Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Defend Ukrainian Holocaust scholar Marta Havryshko!
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns the vicious and life-threatening political witch hunt targeting Dr. Marta Havryshko, a scholar of the Nazi Holocaust. Havryshko has come under attack by the Ukrainian state, its intelligence agencies, neo-Nazi forces, and their supporters in academia. Her life and the safety of her family are in serious danger because her research has challenged the far-right nationalist forces that have been systematically cultivated for the NATO proxy war against Russia. Workers, youth and progressive intellectuals must come to her defense.
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For her principled opposition to the Nazification of Ukraine, Havryshko’s life has been put in real danger. Announcing the Open Letter on X, she declared:
I don’t let my 13-year-old child go alone on the school bus, to the city library, or even to the nearest supermarket. I’ve changed my daily route to the university. I carefully inspect all package labels and never open anything unless I’m sure where it came from. I’ve changed my entire lifestyle because of the death and rape threats I constantly receive from neo-Nazis fighting in Ukraine. In their closed channels, they openly discuss how to kill me, behead me, pour acid on me, rape me, and burn me alive seasoning it all with antisemitic jokes about Auschwitz, soap and strip pajama. (sic)
Significantly, the [the Philadelphia Inquirer] states contracts may be rewritten by the city under certain circumstances, such as “if it is in dire straits financially.” It declares that it could be the case if “there is a sudden economic downturn, or President Donald Trump makes good on his threats to cut federal funding to cities.” The Inquirer calls these entirely plausible scenarios “unlikely.”
Much like in Chicago, Philadelphia workers could find themselves in a situation where the city reopens their contracts in order to make substantial cuts and layoffs after the ink has dried on their bargaining agreement.
3. How the Democratic Socialists of America helped sell out the Philadelphia municipal workers’ strike
The strike by 9,000 Philadelphia city workers was a strategic experience for the whole working class. Workers were pitted against the Democratic Party, which is working with Republicans to impose massive budget cuts all over the country. It was a preview of an emerging conflict between a mass movement of the working class against the entire capitalist ruling elite.
It also showed that this fight is bound up with a fight against the sellout union bureaucracy. The more power the strike showed, the more AFSCME worked deliberately to undermine it, before finally shutting the strike down after eight days with a contract almost identical to the city’s original offer.
From the start, the World Socialist Web Site intervened aggressively in the struggle, publishing daily in-depth reports, updates and commentary— to encourage striking workers to expand their strike movement and to warn them about the growing signs that the union officials were looking to sell them out.
The WSWS called on workers to build independent rank-and-file strike committees and spread their struggle throughout the city. The Philadelphia Workers Rank-and-File Strike Committee which was formed called for the immediate restart of the walkout, an increase in strike pay to $750 a week, a contract with 8 percent annual increases and urged the building of “a national network of rank-and-file committees to coordinate the fight.”
By contrast, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), worked to reinforce the authority of the bureaucracy throughout the strike. Their role shows that it is not a socialist organization at all, but a pseudo-left section of the Democrats, which consciously tries to divert the growing move to the left back behind the capitalist two-party system.
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Across multiple cities, the DSA has been instrumental in helping the American capitalist class betray workers’ struggles to benefit the Democratic Party and the capitalist establishment. The Philadelphia municipal strike followed the Chicago teachers’ contract battle, where the DSA-led Chicago Teachers Union collaborated with DSA-backed mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson to push through a contract on the workers based on false promises.
But immediately after the deal, the city declared a financial crisis and is now considering ripping up even this inadequate contract. Meanwhile, the Chicago Transit Authority is preparing “doomsday” cuts, much like the Philadelphia transit system is preparing, which would permanently damage systems on which millions rely.
4. United Kingdom: Corbyn’s new left party—What it is and what it isn’t
On Thursday July 24, Jeremy Corbyn finally confirmed the creation of a new left-wing party in Britain. Within three days, over 500,000 people had signed up to a mailing list to build “Your Party”, ahead of an inaugural conference expected to be held this autumn.
