Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Stop the escalating genocide in Gaza!
Israel and the US have created an entity known as the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF), which has constructed “aid corridors” that are in reality killing fields—deliberately constructed zones of entrapment, monitored and targeted by Israeli drones and snipers. Nearly 1,000 aid seekers have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded at the sites since the end of May.
The massacre of aid seekers is directly connected to a deliberate campaign of starvation. Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that 18 people died of starvation within a 24-hour period, reflecting a sharp intensification of hunger under Israel’s near-total blockade of food, water and electricity.
Over the weekend, Israel also announced a new ground offensive in central Gaza and issued fresh evacuation orders. The Israeli government is carrying out a plan to force the population of Gaza into a vast concentration camp over the ruins of Rafah, in preparation for their eventual expulsion to other countries.
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The Gaza genocide has triggered an enormous outpouring of global opposition. Millions have taken part in mass protests over the 21 months up until now. However, these demonstrations—while expressing deeply felt and legitimate moral outrage—have lacked a clear political perspective. Certain critical conclusions must now be drawn.
First, the fight against the genocide is inseparable from the fight against imperialism....
Second, the fight against imperialism must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society....
Third, the fight against war must be developed as an international movement against capitalism and for socialism....
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The World Socialist Web Site, the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties call for the building of a new anti-war movement based on international socialism. It must be anti-capitalist and socialist, fighting to abolish the dictatorship of finance capital and put an end to the profit system that is the root cause of war. It must be completely independent of all capitalist parties and their political agents.
And it must be international, uniting workers in every country in a common struggle to put an end to the imperialist system. We urge all workers and young people who agree with this program to take up this fight.
2. Trump twists and turns over Epstein investigation
The attempt to put an end to the Epstein case has had an explosive effect, at least initially, in Trump’s fascist milieu. Trump issued a series of diatribes on social media, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, denouncing his own supporters for demanding greater transparency on the Epstein case.
His most absurd claim was that the Epstein files had been created by Obama, Clinton, Biden and other Democrats, although he and his fascist acolytes have been peddling the opposite story—that Clinton and the Democrats were the principal clientele being serviced by Epstein—for a number of years.
In the end, the most damaging and persuasive material may be uncovered through the investigation into Epstein’s financial affairs, which were extensive and connected him to many of the most powerful US financial institutions and an array of billionaires. Epstein made his own fortune managing the personal wealth of Leslie Wexner, founder-owner of The Limited, the giant holding company for clothing stores and lines like Victoria’s Secret.
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According to an initial account by the New York Times, Senate investigators found that after Epstein’s second arrest on sex-trafficking charges, in July 2019, “filings by four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in transactions—including thousands of wire transfers for the purchase and sale of artwork for rich friends, fees paid to Mr. Epstein by wealthy individuals, and payments to numerous women … A few transactions red-flagged were for as much as $100 million.”
The Times identified the banks as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, and Deutsche Bank.
It is significant that the Biden administration did nothing to pursue the Epstein issue during its four years in office. This demonstrates the bipartisan desire to cover up the extent of the sex-trafficking operation and protect the hundreds of members of the financial oligarchy who were implicated as Epstein’s clients, and the abusers of the young girls he made available to them.
3. ICE gestapo seeks personal data of 79 million Medicaid enrollees
According to the AP, the agreement between the Department of Homeland Security, overseen by Secretary Kristi Noem, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services , led by television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz, will provide ICE agents with the ability to locate “aliens” across the country by cross-referencing personal health, medical and location data.
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Private information, including Social Security numbers, will be in the hands not only of fascistic ICE officials, but there is a real possibility it will end up in the hands of private companies that have facilitated the rise of Trump and growth of fascism in the US such as Palantir.
Palantir is currently led by pro-genocide Zionist CEO Alex Karp, while major Trump and Republican Party donor Peter Thiel is on the board of Palantir and serves at its chairman. Thiel called for Trump’s election at the 2016 Republican National Convention and has donated millions to Trump and other far-right candidates, including Vice President JD Vance.
