Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Newlywed Palestinian woman faces deportation by Trump’s fascistic immigration regime
Ward Sakeik, a 22-year-old Palestinian woman who is not a citizen of any country, is being victimized by the fascist immigration policies of the Trump administration. Detained by US authorities while returning from her honeymoon in February, Sakeik now faces indefinite incarceration and the threat of deportation to a third country where she has never lived and cannot claim citizenship.
Her case has sparked outrage among immigrant rights advocates and exposes the brutal reality of Trump’s ongoing assault on immigrants, refugees, and legal residents.
2. Senate passes Trump’s class-war bill to cut taxes for the rich and wreck Medicaid
The bill marks a new stage in a process that has unfolded over the past half century. Medicaid, passed in 1965, was a cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and “War on Poverty” programs and the last significant social reform enacted in the United States.
Over the past 60 years, the ruling class has waged an unrelenting social counterevolution. Both the Democrats and Republicans have overseen the slashing of social programs to pay for repeated bailouts of Wall Street and the corporate ruling elite. The gutting of Medicaid marks a turning point.
4. Verdi trade union sells out ancillary workers at Berlin’s Charité hospitalIn what Trump and his fascist supporters are calling “Alligator Alcatraz,” some 5,000 people are expected to be herded into the hastily constructed facility in remote South Florida. Governor DeSantis announced that transfers would begin on July 2.As part of a far-right media blitz aimed at normalizing the construction of remote concentration camps for immigrants and political opponents of the US government, the Republican Party is now selling merchandise to promote the Florida camp—complete with hats emblazoned with alligators. It’s the American fascist equivalent of the Nazis selling beer koozies or ashtrays to commemorate Auschwitz.
The new contract is a slap in the face to the ancillary workers, cooked up behind closed doors between management, the union and Berlin’s state government.
5. NUHW aborts UCSF Children’s Hospital strike after management announces 200 system-wide layoffs
The National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) leadership unilaterally ended its strike of 1,300 workers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Children’s Hospital on Sunday. The union called off the open-ended strike, authorized by a 70 percent margin, without even the pretext of having gained anything and only two days after UCSF announced 200 layoffs at other facilities.
This blatant act of sabotage underscores the treacherous role of the union bureaucracy, which is joined at the hip with management and the Democratic Party. The struggle can, and must be resumed, only through a seizure of the initiative by the rank and file organizing themselves independently of the NUHW officials to impose real democratic control over the struggle.
A great many trees and not enough forest. [And]... oddly dated.
7. Australia: NSW Labor budget cuts spending but boosts property developers
Last week’s third budget handed down by the Labor government in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, features more huge handouts to the billionaire property developers who are profiting from Australia’s housing affordability crisis, while junking previous token cost-of-living relief measures for working-class households.
8. Immigration thugs use explosive charges in assault on family home in Los Angeles-area raid
On June 27, in Huntington Park, California, federal agents from Customs and Border Protection (CPB) carried out a violent raid on the home of a working class family while Jenny Ramirez was caring for her two children, aged six and one.
In a scene of militarized terror more typical of a war zone than a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles, agents used an explosive device to blast the front door off its hinges—without warning or announcement—before storming the premises.
9. In Turkey: the attack on Leman magazine is a dangerous provocation
The ruling class and the capitalist political establishment will try to exploit any opportunity to suppress the deepening political crisis and divert attention away from the mounting class tensions.
10. Australian health workers voice outrage over Gaza catastrophe
An open letter from Australian health professionals and the response it has generated speak to the depth of the anguish, shock and anger felt by healthcare workers as they bear witness to the atrocities occurring in Gaza.
11. Canadian woman settles suit over being tortured in “dry cell” solitary confinement
Nova Scotia resident Lisa Adams was kept for 16 days in a solitary room with no running water or flushing toilet under lighted observation by sight and security camera, and with no privacy whatsoever for the entire duration.
12. Tensions grow between Japan, US over Trump tariffs
While Tokyo and Washington routinely claim their military alliance—which is above all directed at launching an imperialist war against China—is “ironclad,” there are clear signs of tensions between the two.
