Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Pro-Israel lobby groups in Britain use “lawfare” to silence solidarity with Palestine
A new report published by CAGE International, Britain’s Apartheid Apologists, highlights the anti-democratic impact of pro-Israel lobby groups and their use of “lawfare” in Britain to suppress opposition to the Gaza genocide.
2. Lessons to be learned from the Izmir municipal workers’ strike in Turkey
The strike by 23,000 workers... which started on May 29, ended on its seventh day. The agreement signed by the Social Democratic Public Employees’ Union, which represents the municipality, and the Genel-İş union... did not result in any gains for the workers.
3. International lawyers sound alarm over counter-terror laws against Filton 18
More than 20 international legal organizations have issued an open letter calling on authorities in the UK to “urgently cease the misuse of counter-terrorism legislation against the Filton 18”.
The letter provides a devastating exposure of the collapse of democracy in Britain, with the right to free speech and protest being overturned.
4. Boeing machinist exposes ongoing safety problems following last year’s strike
A machinist who opposed his union's sellout of strikers last year speaks to the World Socialist Web Site:
"Boeing doesn’t really care about the safety of the employees. They don’t care about what happens when you walk out the door and go home to your families. They don’t care about much other than just get the product delivered. They don’t care how it’s delivered. They don’t care about the quality of the product you’re delivering."
5. Federal firings create massive recession in Washington, D.C.
On May 27, Democratic D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed a budget to address a $1 billion federal cutback in the District’s budget allotment, in addition to a forecasted drop in revenue due to the Trump job cuts.
Reported in the media as a business-friendly proposal, Bowser’s budget plans prioritize bringing companies back into the District at the expense of D.C. workers and their families. This $21.8 billion proposal will be voted on by the Democratic Party-controlled D.C. Council by early August.
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The budget proposal would also repeal the city’s Sanctuary Values Amendment Act, first enacted in 2019, ending Washington’s status as a sanctuary city. The District would be required to comply with detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This comes just one week after Trump unveiled on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) web page a list of 500 jurisdictions, accusing D.C. and many areas in the region of “deliberately and shamefully obstructing” federal immigration laws.
The Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee issues a warning to Canadian mail delivery workers:
Unless workers intervene, the government will strip workers of the right to strike and impose savage contract concessions:
We must explain to all workers that the ruling class wants to impose a decisive defeat on us to set an example for the onslaught they are preparing across the board as they impose policies of capitalist austerity and war. To fund tens of billions per year in additional military spending, they want to gut public services, and slash workers’ pay and benefits. We must fight to counterpose to this capitalist logic a socialist program for jobs, public services, and worker rights for all.
At their meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, the defense ministers of the 32 NATO member states laid the groundwork for the largest military build-up in the alliance’s history.
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The summit took place just days after the most recent large-scale Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on Russian airfields, including in the interior of the country. These attacks were almost certainly planned and coordinated with NATO, and represent a further step in the escalating war. The decisions made in Brussels aim to massively expand NATO’s military capacity for exactly this type of escalation—direct warfare against Russia. As the World Socialist Web Site has warned, this is leading toward open war between nuclear powers and threatens nothing less than the annihilation of human civilization.
The layoffs are being implemented despite increasing and robust profits for the company, prompting Reuters to assert that “Walt Disney quarterly results are looking like the happiest place on earth.”
9. Trump administration revives medieval “kin punishment”
The Trump administration’s arrest and attempt to deport the wife and children of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the Egypt-born man accused of attacking a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado on June 1, marks a new and ominous stage in the American ruling class’ descent into lawlessness.
Hayam El Gamal and her five children, who range in age from 4 to 17, were seized at their Colorado Springs home early Tuesday morning and spirited away “in the dark of night” to the Dilley family detention center in Texas, a distance of 900 miles. Only a desperate search by the family’s attorneys revealed their whereabouts.