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In an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday morning, acting ICE director Todd Lyons claimed that nearly 150,000 people have been deported by ICE this year. In response to mass anger among broad layers of the population towards the ongoing kidnapping operations, Lyons complained that a “sharp increase in rhetoric from election officials” was responsible for growing anger at the immigration Gestapo’s activities.
Lyons promised ICE would continue the practice of “collateral arrests,” meaning immigration police will target friends and family members during raids. He also defended ICE agents wearing masks while kidnapping workers and community members. “I’m not a proponent of the masks,” he said. “However, if that’s a tool for the men and women of ICE to keep themselves and their families safe, then I will allow it.”
4. Silicon Valley’s tech dystopia signals social collapse
Despite Silicon Valley leading the country in innovation and patent generation, nearly 30 percent of households cannot meet their basic needs—exposing the deep disconnect between technological advancement and shared economic security.
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Far from being an exception, Silicon Valley is a concentrated expression of a broader trend: the social disaster produced by the crisis of capitalism. The Bay Area’s self-image as a beacon of progressive success is undermined by a reality of mass displacement, premature death, and economic precarity. These statistics are clear signals of a system in terminal decline.
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Marx warned that capitalism, in its advanced stages, creates the conditions for its own destruction. What Silicon Valley demonstrates is not only the advanced stage of systemic decay but the urgency of its replacement.
The suffering is well documented, and it points clearly to one source: a system based on private ownership of the means of production, profit-driven priorities, and the subordination of human needs to market logic. The solution lies in a fundamentally different social order—socialism, organized on the basis of human need rather than private profit.
5. Los Angeles’s homeless “decline” report: A political scam
The Los Angeles Times has uncritically touted a report claiming a 4 percent decline in homelessness in Los Angeles County in 2025, heralding it as proof that the city’s decades-long housing disaster is finally improving.
This headline is designed to cover up the brutal reality faced by tens of thousands of unhoused workers and families and shield the criminal negligence of politicians who preside over one of the richest cities in the world—a city that houses 56 billionaires amid a growing sea of tents and human misery.
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The ostensible reduction in “unsheltered homelessness” is a displacement campaign designed to conceal the true scale of the problem from public view and craft a false narrative of progress. More than 60,000 people entered homelessness in 2024 alone, a figure that dwarfs the paltry number permanently housed by state and city programs.
It is an exercise in damage control designed to pacify growing public anger and justify the grotesque spending priorities of a ruling class that prioritizes billionaires over the working poor.
“I went down there [to the union headquarters] 2 days straight and still no check,” stated one worker on the union’s Facebook page. Another worker wrote, “You have a strike fund. Everyone should have gotten $600. And if not that, at least give EVERYONE 200. Y’all splitting hairs and people are struggling.” And another worker wrote, “100% guarantee that the union leadership, who make six figure salaries, were paid in full during the strike.”
Anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiment is surging internationally, particularly amongst young people. The Melbourne University expulsions express the deep fear of the Australian ruling elite towards this radicalization and its potential to link up with a broader movement of the working class.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality’s (IYSSE) club at the university has been campaigning among students on campus over the past weeks in opposition to these attacks. Students interviewed by the IYSSE expressed their outrage over the expulsions and connected them to the global assault on democratic rights.
8. Trump's tariff threats against Brazil: the necessary socialist response
"There is no national solution to the fundamental problems faced by the working class."
An important statement of the Socialist Equality Group (Brazil):
Trump’s imperialist attack shook Brazil’s entire political landscape and caused uproar within the ruling class. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva responded to it by calling for the broadest unity of the national bourgeoisie.
The unions and the pseudo-left that orbits the PT immediately embraced this reactionary campaign. Fabricating a “left” cover for bourgeois chauvinism, they are attempting to set a political trap for the working class and youth.
The allegations in Greeley shed light on one of the most exploitative industries in America, with some of the highest injury rates. But they also follow a long pattern of malign neglect of basic safety procedures at JBS in particular.
In 2020, the plant pressured workers to take their shifts even while sick during the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, six workers died at the JBS facility, with more than 200 workers testing positive for the virus at one point. This was also the direct result of president Trump issuing an executive order during the final year of his first term to keep meat processing plants open during the height of the pandemic.
