Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. 80 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Eighty years ago, the US government carried out one of world imperialism’s most horrific war crimes: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The bombings, on August 6 and 9, 1945, instantly killed 120,000 people and led to between 250,000 and 300,000 deaths.
There was barely any international commemoration of the Hiroshima bombing yesterday, and there is no indication that the Nagasaki bombing will receive more on Saturday. Yet today, as US President Donald Trump threatens Iran and Russia with nuclear weapons, and governments across Europe call to prepare for “high-intensity warfare” between nuclear-armed states, this war crime takes on terrible contemporary significance. It is a warning to workers around the world as to where the policies of the most powerful capitalist governments are leading, if they are not stopped.
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The Trotskyist movement denounced the bombings as a war crime. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leader James P. Cannon spoke on August 22, 1945, at a memorial in New York, five years after the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader. The inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, died “in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan.” He issued a warning that remains as true today as in 1945:
Long ago the revolutionary Marxists said that the alternative facing humanity was either socialism or a new barbarism, that capitalism threatens to go down in ruins and drag civilization with it. But in the light of what has been developed in this war and is projected for the future, … the alternative can be made even more precise: The alternative facing mankind is socialism or annihilation! It is a problem of whether capitalism is allowed to remain or whether the human race is to continue to survive on this planet.
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For decades, schoolchildren in the United States were taught the lie that the atom bombing aimed to “save lives” and was the only way to force Japan to surrender. The incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in this narrative, averted the even greater bloodshed of a US-led land invasion of Japan. In reality, Japan—its military cut off by Allied navies from its sources of oil in what is today Indonesia, and its cities relentlessly firebombed—was by then seeking to surrender.
2. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cuts funding for mRNA vaccine grants
On August 5, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled nearly $500 million in grants and 22 federal contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, effectively halting the government’s investment in one of the most transformative medical technologies of the 21st century. The decision, part of what HHS called a “coordinated wind-down” under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, terminates or restructures dozens of vaccine projects with companies and institutions such as Pfizer, Moderna, Sanofi and Emory University.
According to the communication issued by Kennedy,“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”
Kennedy’s statements, in line with his rabid anti-vaccine stance, are patently false and will have potentially lethal consequences as it further undermines the ability for the world to develop targeted vaccines when another epidemic emerges, when time is of the essence for producing these treatments and getting shots in arms.
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It bears reviewing the critical contributions COVID-19 vaccines, particularly the mRNA vaccines, have made during the ongoing pandemic, which have been estimated to have saved millions of lives globally.
A landmark study published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases found that, in just the first year of vaccine rollout (December 2020 to December 2021), vaccines prevented an estimated 14.4 million deaths based on reported COVID-19 fatalities. When factoring in excess mortality, that number rises to 19.8 million, representing a 63 percent reduction in global deaths. These benefits were especially pronounced in countries with widespread vaccine access and high uptake, many of which relied primarily on mRNA vaccines.
In the United States, where mRNA vaccines were the backbone of the national campaign, modeling by the Commonwealth Fund estimated that vaccinations prevented 3.2 million deaths and 18.5 million hospitalizations, while saving the US healthcare system more than $1 trillion in costs. A separate study published in JAMA Network Open found that in the first ten months of vaccine availability that included the Delta wave (from December 2020 through September 2021) COVID-19 vaccines averted approximately 235,000 deaths, 1.6 million hospitalizations and 27 million infections nationwide.
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On the question of vaccine safety, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the most prominent voices spreading disinformation about mRNA vaccines, often aligning himself with anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists. He has falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines are “the deadliest vaccine ever made” and has repeatedly suggested—without credible scientific evidence—that they cause widespread harm, including death, infertility and neurological damage. These assertions are not only untrue, but dangerously misleading. In reality, the safety of mRNA vaccines is supported by an unprecedented volume of global data collected over the past five years.