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“Punishing individuals for the alleged actions of their relatives is a feature of premodern justice systems or police state dictatorships, not democracies,” the family’s attorney, Eric Lee, told the New York Times. “The detention and attempted removal of this family is an assault on core democratic principles and should provoke widespread opposition in the population, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike.”
As of 2025, there are 123 Job Corps centers in the United States with some 45,000 students. The order affects a majority of 99 Job Corps centers operated by private contractors. Nearly all of the facilities provide education, job training, housing, meals and healthcare to tens of thousands of low-income youth aged 16 to 24.
The actions by the DOL represent an unlawful attempt to dismantle the Job Corps program—despite the fact that its future lies in the hands of Congress, which created the program and holds constitutional authority over its funding.
The Job Corps program was established by Congress in 1964 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Over its six-decade history, the program has served more than three million people and currently employs over 10,000 staff. For many students whose parents may be deceased or incarcerated, it is their only access to stable housing and career training.
11. Trump-Xi phone call maintains fragile trade war truce
After considerable pushing by Washington, US President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a phone conversation on Thursday lasting an hour and a half.
The conversation was preceded by a rising tide of accusations. The US claimed that China was slowing the rollout of approvals for the export of rare earth products, vital for key sections of US industry, while China pointed to new bans on the export of US technology and the threat to exclude Chinese students from study in the US.
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Beijing is not confused. It knows very well, at least since the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia in 2011, stridently pushed forward by his secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and the build-up of military encirclement. Together with subsequent tariff and other restrictions, starting under the first Trump administration and deepened under Biden, it makes clear the “endgame” is the suppression of China.
12. International tributes to Wolfgang Weber
On January 19, the Socialist Equality Party held an international meeting in memory of Wolfgang Weber, who died on November 16 after a serious illness. Wolfgang Weber was an outstanding fighter for Trotskyism and long-time Central Committee member of the Socialist Equality Party.
What Neitzel cynically refers to as the “democratic warrior” is in fact the fascist warrior—who combines a willingness for total subordination to the state with an ideological justification of murder and annihilation. In the taz [German daily newspaper, , he puts it quite bluntly: “The task of soldiers is ultimately: fight, kill, die.”
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Neitzel’s interview is no slip-up. For years, he has been involved in a comprehensive campaign aimed at relativizing the crimes of German imperialism in order to prepare new ones. Back in 2014, he spoke at the German Historical Museum together with the radical right-wing Humboldt Professor Jörg Baberowski (“Hitler was not vicious”), where the latter openly advocated war crimes such as taking hostages, “burning down villages” and “spreading fear and terror” in order to win wars.
14. Australia: University of Melbourne expels pro-Palestinian students
The decision marks a further shift to outlaw political free speech on the campuses and more broadly and must be opposed by students, staff and all those who defend basic democratic rights. It comes amid a deepening offensive spearheaded by the federal Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to outlaw opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people which Australian imperialism, along with the major powers in North America and Europe, has supported for the last year and a half.
The attack on protests against the Gaza genocide is part of a wholesale assault on anti-war, anti-establishment and anti-capitalist sentiment which is growing among masses of workers and youth. This has found its sharpest form in the US where the fascist Donald Trump leads an administration which is disappearing pro-Palestinian students and attacking immigrants and political opponents.
Individual protest actions and stunts to try and change the minds of pro-Zionist figures and politicians are a bankrupt dead-end. What is required to end the genocide and imperialist war more broadly is a political fight against the Labor government itself and the development of a global anti-war movement against the system which is the cause of war: capitalism.
The rank-and-file investigation has already uncovered critical information. Workers report that the retooling of the Dundee plant for new engine production was more than a year behind schedule. In an effort to accelerate the launch, management—acting with the approval of the UAW—routinely bypassed safety protocols.
Testimony points to the widespread use of “cheat keys” to override lockout/tagout procedures, allowing work on energized machinery. Skilled trades workers were often forced to perform their tasks without spotters, further increasing the risk of deadly accidents.