However, the bureaucrats of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union refused to take any action to protect lives at this or other meatpacking facilities across the US. At a Tyson pork plant in Iowa, they even worked out an “attendance bonus” with management, which was taking bets on how many workers would fall ill.
10. Canada’s social democratic NDP announces leadership contest following federal election debacle
Over the past decade, the NDP served as a pivotal source of political and parliamentary support for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.
After the Liberals were reduced to a minority government in 2019, the NDP propped it up in parliament, backing major bailouts for corporations at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ruling class’ profits-before-lives pandemic policy. For two-and-a-half years beginning in March 2022, the NDP kept the Liberals in power through a “confidence and supply” agreement. It was aimed, to use Singh’s words, at creating “political stability” as the Trudeau government played a leading role in the US/NATO war on Russia, supported the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, and carried out a massive assault on the working class, banning strikes without even the democratic fig leaf of back-to-work legislation. Throughout this period, the NDP worked in tandem with its union allies to diffuse a major upsurge of the class struggle, which saw strikes sweep across all regions and sectors of the economy between late 2021 and December 2024.
11. Sri Lanka’s corporate profits surge as IMF austerity deepens poverty
Under the IMF’s stringent conditions, ordinary Sri Lankans face exorbitant increases in the cost of living. In sharp contrast to the social distress of the poor, corporate earnings are booming, with major firms reaping massive profits largely fueled by the same IMF-backed economic reforms.
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Sri Lankan workers and the poor face dire social conditions with the cost of living more than doubling in the past four years. In 2021, 7,913 rupees ($US26) were needed per person to meet basic needs each month. In 2025, that figure stands at 16,302 rupees according to the government’s Department of Census and Statistics.
Poverty and unemployment have soared. A World Bank update report in April 2025 estimated that 25 percent of the population—or about 5.5 million people—now live in extreme poverty with 55.7 percent (12.3 million) experiencing multidimensional poverty.
12. Taiwan mounts massive anti-China war games
The Trump administration is already waging an economic war against China, which it regards as the chief threat to its global hegemony, and is preparing for military conflict against Beijing. In a warmongering speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denounced “aggression by Communist China” and demanded that US allies in Asia boost military spending and prepare for an “imminent” war with China over Taiwan.
In reality, just as it actively provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, the US under both Biden and Trump has sought to goad China into using its military to take over Taiwan. Formally, the US still abides by the “One China” policy—de facto recognizing Beijing as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan.
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In the past, the exercises were designed to display the military’s major weapon systems and offer reassurance that Chinese forces could not invade. This year’s drills were based on a scenario in which a Chinese amphibious landing was successful and involved smaller, more mobile weaponry. Taiwanese troops practiced the defense of critical infrastructure and protecting the center of the capital Taipei. The unstated aim was to bog Chinese troops down in a land war, at least for long enough for the US to respond.
More significant, however, was the scope and compulsory nature of the civilian exercises. These included air raid drills, which in one case involved supermarket shoppers being herded into a basement car park and the transformation of a school hall into a makeshift wartime hospital. Some drills involved how to suppress protests if food and other supplies run short. An official told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that taxi drivers are being trained to become a volunteer wartime police force.
13. Why are current humans overwhelmingly the descendants of a late migration out of Africa?
Recently published research, (“Major expansion in the human niche preceded out of Africa dispersal,” Nature, 18 June 2025) proposes a new theory as to why the later immigrants from Africa overwhelmed and/or supplanted the pre-existing human populations of Eurasia. This new theory contends that, while hominins originally evolved on the East African savannah millions of years ago and were adapted to that environment, by several thousand years ago Homo sapiens in Africa had spread out to other environments, developing a range of knowledge, cultural practices, and technology that permitted them to successfully inhabit a range of settings.
14. Australian PM visits China amid stepped-up US military demands
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese concluded a six-day visit to China last Friday. The trip featured a meeting with President Xi Jinping and a behind closed doors banquet with the Chinese leader, as well as other high-level engagements including conferences with Premier Li Qiang and Chairman Zhao Leji of the National People’s Congress.
