Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
The decision by the security cabinet of Israel’s fascistic government to expand its military occupation of the Gaza Strip will mean death for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and presages their final ethnic cleansing. Workers and young people who want to stop this barbarism must construct a socialist movement in the working class against the Zionist regime and its imperialist patrons.
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One million people, around half of the enclave’s population, will initially be driven south toward the Mawasi “humanitarian zone”—a concentration camp—after which a military offensive will be launched in the ethnically cleansed area. Many of these people, who are already starving and have been displaced multiple times since the genocide began, will die en route.
This is a genocide carried out by the Zionist regime but made in Washington, Berlin and London.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to escalate the extermination and expulsion of the Palestinians is made possible by the unconditional support his government enjoys from the imperialist powers that have flooded weapons and other war materiel to the Zionist regime. Indeed, President Trump greenlighted Netanyahu’s plan when he declared on August 5, “So Israel is going to have to make a decision. … It’s going to be pretty much up to Israel.”
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The despotic Arab regimes continue to vie for imperialist favors and are deeply complicit in mass murder. For the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and other Gulf ruling elites, their main concern is to serve as junior partners in Washington’s war of regional conquest and plunder, forming an anti-Iranian alliance, without provoking an upsurge of the oppressed Arab working class against their rule. Thus their refusal to offer any opposition to the genocide beyond hypocritical statements of concern and proposals to orchestrate the expulsion of the Palestinians, i.e., carry out a crime against humanity more “humanely.” On the very day that Netanyahu discussed the expansion of military operations in Gaza with his security cabinet, Egypt inked a joint deal with the Zionist regime for the export of natural gas worth an estimated $35 billion.
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Millions of workers and young people have taken to the streets around the world to express their outrage over the genocide. However, the social democratic and Stalinist parties, as well as the pseudo-left organizations and campaign groups in their orbit, have shackled protesters to the bankrupt strategy of moral appeals meant to pressure the very imperialist war criminals responsible for butchering the Palestinians.
The urgent task facing the working class in the imperialist centres is to mobilize its immense social power to halt the Gaza genocide and the war machine responsible for its implementation. Workers throughout manufacturing, transportation, and other key sectors must organise themselves in defiance of the union bureaucracy to fight for the following demands:
- An immediate halt to shipment of all weapons to Israel.
- The boycott of all trade and other economic activity with Israel.
- US, European and other corporations assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide must be indicted and prosecuted.
- The arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes.
- The end of repression of the opposition to the Gaza genocide.
- The immediate and unhindered access to Gaza for the supply of aid via all available land crossings.
These demands can only be enforced through the initiation of an industrial and political struggle by the working class. This week’s strike at Boeing, at the very heart of the US war machine, underscores the real basis for the development of a mass movement against imperialist war and the horrendous crimes it produces.
In a chilling demonstration of the accelerating authoritarianism of the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced—and then rapidly rescinded—a pilot bonus program offering cash rewards to agents for deporting immigrants within as little as seven days of arrest.
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By Tuesday afternoon, ICE was forced to cancel the program, sending out an internal follow-up email marked in capital letters: “PLEASE DISREGARD.” The sudden reversal came only after inquiries from the New York Times, revealing that the plan had not been an offhand suggestion but had reached the level of signed internal memoranda.
This brief but revealing episode cannot be dismissed as a bureaucratic error or public relations blunder. On the contrary, it illuminates the trajectory of the Trump administration’s far-right, anti-immigrant policy and the broader turn of the American ruling class toward authoritarianism. The mere fact that such a program was devised, approved and internally circulated underscores a political climate in which unconstitutional and illegal acts are not only contemplated but actively prepared by state agencies.
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The broader context makes the implications even more dangerous. In July, Trump signed his signature domestic legislation expanding ICE’s annual budget from $8 billion to a staggering $28 billion—making it the single most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the country. The bill also authorized the hiring of 10,000 new agents, with signing bonuses of up to $50,000, and launched a national recruitment campaign soaked in militaristic and fascistic language.
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The attack on immigrant workers is a spearhead for a broader assault on the entire working class. The structures being built—quotas, incentives and militarized policing—will be used to crush strikes, suppress protests and silence dissent.
ICE and the National Guard have already monitored demonstrations and surveilled activists, while FEMA’s conversion into an ICE recruiting arm underscores how state agencies are being repurposed for repression. Anti-immigrant hysteria is a tool to divide workers and distract from deepening social crisis while the ruling class siphons their wealth to create the machinery of war and dictatorship.
3. Huge Talisman Sabre war games blacked out by Australian media
Almost 40,000 troops from 19 countries participated in what were the largest military exercises in Australian history. Aside from the sheer number and range of nations represented, Talisman Sabre involved some of the most potent offensive weaponry in the world, including US long-range missile systems that have never before been present in the region.
