted in its worst-ever election result in February.
While the manifesto invokes the détente policies of the 1970s, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, arms control and international understanding, and warns against “alarmist military rhetoric and massive rearmament programs,” it is in agreement with government policy on all essential points and conclusions. “There’s nothing disreputable in the paper, it’s not a ‘Russia paper,’” Mützenich emphasized in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
7. University of Michigan uses plainclothes contractors to spy on student protesters
The exposure of U-M’s surveillance has triggered widespread outrage, both on and off campus, which is particularly evident on social media.
Faced with the public exposure of its spy operations, the administration, led by Interim President Domenico Grasso, launched a damage control campaign involving denials and falsehoods.
In a June 8 campus-wide letter, Grasso acknowledged the Ameri-Shield contract, but cynically claimed it was for “observation and reporting of criminal or suspicious activity on university property,” a description that is contradicted by student accounts of extensive off-campus surveillance.
8. Union Pacific employee dies, major train derailment in Texas in separate accidents on the same day
These incidents come at the same time that Class I carriers are pushing for one-person crews and attacking railroad jobs. The Association of American Railroads has requested that the Trump administration overturn a Biden-era regulation mandating two-person crews except with permission from the federal government.
Around three trains derail every day in the United States, as a consequence of decrepit infrastructure, longer trains and overwork in order for the railroads to cut costs. Attacks on jobs will ultimately lead to higher rates of injury and death on the railroad. While railroad fatalities had been decreasing for decades, since 2012 deaths increased from 669 to 995 in 2023. While preliminary figures for 2024 suggest a slight decline in overall fatalities, 11 railroaders still died as a result of workplace accidents last year.
9. Bill Atkinson, visionary engineer behind the Apple Macintosh operating system, dies at 74
Bill Atkinson is remembered by colleagues and friends as a person of immense curiosity, creativity and generosity. He was known for his humility, his willingness to mentor younger engineers, and his passion for both technology and nature. In his later years, Atkinson became an accomplished nature photographer, publishing a book, Within the Stone, that revealed the hidden beauty of polished rocks.
The undemocratic, behind-closed-doors manner in which the strike was called off speaks volumes about the SAG-AFTRA bureaucracy and every other union leadership.
11. Trump’s AUKUS review puts Australian nuclear submarine deal in doubt
The announcement puts the Australian Labor government under great pressure to make major concessions to the US as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flies to Canada for the G-7 summit and a possible meeting with Trump.
12. Marines are mobilized on LA streets, Florida Sheriff threatens to kill protesters
On the eve of nationwide protests on Saturday against the Trump administration’s dictatorial measures, US Marines have been deployed against the residents of Los Angeles, joining National Guard troops. And as thousands of troops and scores of tanks and military helicopters are readied for Trump’s birthday parade in Washington D.C., a law enforcement official in Florida has issued a deadly threat to anti-coup demonstrators.
These developments underscore the depth of the political crisis engulfing the US, as the Trump administration moves to suppress opposition to its drive to war and its anti-immigrant policies and assault on fundamental democratic rights.
13. Another public school student in New York City detained by ICE, as immigration raids escalate
The young man, along with his mother and two younger siblings, immigrated to the US from Venezuela legally, using the Customs and Border Protection One app under the Biden administration. Despite following the legal process, Dylan was arrested when he showed up for a mandatory immigration hearing on May 21. He is being held in an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania.
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In New York, agents have been stationed inside the city’s three immigration courthouses located in Lower Manhattan since the end of May. The masked agents have arrested numerous undocumented immigrants, who have appeared in court for routine hearings for their immigration cases. Stationed in the building lobbies or directly outside of courtrooms, ICE agents have ambushed one person after another, dragging them off as they cried, screamed and pleaded for help.
At a time when workers can only defend their right to workplace safety by building an international movement to take control over working conditions from transnational corporations and nationalist unions and governments, the expressions of solidarity and appeals from workers south of the US-Mexico border takes on crucial importance.
15. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
India:
Maharashtra sanitation workers demand outstanding wages and promised pay rise
Tea plantation workers in the Dooars region demand unpaid wages
Government workers, midday meal and ASHA workers in Punjab protest unmet promises
Himachal Pradesh state primary teachers end hunger strike
Tamil Nadu: Sanitary workers in Coimbatore protest unpaid salary increase and job insecurity
Patna Airport sanitation workers fight unfair terminations
Chevron’s LNG plant maintenance workers’ industrial action in Western Australia enters fourth month
Vertech oil and gas production workers in Western Australia escalate industrial action
Getinge electricians in Queensland locked out during pay dispute
Virtus Health IVF nurses in Queensland demand pay rise
Roy Fagan Centre health workers in Tasmania strike for new work agreement
Bus drivers at CDC in Victoria isolated as Transport Workers Union seeks to push through sell-out deal at Dysons
Epworth Medical Imaging nurses in Victoria strike for higher pay
Crown forklift manufacturing workers in Victoria begin industrial action
South Australian government allied health workers strike over low pay
Public hospital cancer care scientists in South Australia strike for higher pay
Qantas air freight pilots prepare for industrial action in pay dispute
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
Internationally, major artistic figures such as Roger Waters and Ai Wei Wei as well as historians such as Mario Kessler and Christian Gerlach have supported the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk. Many political tendencies have also condemned his imprisonment and called for his release, despite their political differences with the Trotskyist movement. These include Jill Stein from the Greens in the United States, and several groups and websites in Russia and Turkey. Most recently, the website of the Socialist Laborer Party in Turkey, and that of the Partisan Defense Committee, which is affiliated with the Spartacist tendency, have issued statements in support of Bogdan.