The visit has been hailed as a success by Albanese’s supporters, and even as a diplomatic masterstroke. In reality, the trip had a rather desperate character, aimed at shoring up economic and trade ties with China, upon which Australia is heavily dependent, amid the global headwinds of geopolitical upheavals and US President Trump’s trade war.
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Albanese’s visit also coincided with the beginning of Talisman Sabre military exercises in Australia. This year’s iteration of the biennial US-Australian war games is the largest yet, involving 19 countries, including all the major imperialist powers, and advanced weaponry, such as long-range missiles. It has the character of a dress rehearsal for an aggressive US-led war against China, a fact that was openly acknowledged by the Wall Street Journal.
Notwithstanding its unusual length, the trip was conspicuous for the limited character of the discussions and the lack of any concrete agreements.
15. Australia: Tasmania in political limbo after Labor’s vote drops to record low
After the fourth state election in seven years, the outcome is another hung parliament. Neither the caretaker state Liberal government nor the Labor Party obtained anywhere near enough seats to form a majority administration.
Although Tasmania has the smallest population of any Australian state—about 575,000 residents—it has become a concentrated expression of the deteriorating living and social conditions for the working class throughout the country, and the resulting political disaffection.
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What has been covered up in the media coverage, at least outside Tasmania, is the right-wing, pro-business character of Labor’s election campaign, which mirrored the program of the Albanese federal Labor government.
The action taken by Massive Attack is welcome. There are many political questions to be discussed and worked through, but the organization of an alliance of artists to oppose Zionist lies and attacks and the horrifying genocide in Gaza is a step forward. Musicians and artists all over the world, as well as wide layers of the population, have a stake in this development.
At the International Trade Union Confederation Africa Regional Conference on Peace and Security July 18, a high-level gathering of trade union bureaucrats from over 30 African countries convened [in Nairobi, Kenya] to discuss how to safeguard the capitalist order they serve.
18. Greek government bans asylum applications from North Africa in collaboration with European Union
Speaking to German tabloid Bild, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis defended the measure stating, “Greece is not an open transit route. The journey is dangerous, the outcome uncertain, and the money paid to smugglers is ultimately wasted. Illegal entries will not lead to legal residence.”
The measure is a death sentence on many desperate people who are trying to flee economic hardship, political persecution or escape war, risking their lives in the process. They will be sent back to their country of origin or the country they departed from without an opportunity to file a request for international protection. According to the InfoMigrants news and information service, the majority of those affected are from Somalia, Sudan, Egypt and Morocco.
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The pseudo-left Syriza-Progressive Alliance is posturing against the government’s anti-migrant agenda, with its deputies voting against the suspension of asylum application. Commenting on Plevris’ appointment two weeks ago Syriza leader Sokratis Famellos wrote on X, “It’s provocative for the post of Migration Minister to be held by another ex-LAOS member and one that called for dead refugees and migrants at the border.”
But Syriza was a willing accomplice in Fortress Europe while in government between 2015 and 2019. Tens of thousands of refugees were interned under its watch as part of the dirty deal signed between Greece and Turkey in 2016, which stipulated that all refugees crossing into Greece from Turkey be interned until their cases are processed, before deportation back to Turkey. The brutality of this policy was epitomized by Moria, the internment camp on the island of Lesbos that burned down in 2020. Dubbed by the BBC as the “worst refugee camp on Earth,” Moria’s appalling conditions were routinely condemned by aid groups and described by inmates as “hell on earth.”
19. How the far right AfD determines Germany’s political agenda
The far-right and, in part, fascist AfD is being systematically used to drive official politics to the right. The migration policy of Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) bears all the hallmarks of the AfD; the AfD was the first party to call for an increase in military spending to 5 percent of GDP, which has become the official policy of NATO and the German government; and now the AfD is also setting the tone in the selection of judges to the country’s highest court.
20. This week in history: July 21-27
25 years ago:
Concorde plane crash near Paris kills 113, injures 6
50 years ago:
Military triumvirate takes power in Portugal
75 years ago:
US forces massacre up to 400 civilians in No Gun Ri, Korea
100 years ago:
British imperialism defines Palestinian citizenship
21. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
