Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. ICE Gestapo kills man during traffic stop in Houston
In the latest episode of terror unleashed upon America’s working class population by Trump’s Gestapo-like immigration police, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed an immigrant worker from Mexico Tuesday morning in Houston. A spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed the man who died attempted to evade arrest, but local witnesses and civil rights organizations have already challenged ICE’s version of events.
The shooting happened in Magnolia Park, a historic Mexican-American and Latino immigrant neighborhood known for its annual Día de Los Muertos celebrations and multiple community events commemorating the neighborhood’s and city’s multicultural heritage.
*****
Salgado Araujo was shot in the abdomen and transported to a local hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. ICE has not reported any injuries to federal agents involved in the operation.
Tuesday’s tragedy is the first fatal shooting involving federal immigration agents since DHS thugs murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti in separate incidents in Minneapolis in January amid Trump’s escalating deployment of federal police to terrorize immigrants and intimidate citizens opposed to his assault on democratic rights.
Although both killings sparked massive backlash and a general strike movement among Minnesota workers, Tuesday’s shooting makes it clear that the Trump administration has not abandoned the use of deadly force against the American population.
And it comes only two days after the killing of 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson by National Guard troops in Memphis, Tennessee, on July 5. As in the cases of killings by federal agents, the National Guard claimed the soldiers fired on Johnson in self-defense, although there is no indication that Johnson himself fired at them.
*****
As is par for the course, ICE did not provide a shred of evidence corroborating its account of events, echoing numerous fabrications put forward to justify deadly incidents involving Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. In fact, the DHS account of Salgado Araujo’s killing mirrors many of the statements the agency issued following multiple fatalities or injuries to undocumented immigrants and US citizens. This includes the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, who was also accused of trying to ram ICE agents with her vehicle, and the shooting of two Venezuelan men in Oregon earlier this year.
In both cases, as well as other shootings, the official accounts of the incidents were contradicted by video evidence and testimony from witnesses, establishing that the officers involved were not in danger and even acted as the aggressors sometimes. This includes an April incident where the federal government said a California man whom they fired upon during a traffic stop “weaponized his vehicle,” though footage of the interaction proved no officers were hit by his car.
*****
Salgado Araujo’s son Ronaldo told Telemundo Houston that his father had been out that morning picking up fellow construction workers while on the way to a job. In a statement, Ronaldo Salgado said his father was a hard worker who had been going through the process to obtain his legal residency for years.
“My father has been in this country for nearly 35 years,” he said, “working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother. … My father did not deserve this.”
Family members pointed to the fact that the ICE vehicles were unmarked, likely leading Salgado Araujo to believe he was being carjacked and faced the danger of losing his van, vital for his livelihood, and giving him a reason to flee.
*****
Tuesday’s shooting has caused outrage in the nation’s fourth largest city, whose greater metropolitan area is home to an estimated 1.7 million immigrants, with a population that is 44.5 percent Latino or Hispanic. Local elected officials and civil rights organizations, including the Texas Civil Rights Project and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), have issued calls for transparency and an independent investigation.
*****
The Trump administration’s deployment of ICE as a paramilitary force carrying out mass roundups, renditions and even cold-blooded killings in American streets is not a departure from the normal functioning of American capitalism; it is the political expression of its deepening crisis. ICE’s transformation into the “Amazon of deportations” serves to divide the working class by scapegoating immigrant workers, and it provides the legal and political framework for expanding police-state powers that will ultimately be deployed against the entire working class, regardless of immigration status.
The struggle against ICE is therefore not only the defense of one particularly exploited section of the working class, it is the central front in the defense of democratic rights for all workers. For the American working class, the defense of immigrants is inseparable from the class struggle that pits them against the capitalist oligarchy.
What is unfolding and being planned at the highest stage of the government, with the complicity of the Democratic Party and its pseudo-left satellites, is a grand conspiracy to counter the growing disillusionment with the capitalist system with the establishment of a military-police dictatorship. The independent mobilization of the working class—through independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces and neighborhoods—to utilize its massive social power is the only way forward in combating the assault being prepared.
2. Trump launches new phase of US imperialism’s criminal war on Iran
US President Donald Trump has relaunched American imperialism’s illegal war of aggression against Iran, after repeatedly making Hitlerite threats in recent days to destroy the country’s basic infrastructure and rain death and destruction on its people.
Speaking Wednesday on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump effectively repudiated the 60-day truce reached between Washington and Tehran last month. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” he declared. He went on to vow that the US will continue the campaign of air strikes launched on Iran in the early hours of Wednesday morning. “We’re going to hit them hard tonight,” boasted the fascist would-be dictator president.
This was coupled with a flurry of other threats, including the possible resumption of the US blockade of Iranian ports and the “takeover” of Kharg Island, Iran’s principal Persian Gulf oil export hub.
On Tuesday, Washington canceled the oil export sanctions “waiver” that it had granted Tehran as part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that underpins the truce. Hours later, the US mounted air strikes on more than 80 targets in southern Iran, killing, according to Iranian authorities, eight military personnel.
In his characteristic gangster-style fashion, Trump denounced Iran’s leaders in his Wednesday remarks, reveling in his capacity as the head of the US imperialist war machine to order execution air strikes like that which killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei at the war’s outset. “I do not want to deal with them any more, they are scum. They are sick people,” he snorted.
