Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Democratic condemnation of Trump’s Iran deal exposes bipartisan conspiracy for war
The publication Thursday of the terms of the memorandum of understanding between the Trump administration and Iran is such a moment. It has triggered an outpouring of criticism from both the Democratic and Republican parties on the grounds that the war US President Donald Trump launched against Iran in February failed to secure American imperialism’s objectives in dominating the Middle East.
Republican former Vice President Mike Pence called the deal “appeasement” this week and demanded that, short of a harsher settlement, “we should let our Armed Forces finish the job on our terms.”
The Democrats joined the Republican condemnation of the agreement, criticizing it in much the same language. Senator Adam Schiff of California called it “a thorough capitulation,” writing that “Iran gets sanctions relief... and a $300 billion reconstruction fund.” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut called it “essentially a surrender to Iran.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared that “Iran is stronger and America is less safe” as a result of the agreement.
The New York Times, in an editorial headlined “President Trump Lost This War,” called the agreement “a humiliating comedown” and named Iran “the strategic winner of the four-month war.”
Jacobin magazine, the semi-official publication of the Democratic Socialists of America, criticized Trump’s deal with Iran in language indistinguishable from that of the Republicans and the Democratic leadership.
Jacobin’s article, titled “Donald Trump Has Nothing to Show for His War With Iran,” took the form of an interview with Andreas Krieg, a professor of “defense studies” at King’s College London. The article states that Trump “has ended up in a weaker strategic position than when he started.”
Krieg told the magazine the war had produced “tactical degradation but strategic regression.” Iran, he noted, had not surrendered its enrichment program, its government had not collapsed and “its ability to close Hormuz has been proven rather than deterred.” It offers neither a word of condemnation of the war itself nor any call to oppose it.
The Trump administration waged an illegal war of aggression against Iran, in violation of international law. The war opened with a series of assassinations, including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the country’s military and political leadership. This act of murder and perfidy under cover of negotiations met with approval from both parties. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the time, “I will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei,” while Jeffries called Iran “a bad actor” that “must be aggressively confronted.”
Throughout the war, the Democrats sought to stifle broad popular opposition to it through a series of meaningless procedural votes, intended to fail. In the massive demonstrations of millions of people under the banner of “No Kings,” Democratic Party organizers worked to deliberately exclude any reference to the war.
But now that the war has failed to achieve Trump’s objectives, the Democrats have found their voice, condemning his “capitulation” to Iran. This is the same party that spent the last year and a half presenting Trump as a colossus whose social and economic policies could not be opposed because he had a “mandate” from the electorate.
In reality, the Democrats, who speak for the same ruling class as Trump, agree with broad sections of Trump’s domestic agenda. Whatever their rhetoric, they believe, together with Trump, that fundamental social programs must be slashed to fund the expansion of the military and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.
It is in defense of the interests of American imperialism that they are intractable. During his first term, the Democrats chose to impeach Trump not over his assault on democratic rights, but, in 2019, for his insufficient commitment to war with Russia and his withholding of military aid to Ukraine.
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The Democratic response to the agreement makes clear that their claim to represent any sort of “progressive” opposition to the fascist Trump is a lie. They are ferocious defenders of American imperialism, and should they come to power, there would be no fundamental change in foreign policy.
A world separates the working class from these parties. From the first day of the war, the World Socialist Web Site, the organ of the International Committee of the Fourth International, defined the war by its social character, calling it “a criminal war of aggression by an imperialist power against an oppressed former colony, aimed at plundering its oil wealth and establishing control of the Persian Gulf.” The Socialist Equality Party declared in a statement that it “condemns this war unconditionally and calls on the working class of every country to oppose it,” insisting that “the main enemy is at home” and that American workers “have no interest in a war against the people of Iran.”
2. Artist as a Not Very Important Person
The Christophers is amusing at times. McKellen’s “pyrotechnics” are entertaining, and Coel, Corden and Gunning do perfectly well. Soderbergh makes films (he also does the actual cinematography and editing) more stylish and “knowing” than the norm.
But the film doesn’t, in the end, add up to much. It impresses the critics because they are not difficult to impress.
In other words, it is doubtful that on viewing The Christophers, anyone’s thoughts have been “enriched by something new,” or that new human types have been “engraved upon your heart.”