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Political attacks on mRNA vaccines are threatening to derail public health research and undermining the entire healthcare infrastructure. They will have significant long-term consequences for population health as well as threaten the risk of emerging infectious diseases.
Particularly disastrous is the attack on the National Institutes of Health by its new leader, installed by Trump and Kennedy. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has terminated HIV vaccine research programs, including Moderna’s mRNA-based efforts.
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The impact of canceling the mRNA vaccine contracts will be far-reaching and potentially catastrophic. One must recall that in the first year of the pandemic, before the vaccines had been introduced, low-income working class people in the US were dying at rates five times higher than affluent demographics (72.2 per 100,000 versus 14.6 per 100,000). Globally, low-income individuals, marginalized ethnic minorities, essential workers, migrants, incarcerated people and those facing homelessness faced the harshest outcomes. The COVID pandemic exposed to the fullest the social impact of inequality.
3. Investigative report exposes Microsoft support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank
This unprecedented integration of Microsoft with the war crimes of the Israeli military exposes the increasingly central role played by and correspondence of interests between giant global tech corporations and the strategic aims of US imperialism in the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
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The technological infrastructure that Microsoft built and now maintains is significant in its scale and scope. The foundation of the system is Azure data centers located in the Netherlands, with additional clusters in Ireland and within Israel itself. By July 2025, at least 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data—equivalent to about 200 million hours of audio—were being stored on Microsoft servers.
Most of the data, according to Israeli and Microsoft sources cited by the investigation, consist of recordings of phone calls by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Surveillance officers and internal documents described the ambition to “capture and store up to a million calls an hour.”
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The Israeli surveillance of Palestinians is universal. The operations described in the investigation mirror details revealed by former NSA intelligence officer Edward Snowden in 2013 about the scale and scope of US government surveillance, data storage and searching of the electronic communications of everyone in the country, if not throughout the entire world.
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Three sources specifically confirmed the data collected and stored using Microsoft’s cloud has been pivotal in planning lethal airstrikes in Gaza, as well as sweeping military detentions in the West Bank, operations which have left thousands of Palestinians dead or disappeared since October 2023.
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For its part, Microsoft continues to publicly deny it is abetting Israeli war crimes. In response to questions from The Guardian and +972 Magazine, the company issued carefully worded statements. “Microsoft’s engagement with Unit 8200 has been based on strengthening cybersecurity and protecting Israel from nation state and terrorist cyber-attacks,” a spokesperson said.
With standard language used to deny any connection between US corporations and military violence, Microsoft said, “At no time during this engagement or since that time has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned.”
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The Israeli military, through official IDF spokespeople, has also denied any direct relationship with Microsoft on the processing and storage of surveillance data. One statement reads, “The coordination between the Defense Ministry and the IDF with civilian companies is conducted based on regulated and legally supervised agreements. … The army operates in accordance with international law, with the aim of countering terrorism and ensuring the security of the state and its citizens.
In a follow-up after the publication of the investigative exposé, the IDF added, “We appreciate Microsoft’s support to protect our cybersecurity. We confirm that Microsoft is not and has not been working with the IDF on the storage or processing of data.” These denials are sharply contradicted by the facts of the reporting, technical documentation and verification by multiple Israeli defense sources.
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An analysis of Microsoft’s business priorities exposes the link between its drive for profit, and the war aims in the Middle East of US and other imperialist powers and around the world. As of 2025, Microsoft remains the world’s second most valuable company, with annual revenues exceeding $228 billion and a market valuation hovering near $3 trillion.
CEO Satya Nadella’s compensation in the previous fiscal year was over $56 million, a figure linked not only to stock performance but to Microsoft’s ability to secure and expand lucrative government and defense contracts.
Azure’s client roster includes every major branch of the US military, intelligence community and a roster of allied security agencies, making Microsoft’s bottom line dependent on the architecture of surveillance, conquest and war. Key contracts include JEDI (later JWCC) for the US Department of Defense, running into the billions, along with deals with the National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The company’s strategy is to position its platforms as indispensable “force multipliers” for both commercial and military clients, a model that fuses monopoly capital with the apparatus of military and police violence on a world scale.