The announcement is a milestone in the ongoing breakup of the Labour Party. Millions of workers and young people have drawn the conclusion that Labour, under the leadership of Keir Starmer, is an irredeemably right-wing, pro-business party of warmongers and defenders of genocide in Gaza.
The new party’s brief launch statement, signed by Corbyn and recently resigned former Labour MP Zarah Sultana, declared, “It’s time for a new kind of political party. One that belongs to you.” It points to the millions living in poverty as “giant corporations make a fortune” and the government provides “billions for war”, and to “the government’s complicity in crimes against humanity”.
The statement calls for a “mass redistribution of wealth and power”, for the defense of “the right to protest against genocide”, and opposes the scapegoating of migrants and refugees and the “fossil fuel giants putting their profits before our planet”. It is “ordinary people who create the wealth,” it continues, “and it is ordinary people who have the power to put it back where it belongs.”
Millions agree and see the need for a new party to put these ideas into action. But this is not that party. Although Corbyn has been forced to make an organizational break from Labour, his new party does not represent a political break from Labourism. It advocates only limited reforms to be pursued through parliament—a Labour Party Mark II.
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As the Socialist Equality Party has consistently argued, Labour’s degeneration and transformation into a party no less reactionary than the Tories, and similarly despised, is not the product of mistaken ideas and bad leaders. It is rooted in fundamental shifts within the foundations of world capitalism. The development of globalized production, falling profit rates and rampant financialization backed by public debt have ended any possibility of combining a defense of the capitalist profit system with securing reforms, however limited.
The working class in Britain and internationally faces a world in which the super-rich oligarchy monopolizes an ever greater percentage of the world’s wealth and the imperialist powers build up their militaries for wars for territory and resources. Workers’ collapsing living standards are the price to be paid, and police-state measures deployed and right-wing parties cultivated to repress resistance.
5. Australian PM acknowledges Israeli war crimes, but continues to support Zionist regime
In a television interview on Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged that Israel is committing war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza. He stated that it is “quite clearly” a “breach of international law to stop food being delivered, which was a decision that Israel made in March.”Speaking on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Insiders” program, Albanese said that the scenes of mass starvation in Gaza “break your heart.” The actions of the Israeli regime, which has barred humanitarian aid from entering the strip, were “indefensible.” The PM made similar comments in a statement he released on Friday.
Albanese’s remarks are an exercise in massive hypocrisy. His Labor government has supported Israel, politically, diplomatically and materially, throughout its genocidal onslaught on Gaza. And Albanese and the government, notwithstanding the handwringing, have not changed that stance one iota.
Instead, the remarks are part of an internationally coordinated shift in rhetoric, not substance, from a number of imperialist powers that have been key backers of Israel.
6. Israel has starved to death dozens of Palestinian children
Amidst the unrelenting 20-month blockade and bombardment of Gaza, the fascist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is systematically starving children to death. Reports from besieged hospitals and grief-stricken families present a picture of deliberate food deprivation targeting the most vulnerable.
The death toll from starvation and malnutrition-related causes continues to climb with each passing day. As of July 25, officials in Gaza report at least 113 starvation-related deaths since October 2023, of which 81 are children.
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Hunger and grief have tormented mothers across Gaza, especially those attempting to breastfeed their infants. Normally a biological lifeline between mother and child, breastfeeding has become all but impossible.
One woman, Nada, told a journalist via text message: “There’s barely salty water. I am collapsing from hunger and dehydration, unable to produce milk for my son... I fear he will die.”
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The images now emerging from Gaza shock the conscience and recall the worst crimes in history. Photographs of emaciated Palestinian children lying in bombed tents or hospital floors, too weak to cry, bear an undeniable resemblance to the infamous images of Jews starved in Nazi concentration camps in World War II. The starvation, the sunken eyes, the wasted bodies all invoke memories of Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.