Tehran, for its part, has warned that the US is in breach of the MoU. An Iranian Foreign Ministry statement issued Wednesday said America’s “repeated illegal attacks against Iran,” the re-imposition of sanctions on Iranian oil and Israel’s continuing aggression against Lebanon “have rendered important and fundamental parts” of the truce agreement “ineffective.”
Iran has responded to the Pentagon’s Tuesday night attack with counter-strikes on US military bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and by warning the region’s other oil sheikdoms that they will be similarly targeted if they continue to facilitate US aggression.
The truce has been hanging by a thread since it was formally signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on June 17.
*****
Trump’s relaunching of the war on Iran unfolded against the background of a NATO summit dominated by the imperialist powers’ competing agendas in what is a developing global war for the control of resources, markets, production networks and strategic territories akin to the imperialist world wars of the last century—only on a far greater and more lethal scale.
The European powers, joined by Canada, used the summit to escalate the war on Russia, boasting of their accelerating rearmament drive and role in providing their Ukrainian proxy with the capabilities of striking deep inside nuclear-armed Russia. Trump, meanwhile, denounced them for not being more supportive of the US-Israeli war on Iran, demanded Greenland be ceded by Denmark to the US, reiterated his support for a US-Russia deal to end the Ukraine war at the expense of America’s NATO “allies” and threatened to cut off all US trade with Spain.
The imperialist powers and the capitalist system they lead are dragging humanity to the abyss. The only progressive answer to their rival predatory agendas for rearmament and war, austerity, and the evisceration of democratic rights is the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class. The World Socialist Web Site has long insisted that the same crisis of global capitalism that is fueling global war is intensifying class conflict, creating the objective conditions for the emergence of a mass movement of the working class for socialism.
3. Trump-Erdoğan meeting: A deepening war alliance between Washington and Ankara
US President Donald Trump met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Tuesday on the sidelines of the 36th NATO Summit in Ankara. The meeting took place under conditions in which hundreds of anti-war protesters have been detained, demonstrations banned and the capital turned into a fortress by some 70,000 security personnel.
It points to the deepening of relations between Washington and Ankara based on the escalation of imperialist war.
4. United Kingdom: SOAS graduate Sarah Cotte defends free speech during trial on terrorism charges
A jury has been discharged following a trial at the Old Bailey in London in the case of Sarah Cotte, a 22-year-old School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) graduate charged under Section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act (2000). Prosecutors allege that her support for the Palestinian resistance equates to support for Hamas, banned by the UK government under the Terrorism Act.
Cotte’s “crime,” according to the prosecution, was a speech she delivered at SOAS on October 9, 2023, just two days after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was launched from Gaza and amidst massive retaliatory bombardment by Israel, in which she defended the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation. Cotte was secretary of the college’s Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! (FRFI) society.
For her speech, she was arrested in a dawn raid on January 31, 2024, interrogated, doxxed, and subjected to a two-year ordeal culminating in an eight-day trial, and now, a retrial. The date for retrial has been set for September 14, 2026.
Not a single mainstream journalist reported on the court proceedings. A week-long trial of a student charged with terrorism for speech on campus against genocide has unfolded in near-total silence.
*****
Speaking outside the Old Bailey on Wednesday, Sarah Cotte told supporters she was seeking to establish “why it is right for the Palestinian people, for occupied people to resist their occupation, to fight back against their oppressors and to reiterate that this is a basic principle of international law.”
Whatever the outcome, the trial itself stands as an indictment of the British state’s use of counter-terrorism legislation to criminalize solidarity with the Palestinian people and to suppress fundamental democratic rights of speech and protest.
Fujimori's rise to power unfolds against a backdrop of open US imperialist intervention, a decade of accelerating institutional collapse and intense social crisis.
6. The death of Alejandro Águila exploited to militarize Chile
The tragic killing of 12-year-old Alejandro Águila on June 23 has been seized upon by the entire Chilean political establishment to advance a pre-existing agenda: the expansion of the police state, the criminalization of youth, the militarization of public security and the granting of sweeping impunity to the forces of repression. The cynicism is staggering, but it is not new. It follows a well-worn script in which the ruling class utilizes a shocking crime to push through measures that have nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with preparing the state for social counterrevolution.
The facts of the case are harrowing. Alejandro's family was returning from the Santiago airport in the early hours of June 23 when they were intercepted by a gang at an intersection in the municipality of San Bernardo. The five assailants, including two 17-year-olds, stole the family’s car with Alejandro unable to escape, his seatbelt still fastened. The father and aunt screamed that the boy was being dragged as the car sped away. Alejandro was dead by the time the vehicle was abandoned nearly three kilometers later.
What followed was a coordinated political offensive. The Pinochetist UDI caucus immediately demanded urgency on a bill to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 14 to 13 and apply adult penalties to 16 and 17-year-old repeat offenders. The Chamber of Deputies approved a non-binding resolution to that effect by 77 votes to 40 on June 24. President José Antonio Kast, who had called for the perpetrators to be imprisoned “for the rest of their lives,” endorsed the grieving family’s demand for prison sentences without parole regardless of age.
But the most significant demand to emerge from the political establishment was not about juvenile sentencing at all. It was the call, led by figures from across the governing coalition and the so-called opposition, to deploy the Armed Forces onto the streets of Santiago.
