Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. US imperialism wargames the military draft
On July 22, the U.S. Selective Service System issued a request for quotations seeking a contractor to develop a computer simulation of a military draft. The project is another indication that the American ruling class is making concrete preparations to mobilize hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of young people for future wars.The proposed “Readiness Simulation” would model the Selective Service System’s entire mobilization pipeline, from registration and selection to notification, classification and delivery of conscripts to the military.
According to the solicitation, the agency wants to test different mobilization and policy scenarios, determine staffing and resource requirements, assess the impact of sudden surges and identify delays and bottlenecks that could obstruct the rapid induction of conscripts.
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The project represents a significant modernization of American draft planning. Active military inductions ended in 1973 amid mass opposition to the Vietnam War, widespread disillusionment and growing resistance among conscripted soldiers.
Subsequent Selective Service exercises largely concentrated on local boards and the processing of paper records. The new project would create a digital environment in which officials can pressure-test the entire conscription system and identify obstacles to rapidly supplying the military with draft-age men.
The solicitation does not identify a particular war or estimate the number of conscripts the system would be expected to process. Its publication, however, takes place amid the expanding US war against Iran and advanced preparations for military conflicts involving China, Russia and North Korea.
Any one of these conflicts, particularly a direct war between nuclear-armed powers, could produce demands for military personnel far beyond what can be supplied by the present all-volunteer force.
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The Pentagon undoubtedly prepares such estimates behind closed doors. Military planners must calculate expected casualties to determine requirements for replacement troops, medical support, equipment and unit rotations. The population is denied this information because an honest account of the potential consequences would provoke enormous opposition.
A ground campaign against Iran would confront immense military and logistical difficulties. Iran is a country of more than 90 million people with extensive coastlines, mountain ranges and large armed forces.
Even publications and military analysts that support the basic framework of US foreign policy have warned that a ground or amphibious campaign against Iran could become a modern-day Gallipoli. The Times, the Free Press, the US Naval Institute and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have all invoked the disastrous 1915 campaign when assessing the consequences of attempting to force open the Strait of Hormuz or seize Iranian territory.
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Vendor proposals for the Selective Service simulation are due August 14. The accelerated procurement coincides with the introduction of automatic draft registration by December 18.
Automatic registration was mandated under the bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026. It transfers responsibility for registration from individuals to the Selective Service System, which will assemble its database using information collected by other federal agencies.
As the World Socialist Web Site warned in “Trump’s selective service filing prepares for activation of US military draft,” automatic registration does not itself activate conscription. It does, however, expand and modernize the administrative machinery that would be required to carry one out.
The new simulation project goes another step. It is designed to test whether that machinery could withstand the strains of an actual mobilization and rapidly deliver conscripts to the military.
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The war against Iran is itself one theater of an expanding world war. Ukraine’s recent attack on an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea, which killed one sailor, and joint US-Saudi strikes against Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq demonstrate how rapidly supposedly separate regional wars are merging.
A military draft is not inevitable. But the ruling class is preparing for one, and workers and young people must prepare their own response.
As the Socialist Equality Party explained in its April statement, “Oppose the draft! Build a working class movement against imperialist war!” the struggle against conscription cannot be entrusted to the Democratic Party or any faction of the political establishment.
Workers and young people must organize independently of both capitalist parties and build a mass socialist movement against war. This movement must demand an end to the war against Iran, the abolition of the draft and the standing army, and the dismantling of the vast military-intelligence apparatus used to wage war abroad and repression at home.
2. Dollar fears prompt US-Japan yen rescue operation
The US Treasury joined with the Japanese Ministry of Finance last Friday in an operation to try to prop up the value of the yen, which had fallen to its lowest levels in 40 years despite the tens of billions of dollars spent since April to try and support it.
Like virtually everything he says, comments by US President Trump on the US intervention stood reality on its head.
Asked on Sunday why the US had stepped in—the first such combined action in 30 years—Trump said: “To support the Japanese currency. We have a good relationship with Japan. We’re very strong—very, very strong financially—and … they have a weakening yen, and they wanted a little bit of bit of help, and we’re always there for Japan.”
It was also “good for the world economy,” he said.
The image of Trump as some kind of benevolent guardian for the global economy and financial system, after he has spent his second term tearing down the institutions which maintained stability, not least with measures that have hit Japan, does not square with reality.