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Washington is using the threat of tariffs to force countries to further align with US military plans. While Japan is already in the process of doubling its military spending to two percent of GDP, the US considers this insufficient. At present, Tokyo plans to complete this process by 2027, with the increase including the budget for the coast guard and other military-related expenses
13. Starmer thrown a lifeline by collapse of Labour rebellion as his gutted welfare reform bill passes
The figures of yesterday’s parliamentary vote on the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments Bill speak to two things: the weakness of Keir Starmer’s Labour government and the unprincipled and spineless character of what passes for the “left” opposition within the Labour Party.
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Jeremy Corbyn, whose block of five Independent MPs voted against the amended bill, made no call for a campaign to remove Starmer and his cronies and wrote his usual entirely personal pledge on X: “Yesterday, the government removed vital support from disabled people. Today, the government will criminalize protestors who want to stop genocide. I opposed the government’s attack on the disabled—and I will oppose the draconian proscription of Palestine Action.”
14. Philadelphia municipal workers launch largest strike in nearly 40 years
For the first time in nearly four decades, Philadelphia’s largest municipal workers’ union, AFSCME District Council 33 (DC 33), is on strike. The work stoppage is sending shockwaves through city operations and daily life. It is the first strike of municipal city workers since 1986.
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The strike shows that the conditions are emerging for a mass movement across the country against austerity, not only from Trump but the Democrats who run most major US cities.
15. The CWU’s whitewash of Royal Mail USO pilots cannot conceal a workplace disaster
Far from a modest “reform,” the pilots are the first tranche of the Optimized Delivery Model jointly devised by Royal Mail, regulator Ofcom, and Communication Workers Union (CWU) leaders. This aims to slash £300 million across 1,200 delivery offices—profits destined for billionaire Daniel Křetínský’s EP Group, now sole owner of Royal Mail.
The Trump administration is preparing to water down or kill a proposed federal rule on workplace heat exposure. The rule, introduced last year by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), would be the first of its kind in US history. Its fate now hangs in the balance as extreme summer heat grips much of the country, particularly the Midwest and East Coast.
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According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), an average of 40 workers have died on the job from heat exposure each year from 2011 to 2022. An average of 3,389 workers annually from 2011 to 2020 experienced heat-related injuries or illnesses severe enough to cause them to miss one or more days of work. The USPS Office of Inspector General recorded 1,332 heat-related incidents among postal workers alone between 2022 and May 2025. That averages to more than 380 cases annually.
17. A sharp warning on the state of the global economy
The US has a debt of $36 trillion, rising at what is universally characterised as an “unsustainable” rate. In the UK, which experienced a major crisis in 2022, there have been warnings of a bond market sell-off because of the high levels of debt. European countries, particularly France and Italy, are weighed down in debt, while the Japanese prime minister has likened the government’s financial position to that of Greece in the 2010s.
18. Israel’s “eighth” domestic front in ever-widening genocide and war
Israel regards its Palestinian citizens as the enemy within and a target in its US-funded war against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and against Iran and its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
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Under Israel’s “Nation-State” law enshrining de facto apartheid-style discrimination and segregation, Palestinian Israelis are second-class citizens. Their towns and villages have long been denied equal financing for education, health and welfare and planning permission for housing and public and social infrastructure.
In recent weeks, during Iran’s retaliatory strikes, they were left to fend for themselves. A 2018 State Comptroller’s report found that 60 of 71 municipalities with Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Tamra with its 35,000 residents, lacked public shelters. Four Palestinians were killed in Tamra, about 25 kilometers east of Haifa, when an Iranian missile struck their residential building. Some of the areas where Palestinians live, particularly in the southern Negev, home to Bedouin villages, are designated “open areas” where Israel’s Iron Dome interceptors deliberately allow missiles to fall or detonate interceptors overhead, showering civilians with deadly shrapnel.
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According to the UN, since 7 October 2023, Israeli settlers and the army have killed over 1,000 Palestinians and wounded over 7,000 in the West Bank, while the Israeli authorities have demolished, confiscated or forced the demolition of 3,844 properties, including 1,376 homes, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The IDF have emptied three refugee camps in the West Bank, displacing more than 40,000 Palestinians from their homes, and installed hundreds of checkpoints.
Settler attacks, under the protection of the Israeli military, are part of a broader plan by Israel’s fascistic government to provoke the Palestinians in the West Bank into an attack that can be used, like the 7 October attack, as the pretext for a broader war against the Palestinians.
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