*****
Kast is a populist who appeals to the basest sentiments: fear of crime, xenophobic hatred, the longing for an iron fist. His posture on military deployment has evolved in ways that reveal a calculated, Caesarist logic: he is waiting for the popular mandate to do what he has been planning all along.
*****
The San Bernardo tragedy has been seized upon with such urgency because the Kast government is in political trouble. The Haitian children scandal, in which the government and media spent ten days alleging trafficking networks and organ harvesting based on a Comptroller’s report that exposed no such things, collapsed on June 23 when the PDI confirmed all 64 “missing” children had been located with their families. The lurid allegations of child smuggling, child prostitution and organ trafficking were fabrications designed to justify the administration’s anti-immigrant offensive of border walls, mass expulsions and the stripping of healthcare and education from undocumented migrants.
Kast’s approval rating has fallen dramatically. The Pulso Ciudadano poll released June 29 showed that 56 percent rate his handling of crime as “bad or very bad.” The economic crisis is deepening with unemployment now at 9.4 percent and rising living costs, while the structural deficit of 3.7 percent of GDP is being used to justify deeply unpopular cuts to education, healthcare and pensions.
The push for military deployment and punitive sentencing is the political response to this crisis. It is an attempt to redirect social anger away from extreme inequality, mass unemployment, the destruction of public services, the conditions that produce crime, and toward the most politically convenient targets such as adolescents, immigrants and the specter of “disorder” that justifies the expansion of the repressive state.
The demand for troops on the streets, the legal architecture of immunity for the forces of repression, the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility, the registry of “vandals” that will strip protesters of social benefits are not responses to the death of a 12-year-old boy. They are the components of a social counterrevolution that has been under construction since the 2019 uprising shook the Chilean ruling class to its foundations. Every party that has participated in this construction, from the PS to the PC to the FA, bears responsibility. The defense of the working class against the coming crackdown cannot be entrusted to any of them. It requires the building of a genuinely revolutionary leadership, grounded in the international unity of workers across all national and ethnic lines, against the capitalist state and its fascistic government.
7. Under guise of relief, Pentagon deploys 2,000 troops to Venezuela, securing semicolonial foothold
Two weeks after twin earthquakes of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 struck northern Venezuela on June 24—the strongest to hit the country in over a century—more than 3,600 people have been confirmed dead, 16,700 injured, and tens of thousands remain missing.
Dozens of bodies are being thrown into mass graves after briefly passing through an improvised morgue at La Guaira port. International search and rescue teams have left, and local agencies have all but abandoned their already limited efforts. Those still searching for the missing amid the rubble have been forced to rely on their own means—collecting thousands of dollars to rent a crane, digging with their hands, shovels and ropes.
“There is no support,” one man whose sister was buried in a collapsed Caracas apartment building told the Christian Science Monitor. “The effort is being made by us, the families.” These actions have relied on WhatsApp groups and Instagram accounts.
The government of acting President Delcy Rodríguez has dispatched police not to dig but to intimidate, rifles in hand, filming survivors. Volunteer rescuer Wilmer Cruz was arrested for denouncing the government's response and released only after public pressure.
The New York Times cited a man who spent ten days searching for survivors between slabs of concrete, who said he was no longer afraid to speak out. “Why would I be afraid, if I was born to die?” he told the paper. The Times then noted nervously:
The public outrage could also complicate the Trump administration's strategy of supporting Ms. Rodríguez so the United States can benefit from Venezuela's resources… this public outcry could also spur a crackdown, leading to questions about how the United States would respond to any repression.*****
US Southern Command Commander General Francis Donovan announced this Wednesday that “the US military, the Department of War, has roughly 2,000 teammates in the area on land, air, and sea around Venezuela.” The day before, Donovan had told Reuters that 900 US servicemen and women were on Venezuelan territory. The rapid escalation in force numbers, alongside Donovan's expressed hope that the mission would build stronger “military-to-military” relations with Venezuela, makes clear that the humanitarian framing is a Trojan Horse.
The operational footprint is that of a military occupation. After carrying out repair works on a runway, the US Air Force's Contingency Response Element has been conducting “airfield management, air traffic coordination, communications, and security” at the Simón Bolívar International Airport. SOUTHCOM press releases have documented the arrival of multiple military transport aircraft, while MQ-9 Reaper drones and combat helicopters have conducted intelligence reconnaissance over Caracas and other affected areas.
US forces have also taken a position at La Guaira port with the docking of the amphibious warship USS Fort Lauderdale. The USS Billings remains positioned in Venezuelan territorial waters. A Marine Corps combat logistics company, with transport trucks, off-road vehicles and ambulance support, has been deployed. The deployment and larger official response is being directed by Marine Maj. Gen. Kevin Jarrard.
US chargé d'affaires John Barrett declared the Venezuelan government “fully compliant” with all US requests, adding: “We will continue to work with the Venezuelan people to adjust these needs, including sanitation, water, energy generation, and we will continue along that path as long as it takes.”
The US government, in other words, is framing its indefinite military presence in the broadest possible terms. The precedent is Haiti: Washington responded to the 2010 earthquake there with a large military deployment that became a prolonged neocolonial intervention.