It is a cruel irony that the people of Israel—many of whom have family members who were victims of Hitlerite genocide—are now governed by a regime practicing the same methods as the Nazis. Zionism has resulted in targeted killing, displacement and starvation of an entire people.
However, unlike during World War II, when the world learned of the full scale of Nazi crimes only after the liberation of the death camps in 1945, the genocide in Gaza is unfolding today before the eyes of billions of people around the globe in real time.
Through websites, social media, smartphone recordings and live streaming around the globe, no amount of lies or justifications can hide the truth of what is happening. The deliberate starvation of children by Israel is taking place openly with the support of both the US and European imperialist governments.
7. Top Justice Department official meets for 9 hours with Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell
The Blanche-Maxwell meeting was highly unusual, both from a legal and a political standpoint. As the top deputy to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Blanche is in charge of the day-to-day operations of the Department of Justice, a vast agency with more than 100,000 employees. For him to devote two full working days to traveling to Tallahassee, Florida, and interviewing a prisoner serving a 20-year jail sentence for sexual exploitation of children is extraordinary.
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All indications are that Trump, acting through Blanche, is seeking to gather as much dirt as possible on prominent Democrats and Wall Street figures, who socialized or did business with Epstein during the two decades in which he built a fortune as a financial adviser to billionaires like Les Wexner, founder of The Limited clothing chain. The goal would be to offset the political impact of Trump’s own name appearing in the Justice Department investigative files on Epstein, of which Trump learned in May from Bondi and Blanche.
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The Epstein affair has contributed to the further decline in Trump’s approval rating, to 37 percent, barely above the 34 percent rating, his lowest ever, which followed the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This reflects not only the scandal’s impact, but more importantly, the mass hostility to Trump’s persecution of immigrants, his tariff war on the world, and other attacks on democratic rights and social benefits.
The Democratic Party has not benefited from Trump’s decline however, as a Wall Street Journal poll published Friday night found that 63 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of the Democrats, the worst showing since 1990. Only 33 percent had a favorable view. The parallel declines of Trump and the Democrats suggest that an increasing portion of the American population correctly views the Democrats not as Trump’s opposition but as his partners in crime.
8. Los Angeles Times investigation reveals deadly fire response failures
To accept the Eaton Fire as a “natural disaster” is to accept a lie. The fire itself may have been sparked by natural conditions, although that remains subject to investigation, with profit-gouging utilities potentially sharing the blame, but its deadly consequences were entirely the result of social and political choices. The fire was not an act of God—it was an act of government.
At every level, the capitalist state failed—and not by accident. President Donald Trump gutted environmental regulations during his first term, and little was restored under Joe Biden. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2025–26 budget included cuts to critical social services. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council declared a “fiscal emergency,” slashing spending on social infrastructure while preserving corporate incentives and police funding.
9. Trump “steamroller” imposes tariff and trade deal on European Union
Under the main terms of the agreement, announced after a meeting between Trump and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland yesterday, the EU will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on US energy products and weapons and be hit with a 15 percent tariff on European exports to the US.
The only “concession” by the US appears to be that exports of Europeans cars would have a 15 percent tariff rather than the 25 percent previously announced.
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An article in Bloomberg noted that the measures so far announced by the Trump administration have lifted the US tariff rate to the highest level since the 1930s. They are now six times what they were when Trump took office just six months ago.
And according to an analysis by Bloomberg Economics, the hit to the world economy will reach $2 trillion by the end of 2027 relative to its pre-trade war path. In conditions where global economic growth was already on a downward trajectory, that spells an intensification of economic and trade conflicts.
10. Resident doctors speak from picket lines in England as five-day strike begins
One doctor:
“The amount of turnover we have among community mental health staff, especially. community psychiatric nursing, has been insane. Constant staff turnover makes it difficult from a therapeutic relationship point of view, especially with the most vulnerable people in our society. It takes time to establish. And if we are not able to retain our staff, if we’re not able to give them conditions that they deserve and that they have worked and trained for, it’s far from ideal how things are on the ground as opposed to what you learn theoretically in university, isn’t it?"
11. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud: “Profiteering and revenge overlap and amplify…”
Certain critics and filmgoers consider Kiyoshi Kurosawa a remarkable writer-director. Another possibility is that his bleak, misanthropic, often bloody films epitomize the overall decline in Japanese filmmaking, once a crowning jewel of international cinema (Akira Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu and others), over the past 40 to 50 years.
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Everyone in Cloud is either a fraudster, a cynic, an opportunist or a psychopath. Not a single one of them deserves much of the viewer’s concern or attention. How accurate is that as a view of life in Japan, or anywhere else?
12. New COVID-19 variants surge as Kennedy escalates war on science
The ruling class’s declaration that “the pandemic is over” has been disproven yet again, as the 11th wave of mass COVID-19 infection is now sweeping across the US and other countries, driven by new highly transmissible variants. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has shown no signs of settling into a predictable “endemic” state falsely promised by official scientists and COVID contrarians alike.
The current surge is being propelled by two dominant variants: NB.1.8.1, dubbed “Nimbus,” and XFG, known as “Stratus,” which together represent a new phase of viral evolution. NB.1.8.1 now accounts for 43 percent of US cases, while XFG has rapidly spread worldwide and comprises the third most prevalent strain nationally.
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The current crisis represents the culmination of a bipartisan war on public health, which began not with Trump’s return to power but with the Biden administration’s systematic dismantling of COVID-19 protections. Biden’s September 2022 declaration that “the pandemic is over” set the stage for today's wholesale dismantling of all public health measures under the diktats of the anti-vaccine quack Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
13. Recall of opposition lawmakers in Taiwan rejected by voters
The bitterly fought campaign reflects sharp infighting in Taiwanese ruling circles fueled by the intensifying US-led drive to war against China, in which Taiwan is the central flashpoint. President Lai Ching-te, who came to office in May last year, has increasingly aligned his administration with Washington, sought to boost military spending and earlier this month held the largest annual military war games, explicitly aimed against China.
The KMT, along with the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has a majority in the legislature. It has blocked key aspects of Lai’s agenda, cutting this year’s military budget and fueling accusations that the KMT members were pro-China and Communist agents or stooges.
Pro-recall campaigners denounced the KMT in the most lurid and inflammatory terms. Slogans included “Fake Legislators Are Real Communist Bandits.” One campaigner, cited by the US-based National Public Radio, declared: “Their purpose is to weaken Taiwan. They want to sabotage Taiwan from within.”
In reality, the KMT fought a civil war in China against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but was forced to retreat to Taiwan—with the assistance of the US military—following its defeat in the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Chiang Kai-shek, its leader, routinely branded the CCP as “Communist bandits.” His dictatorial regime claimed to be the legitimate government, in exile, of all China.
The KMT’s attitude to Beijing only began to shift with the restoration of capitalism in China from 1978 onward, and the loss of US backing after Washington established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979. In seeking to improve relations with Beijing, the KMT represents the interests of Taiwanese corporations that have heavily invested in China to the tune of some $US200 billion.
The DPP, like the KMT, is a right-wing capitalist party but is oriented to ending the ambiguous status of Taiwan. In establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979, the US de facto recognized the “One China” policy under which Beijing is regarded as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan. At the time, the US ended diplomatic relations with Taipei and withdrew all military forces from the island.
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In May, congressional testimony by retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery revealed that 500 US military personnel were stationed in Taiwan, far more than the handful previously acknowledged. Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that President Xi Jinping was preparing to invade Taiwan by 2027 and war with China was “imminent.”