4. University of Michigan holds disciplinary hearings against anti-Gaza genocide protesters
The University of Michigan has brought new disciplinary charges against 11 current and former students for their involvement in campus protests held last year against the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. The charges carry a range of penalties, including suspension, formal reprimand and a lifetime ban from the campus.
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The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan demands an end to disciplinary hearings and the dropping of all charges. This is a witch-hunt against students and workers whose only “crime” is to have opposed the genocide in Gaza. Pro-Palestinian students and workers face slanderous accusations of antisemitism for peacefully protesting against the war crimes of US imperialism and the Zionist Israeli regime.
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The charges are part of a national campaign to suppress opposition to US imperialism’s crimes abroad, directed in Michigan by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer and coordinated with the U-Mich Democratic-dominated Board of Regents. Between 2023 and 2024, the Democratic Biden administration served as the nerve center for this national repression campaign. Now, in 2025, the campaign continues, combined with the fascist Trump administration’s plans to subordinate the entirety of higher education to its interests and dictates, with the tacit support of the Democratic Party.
5. Concerns grow over sacking of BLS commissioner
A wave of concern is spreading through financial, government, academic and media circles over the decision by US President Trump to sack Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), on Friday after a jobs report showed that the US labor market is weakening.
In a move that forms part of his drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, Trump justified the sacking with bogus claims that the numbers had been “rigged” to make him and the Republicans look bad.
While the head of the BLS is appointed by the president, it is not a partisan position, like a member of the cabinet. The commissioner is tasked with producing accurate data on the US economy, including the labor market and inflation.
Black’s death adds to the grim tally of executions in 2025, a year characterized by an aggressive push from Republican governors and federal mandates under President Donald Trump to accelerate state-sanctioned killings. Twenty-eight men have been executed so far this year.
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The Supreme Court, in its 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision, ruled that executing individuals with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment. Though Tennessee lawmakers passed legislation in 2021 providing a path for death row prisoners to claim intellectual disability under current standards, and even the Davidson County District Attorney General conceded that Black met the criteria for an intellectual disability diagnosis and his sentence should be commuted to life, a judge rejected a new hearing on procedural grounds.
The courts concluded that because Black had received a hearing on the matter years prior he was not entitled to another, effectively sealing his fate based on a legal technicality rather than his current, recognized disability. Black’s legal team states that if he were tried today, he would not be eligible for the death penalty. His execution marks him as the first intellectually disabled person executed by Tennessee in the modern era of the death penalty.
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States carrying out death sentences this year include Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, has led the nation in executions, having conducted nine so far. The state recently passed legislation to allow non-unanimous jury recommendations for death sentences, lowering the threshold to 8-4, a clearly unconstitutional move.
7. An interview with Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler
The World Socialist Web Site interviewed Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler about the state of healthcare and the impact of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) on the healthcare industry. Dr. Woolhandler is a prominent health policy expert with extensive experience as a primary care physician and a former Harvard Medical School professor. She served as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy fellow at the Institute of Medicine from 1990 to 1991. Over her career, she has authored more than 150 scholarly works on topics such as healthcare policy, administrative waste, and the uninsured.
8. Los Angeles County CEO unveils sweeping assault on social programs and public health care
In a chilling briefing last week to the Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles County CEO Fesia Davenport laid out a sweeping plan to impose unprecedented austerity measures that would gut critical public services, dismantle vital social programs and even shut down parts of the region’s already overburdened public hospital system.
Davenport, who oversees the largest county government in the United States, warned that the combination of deep federal funding cuts, spiraling legal and emergency costs and rising labor expenditures had created a “tidal wave” of financial pressures.
The planned cuts in Los Angeles County threaten devastating consequences for the working class. Already, the county has begun shuttering regional parks, closing probation offices, reducing beach cleaning, and slashing hours at pools and youth programs.