Despite this, the vast majority of the Australian population would have no idea that Talisman Sabre even took place. The exercises were subjected to a near total media blackout. That itself underscores the reality that what took place was the preparation for war, which the powers-that-be are aware could provoke widespread popular opposition.
An article previewing the war games last month in the Wall Street Journal was far more extensive and forthright about the purposes of Talisman Sabre than anything that has appeared since in the Australian establishment press.
The Journal bluntly declared that Talisman Sabre was “meant to send a message to China” of US preparedness to fight a war in the Indo-Pacific, then cited top American military officials making the same basic point.
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At the conclusion of Talisman Sabre, the US army revealed that its Dark Eagle hypersonic missile system had been transferred to Australia for the exercises—the first time it had been stationed outside of US territory. The hypersonic missiles travel at five times the speed of sound. They have a range of 1,700 miles.
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Dark Eagle would fulfil the role repeatedly raised in US strategic and think tank documents planning a war with China, of wiping out Beijing’s military capacities as rapidly as possible in the event of a conflict.
The stationing of such a system in Australia should have been headline news, but again it has largely gone unreported.
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While couched in terms of “deterrence” and opposition to Chinese “aggression,” Talisman Sabre makes clear that these US talking points are an inversion of reality. There is no question that a Chinese or Russian-led military exercise of a similar scale in South or Central America would be viewed as something approaching an act of war against the United States.
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The US is already in a de facto war with Russia in Ukraine and is sponsoring the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as part of a broader regionwide offensive targeting Iran. However, American imperialism is also preparing to open a new and even more catastrophic front in what increasingly has the character of a global war.
4. House committee in the United States subpoenas Epstein files, Bill and Hillary Clinton
By subpoenaing the Clintons, [The Republican-led House Oversight Committee] signaled that the Republicans hope to place the spotlight in the Epstein scandal on the Democrats, while exonerating Trump. Both, in fact, had frequent interactions with Epstein and could hardly have been unaware of his sex-trafficking operation involving underage girls. Both sent greetings to Epstein on his 50th birthday, including a message from Trump that included the outline of a naked woman. According to flight logs, both flew multiple times on Epstein’s private jet. Epstein was member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club until 2007, and Clinton visited Epstein’s Manhattan residence at least once.
5. Sri Lankan health workers and patients’ relatives denounce public hospital crisis
Popular anger and frustration are rising over the Sri Lankan government’s failure to provide adequate funding for life-saving medicines, essential medical equipment and laboratory facilities in the public hospitals and related health institutions.
Patients are being forced to buy medicine and access services from private pharmacies and laboratories at exorbitant prices. Those who cannot afford these expenses face life-threatening risks.
Health Minister Nalinda Jayatissa has attempted to deflect the rising mass anger by blaming previous governments for failing to place timely orders for basic medical supplies. While this may be partly true, it is not the main cause of the worsening health crisis.
During last year’s elections, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) promised to improve the health service if elected. In line with International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands, the JVP/NPP government has reduced annual health expenditure to 383 billion rupees ($US1.27 billion) this year, down from 410 billion rupees in 2024.
6. Workers and workplace safety experts at the IWA-RFC hearing on death of Ronald Adams Sr.
A former Cal/OSHA compliance officer and others testified on the issues raised by the breakdown of safety at Stellantis Dundee Engine.
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The World Socialist Web Site is continuing its reporting on the July 27 public hearing of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees’ investigation into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. by publishing statements submitted to the investigation by workers and safety experts.
Ronald Adams, a 63-year-old skilled tradesman, was crushed to death by an overhead gantry at the Dundee Engine Complex in Michigan on April 7 under circumstances which have still not been explained by either the company, the United Auto Workers, or the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA).
The hearing was attended by 100 workers, youth and community members. It was addressed by Shamenia Stewart-Adams, Ronald Adams’ widow, and featured powerful reports from Mack Trucks worker and IWA-RFC member Will Lehman, WSWS labor reporter Jerry White, and other autoworkers and rank-and-file workers.
The meeting unanimously adopted a resolution to continue and expand the investigation, establish rank-and-file safety committees and build an international campaign to defend the lives and rights of workers.
7. Venezuelan man nearly dies after being denied medical care at Florida Everglades concentration camp
A 38-year-old Venezuelan man nearly died this week after falling seriously ill inside the ICE concentration camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” located in the Florida Everglades. As part of the ongoing mass deportation campaign, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is subjecting thousands of people to inhumane and deadly conditions.
Authorities at the prison camp have refused to carry out testing for COVID-19, which appears to be spreading throughout the camp without any public acknowledgement. Earlier this month, a whistleblower employee at the camp told Florida’s WFLA that she was fired after contracting COVID-19.