3. Mamdani opposes $10,000 bonus for paraprofessional school aides
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is opposing a $10,000 bonus for paraprofessional educational support staff in the city’s public schools, reversing his campaign pledge to support the measure. This sets the stage for a potentially explosive confrontation between 200,000 educators and staff in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), one of the most powerful sections of the working class in New York, and the self-described “socialist” mayor, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Mamdani’s election last November reflected a profound and broad shift in the political outlook of workers and young people to the left. It expressed growing disgust with the existing economic and political system and increasing interest in a socialist alternative. That process of social radicalization continues, as demonstrated in recent electoral victories by DSA and DSA-backed candidates in Democratic primaries in New York, Washington D.C., Denver and other cities.
What is already being revealed in New York, however, is that the DSA, a faction of the Democratic Party, is not a vehicle for serious social reform, let alone socialism. It is, rather, an instrument for containing the mass opposition to war, inequality, dictatorship and poverty and blocking an independent movement of the working class by binding the growing opposition to the Democratic Party.
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Mamdani’s opposition to the paraprofessionals’ bonus is only the latest, though perhaps the most flagrant, in a growing list of accommodations to the corporate oligarchy at the expense of the working class since he assumed the mayoralty in January. Faced with a $5.4 billion budget deficit, he has systematically implemented austerity measures to satisfy the demands of Wall Street and the bond markets.
Virtually all of Mamdani’s reform proposals—free bus service, universal child care, a tax increase on millionaires, disbanding the police department’s Strategic Response Group—have been dropped. Meanwhile, Mamdani has met twice with the fascist Trump and given a friendly interview to the New York Times, the de facto organ of the Democratic Party establishment, in which he defends the “right” of the banks and corporations to make a profit and praises their supposed loyalty to New York.
The issue here is not the hypocrisy of a supposed “socialist” politician but a fundamental conflict of class interests. The entire program and perspective of Mamdani and the DSA, based on the false conception that socialism is capitalism with the addition of a few social reforms, and that the Democratic Party—a party of Wall Street and imperialist war—can be turned into a “progressive” party that represents working people, is refuted by the reality of capitalist rule and its instrument, the capitalist state. The DSA’s program reflects the interests not of the working class but of affluent layers of the middle class that seek a more favorable distribution of the wealth extracted from the labor of the workers.
4. Now available from Mehring Verlag: “My Life” by Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky’s autobiography “My Life” is now available from Mehring Verlag. The work is published in a German translation by Alexandra Ramm, with a new foreword by David North.
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To this day, the book continues to fascinate with its narrative power, its portraits, its wit and its dramatic portrayal of an era of war, revolution and exile. Trotsky depicts his life not as a private memoir, but as part of the great upheavals of the 20th century. This new edition makes accessible a work that uniquely combines literature, history and politics.
Trotsky wrote his autobiography on the Turkish island of Büyükada after being driven into exile by Stalin. He takes the reader from his childhood in rural Yanovka in Ukraine, through the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the formation of the Red Army, right up to the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy.
David North emphasizes the book’s enduring relevance:
“My Life could just as well have been given the title, Our Epoch. Even after the passage of a century, the autobiography has not been overtaken by history. We are living in a world that Trotsky would understand. The technology has advanced enormously, but the problems remain the same in their essence and have grown far worse in their scale. Though the death agony of this social system has been more protracted than Trotsky might have expected, his historical prognosis retains its validity. The capitalist system must give way to socialism.”
Mehring Verlag is the leading publisher of Trotsky’s writings in German and has published other outstanding works, including “History of the Russian Revolution”, “The Revolution Betrayed” and “Portrait of National Socialism.” All books are available in the Trotsky Library.
More than 65,000 people have been evacuated from Spokane, Washington, as a complex of wildfires burns through working class neighborhoods and forces the displacement of roughly one in four of the city’s residents. For the second time in two weeks, a major city might go up in flames as climate change induced by capitalism continues unabated.
The climate crisis worldwide is increasingly dire. The fires earlier this year in Canada and northern Minnesota, the fires currently burning in Africa and the Middle East, and the fires across Southern Europe that threatened to burn down Bordeaux are other examples of modern extreme weather events. All are the result of the anarchic nature of capitalist production, above all, of fossil fuel industries spewing greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere at an unprecedented rate.
6. Health workers in Britain defend Will Lehman against violent threat by UAW bureaucracy
NHS FightBack, representing rank-and-file doctors, nurses and allied health professionals, e-mailed the following letter to the UAW to register their outrage and demand immediate action:
“To the United Auto Workers leadership,
“As healthcare workers, we are appalled by the AI-generated image posted by Raymond L. Jensen Jr., a senior UAW official, on the election campaign page of Will Lehman, a candidate for UAW President. The image depicts Lehman bound, gagged, and bleeding, with a masked gunman aiming a rifle at his back. This is a clear threat of violence against a rank-and-file candidate.