At the center of the crisis are deep Medicaid cuts that will impact 4 million county residents—children, seniors and low-income families—denying them care and overburdening emergency services. George Green of the Hospital Association warned that the scale of cuts could force clinics and even hospitals to shut down.
9. Protesters speak out against Australian state Labor government’s planned public housing demolition
Socialist Equality Party campaigners explained the necessity of taking up a struggle against Labor and all the parties and organizations—including the Greens, unions and pseudo-left—which put forward the illusion that public housing can be defended by appeals to the Labor government. The SEP called on protesters to join its fight to build the Neighborhood Action Committee—an independent organization of residents, workers and others—to halt the demolition and defend public housing.
10. Australia: Hundreds protest Labor government plans to demolish Melbourne public housing towers
More than 500 people took part in a demonstration in Melbourne on Saturday to oppose the Victorian state Labor government’s plans to demolish 44 public housing towers in the city. The protest included a march to the headquarters of Homes Victoria—the government agency responsible for housing—and a march to the state parliament.
At least 10,000 residents will be displaced by the demolitions, which are part of an attack on public housing around Australia and internationally in the interests of boosting corporate profits and slashing government expenditure in vital social services to stack ballooning military budgets.
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The great unmentionable during Saturday’s rally was the role of the trade unions, above all the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU), which are tied by a thousand strings to the Labor Party. The CFMEU has presented phony opposition to the demolition of the public housing towers, while doing everything it can to prevent a fight by workers—above all, its own members who are involved in the demolition works—against the demolition.
Speakers like de Vietri, Bolton, RAHU representatives and Steph Price from the pseudo-left Victorian Socialists avoided the question of the unions like the plague, because it would expose their own role in propping up Labor and the unions while preventing an independent movement of residents and workers to stop the demolition.
In contrast, the SEP members at the rally spoke with residents, workers, youth and supporters of public housing about the urgent need to organize independently of all these organizations. SEP campaigners warned that the demolition would proceed if opposition remains confined to appeals to Labor through protest, courts and inquiries.
11. US, South Korea to “modernize” military alliance as war drive against China accelerates
South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun on Sunday concluded a four-day visit to the US where he reaffirmed the Lee Jae-myung administration’s commitment to Washington’s imperialist war drive against China. The trip also paves the way for a summit between Lee and US President Trump later this month.
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Since coming to power two months ago, the so-called “liberal” Lee administration has rapidly moved to align itself with Trump’s demand that allies throughout the Asia-Pacific region prepare for war with China. This is what is meant by “modernization” and Lee’s support for it, which belies the claims that his administration is seeking better relations with Beijing or to reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
There is nothing defensive in these war preparations. Washington, which is seeking to offset its relative economic decline and block the rise of China as a competitor, is using its military to surround and goad Beijing into a war, particularly over Taiwan. The Trump administration is demanding allies increase military spending to 5 percent of GDP to prepare for this conflict, which for South Korea means approximately doubling its military budget.
Washington is working with Seoul to ensure that US Forces Korea (USFK), the name of the American military stationed in South Korea, can use the country as a base for attacks. Ostensibly, the US military’s purpose in South Korea has been to “defend” the South from North Korea. While this has never been true, Washington and Seoul are using this as the pretext for military “modernization.”
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The US and South Korean militaries are closely intertwined and regularly stage massive war games on and around the Korean Peninsula, which are now increasingly involving Japan as part of their trilateral military cooperation. Furthermore, in the event of war the US takes operational control (OPCON) of South Korea’s huge military.
12. Germany: Mercedes increases pressure on 40,000 employees to leave the company
When the Mercedes management board and IG Metall union announced the massive austerity program “Next Level Performance” in February, Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius and the chair of the group works council, Ergun Lümali, spoke–alongside the usual platitudes about efficiency and performance–of the inevitable reduction in jobs, though they did not mention specific figures. The entire savings process would be fair and socially responsible, they promised.