3 Mississippi cop fires on vehicle in Walmart parking lot, killing 1-year-old child
According to the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, officers from the Senatobia Police Department and the Tate County Sheriff’s Office responded to a shoplifting call at the Walmart on US 51 and encountered two adults and a child leaving the store and entering a vehicle. The department press release states: “Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one. An officer then discharged their weapon, and the vehicle fled the scene.”
The vehicle later reached a hospital, where the child was pronounced dead and another occupant was listed in critical condition. A video captured by a bystander from the front of the Walmart and broadcast by Fox13 News of Memphis shows officers chasing a vehicle, which then pulls away from them.
The Guardian reported that Carlos Haynes, the child’s grandfather, described his grandson as a happy baby and said he was looking forward to watching him grow. “Someone ended it all before it could even start,” Haynes said.
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The state police account has outraged family, friends and residents because key evidence remains unreleased, while the narrative of an officer’s life being in danger to justify the shooting is all too familiar. The same justification is being used by federal authorities to clear ICE agent Jonathan Ross for murdering Renée Nicole Good during the mass protests against the brutal treatment of immigrants in Minneapolis last January. Family members of Kohen Kartier Wiley say the officer should never have placed the child in harm’s way in the first place.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has been hired by the family, wrote on social media that “A 1-year-old child is dead after police officers in Mississippi opened fire on a vehicle in a crowded Walmart parking lot in Senatobia.” He added that the child’s mother said she tried to tell officers there was a baby in the car.
On Tuesday, family members, friends and community supporters gathered outside the Walmart to protest the killing, and police responded with tear gas. Reporters at the scene said the gas affected demonstrators and members of the press, turning the protest into a public confrontation over the use of force. Community members were not simply mourning; they were demanding accountability in a case that involved the death of a child.
Aside from their self-justifying press release, state police have provided no additional information, and they say the case is now under investigation by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI). MBI said its agents are gathering evidence and reviewing the circumstances surrounding the shooting, and local officials said the officer involved has been placed on leave.
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Senatobia is a small city in Tate County in northern Mississippi, about 30 miles south of the Tennessee border and 40 miles south of Memphis. The area has very low incomes and elevated poverty, and the local economy is dominated by low-wage work and limited public resources.
The state of Mississippi remains among the poorest in the US. ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) research found that 48 percent of households in the state were either in poverty or financially strained in 2024.
The Mapping Police Violence website ranks Mississippi as the state with the 12th highest number of police killings in the US, with 5.4 deaths per 1,000 people and a total of 215 people killed through June 8, 2026.
In 2025, the Police Violence Report said at least 1,201 people were killed by police in the US. Security.org’s 2026 summary put the 2024 number at 1,202 and said gunshots caused 94 percent of police-involved deaths in 2025. Police use of firearms remains the dominant cause of fatal encounters between the public and law enforcement across the country.
Mississippi also has the highest rate of firearm mortality of any state in the country. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, Mississippi was the only state in 2024 with a rate of 28 firearm deaths per 100,000 people.
Late Friday night, President Donald Trump announced on social media that US Southern Command had carried out a “lethal kinetic strike” killing Héctor Guerrero Flores—known as “Niño Guerrero” or “El Innombrable”—the alleged leader of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
The extrajudicial execution was carried out “at my direction,” Trump posted, attaching a 10-second video of a structure being struck from the air. The operation, he said, had been coordinated with Venezuelan leaders.
In December, Guerrero had been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on charges of ordering, directing, and facilitating acts of terrorism and violence in the United States. He was never arrested, never charged in a Venezuelan court, and never tried.
The operation had in fact been underway for days before Trump’s announcement. On Tuesday, Venezuelan military helicopters were already conducting attacks over the gold-mining territory of Bolívar state, controlled by Tren de Aragua.
Residents filmed aircraft overflying the area, firing bursts of gunfire or dropping troops. Hundreds of men—informal miners—were seen fleeing from the open-pit mines allegedly controlled by criminal organizations.
“Bombs and gunfire could be heard in the jungle,” a neighbor of Las Claritas told Reuters. “There are mines in those areas. This is bad; you can’t go out.”
Human rights organization Provea issued a warning: “The Venezuelan Army is deploying a massive operation in Las Cristinas and at Km 88 in Bolívar state. We warn of the risk of extrajudicial executions and arbitrary detentions against the civilian population in the area.”
The men who fled through that jungle mud were not cartel commanders. They were informal miners—workers, however entangled the criminal structures may be in informal mining across Venezuela’s Orinoco Mining Arc, a vast territory near the borders with Guyana and Brazil.