“The message is unmistakable: violence against Lehman is being encouraged by a leading representative of the UAW.
“NHS Fightback, representing healthcare workers, doctors, and nurses in Britain, finds this conduct abhorrent. We support the demand for a full investigation, a public repudiation by the UAW of the threat made against Lehman, accompanied by a formal apology, and a guarantee that the remainder of the 2026 election is conducted free from intimidation.
“Healthcare workers in Britain understand what intimidation means. Under the Labour government, doctors and nurses who opposed the Gaza genocide have faced suspension, removal from the medical register, and doxxing by far-right forces. The UAW appears to be adopting its own Trumpian tactics of intimidation against rank-and-file members. Last month, the federal Monitor found that President Shawn Fain had engaged in a ‘recurring pattern of retaliation,’ including threats to ‘slit’ opponents’ ‘throats.’
“We can all see why this is happening. Lehman is being targeted for his prominent campaign to abolish the bureaucracy and build rank-and-file power. As he stated, ‘This threat is not aimed at me alone. It is an act of intimidation directed against the entire rank-and-file opposition.’ Addressing fellow autoworkers, he added, ‘The apparatus resorts to intimidation because it fears you. The answer is not to retreat, but to organize.’
“NHS FightBack lends its wholehearted support to Lehman’s campaign. We join UAW members and workers internationally in opposing this outrage. The fight to defend Will Lehman is the fight to defend the democratic rights of all workers.
“Ajitha Gunaratne (National Health Service nurse) on behalf of NHS FightBack.”
7. United Kingdom: Burnham pledges to be “relentless” in blocking migrants crossing the Channel
Amid a right-wing backlash following events at Ceuta encompassing all Europe’s capitalist parties, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham travelled to Dover on Sunday to take his place in this xenophobic campaign.
8. An Interview with Historian Timothy H. Breen on popular mobilization in the American Revolution
Professor Breen discusses the role of ordinary people and local committees in the American Revolution, the emergence of popular sovereignty and democracy from below, the cultural break with Britain, and the contemporary misuse and neglect of the revolution’s history.
9. SEP condemns police intimidation of WSWS reporter in Sri Lanka
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka condemns the attempt by Kayts police to threaten World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reporter Dinesh Heymaal with arrest following his coverage of a fishermen’s protest and subsequent media event at Kurikattuwan Jetty, 31 kilometres from Jaffna, on July 29.
The police withdrew their threat to arrest Heymaal only after the WSWS editorial board in Colombo was informed of their actions. The incident is a serious attack on freedom of expression and the democratic rights of journalists, and exposes the methods employed by the police to intimidate those who challenge capitalist politicians and union bureaucrats.
The protest was organized by the Fisheries Cooperatives in the islands near Jaffna Peninsula against incursions by large Indian bottom-trawlers that had damaged the nets of around 200 fishermen in the area. The organizers demanded punitive state action against Indian fishermen, calling for them to be arrested and even shot. No demands were raised concerning the soaring cost of fuel, the IMF austerity measures imposed by the Dissanayake government, the rising price of nets and equipment, and the destruction of fishers’ livelihoods amid the global capitalist crisis.
This selectivity is not accidental. It reflects the class interests of those who organized the protest. The leadership of the Fisheries Cooperatives is not composed of impoverished small-scale fishermen, but wealthy individuals with close ties to Tamil nationalist politicians.
Heymaal covered the protest from the beginning. Afterwards, while he was having tea at a nearby restaurant, two uniformed police officers accompanied by two plainclothesmen approached him. Heymaal had earlier observed the plainclothesmen monitoring the protest and press briefing. The police had apparently noted his motorbike and followed him after he left.
The police threats against Heymaal were directly connected to an incident at the media event following the protest.
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Heymaal firmly rejected the attempt to silence him. He made clear that he was a WSWS reporter and had the right to carry out his journalistic duties without interference. The attempt to exclude him exposed the organizers’ nationalist and pro-capitalist position and their inability to answer questions raised from the standpoint of the interests of the working class.
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There is no doubt that the police were emboldened by the provocative attempts of the media personnel to prevent Heymaal from asking questions. The police were clearly attempting to intimidate a journalist because he had challenged political figures and raised uncomfortable questions.
The SEP takes this threat against our comrade seriously. Police harassment and intimidation of journalists is continuing and intensifying under the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government.
In the war-ravaged North and East, the military maintains a pervasive presence 17 years after the end of the bloody communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Police and military surveillance of the population has long been a feature of daily life in these provinces.