According to a press release issued by his legal team, Luis Manuel Rivas Velásquez—also known as Luis Frio on Instagram—collapsed inside the camp after exhibiting symptoms of a serious respiratory illness. According to at least one witness, Rivas Velásquez was denied medical care after he collapsed.
“A guy is dying on the floor, and no one has called for medical help. The paramedics aren’t here,” a detainee recalled in a phone call shared with NBC6 Miami.
After collapsing some point on Tuesday for roughly 48 hours, Rivas Velásquez was held incommunicado from his family and lawyers. During this period, it was unknown if Rivas Velásquez had died.
Rivas Velásquez’s pro-bono immigration attorneys Eric Lee and Chris Godshall-Bennett wrote in their statement that while Rivas Velásquez was in the hospital receiving treatment, immigration thugs handcuffed him tightly to the bed and mocked him with one guard telling another they needed to be “tough” on him.Rivas Velásquez, like the vast majority of those kidnapped by the US immigration Gestapo, is not a convicted criminal or a threat to society. Before he was taken by immigration agents, Rivas Velásquez was an influencer on social media, regularly sharing photos and videos of cars, Miami, family and friends to his over 160,000 followers.
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The outbreak in the Florida Everglades camp is not an anomaly. It was only weeks ago that a tuberculosis outbreak was confirmed at the Tacoma ICE facility in Washington state. There is every reason to believe a similar outbreak, whether TB or COVID-19, is now sweeping through the Everglades camp.
The same day Rivas Velásquez nearly died on August 5, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the cancellation of $500 million in vaccine grants, signaling that the federal government is not only ignoring outbreaks inside detention centers—It is dismantling public health infrastructure altogether.
The war on immigrants is inseparable from the war on public health, democratic rights and the working class as a whole. If immigrants today can be treated like animals, tortured, denied medical care and disappeared without recourse, tomorrow it will be citizens and any who resist the tyranny of the financial oligarchy.
8. Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye exhibition at Tate Modern
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The Tate Modern in London is currently hosting a landmark exhibition celebrating the art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c. 1914–1996), recognized as one of Australia’s most significant visual artists of the late 20th century. The retrospective, running from July 10 to January 11, 2026, features 70 pieces—from her early batik designs and her first canvas in 1988 to her final works in 1996.
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Some critics have compared her work to that of the great impressionist painter—Claude Monet—or abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Whilst there are similarities in the form, technique and medium used by Kngwarreye and many modern artists—the explosion of brilliant dotted colors, the broad brush sweeps with their inventive simplified forms, the rhythmic gestural lines—these comparisons provide little information about the cultural and religious content of Kngwarreye’s work.
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Kngwarreye’s vibrant images evoke the characteristics and stories of the land of her origins—its serene spiritual beauty and harmony, its harsh and primitive rawness. An artist of very few words who regarded talking about her work as “other peoples business”, Kngwarreye was asked in 1990 to explain what she painted. She told the interviewer that she painted her country, in all its aspects:
“…Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my dreaming), Arlatyeye (pencil yam), Arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (a dream-time pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (a favorite food of emus, a small plant), Atnwerle (green bean), and Kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint: whole lot.…”
In other words, far from Kngwarreye striving for a non-objectivist art, as many abstract painters do, she strove to nurture, celebrate and express nature in her paintings. The content and aim of her work was to express her Aboriginal Dreaming—the stories of her ancestors, their spiritual beliefs and their relationship to the land.
9. US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opens office in New Zealand
During a visit to New Zealand last week, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel opened a new, permanent FBI office attached to the US embassy in Wellington.
The move is directly linked to US imperialism’s accelerating preparations for war against China. In a video announcement on July 31, Patel declared that a key purpose of the new FBI office was to work with New Zealand on “countering the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] in the INDOPACOM theater.”
In other words, the FBI’s operations are bound up with those of the US Armed Forces Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), which is building its presence across the vast region and holding provocative military exercises, openly aimed against China.
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New Zealand’s right-wing National Party-led government made no prior announcement of Kash’s visit or the new FBI office. The decision to expand the agency’s presence in NZ was done in a secretive and anti-democratic manner.
Defense Minister Judith Collins and Foreign Minister Winston Peters both downplayed Patel’s reference to “countering” China. Peters told Radio NZ (RNZ) that this was not discussed during his meeting with the FBI director. Collins said the FBI office would play an active role across the Pacific region in opposing drug trafficking, gun running and “interference in countries’ systems.”
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Sections of big business in New Zealand are concerned about deteriorating relations with China, NZ’s number one trading partner. In a statement responding to Patel, the Chinese Embassy in Wellington said: “we strongly oppose any attempt to make groundless assertions or vilification against China out of the Cold War mentality.”