Following Adams’ death, workers report that management quietly asked for the return of cheat keys, “without penalty.” They also say that the plant manager, Adams’ supervisor and the UAW safety representative were dismissed in the aftermath. Spotters have since been assigned to monitor enclosed workspaces, a tacit admission of the dangerous conditions that had previously been allowed to persist.
Even as it hands out billions to its top investors, Stellantis is carrying out a massive cost-cutting campaign—dubbed “doghouse”—aimed at extracting more from workers, suppliers and contractors. “The doghouse is back!” Stellantis Chief Financial Officer Natalie Knight boasted earlier this year. “If we apply more discipline, we can ensure big savings for the company.”
16. Chicago Public Schools floats plan to overturn teachers’ contract to slash budget deficit
According to a WBEZ news report, officials at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) wrote a letter to CPS board members on Tuesday outlining possible ways of dealing with the district’s $529 million budget deficit. Among the plans being floated by CPS are proposals to “delay” implementation of parts of the recently concluded teachers’ contract, including the hiring of librarians, nurses and staff needed to reduce class sizes.
These plans completely vindicate the warnings of the World Socialist Web Site that the contract was brought to teachers under false pretenses, and that educators would come under immediate attack if the Chicago Teachers Union and Johnson administration were allowed to block strike action.
17. Trump brings Abrego Garcia back to the US to face felony charges
Attorney General Bondi confirmed at a press conference that “our government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant, and they agreed to return him to our country,” emphasizing that the administration’s decision to return Abrego Garcia was the result of a Tennessee grand jury indictment and not court rulings that determined his deportation was illegal in the first place.
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Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in July 1995 in San Salvador, El Salvador, and immigrated to the United States in 2011 at the age of 16 to escape gang violence. In El Salvador, the Barrio 18 gang extorted his mother’s business and threatened to kill him if he refused to join. After arriving in the US, he settled in Maryland, living with his brother, who became a US citizen.
He married Jennifer Vasquez Sura, also a US citizen, and together they have a child with special needs, whom they raise alongside her two children. All three children are American citizens.
Abrego Garcia was granted withholding of removal in 2019, allowing him to live and work legally in the US, and he complied with all ICE check-ins until his illegal deportation.
18. Australia: Queensland nurses and midwives vote to strike for first time in decades
More than 96 percent of public-sector nurses and midwives voted to strike, compelling the Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union to call the first industrial action in two decades. But the union bureaucracy, which boasts of its “strong history of adopting an interest-based problem-solving bargaining approach … and working collaboratively on solutions” with Queensland Health, is working to keep this action as limited as possible.
19. Australian military chief calls for war readiness
On behalf of the Trump administration in Washington, [the US Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth laid down the law to governments throughout the [Asian and Pacific] region at last weekend’s Shangri-la Dialogue [in Singapore]. They had to dramatically escalate their military build-up and put themselves on a war footing for “imminent” conflict with China, just as the US was demanding of its NATO partners in the Ukraine war against Russia.
In line with that ultimatum, Hegseth announced that he had “conveyed” to the Australian Labor government that it should increase its military spending from around 2 percent to 3.5 percent of GDP “as soon as possible.”
20. Workers Struggles: Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Bangladesh:
Protesting apparel workers attacked by police
Footwear workers demand unpaid wages
India:
ASHA workers’ strike in Kerala enters fourth month
Haryana: Health and science university outsourced workers at Rohtak begin indefinite strike Municipal workers in Hosapete, Karnataka strike for permanent jobs
Karnataka: Civic workers in Kodagu strike for permanency
Rajasthan apps-based taxi drivers on strike in Jaipur
Government school teachers in Gilgit-Baltistan strike
Sindh province government clerks rally for pay rise
Zinfra gas utility workers in New South Wales strike for pay rise
BMS Heavy Cranes workers remain on strike in Victoria
Qube crane operators in Queensland on strike for industry standard pay rates
West Wimmera council workers’ industrial action enters fourth week
Noosa council workers locked out for second time during pay dispute
South Australian public hospital health workers escalate industrial action
Country Fire Authority workers in Victoria begin industrial action
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