The police monitoring of the Kurikattuwan Jetty protest, where ordinary fishermen spoke openly about their worsening living conditions, and the officers’ subsequent intimidation of a WSWS reporter, are part of a broader effort by the state to restrict political discussion and suppress opposition.
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Governments globally are increasingly resorting to authoritarian methods and are inflaming communal and nationalist divisions to uphold capitalist rule, which is plunging broad layers of the population into poverty. The defence of freedom of expression and freedom of the press is therefore inseparable from the struggle for the socialist reorganization of society.
10. Australia: NSW Teachers Federation collaborates in teacher dismissals
Two experienced teachers recently contacted the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the educators’ rank-and-file network, after being placed on Informal Support Plans, the first stage of being dismissed for “under-performance” via the so-called Teacher Improvement Program (TIP).
When they sought assistance from the New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSWTF), they were told that union support officers were “inundated,” with seven staff handling more than 500 cases.
This admission points to a widening offensive against teachers. Yet the union continues to insist there is “relative stability” in TIP numbers, concealing the scale and implications of the process.
The TIP system facilitates the removal of experienced, higher-paid permanent teachers and their replacement with younger, lower-paid and insecure staff. It is being used to intimidate, witch hunt and dismiss longstanding teachers—particularly those who are independent and critical about what is happening in schools—as both federal and state governments slash public education spending, increase workloads, cut real wages, suppress anti-genocide dissent, enforce standardized testing and introduce temporary contracts at the expense of permanent positions.
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From its inception, the TIP was a union-government collaboration aimed at dismantling job security and enforcing the pro-market “education revolution” of the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments of 2007 to 2013. This program, cloaked in the rhetoric of equity and reform, subordinated public education to cost-cutting and market imperatives.
Experience has shown that the role of the trade unions is not to defend teachers, but to facilitate the TIP process. Teachers can only challenge allegations through union representatives, who are structurally integrated into the framework alongside school management. At the same time, confidentiality provisions—enforced with union backing—prevent teachers from discussing their cases with colleagues, ensuring isolation and blocking any collective resistance.
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These attacks are intensifying amid a deepening crisis in public education. Under the Albanese federal Labor government and the Minns state Labor government, teacher shortages have reached unprecedented levels.
Around 50 percent of teaching students do not complete their degrees, while 70 percent of teachers plan to leave before retirement. Schools are increasingly reliant on underqualified and temporary staff. Yet at the very moment teachers are most urgently needed, the TIP is being used to accelerate their removal.
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The defense of teachers’ jobs, conditions, and democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the unions or the industrial courts, which are aligned with the ongoing market restructuring and privatization of education.
During the 1960s and 70s, teachers waged bitter struggles to defend their security of tenure and prevent victimization by inspectors and education administrators. The unions have now torn up these hard-won gains by helping to devise and police new methods to discipline and sack teachers.
What is required is not a modification of the TIP, but its abolition through a counter-offensive by teachers and educators.
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Teachers are urged to contact the CFPE to discuss their experiences and participate in building these committees.
11. Thousands evacuated from their homes as wildfires rage across Canada
More than 900 wildfires are currently burning across Canada, with dozens of them out of control. Over 120 of these are raging in British Columbia.
Residents of well over 2,000 properties had been evacuated in Canada’s West Coast province under 32 orders as of Friday. By Sunday evening, the province reported that a further 5,000 residents had been ordered to leave their homes over the preceding 24 hours. Sections of the Trans-Canada Highway have been closed due to the flames. Close to 900 properties were ordered to evacuate on Friday alone due to the Pear Lake wildfire, which was burning out of control near Clinton, while most of the evacuations on Saturday and Sunday came in the north Okanagan due to a fast-moving fire near Vernon.
In Northern Ontario, over 3,000 residents from at least 13 communities, including 12 First Nations reservations, were forced to flee their homes in mid-July. The Ontario fires, which began accelerating around July 13 during a major heat wave, drove the highest air quality pollution levels ever recorded on the North American continent as the smoke carried across the Great Lakes, impacting over a hundred million people in both Canada and the US.
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Climate change is the key factor driving the rapid increase in the scope and intensity of wildfires. Warmer temperatures remove moisture from trees and vegetation, creating ideal conditions for blazes to erupt. Higher wildfire activity in turn fuels climate change. If the carbon emitted from Canadian wildfires in 2023 was considered as a country, it would have produced the four-highest emissions in the world, behind only China, India and the United States.