New Zealand is a minor imperialist power which, since World War II, has relied on its alliance with the US to uphold its predatory interests, including NZ dominance over small island nations in the southwest Pacific.
The new FBI office will build on the already extensive intelligence ties between New Zealand and the US. As part of the Five Eyes—the intelligence-sharing network that includes the US, UK, Australia and Canada—New Zealand’s spy agencies routinely share information with the US National Security Agency, including private communications intercepted by the Waihopai spy base.
The FBI will assist with surveillance and the suppression of democratic rights in New Zealand and the Pacific. Over the past century the FBI has spied on, infiltrated and disrupted anti-war, Civil Rights, left-wing and socialist organizations, including the Trotskyist movement. In 1941, the FBI raided the offices of the Socialist Workers Party, which was followed by the prosecution of 29 of its leading members, 18 of whom were imprisoned because of their socialist opposition to the war.
The agency now has 38,000 agents and a budget of more than $US10 billion. It is under the control of an extreme right-wing, authoritarian administration. Patel is a fascist who was appointed to lead the FBI because of his absolute loyalty to Trump: he supported Trump’s January 6, 2021 attempted coup to overthrow the election of Joe Biden.
10. New exposures of far-right activities in Canada’s military and beyond
The authorities, led by Prime Minster Mark Carney and the federal Liberal government, are trying to cover up the significance of this latest exposure of violent far-right extremists in the military. They have refused to forthrightly identify their politics as fascist, claiming the terrorist plotters were merely “anti-authoritarian extremists,” a designation that deliberately conflates left and right-wing opponents. On Wednesday, the three of the four who face terrorism charges—Chabot, Angers-Audet, and Lagacé—were denied bail. However, the public has been denied any further insight into the terror plot, because the bail hearing was subject to a Court-imposed publication ban.
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On July 18, the CBC and its flagship investigative journalism program, The Fifth Estate, exposed the growing network of fascist “Active Clubs” across the country. These organizations use physical fitness training in parks and private gyms to recruit white racists to train for “a coming race war.”
Their mainly male recruits are drawn directly from the desperate and impoverished layers of the lumpenproletariat and lower middle class who were drawn into the misnamed, fascist “Freedom Convoy.” As the World Socialist Web Site exposed at the time, the Convoy was supported and promoted by key sections of the Canadian capitalist ruling class; its political representatives, including the federal Conservative Party, its soon to be leader, Pierre Poilievre, and Premiers Doug Ford, and Scott Moe; and enjoyed significant backing from within the police and military.
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The ability of far-right and outright fascist groups to operate with virtual impunity is due to the promotion of their politics by powerful sections of the ruling elite. They enjoy no mass popular support but can make a fraudulent appeal to disoriented and backward sections of the population due to the sabotaging of all opposition to Canadian imperialism’s program of war and austerity by the New Democrats and trade unions.
London’s Metropolitan Police threatened mass arrests on Monday of participants in Saturday’s planned protest outside Parliament in Westminster, central London.
This was followed by an announcement of three prosecutions under anti-terrorism laws of people arrested for opposing the proscription of the peaceful direct action anti-genocide group Palestine Action. The three and at least 200 others face up to 14 years in prison.
The website of the main group organizing Saturday’s protest and most others nationally, Defend Our Juries, was taken down Wednesday.
The witch-hunting of Palestine Action and its defenders has escalated ever since the High Court ruled July 30 that Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori can challenge the lawfulness of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s July 5 order banning the group. A judicial review is scheduled for November based on the grounds of disproportionate harm to freedom of expression/assembly and a failure to consult.
The witch-hunt has involved the media, the Starmer government, the police and Zionist groups.
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The escalating assault on democratic rights will not stop with Palestine Action. Rather the proscription of PA spearheads an offensive against all opposition to the Gaza genocide and, ultimately, against any political and social opposition in the working class.
12. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, and Middle East
Africa
Nigeria:
Doctors at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology Teaching Hospital, Oyo State resume strike
South Africa:
National Student Financial Aid Scheme workers in Cape Town strike against management incompetence
Bus drivers at Soweto bus depot in walkout to protest unroadworthy vehicles
Tunisia:
Three-day national strike over pay and conditions brings transport to a halt
Europe
Cyprus:
Bus drivers in Larnaca walk out after breach of working hours agreement
Germany:
Meat processing workers strike over backbreaking work and low pay at kebab factory
Spain:
Crane operators in Seville stop work to force pay increase
Lifeguards and marine rescue workers in Barcelona strike for full employment and improved working conditions
United Kingdom:
Bar staff and hotel workers at London hotel and bar to strike over conditions and hold joint picket
Union calls off Repsol UK Scottish offshore oil platform walkout over pay at last minute
Middle East
Iran:
Further protests over daily power outages, shortage of water and poverty
13. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