Tren de Aragua, it should be noted, has no large-scale involvement in trafficking cocaine to the United States, according to InSight Crime. Instead, informal gold mining and local drug trafficking, and the violence from the conflict between criminal organizations and the state, have been fueled by the economic desperation that decades of US sanctions deliberately produced.
The killing of Guerrero is a dramatic escalation inland of the extrajudicial campaign the Trump administration has been waging since September in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. At least 210 fishermen have now been killed in US military strikes on small boats, accused of drug smuggling without evidence, identification, formal charges, or trial.
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Six months after US special forces abducted sitting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, bringing them to the US to face a rigged trial in New York, the Chavista government led by Maduro’s former vice president Delcy Rodriguez is jointly operating with the US military to execute Venezuelans under indictment in US courts.
Now, into the territory the militaries are attempting to clear, a different criminal cartel will move: US and Canadian mining corporations with long histories of corruption, environmental destruction and violent repression.
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The cartels hiding in the jungle are being replaced by gangsters in Wall Street boardrooms who will manage concessions, extract the gold and remit the profits abroad while informal miners are pushed off the deposits they have worked for years.
This is the broader logic of what has unfolded since January 3, when US forces abducted Maduro. The Trump administration has seized effective control of Venezuela’s oil exports. Nearly 100 million barrels of oil, worth an estimated $8 billion, have moved through a system Washington controls with no public accounting for sales, revenues or expenditures.
The same opaque mechanism has been extended to gold and other mineral exports. Acting President Rodríguez’s government submits monthly budget requests for US approval while Washington and private traders manage the sales, audits, and disbursements. Rodriguez has also renewed ties with the IMF, hoping for access to billions in credits.
Trump’s main objective was explicit: to drive out Chinese and Russian economic and political influence and gain unfettered control over the world’s largest proven oil reserves—a prize US and British imperialism have coveted since Standard Oil and Shell divided Venezuela between them in the 1920s.
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The conditions being imposed today recall precisely those that have historically produced the most explosive working class resistance in Venezuela and across Latin America.
The austerity and privatizations of the 1980s produced the Caracazo of 1989—a mass workers’ uprising that shook the foundations of Venezuelan bourgeois rule. The protest movements that followed were betrayed and channeled behind the election of Hugo Chávez, whose bourgeois nationalist program proved structurally incapable of breaking with imperialism and ultimately handed the country back to Wall Street.
Today’s mass struggles of the working class require a new leadership that turns to the lessons drawn by the International Committee of the Fourth International—the only tendency that has consistently analyzed the betrayals of Social Democracy, Stalinism, Pabloism and bourgeois nationalism across the region, and that fights for the revolutionary unity of the working class across the Americas.
Autoworkers continue to respond with enthusiasm to the nomination of Mack Trucks worker and socialist Will Lehman to run for United Auto Workers president. Lehman was nominated Wednesday by two delegates to the UAW Constitutional Convention in Detroit, which concluded on Thursday.
Lehman issued a statement thanking the delegates from Florida and Michigan who rose to nominate him and every delegate who pledged to nominate him but were denied the chance under the rule limiting nominations to two.
The statement read in part:
I want to thank every worker who made this nomination possible—every autoworker, parts worker, academic worker, healthcare worker, casino worker and retiree who shared this campaign and contributed to it… This campaign is directed against that apparatus. It is about the fight to transfer power from the bureaucracy that has dominated this union to the rank and file—to the workers on the shop floor.
6. Obama library dedication turns presidency of war, Wall Street bailouts into Democratic Camelot
In attendance were former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Joe Biden, along with Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Jill Biden. The presence of Bush, the war criminal responsible for the invasion of Iraq, who came to power through the theft of the 2000 election, underscored the fundamental unity of the two parties of American imperialism.
The Democratic Party establishment was represented by figures from every wing of the party: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President and 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Also present was Michigan U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who joined in honoring Obama, the president who continued Bush’s “War on Terror” and institutionalized drone assassinations of so-called “enemy combatants,” including US citizens.
The list of foreign dignitaries included former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and former Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj. Also in attendance were Tom Hanks, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, Bono and the Edge of U2, Christina Aguilera, Marc Anthony, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Tems and Eddie Vedder.
The ceremony lasted more than three hours and combined militarism, celebrity worship and nationalist pageantry, overlain with identity and racial politics. Following a benediction, the Illinois National Guard presented the colors, and Jennifer Hudson sang the national anthem. This was followed by a promotional film narrated by Obama, filled with the hollow slogans of his 2008 campaign, including “Yes, we can” and calls to “imagine your impact.”