Yet Canada remains the only member of the G-7 without a national wildfire firefighting service. The job of suppressing fires and coordinating emergency responses remains in the hands of the provinces and territories, with the federal government offering only the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre to coordinate resource sharing, and limited wildfire research capabilities. As part of its sweeping austerity program in the 1990s, the federal Liberal government gutted the Canadian Forest Service from 2,200 to 700 staff, undermining environmental research capabilities.
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Moreover, Canadian capitalism’s ruthless plundering of the natural environment to extract ever greater profits puts human life in greater danger. The rapid expansion of resource-extraction towns is increasing what researchers refer to as the “wildland-urban interface,” areas where built-up towns and cities directly border forests or land with lots of vegetation that serves as prime fire fuel during dry periods of weather. The dangers contained in this process were exemplified by the more than 2,000 properties destroyed in 2016 by the wildfire in Fort McMurray, a resource town built essentially in the middle of nowhere over the past four decades to facilitate the extraction of oil and other natural resources from Alberta’s tar sands by the profit-hungry energy corporations. Governments at all levels facilitate this process by enforcing low corporate taxes and business deregulation.
Provincial governments continue to allocate the bare minimum of funds for fire suppression. In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford’s right-wing Progressive Conservative government allocated a mere $135 million for firefighting in 2025, but ended up spending more than twice that sum ($271 million). For this year, just $150 million has been allocated, even though everyone knows that more resources will be required. The end result of this deliberate underfunding is that permanent staff and suitable infrastructure cannot be maintained. As far back as 2016, reports have repeatedly criticized Ontario’s wildfire suppression efforts for the failure to retain and recruit personnel.
A similar picture exists in British Columbia, which has been governed by the New Democratic Party since late 2017. Environmental organizations have criticized the government’s failure to invest in active forestry management, which has resulted in the closure of several mills in recent years and the consequent loss of forestry expertise. A report earlier this year by the BC Auditor General pointed to serious problems in disaster management in the province following a fire in June 2021 that destroyed much of the village of Lytton. According to the investigation, “At the time of the fire, the province did not have a comprehensive legal framework to guide disaster recovery, and its funding mechanisms did not anticipate the scale of the village’s needs.
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Tackling wildfires and the problem of climate change that is their root cause requires a global strategy. The disruption to weather patterns linked to climate change are no less indifferent to national borders than the smoke from wildfires that has blanketed wide swathes of the North American continent. The global character of the crisis is underlined by the wave of fires tearing across Europe, which have displaced hundreds of thousands of people from France to Turkey, Greece and Spain, and the drought conditions gripping large parts of Africa leaving millions of people to starve.
However, this necessary international collaboration is prevented by crisis-ridden capitalism, whose irreconcilable contradictions are deepening the antagonisms between the major powers and driving the escalation of world war as they fight for access to resources, markets, and cheap labor. This reality was underscored by the response of US President Donald Trump to the wildfires. The fascist occupant of the White House, who has openly denied climate change and removed virtually all restrictions on fossil-fuel exploitation, threatened to impose “a big tariff” on Canada because of the smoke from its wildfires that crossed the border into the United States.
12. Japan launches new intelligence agency
Last Friday, Japan’s far-right government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi launched its new National Intelligence Bureau (NIB), a body designed to centralize intelligence gathering across the country’s various military and police agencies. This restructuring of Japan’s intelligence operations is being undertaken as Tokyo remilitarizes as part of the US-led war preparations against China and to suppress domestic opposition to such a conflict.
The NIB is Japan’s first centralized intelligence body since World War II. This new body will collect information from agencies, including the Foreign Affairs and Defense Ministries as well as the National Police Agency (NPA), supposedly to focus on terrorism, national emergencies, and counterintelligence nationwide.
The NIB will streamline intelligence sharing between these different agencies while independently setting the government’s related agenda. The bureau was founded through the National Intelligence Council Establishment Act passed in May.
The revamping of intelligence gathering operations is a major component of Japan’s remilitarization, which has sharply accelerated under Takaichi’s far-right government—a coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner Nippon Ishin no Kai. Article 9 of the constitution banning Japan from fielding a military or waging war overseas has for all intents and purposes been turned into a dead letter.
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The reorganization of Tokyo’s intelligence operations is meant to expand military collaboration with its allies. Tokyo has already established trilateral intelligence agreements with the US and South Korea as well as the US and the Philippines in order to target China, as the countries carry out massive war games and the construction of a wide-ranging missile system on Beijing’s doorstep.