But the cynicism is even more glaring in Venezuela’s case. The same power that spent two decades imposing sanctions that gutted the country’s oil revenues, collapsed its public health system, drove more than 8 million people into exile and left the housing stock in the state of disrepair that turned the earthquake into a mass casualty event now presents itself as Venezuela's savior.
*****
Even as it claims purely humanitarian intent, Washington has maintained the sanctions that freeze Venezuelan government assets in US jurisdiction—including 31 tonnes of gold deposited at the Bank of England—while a special license permits only a narrow band of relief-related transactions.
The arrival of an Israeli military delegation further exposed the true character of the operation. Brig. Gen. Elad Edri, chief of staff of the IDF Home Front Command, arrived with “expert teams” for reconstruction, according to the Israeli government. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil welcomed Israel’s “support for the Venezuelan people”—the same Gil who, as recently as Christmas, wrote on social media condemning the “extermination” of the Palestinian people by what he called a “genocidal actor.” Those responsible are now welcomed with open arms.
The presence of the White Helmets, presented as “Syria's first overseas humanitarian search-and-rescue deployment in modern history,” is further proof of relief efforts being used to further regime change operations. This group was created by British intelligence with US and European funding in 2013 as a propaganda tool to promote the forces seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
8. Massachusetts nurses strike Mass General Brigham in largest healthcare walkout in state history
More than 4,500 nurses and clinicians walked off the job Wednesday morning at Mass General Brigham (MGB), the biggest private hospital system in Massachusetts, in the largest strike of healthcare workers in the state’s history and the first by nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). The walkout includes more than 4,000 registered nurses at BWH in Boston and roughly 450 MGB Home Care clinicians—registered nurses, occupational and physical therapists, speech-language pathologists, social workers and dietitians—across Greater Boston.
Thousands of nurses in red shirts ringed the hospital in the Longwood Medical Area beginning at 7 a.m., chanting and carrying signs reading “Boston Strikes” and “Nurses do the labor, MGB gave no delivery.” The Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) only called a 24-hour strike at BWH, while the much smaller Home Care unit began a seven-day walkout.
MGB has seized on the limited character of the action at BWH to impose a lockout. Although nurses had planned to return to work Thursday morning, management is barring them from the hospital until 7 a.m. Monday, July 13, claiming the nearly 1,300 traveling nurses it has imported as strikebreakers require five-day minimum contracts. The one-day strike called by the MNA has thus been converted into a five-day work stoppage on management’s terms.
*****
The sentiments of these workers—for a broader, longer and unified struggle—stand in sharp contrast to the strategy of the MNA bureaucracy. The union knew that MGB would answer a 24-hour strike with a lockout, but it proceeded with the token action anyway, giving management ample time to recruit replacement staff and wait out the walkout. The MNA has kept the Brigham nurses and Home Care clinicians on separate timetables and has done nothing to mobilize the tens of thousands of workers across the MGB system, where nurses at system’s other flagship facility, Massachusetts General Hospital, are nonunion and are not on strike.
MGB’s cries of financial hardship are obscene. The system holds $35.8 billion in assets and reported $2.4 billion in net income for fiscal year 2025, even as it shuttered the Brigham Burn Unit, the Weiner Center preoperative clinic and other patient services. Its 14 highest-paid executives took home a combined $35.9 million in fiscal 2024, including $8.4 million for CEO Dr. Anne Klibanski—nearly 100 times the $86,700 starting salary of a Brigham nurse.
*****
To prevent a similar sellout, Brigham nurses and Home Care clinicians should form rank-and-file committees, independent of the MNA apparatus and the Democratic Party, to demand open bargaining, the publication of all contract proposals and the extension and unification of the strikes. Above all, they should appeal directly to healthcare workers throughout MGB, UMass Memorial and across the state to transform these limited actions into a unified fight against the corporate looting of healthcare and for the establishment of genuine socialized medicine.
9. Italy’s summer of struggles: Workers confront Meloni’s austerity, war and police state
The Italian working class is in open conflict with the Meloni government. A wave of strikes concentrated into July, before the legal summer strike ban (franchigia estiva) takes effect, and set to resume with greater force in September signals that class tensions in Europe’s third-largest economy have reached a breaking point.
Workers in aviation, rail, logistics, maritime transport, local transit and the public sector are fighting falling living standards, the government’s military spending and the harshest anti-strike laws introduced in postwar Italy. The struggle is not merely economic. It poses directly the question of political power.
The strike wave continues a year-long cycle of working class resistance. National strike actions on September 22 and November 28–29 last year and May 18 and May 29 this year repeatedly brought large sections of the country to a standstill. Each has taken on a more political character, connecting wage demands with opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, NATO’s war drive and the government’s authoritarian policies.
*****
What sets this strike wave apart from the sector-by-sector stoppages of previous decades is its openly political character. Workers are demanding more than higher wages. USB calls for a legal minimum wage of €2,000 a month, restoration of the scala mobile wage-indexing system, a windfall tax on energy and banking corporations, and the defense of healthcare, education and pensions against a budget that shifts billions to military spending.
Under the slogan “Nemmeno un chiodo per guerre e genocidio” (”Not even a nail for wars and genocide”), the May 18 national strike linked Italy’s plan to raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP with cuts to social programs. USB demanded that the government sever all diplomatic, economic and military ties with Israel and condemned US attacks on Iran. Dockworkers in Genoa, Livorno and Ancona refused to load weapons bound for Israel.