In fact, it is the US that is accelerating preparations for war with China by seeking to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan—paralleling the way it provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine. And in similar fashion, Washington is completely indifferent to the catastrophic impact such a war would have on the Taiwanese population. US imperialism is driven above all by the fear that China’s economic growth is undermining America’s global dominance.
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Over the past year, the two parties of the Taiwanese bourgeoisie stopped at nothing in their battles in the legislature, at times descending into physical brawls. The KMT has used its legislative power in a bid to curb the powers of the presidency and courts. After the country’s Constitutional Court struck down some of its bills, the KMT refused to confirm any of Lai’s nominations to the court. The KMT’s own efforts to target DPP legislators failed to meet the required level of signatures amid allegations of fraud against its local chapters.
Throughout this acrimonious political brawling, the two parties and their supporters made no attempt to address the social crisis facing working people. Despite their occasional empty promises, both parties are staunch defenders of capitalism committed to imposing the demands of big business on the working class.
This witch-hunt against Chinese scholars is part of Washington’s preparations for war against China. By whipping up anti-Chinese sentiment through alarmist, unscientific claims about “agroterrorism” and “sabotage,” the US government seeks to put the American population on a war footing and subordinate the entire university and college system to militarist and hyper-nationalist ideology. By means of punitive investigations, threats to federal funding, and strict compliance requirements universities are being coerced into severing international ties and suppressing any internationalist or anti-war sentiment.
The second “mega picket,” staged on July 25 billed as a show of support for 400 striking Birmingham bin workers, was a travesty of genuine working-class solidarity.
It served only the interests of Unite and the broader trade union bureaucracy, which has isolated the strike for more than six months while refusing to lift a finger in defense of a militant section of workers opposing job losses and drastic pay cuts of £8,000, and who are facing a strikebreaking operation led by the Starmer government and co-ordinated by its flagship local authority under councilor John Cotton.
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The Birmingham bin strike can and must be won—but not through stunts, hollow appeals, or reliance on a union bureaucracy. What is needed is the formation of a rank-and-file strike committee to take control of the struggle and break out of its isolation, to unify with council workers and other sections of the working class nationwide, to wage a collective fight against austerity and the frontal assault on workers’ rights by the Starmer government.
The declared bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council in September 2023—initiating £300 million in cuts overseen by Tory government-appointed and Labour-maintained commissioners—is the tip of a much broader crisis. A 2025 National Audit Office report warned that around 43 percent of English councils are at risk of effective bankruptcy. A Local Government Association survey found that one in four councils may require emergency financial support to avoid insolvency by 2026–27. Between 2010 and 2020, core funding from central government to councils was slashed by over 50 percent in real terms.
16. Workers protest against Electricity Board restructuring in Sri Lanka
Around 16,000 Ceylon Electricity Board workers from the company’s 22,000-strong workforce took sick leave action on July 22 and held a one-day protest against the Sri Lankan government’s proposed Electricity (Amendment) Bill.
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According to the proposed bill, the CEB will be broken up into five separate companies under government control. These entities will be overseen by boards of directors appointed by the minister of power and energy. The bill stipulates that these five companies will be demerged into 12 additional entities after six months.
The bill makes no mention of workers’ rights during this transfer process, including matters related to salaries, allowances, loans, and medical benefits. This implies that existing employees’ rights will be discontinued and that the new companies will unilaterally determine salaries and working conditions. In other words, the government is preparing to unleash a sweeping assault on workers’ rights.
While the bill does not explicitly state this, the companies are expected to be transformed into public-private partnerships or fully privatized entities. This is in line with the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) demands for the “restructure” of state-owned enterprises—dismantling previous nationalist protections—and their opening up to private investors.
17. This week in history: July 28-August 3
25 years ago:
Republican National Convention opens in Philadelphia, financed by big business
50 years ago:
US and Soviet Union sign Helsinki Accords
75 years ago:
General strike in Belgium forces abdication of King Leopold III
100 years ago:
British government forestalls miners’ strike
18. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