The creation of the NIB was carried out in collaboration with the United States, Australia, and Germany. According to the New York Times, US officials have advised Tokyo on cyber-defense systems to counter so-called industrial espionage and scrutinize foreign investment. Australian officials have similarly advised Takaichi’s government on technology while the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service recently visited Tokyo to discuss the NIB and closer collaboration between the two countries.
Tokyo has also sought closer cooperation with the top-level, US-led Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, which includes the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. However, there have been reservations over what the Five Eyes members consider an “information security gap,” which has led to calls within and outside Japan for an anti-espionage law.
For the ruling class, free speech and association as well as other democratic rights must be done away with in the name of “national security” to prevent public knowledge of war planning and to criminalize opposition. These war plans include the extent to which Japan has played a central role in whipping up tensions with China in the Indo-Pacific alongside the US.
Tokyo and Washington have sharply exacerbated territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas for the past 15 years while all but openly promoting Taiwanese independence as a means of goading Beijing into war. Takaichi even stated last November that she would go to war with China over Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade province and its most significant diplomatic redline.
Additional legislation being prepared in Japan would force people supposedly acting as “foreign agents” to register with the government. A wiretapping law allowing broad, warrantless surveillance of the public is also under consideration.
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These measures are being undertaken in the face of the deepening crisis of capitalism. Japan and the US both hope to eliminate China as a major economic competitor. Tokyo at the same time is remilitarizing in order to once again independently assert its own imperialist interests through military means after three-and-a-half decades of economic stagnation.
Tokyo has removed restrictions on exporting lethal weaponry abroad, raised military spending to 2 percent of GDP while planning to increase it further, and deployed long-range missiles on its territory for the first time. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi declared last month that Japan should begin discussions on acquiring nuclear weapons.
Conscious of the widespread anti-war sentiment throughout the working class, this agenda is being carried out under the phony guise of “collective self-defense,” with successive governments in Tokyo whipping up an anti-China atmosphere. This can only take place through a massive assault on the democratic rights of the working class.
13. Porsche and IG Metall union agree elimination of a further 5,000 jobs in Germany
While Porsche and the IG Metall-dominated works council have agreed to further job and pay cuts and worse conditions, union officials are being rewarded with new paid positions on a “future advisory board.”
14. ICE Gestapo kidnaps record 51,000 people in July as Trump expands mass deportation operation
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement kidnapped as many as 51,000 people in July, the highest monthly total in the agency’s history, as the Trump administration intensified its mass deportation operation across the country.
Fox News reported Monday that ICE made approximately 51,000 arrests during the month, an average of 1,645 every day. The figure, attributed to multiple federal sources, surpassed the previous record of roughly 43,000 arrests set in June.
Separate preliminary Department of Homeland Security figures obtained by CBS News recorded more than 46,000 people booked into ICE detention during July. The figures measure somewhat different stages of the mass deportation operation. The CBS total includes people initially arrested by Customs and Border Protection before being transferred to ICE custody.
Both reports confirm an immense nationwide escalation. ICE is kidnapping workers at their homes and workplaces, ambushing immigrants at airports and immigration check-ins, and carrying out traffic stops using masked agents in unmarked vehicles.
At airports alone, ICE agents are reportedly seizing between 20 and 40 people every day, with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supplying passenger information used to identify and target travelers.
The airport arrests expose the Democrats’ complicity in Trump’s attacks on immigrants, which serve as a spearhead for the creation of a presidential dictatorship. During the partial DHS shutdown in the spring, Democratic politicians made limited calls for the removal of ICE agents deployed as substitute airport personnel. Those demands have been completely abandoned even as ICE and the TSA have transformed airports into hunting grounds.
As of last weekend, ICE has imprisoned approximately 68,000 people across its sprawling network of concentration camps and makeshift holding facilities. The vast majority of those detained are held in facilities operated by private prison companies or local governments under lucrative contracts with the federal government.
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Tens of thousands of immigrant workers, the vast majority of whom have committed no crimes and are abiding by law, are being seized every month and disappeared into a network of filthy and deadly concentration camps.
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Between Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, and June 4, 2026, 52 people died in ICE custody, according to a joint investigation by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights. The mortality rate is nearly four times that recorded under the Biden administration and more than two and a half times the rate during Trump’s first term.
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The bipartisan character of the attack on immigrants was further exposed Monday by a Guardian investigation into the forced treatment of hunger strikers in ICE custody.
The newspaper reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings showing that DHS officials sought permission to subject at least 10 hunger strikers to involuntary medical procedures since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.
At least three immigrants were definitely subjected to the procedures, while court records indicate that two more probably underwent them. Another five ended their hunger strikes as force-feeding was about to begin.