At the May 29 strike in Rome, a SI Cobas logistics worker told the WSWS: “With rising military spending, healthcare, pensions, hospitals and schools are cut. So workers must organise and oppose wars waged by bosses for the bosses’ profits.” Bereket, a worker from Eritrea, told the WSWS: “We, as workers ... fight internationally. I am not Italian, but I stand alongside Italians, alongside workers from other countries.”
Yet the strike movement exposes a deep divide within Italy’s labor movement—and the political limitations of the forces leading it. The confederal unions CGIL, CISL and UIL have repeatedly refused to join the mobilizations called by the base unions. When USB and CUB organized a national strike against the “war budget” on November 28, 2025, the CGIL scheduled a separate action two weeks later, splitting the movement. The same occurred in May 2026.
*****
The base unions—USB, SI Cobas, CUB, SGB and Unicobas—emerged because many workers concluded the confederal unions imposed concessions rather than fought them. They have built support among logistics workers, dockworkers, educators, subcontracted employees and immigrant workers. Their militancy and opposition to war have attracted workers seeking a fighting alternative to the CGIL.
But the base unions remain within a reformist framework, and this is not a secondary limitation—it is their defining feature. While denouncing the Meloni government as authoritarian and calling its budget a “war financial law,” they continue appealing to government ministers for reforms such as a higher minimum wage, labor negotiations and policy changes.
The anarcho-syndicalist traditions represented by the USI offer no strategy for winning political power. Refusing to handle weapons shipments is a principled act of solidarity. But refusing to build a political party capable of replacing the government that orders those shipments leaves workers without a means of ending war and austerity. Isolated actions, however courageous, must be developed into a coordinated political movement.
*****
Meanwhile, the Meloni government has strengthened the state’s powers of repression. Law No. 80/2025, adopted in June 2025, is the broadest expansion of criminal penalties in postwar Italy. Its key provision restores criminal penalties for roadblocks. Since 1999, blocking a road with one’s body had been treated as a civil offense. The new law makes it punishable by prison and imposes sentences of six months to two years when carried out by groups.
The measure directly targets strike pickets, especially in logistics and transport, by treating workers peacefully blocking a workplace as participants in an aggravated criminal offense. It also increases penalties for protests affecting energy, transport and telecommunications infrastructure and creates a new offense of “mutiny” in prisons and immigration detention centers that includes nonviolent resistance.
*****
The crisis facing Italian workers is part of a global crisis. The same capitalist system that funds Israel’s war, finances Italy’s military buildup and imposed austerity measures such as the abolition of the scala mobile and the Jobs Act cannot be overcome within national borders. Workers in Italy and internationally confront the same system. Both the CGIL’s class-collaborationist leadership and the base unions’ left-syndicalist approach accept the framework of the capitalist nation-state. They limit the struggle to economic reforms rather than the fight for political power.
The alternative is for workers to break with all pro-capitalist parties and union bureaucracies and build rank-and-file committees in every workplace, democratically controlled by workers and linked internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Dockworkers’ refusal to load weapons for Israel demonstrates the potential of international working class action, but such actions must be subordinated to the building of a revolutionary party.
To this end, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), founded by Leon Trotsky, is building its Italian section. It advocates the international unity of the working class based on a socialist program, including public ownership of the banks and major corporations, the establishment of a workers’ government and the creation of a United States of Europe as part of a world socialist federation. It calls on workers dissatisfied with the existing unions and parties to join the IWA-RFC and help build a revolutionary party.
10. H5N1 “Bird Flu” spreads to Australia
Concerns have been raised for the health of the Australian public and wildlife following the discovery of multiple birds infected by the H5N1 strain of Avian Influenza (“bird flu”) last month. The first cases were two migratory seabirds found near Esperance in Western Australia.
Confirmation of H5N1 bird flu in a migratory giant petrel found near Hawks Nest, New South Wales, in recent days extends the virus’s known presence to Australia’s east coast and brings the total to six cases. Numbers are expected to rise as more birds are investigated. Australia had been the last continent to have proven local cases of H5N1.
Classified as a “high pathogenicity avian influenza” (HPAI) virus because of its high fatality rate, H5N1 has been responsible for the deaths of millions of farm livestock and wildlife globally since 2020. H5N1 has infected nearly 1,000 people this century and has a historical death rate of about 50 percent. Farm workers who handle infected animals are especially at risk.
The virus is contagious, and spreads both by direct contact with infected body fluids and airborne transmission. It can also spread through untreated meat and dairy products, like raw poultry or unpasteurised milk. In humans and most animals, H5N1 attacks the respiratory tract, causing respiratory failure in the most severe cases. Vaccines and anti-viral treatments exist for some strains of H5N1 but are of limited effectiveness. Infected animals are usually culled in order to prevent spread, where quarantine is not practical.
Migratory seabirds are recognized as major carriers for H5N1, and in recent years have been responsible for bringing the virus to South America, Antarctica and various islands in the Indian Ocean, devastating local wildlife. It is likely that the birds that brought H5N1 to Australia came from the sub-Antarctic region, a route predicted by scientists based on known migration patterns.