Shortly thereafter, the company contradicted this. Mercedes sent 40,000 employees a severance offer by email, which, according to internal reports, they would be well advised not to reject. An article that appeared at the end of July in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung under the headline “In the Shaken Mercedes World” provides insight into the pressure and terror exerted by management that is leading to unbearable working conditions within the company.
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At factory gates, workers have reported to the WSWS about the increased work pressures and tense atmosphere–but only after making sure that the WSWS reporters were not part of IG Metall. They said there was strong resistance to the manoeuvres of the IG Metall works council, which acts as an extension of management and is also perceived as such.
This resistance needs a perspective. It is essential to break politically and organisationally with IG Metall and its works councils in order to repel Mercedes’ attacks. What is required is the building of independent action committees that are only accountable to the rank-and-file, take the struggle into their own hands, and link up with action committees in other plants, companies and countries.
Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting has launched a vile smear campaign against National Health Service (NHS) resident doctors in England fighting for a 29 percent pay rise to reverse the real-terms wage cuts since 2008.
The first phase of five days of strike action July 25–30 by around 50,000 resident doctors represented by the British Medical Association (BMA) was met with an extraordinary outburst by Streeting. He denounced the action as “unreasonable” and “reckless,” accusing resident doctors of “using the suffering of patients as leverage.” His diatribe, published in the Guardian July 30, contained a direct threat: doctors, he warned, would “lose a war against this government.”
Streeting’s denunciation was laced with hypocrisy as he presented himself as the trusted steward of NHS recovery, declaring “waiting lists are at their lowest levels in two years” and that “the NHS is finally moving in the right direction.”
This propaganda effort has already unravelled. New data highlights an unprecedented crisis in NHS patient waiting lists and sheds light on how the Starmer government is exploiting the backlog to carve up the NHS for outsourcing to profit-hungry private providers.
14. Public meeting discusses how to fight Australian university job cuts
A lively and important discussion developed when the Western Sydney University and Macquarie University Rank-and-File Committees (RFCs) hosted an online public meeting last Saturday to fight for a unified campaign by educators, students and working people against the Albanese Labor government’s cuts to international student enrolments and university jobs.
The speakers outlined the connection between the restructuring and sweeping job cuts throughout the country’s 39 public universities—now totalling more than 3,500 in the past 10 months—and the underlying pro-corporate, pro-military reshaping of tertiary education in Australia and internationally.
Chairing the meeting and speaking first, Macquarie RFC and Socialist Equality Party (SEP) member Carolyn Kennett explained: “The latest round of job cuts are the direct result of decades of underfunding by governments of both stripes and the massive cuts to international student enrolments by the Albanese Labor government.
“The reactionary move to cap enrollments was accompanied by the government scapegoating of international students, by falsely claiming that overseas students were responsible for the worsening housing affordability and cost-of-living crisis affecting working-class households.
“At the same time, the ‘Job-Ready Graduate’ package introduced by the Morrison government, but continued under Albanese, is one of the factors in the decline in domestic student enrollments… The program is designed to push students into priority and skills courses to meet the needs of the corporate elite.
15. Boeing workers connect strike to capitalism and war
The strike comes as Boeing has received a $20 billion contract from the Trump administration to build the F-47 fighter jet for war preparations against China. The St. Louis plants also produce weapons for Israel’s assault on Gaza, including F-15s delivered under a $20 billion deal announced in November 2024.
Comments from workers on social media reveal the depth of opposition to Boeing’s proposals and the broader conditions facing the working class.
One connected the attacks by Boeing on workers’ living standards to the profit motive. “This company has become a joke. They put stock price and rate before safety and way before employee well-being. Executives have no idea what’s going on and they don’t want to know. It’s purposeful ineptitude so they have plausible deniability while also knowing the company is getting squeezed dry for short term profit to boost the stock price. It’s really what this country has become in letting Wall Street take over everything.”
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk