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The practice did not begin with Trump. In 2024, during the final year of the Biden administration, DHS attempted to subject at least 10 hunger strikers to forced medical treatment. The Guardian confirmed that the procedures were carried out against at least two people and probably against four others.
The continuity exposes the fraud of claims that the Democratic Party represents an alternative to Trump’s mass deportation operation. Biden maintained ICE, expanded its resources and authorized the same methods of physical coercion now being employed on a vastly greater scale.
Hunger strikes have erupted across the detention system in response to indefinite imprisonment, medical neglect, solitary confinement, inedible food and filthy water.
15. Brazil: Fifty-four-day strike at São Paulo’s universities: The political lessons
Between April and June of this year, a strike movement swept the state universities of São Paulo—the University of São Paulo (USP), the São Paulo State University (UNESP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP)—drawing students, staff and faculty into one of the largest movements in the history of higher education in Brazil’s most populous and wealthiest state. The struggle that emerged from South America’s leading university hub carries a political significance that transcends the boundaries of the campuses.
The strikes were a concentrated response to the accelerating deterioration of working and teaching conditions at the public universities: shortages of faculty, crumbling infrastructure, the advance of outsourcing and a market logic increasingly penetrating institutions of teaching and knowledge production. For students, this is compounded by ever more degraded social conditions, which directly impact their ability to enter and remain in the university.
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The strikes at the São Paulo universities were not an isolated occurrence. They formed part of a broader wave of mobilizations across education in São Paulo and Brazil, with a rising tide of protests and strikes since the start of the year by teachers, staff and students in both basic and higher education against precarious conditions, low wages and the advance of privatization schemes.
This is not a uniquely Brazilian phenomenon. Around the world, bourgeois governments of every political stripe are attacking education and social services amid capitalism’s headlong turn toward war and dictatorship. Protests and mass strikes against these attacks are sweeping Latin America and the world.
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Despite the strength shown by students, staff and faculty, the movement at the São Paulo universities ended isolated, exhausted and defeated.
At USP, the students’ central demands were not met. The increase in the student stipend, a non-negotiable demand for thousands of students in situations of social vulnerability, remained a dead letter. This did not stop the pseudo-left organizations leading the Central Student Directory (DCE) at USP from proclaiming that the “strike was historic” and victorious.
Throughout the movement, these organizations systematically diverted the struggle into sterile negotiations with the university administration and the state government, denouncing their “intransigence” and blaming them for the failure to meet the demands. This claim conveniently masks the role played by the leadership itself. The formula adopted at the strike’s closure, a “unified exit with a state of permanent mobilization,” exposes its inability to specify what the proclaimed “victory” actually consisted of.
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What confronts students is not a tactical correction to the student movement, but a program founded on entirely different principles. That program is championed by International Students and Youth for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth organization of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
The starting point of the IYSSE is internationalism. The working class is a world class, and the crisis that produced the strikes at the São Paulo universities—the subordination of education to the demands of the market, the dismantling of public services, militarization—is the same crisis that brought students in Latin America and throughout the world into the streets this same year. There is no national solution to a world crisis. Every perspective that subordinates Brazilian students and workers to the defense of “national development,” of “sovereignty,” or of a supposedly progressive faction of the bourgeoisie leads to defeat, and the twentieth-century history of Latin America records not a single exception.
Capitalism is not reformable, and the institutions of the bourgeois state—university administrations, university councils, legislative assemblies—cannot be turned into instruments of the oppressed through pressure or internal constituent processes. The IYSSE fights for the socialist reorganization of society: the transfer of productive and financial resources to the democratic control of the working class, under planning oriented to social needs. It is from this program, and not from calculations about what the administration might be willing to concede, that the demand for free, universally accessible public higher education follows.
The IYSSE orients students and youth to the working class, the sole revolutionary force in society, and fights for the political independence of that class from every party and faction of the bourgeoisie. The working class is not a force to be invoked for acts of solidarity: it is the social force whose position in production gives it the power to reorganize society on a rational socialist basis. The unity of the working class is the necessary condition for any serious confrontation with capitalism. For this reason, the IYSSE rejects the reactionary identity politics of the pseudo-left, which fragments the working class along lines of race and gender, serving the interests of the affluent middle class that disputes over positions within the existing order.
16. Israel launches massacre in Gaza, as Trump threatens Iran with “decapitation”
Israeli forces killed at least 26 people in Gaza over the weekend, striking apartment blocks, tent camps and the medicine warehouses of a hospital, in the territory’s deadliest days in weeks. The killings came as US President Donald Trump threatened Iran with “decapitation” after a week of American strikes across the region.