*****
Coverage in the corporate media and the response of federal and state governments have focused mainly on the economic impact on the agricultural industry, should H5N1 spread into local poultry. Already, in response to the initial bird flu cases, Papua New Guinea, a major customer for Australian poultry, has suspended imports of chicken and eggs.
In the US, mass cullings from bird flu resulted in at least $1.4 billion of additional costs for the American poultry industry between 2021 and 2024, and caused estimated price increases for eggs of up to 300 percent in parts of the country. Similar impacts are feared in Australia, under conditions of an escalating cost-of-living crisis.
While these are serious concerns, what is being downplayed are the threats to humans, with only those who interact directly with infected animals considered at risk of infection.
Human-to-human transmission has not yet been observed. However, there has been an ever-widening number of species infected by H5N1, and repeated instances of animals infecting humans. This highlights the risk that with subsequent mutations, the virus will develop the ability to more easily infect and then to spread among humans. This process, a natural phenomenon known as zoonotic spillover, has a long history and was responsible for the COVID pandemic and Ebola.
*****
Current and recent experiences with COVID, Ebola and other diseases and the dangers posed by H5N1 require an international response. Man-made climate change, the globalisation of production, and disruptions to wildlife habitats all pose ever increasing risks of existing and new diseases emerging and spreading, which cannot be solved by any one country.
The starting point of any scientific response is an emergency expansion of healthcare infrastructure, including millions of dollars for public hospitals, universal free testing and the shutdown, with full pay for all workers, of the most dangerous industries. That requires a political struggle by the working class based on a socialist perspective that makes basic social needs, not corporate profits, the priority.
11. Fiji military commander publicly denounces budget cut
Fiji’s military commander Major General Jone Kalouniwai has responded to budget cuts to the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) with an extraordinary campaign in the Pacific country’s newspapers and on social media. Kalouniwai took out full-page advertisements opposing the government’s measures with a message entitled “Beyond the Budget—and Into the Grey Zone.”
*****
Kalouniwai said critics of defense spending should consider the military’s “contribution” to society, including its role in responding to natural disasters and the military training programs operating in 70 schools.
Kalouniwai portrayed the RFMF as the only force capable of dealing with drug trafficking and organized crime. He stated that the country’s other “institutions are being hollowed out by corruption,” including the police, border agencies and the judicial system. The military, he said, was fighting a “grey zone war” against “the systemic rot” afflicting “the very mechanisms of governance and law enforcement” which enabled the drugs trade.
This depiction of the military as the only uncorrupted institution is ominous. The RFMF has a history and ingrained culture of torture and brutality, and has carried out several coups (1987, 2000 and 2006), including first led by Rabuka.
*****
Fiji is gripped by a worsening economic and social crisis: soaring prices, entrenched poverty, a drug abuse epidemic and the highest rate of HIV infection in the world. As is the case internationally, the turn towards militarism and authoritarian forms of rule reflects deep fears in the ruling class that popular anger will explode.
The televised debate between Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens on Tuesday evening in Grand Rapids, Michigan exposed both the sharpening factional crisis within the Democratic Party and the narrow pro-capitalist political limits within which the conflict is being waged.
The Democratic Party winner in the August 4 primary in Michigan will face the unopposed Republican, former Representative Mike Rogers. Rogers, who served 14 years as the Representative from Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, is a Trump-backed candidate for the Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Gary Peters.
The debate on Tuesday followed a sudden shift in the primary field. WOOD-TV8 and CBS News Detroit had planned a three-way event featuring El-Sayed, Stevens and state Senator Mallory McMorrow. However, after polls showed her running a distant third, at between 5 and 6 percent, McMorrow suspended her campaign and abruptly left the race two days before the debate.
The event moderators framed the contest as a pivotal primary in a “closely watched” battleground state, stressing that control of the Senate might hinge on the outcome. This fact has intensified the drive by the Democratic Party establishment and its corporate backers to close ranks around Stevens.
*****
Both candidates advanced economic nationalism as the solution to the problems facing the industrial working class in the US, thus demonstrating their fundamental agreement with the Trump administration, despite their pretense of unbending opposition to the fascist president.
El-Sayed denounced Trump’s war of choice against Iran, claiming the US president was carrying out the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In this way, he sought to avoid any discussion of the historical role of US imperialism in the Middle East, in which Israel is an instrument of Washington, not the other way around.
The moderators pressed both candidates on the administration’s unrelenting military support for Israel as it continues mass killings and destruction in Gaza, as well as on Washington’s confrontation with Iran, which has included escalating air and missile strikes and preparations for a wider regional war.
Stevens reiterated standard pro-Zionist talking points about Israel’s “right to defend itself” and supported continued military aid, and never used the word “genocide,” while mentioning humanitarian aid and the need to “protect civilians.”
*****
The debate exposed the efforts by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to present El-Sayed as a “left” and even a “socialist” candidate. Despite his endorsement by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, El-Sayed has never called himself a socialist, avoiding even the pretense that he opposes the capitalist system.
Whatever the ultimate outcome on August 4, the Democratic Party, in Michigan as across the US, offers no alternative to war, dictatorship and capitalist exploitation. The essential task for workers remains not choosing between rival factions of the two parties of the military-industrial-information complex and the financial oligarchy on Wall Street but building an independent political movement of the working class, based on a socialist program and dedicated to putting an end to capitalism in the US and on a world scale.
13. Israel continues Gaza onslaught, after Hamas announces plan to hand power over to UN committee
Israel is continuing its criminal genocide and violation of the Gaza cease-fire, killing as many as 16 Palestinians, including a child, in the two days since Hamas announced it was preparing to transfer power to a technical committee backed by the United Nations as part of a US-brokered peace deal.
*****
The deaths over 48 hours in Gaza are part of the continuing lethal attacks that violate the US‑mediated cease-fire announced eight months ago. And beyond Gaza, UN human rights and humanitarian agencies have reported deadly incidents in the occupied West Bank in recent days.
*****
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza was captured in a recent CNN report describing bodies lying unclaimed and rats running rampant in areas where families are living amid ruins. In Deir al‑Balah, central Gaza, journalists found a patch of sandy ground where makeshift graves and partially decomposed bodies remain in the open because relatives have been displaced or killed and authorities lack the capacity to recover and rebury the dead.
As temperatures rise, the report describes how the smell of decomposition hangs over nearby tented areas, and residents fear disease outbreaks. CNN also recounted scenes of rats “running rampant” through these areas, entering tents and informal shelters at night and biting children as they sleep.
One local resident told the network that parents are forced to stay awake to try to swat away rats and other vermin, turning nights into desperate vigils rather than rest. Humanitarian workers described these conditions as a “public health nightmare,” with limited pest control, scarce clean water and a health system already gutted by months of war.
Against this backdrop, Hamas has moved to dismantle its governing structures in Gaza in line with cease-fire arrangements brokered with international mediation. On Monday, the group announced that it had dissolved its government in Gaza and was preparing to transfer power to a technical committee backed by the United Nations as part of a US‑brokered ceasefire deal.
A Hamas spokesman, Hazem Qassem, described the decision as a “clear” move to end “all governmental entities overseeing affairs in Gaza and transfer their duties to an independent technocratic committee.”
Hamas has governed Gaza for nearly two decades, since it assumed power of the strip in 2007. An Islamist Palestinian movement founded in 1987, Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council in the elections of January 2006. Factions of the Zionist state, including Netanyahu, encouraged Islamist Palestinians and stoked the conflict between Hamas and the Fatah faction of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had ruled Gaza for the previous 13 years following the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
According to sources within Hamas, a delegation is due in Cairo to discuss the second phase of the ceasefire agreement with Israel and finalize consensus on the members of the administrative committee. That second phase reportedly includes a complete military withdrawal from Gaza by Israeli forces, the disarmament of Hamas, large‑scale reconstruction, and the formation of a transitional governing body to administer the enclave.
The nearly defunct “Board of Peace,” the US‑backed body created by the Trump administration to oversee elements of the cease-fire and reconstruction framework, acknowledged the announcement but stressed it would judge Hamas “on actions, not promises.”
*****
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the Hamas announcement by insisting Israel will not withdraw from Gaza in the near term. On the ground, Israeli troops continue to control more than 60 percent of Gaza, patrolling what Netanyahu has described as a buffer zone to deter renewed attacks, and carrying out periodic strikes they say are aimed at remaining militants.
Netanyahu’s broader regional perspective was spelled out in a recent speech at a graduation ceremony for combat officers in southern Israel. In that address, he stated that Israeli forces would “remain in southern Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza for as long as required.” His comment came amid ongoing Israeli operations in southern Lebanon and reported strikes on targets in Syria.
The prime minister’s insistence that Israel will not withdraw from Gaza aligns with previous statements that the IDF will remain in neighboring territories “as long as required.” This shows that any transition of power in Gaza’s civil administration under a UN‑backed committee is unlikely to be accompanied by a complete end to Israeli military presence.
14. “Work more for the same money”—33,000 Mercedes-Benz employees protest in Germany
On Friday, 3 July, more than 33,000 Mercedes employees protested nationwide against the company’s cost-cutting drive. The vehicle manufacturer had previously announced longer working hours and pay cuts in a letter and a video message—tantamount to a declaration of war on the workforce. The “Next Level Performance” savings program agreed to by the union-led works council at the end of 2024 is now being further intensified. In Sindelfingen, the group’s largest production site, more than 20,000 employees gathered. Further protests took place at the Mercedes-Benz plants and subsidiaries in Stuttgart (company headquarters) and Untertürkheim, Bremen, Rastatt and Kuppenheim, Berlin/Marienfelde, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Germersheim.The protests were directed against the company leadership, but indirectly also against the IG Metall union and its works council reps, who have repeatedly pushed through cost-cutting measures and plant closures. The high level of participation surprised even IG Metall, which had organised the protest. According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, the chairman of the group works council, Ergun Lümali, was “overwhelmed by this enormous willingness to protest” in Sindelfingen: “Even the protest-hardened Ergun Lümali did not expect this,” the paper wrote. Lümali’s speech was aimed at breaking the fighting spirit of the assembled workforce.
*****
The Mercedes group sold 2,160,000 vehicles in 2025, 229,000 fewer than in 2024. For the 2025 financial year, shareholders were awarded a total dividend of €3.3 billion at the annual general meeting in April 2026. Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius received €8.8 million.
The high level of participation in Friday’s protest action is an expression of growing opposition among workers to IG Metall’s collaboration with management. Employees at Mercedes, Volkswagen, Bosch, Mahle and throughout the automotive and supplier industries have had enough of the constant sell-offs.
The shop stewards at Mercedes Untertürkheim recently adopted a resolution calling for resistance against the government and the corporations. “We are active in our union and demand that demonstrations against the greed of the bosses, against the government and for a better future be organized as soon as possible. Up to and including strike action. And if the union leadership drags its feet, then we’ll do it ourselves,” it states. However, the resolution calls on employees to wait and see whether the “union leadership” will side with the workers and organize strikes. This is either naive or a calculated maneuver. The entire trade union apparatus, rooted in nationalism, supports “social partnership” and the German government’s multi-billion rearmament policies.
The struggle to defend jobs and against the government’s massive rearmament and war policy cannot be waged within the prevailing trade union framework. The immediate task of Mercedes workers is to form independent rank-and-file action committees and build a network with employees at Volkswagen, Bosch and internationally.
15. UK Labour government rams through authoritarian National Security Bill
The Labour government’s National Security (State Threats) Bill passed all its stages in the House of Commons on July 6, becoming law two days later. It represents one of the most far-reaching attacks on democratic rights and press freedom in modern British history.
The Bill is a weapon against political protest, journalism and humanitarian work, and gives the state the means to prosecute those who oppose its wars. Its purpose is to intimidate and suppress political dissent and critical journalism by depicting this as a threat to national security.
The Commons passed the Bill unopposed after agreeing to six amendments proposed by the House of Lords supposedly meant to safeguard against its extraordinary attacks on press freedoms and the activities of NGOs, without addressing the equally chilling impact on anti-war and anti-genocide protests.
Security Minister Angela Eagle spun the government’s false narrative that it was aimed at tackling threats “predominantly, though not exclusively, from three countries: Russia, China and Iran”.
*****
The speed with which the measure was forced through is confirmation of the break with democratic norms in ruling circles. The legislation completed its entire passage—from its official announcement in the King's Speech on May 13 to becoming law—in less than two months.
Such was the frenzy of the government to get it through that the Bill cleared every one of its Commons stages in just a single day—on June 17—including its second reading, committee and report stages and third reading. A 'guillotine' procedure was deployed to limit debate to just six hours, ensuring that legislation carrying 14-year sentences received a fraction of the scrutiny given to routine measures.
The Bill expands a battery of existing repressive legislation, primarily the National Security Act 2023, and operates in tandem with the Crime and Policing Act 2026; it incorporates the draconian Section 12 provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000 already wielded against journalists and demonstrators.
Large parts of the Crime and Policing Act came into force on June 29, and the list of protest actions now criminalized is staggering. Climbing on any of two dozen specified memorials can now bring three months in jail under the Act's new Schedule 17 offense. Protesting outside the home of any elected official or candidate now attracts up to six months' imprisonment.
Separately, under the National Security Act 2023, many sites across the country are designated 'prohibited places,' where unauthorized entry, approach, or even photography can carry a six-month sentence—rising to 14 years if prosecutors allege a purpose prejudicial to the 'safety or interests of the United Kingdom.'
*****
It is also now an offense to conceal one's identity—including with a face mask, even by using medical masks—in a designated area controlled by police restrictions, punishable by up to a month's imprisonment. Possessing a flare or firework on a demonstration carries a £1,000 fine.
*****
Throughout the Bill’s passage, the government ignored every protest and legal objection raised. The Society of Editors called for explicit statutory protection for public-interest journalism. Index on Censorship, Tribune and The Guardian warned that vague drafting around 'material benefits' would result in self-censorship and endanger reporters working from Iran, Lebanon and Palestine.
Human rights groups warned that the National Security Act 2023 “prohibited places’” regime could risk disproportionately interfering with Article 10 (freedom of expression) and Article 11 (freedom of assembly) of the European Convention on Human Rights--creating a 'chilling effect' on lawful dissent.
*****
This week’s final vote laid bare the spinelessness of the few dozen Labour MPs who call themselves 'left.' Not once, at any stage, did those in Labour’s Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) caucus vote No to the Bill in its entirety. Instead, they confined themselves to abstentions on the final vote and making a few critical comments posted on social media.
The SCG’s main concern was to avoid losing the whip, and to retain their cozy political careers. When the House of Lords amendments were returned, the “left” accepted these as good coin--notwithstanding the warnings from human rights groups that the executive’s dictatorial powers remained wholly intact and that the promised protections for NGOs and journalists amounted to hollow “defenses” rather than strict legal exemptions.
The rotten Labour Party which rammed the legislation through will shortly be led by Andy Burnham, who has not uttered a single word on this major offensive against democratic rights. His silence is the consent of someone who will continue backing British imperialism’s wars and global aggression and intensify the offensive against the working class.
Europe’s imperialist powers have for the past several years concluded a series of far-reaching trade agreements and raw materials partnerships spanning Latin America, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific.
The intensification of inter-imperialist antagonisms and open reemergence of conflicting blocs resembles the competing trade blocs of the 1930s that preceded and fueled World War II.
18. WSWS begins posting highlight clips from webinar on the American Revolution
On June 25, the World Socialist Web Site hosted an extraordinary panel of eminent historians at a webinar to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
The full webinar, “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings,’” can be accessed at wsws.org/1776.
Here is another clip:
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