Israel killed at least seven people on Saturday and destroyed two of the four medicine warehouses of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Al Jazeera reported. Gaza Health Ministry Director-General Munir al-Bursh said the destruction “turns medicine and illness itself into a tool of war.”
The Associated Press reported that the Israeli military killed at least 17 more people, children among them, from Saturday night through Sunday, according to local hospitals. Al Jazeera counted 19 dead Sunday and put the weekend toll at 26. Among the dead were Abdullah Abu al-Teif, 33, his pregnant wife Abeer Anan, 29, and their five-year-old son Azzam, killed at the Al-Sousi Tower in western Gaza City. The Israeli military said the strikes had targeted militant operatives.
The bloodshed unfolded behind an official propaganda barrage of peace. On Thursday Trump announced a “HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas”; on Saturday he claimed the “perimeters of a deal” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz had been agreed. As he spoke, Israeli bombs fell on Gaza City, Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, and US bombers massed for what Trump said Sunday “would have been the biggest attack since World War II.”
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The Israeli army is meanwhile in the second week of a “wide-scale military operation” Netanyahu ordered across the West Bank after settlers from the Havat Gilad outpost attacked the village of Tal on July 24. Four Palestinians of the Ramadan family and two Israelis died.
The army deployed 26 battalions and raided towns from Jenin to Hebron, Al Jazeera reported on July 28; Army Radio counted 30 settler attacks the following weekend, including two mosques set on fire and a family home in Urif that more than 150 settlers set alight—an infant survived because her grandfather pulled her from her crib.
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Trump’s claims of peace negotiations met a flat denial from Tehran. “We are not negotiating with the United States at this time,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said Monday; Iran says its only talks are with Oman, over a temporary shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz.
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At a Senate hearing on July 21, Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan demanded that the administration win the war, telling Hegseth: “You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war. Win the war.”
The war is deeply unpopular: 64 percent of Americans told an AP-NORC poll published July 30 that it has not been worth fighting, and 60 percent told Quinnipiac July 29 they oppose US military action against Iran. But in Washington, the argument is over how the war should be fought, not how to end it.
17. Twenty-three-year-old Aboriginal man dies in police custody in South Australia
A 23-year-old Aboriginal man from the APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) Lands died in police custody on July 24, 2026, after his arrest by South Australia Police (SAPOL) on West Terrace in state capital Adelaide’s central business district.
Police say they responded to reports of a fight in the car park of the Elephant and Castle Hotel and calls that a man was smashing cars and “may be armed with a knife.” When officers arrived, they found the man holding a “piece of wood or a stick” which he put down when ordered.
Four officers then moved to arrest him. Police claim he “resisted,” that there was a struggle, and that he was biting. Within minutes of being restrained on the ground he became unresponsive and died at the scene, despite CPR and ambulance attendance.
SAPOL has confirmed that the entire incident was recorded on body-worn cameras worn by the attending officers, but no footage has been released to the public. The officers involved remain on active duty; none has been suspended or stood down.
As always in such cases, the state is now “investigating itself:” Major Crime will prepare a report for the coroner, the Police Commissioner has ordered an internal inquiry, and SAPOL’s Ethical and Professional Standards Branch is conducting a review under the formal oversight of the Office for Public Integrity. These processes are presented as mechanisms of accountability, but their record is clear: decade after decade, hundreds of deaths in custody across Australia—disproportionately affecting Indigenous people as a particularly vulnerable section of the Australian working class—and not a single police officer or prison official criminally convicted.
The pattern is borne out in recent deaths in custody in South Australia.
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The reality documented by the deaths in South Australia and the national statistics is that the oppression of Aboriginal people is a concentrated expression of the same capitalist system that produces poverty, austerity and state violence for the working class as a whole.
Further royal commissions, internal investigations or constitutional bodies function to divert anger and shield the institutions of repression. The answer lies in the independent political mobilization of the working class, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, against the capitalist system itself.
The deaths of the APY Lands man on West Terrace, of Gaurav Kundi in Royston Park, and of the 44-year-old in Clare are manifestations a state that defunds social services, deepens inequality and then uses its armed apparatus to enforce that social order. Confronting that reality demands a conscious, unified struggle to overturn it and to build a society in which health, housing and human dignity are guaranteed.
18. Workers Struggles: The Americas
Canada:
900 Toronto-area casino workers strike
Strike continues at Salit Steel in Niagara Falls
Mexico:
Peru:
United States:
Pennsylvania hospital workers launch 5-day strike in State College
19. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