That Valerie Jarrett, chief executive officer of the Obama Foundation, delivered the first speech was politically significant. Jarrett, a longtime Obama associate, is representative of the reactionary social layer elevated through the Democratic Party and identity politics: wealthy, corporate-connected, deeply embedded in Chicago’s political machine and hostile to the working class.
Before serving as Obama’s senior adviser from 2009 to 2017, Jarrett was CEO of the Habitat Company, a major Chicago real estate firm that managed public housing developments, including Grove Parc Plaza, where poor residents lived in conditions marked by decay, vermin and neglect. Her career has included leading positions on corporate, financial, university and transit boards. Less than three weeks after the murder of George Floyd, amid mass protests against police violence, Jarrett rejected calls to defund the police and suggested that more money was needed for law enforcement.
The central political purpose of the ceremony was expressed in the speeches of Michelle and Barack Obama. Michelle Obama’s remarks are already being hailed by the media as “historic.” But like the rest of the event, they were aimed at rewriting the Obama years as a kind of Garden of Eden, ignoring the social devastation, war, police violence and corporate plunder that defined the period.
Michelle Obama praised her husband’s “dazzling brilliance” and “unshakable moral fiber,” declaring that he had made the country proud by “rescuing our economy, expanding healthcare, ending a war, ordering the Bin Laden raid, saving the auto industry, winning a peace prize, keeping us safe from Ebola, regulating the banks, standing up for marriage equality, listening to science, and comforting an entire nation in the face of unspeakable tragedies.”
Every phrase in this litany is false. “Rescuing our economy” refers to the bailout of Wall Street following the financial crash of 2008, which was initiated under Bush and expanded under Obama. Trillions of dollars in loans, guarantees and cash handouts were funneled to the banks, while millions of workers lost their homes. Not a single major Wall Street executive was prosecuted. When measures were proposed to limit executive pay at bailed-out firms, Obama intervened on behalf of the financial aristocracy. During the Obama presidency, the number of American billionaires rose from 359 to 565, a 57 percent increase.
“Expanding healthcare” refers to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, a program modeled on Romneycare that strengthened the domination of the insurance companies and funneled billions in public subsidies to the private healthcare industry.
“Ending a war” is perhaps the most grotesque claim of all. Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan, continued the occupation of Iraq, oversaw drone assassinations across the Middle East and Africa, initiated the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore in Syria and backed the US-NATO war in Libya, which destroyed the country and helped reintroduce open slave markets in North Africa.
The “saving” of the auto industry meant the use of federal bailout funds to impose a historic attack on autoworkers. In the 2009 managed bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler, tens of thousands of jobs were destroyed, plants were closed, new-hires’ wages were cut in half, strikes were banned for six years and the United Auto Workers bureaucracy was handed a direct financial stake in the “restructuring” through its control of the VEBA retiree healthcare trust.
Barack Obama’s own speech was no less reactionary. He preached “bipartisanship” and the “shared values” of the two parties of big business and war, declaring that a “sense of duty and honor” was not Republican or Democratic but “American,” and that every president on stage had tried to uphold these values. He explicitly included John McCain and Mitt Romney in this pantheon.
This was the political essence of the ceremony. Obama presents Trump as an interloper, a temporary departure from the “arc” of American democracy. In reality, the fascist Trump embodies the financial oligarchy that rules the US. He is the product of the very social order Obama rescued after the 2008 financial crash.
Obama’s reference to the United States as an “undeniable force for good in the world” was the greatest lie of all. In fact, US imperialism is the undeniable center of global reaction, responsible for countless wars, occupations, sanctions, coups, assassinations and, more recently, outright genocide by its Israeli attack dog in Gaza.
The Obama Presidential Center is a monument to hypocrisy. Its purpose is to provide the Democratic Party with a usable myth as it seeks to contain popular hatred of Trump while blocking any independent movement of the working class.
The 225th Interior Ministers’ Conference, which has been meeting in Hamburg since Wednesday, marks a new stage in the construction of a German police and military state. Under the slogans of “civil defense capability” and the defense against “hybrid threats,” the federal and state governments are driving forward the systematic integration of the police, intelligence agencies, judiciary, economy and Bundeswehr (armed forces).
For the first time, Federal Defence Minister Boris Pistorius is taking part in the plenary session of the Interior Ministers’ Conference (IMK). According to the Hamburg Interior Authority, provision is being made for the Federal Ministry of Defence and the Bundeswehr to be permanently integrated into the structures of the IMK in future. The aim is to build up “military and civil defense capability with equal consistency and speed by 2029.”
This formulation is of enormous political significance. The IMK, which traditionally sets guidelines for internal security, is being openly integrated into military war planning. Pistorius and the military leadership have repeatedly emphasized that Germany must be placed in a position by 2029 to wage a comprehensive war against the nuclear power Russia. What is being sold as the “growing together of external and internal security” in reality means the further abolition of the dividing lines between the police, intelligence agencies, military and civilian administration in order to make Germany “war-ready.”
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This development is directly connected to the federal government’s war and rearmament policy. While NATO and the EU in Brussels discuss new billions for the war in Ukraine, the rearmament of Europe and the confrontation with Russia, the Interior Ministers’ Conference in Hamburg is organizing the domestic political side of the same development: an apparatus that remains functional in wartime, controls oppositional sentiment and suppresses social resistance.
This is particularly clear in the term “hybrid threat.” It is deliberately boundless. It includes sabotage, espionage and cyberattacks as well as “disinformation,” “influence operations” and the shaping of public opinion. In this way, the entire political and media sphere is declared a security problem. Criticism of NATO, of Germany’s Ukraine policy, of support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, of the war against Iran or of social cuts can at any time be defamed as part of a foreign influence operation.
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Involved are intelligence services, federal and state police authorities, cyber agencies such as the BSI, federal and state criminal police offices, the Central Customs Authority, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, business associations and, depending on the occasion, the Bundeswehr. This creates a central hub in which intelligence findings, police measures, economic interests, prosecutorial action and military security logic are brought together.
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The construction of a German police and military state is inseparably bound up with the return of German militarism. As in the first half of the 20th century, crisis and war are driving capitalism toward dictatorship and barbarism. Only an international socialist program that breaks the power of the banks, corporations and arms capitalists, dissolves the Bundeswehr, abolishes the intelligence agencies and places the economy under the democratic control of the working class can stop this development.
8. Western Balkans Summit: The EU pushes for economic and military alignment
At the EU-Western Balkans summit held on June 5 in Tivat, Montenegro, the European Union’s leading powers—above all, Germany—pushed for the fastest possible integration of the Western Balkan states into the EU.The EU is accelerating the incorporation of the Balkans not for democratic or social reasons. Under the guise of “stability,” “reforms” and “European perspective,” the region’s states are being brought into line with Brussels and integrated into European war policy. Under conditions of the Ukraine war and growing rivalry with Russia, China and increasingly also the US, the EU is seeking to bind the Balkans more closely to its economic, military and geopolitical interests.
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Behind the formula of “gradual integration” lies a model that incorporates the candidate states into central EU structures even before full membership—but without voting rights. Von der Leyen put it bluntly: Sectors of the internal market were being opened to companies from the Western Balkans, and in return these countries must carry out reforms to create “level playing field” conditions for European capital.
This effectively means their geopolitical, economic and military subordination without full political rights.
As early as 2023, the EU had promised up to 6 billion euros for “reforms and investments” under the so-called Growth Plan. However, these funds are tied to closer integration into the EU single market, regional economic cooperation and comprehensive “reforms”—i.e., opening up markets, privatization, austerity and the subordination of the region to the interests of European capital.
Summit host Montenegro is considered a front runner. The country is the most advanced candidate and aims to become an EU member by 2028. It is already a NATO member and has introduced the euro. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said his country, which holds the EU Council presidency in the first half of 2027, would “do everything to promote and accelerate this process.” Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, whose country holds the EU Council presidency in the second half of 2026, also hoped “to remove all obstacles so that the remaining negotiation chapters can be closed.”
For the other five states—Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo—negotiations are less advanced.
As past EU enlargements have shown, integration on the terms of the European powers means a further deterioration in the situation of the vast majority of the population. These countries are already scarred by poverty, unemployment and emigration. At the same time, the governments of the Western Balkan states are politically extremely fragile, enjoy no popular support for their right-wing policies and are frequently deeply entangled in corruption and crime.
This combination repeatedly leads to fierce social protests. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Albania against the government. The immediate trigger was the approval of several luxury tourism projects on the island of Sazan in the Karaburun-Sazan Marine National Park and in the Narta Lagoon, including at Pishë Poro beach near Zvërnec, which belongs to the Vjosë-Narta Protected Landscape. Beneficiaries of the project include Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and a network of companies and corrupt Albanian politicians.
In Serbia, nationwide protests against President Aleksandar Vučić repeatedly take place, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina thousands of people protested for several days in the capital Sarajevo in February. The trigger was a tram accident in which one person was killed. This caused pent-up anger to boil over about dilapidated infrastructure, a lack of safety checks, and the corruption and indifference of the political elite.
The governments, which are under enormous pressure, welcome rapid attachment to the EU in order to preserve their own privileges and those of the extremely narrow upper classes. Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama called for a faster pace in enlargement. Last year he stated his country was aiming for EU accession by 2030 and described himself as an “EU fanatic.”
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The ruling class in Europe expects integration will bring not only new markets, raw materials and investment opportunities. At the summit, it became clear that this “geopolitical investment” is primarily directed against Russian and Chinese influence in the region.
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Although the war against Russia was not officially on the summit agenda, the issue was omnipresent, also in connection with a possible EU accession of Ukraine.
Parallel to the Western Balkans summit, the EU is pushing ahead with Ukraine’s integration. Two days before the summit, on June 3, the new Hungarian government under Prime Minister Péter Magyar withdrew its veto against Ukraine’s EU accession. A week after the summit, on June 12, Council President Costa and Commission President von der Leyen jointly declared that all member states had agreed to open the first negotiating cluster with Ukraine and Moldova. This is a further escalation against the nuclear power Russia.
The EU has long regarded the Balkans as part of its geopolitical sphere of influence. The summit was fully in line with the disastrous record of German and EU policy in the region.
The destruction of Yugoslavia was driven decisively by Berlin, which sought to revive its historical sphere of influence in the Balkans after German reunification in 1990. In 1991, the Kohl government pushed for international legal recognition of Slovenia’s and Croatia’s secession, while knowingly accepting the prospect of ethnic civil war.
The 1999 NATO war, in which Germany participated for the first time since World War II with combat missions in the Balkans, completed the destruction of Yugoslavia and subjected the region to the dictates of the IMF and World Bank. Bosnia became a de facto IMF protectorate. In 2006 and 2008, the EU and the US further pushed the secession of Montenegro and Kosovo.
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The EU and Germany no longer view the Balkan states merely as an energy and raw materials corridor, a reservoir of cheap labour and an instrument to repel migrants but increasingly also as a strategic outpost against Russia and other rival powers.
9. Fiji deaths in custody reignite allegations of state brutality
Two deaths in custody in recent months have reignited allegations of torture, sexual abuse and fatal violence by Fiji’s police and military forces. Similar reports involving patterns of brutality by the Pacific Island country’s security forces have recurred repeatedly over many years.
In the latest case, the Fiji Police Force has acknowledged that 12 officers, including members of the Royal Fiji Military Force (RFMF) were present during the arrest of 32 year-old Sakiasi Ose Radravu, whose family claims he was severely beaten, resulting in his death.
The family alleges that on the night of April 23, Radravu was tortured during a raid at his home in Kinoya, near the capital Suva, by police and military officers, and beaten within an inch of his life. He died on June 4.
Police claim that the autopsy report shows the cause of death was “a pre-existing medical condition.” According to Fijivillage, they later claimed he was under the influence of a substance when he was taken into custody and his behaviour was “marked by distress, including screaming.”
Radravu’s aunt, Elizabeth Kabuyawa, told Radio NZ (RNZ) that the family is seeking a second autopsy due to concerns about a cover-up. The death certificate lists the main cause of death as sepsis and complications from pneumonia.
The family says the period from the arrest to death was sudden, unexplained, and difficult to accept. Kabuyawa declared: “I think they’re [police] trying to masquerade it. They’re not even considering that there was an underlying issue that he’d had from these beatings. My nephew was sodomised, his head was stomped on, he was beaten almost to his death.”
Radravu’s cousin Buna said the raid was prompted by an accusation that he had stolen a laptop. After being roused, family members arrived at Radravu's nearby house to find it surrounded. “We could hear that our cousin was actually screaming and yelling for his life,” Buna said.
Radravu’s girlfriend was reportedly in the room as he was being beaten, “[She] came crying home and came to inform the family of what had happened. After they had beaten him up, they had taken him up to the [police] station,” Buna said. The family alleges that his detention was never recorded, and that police had not issued a warrant for the raid.
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Beatings and deaths are not “excesses” by rogue soldiers. They are the product of a state built on successive military coups, rooted in the ongoing crises of Fijian capitalism. Sitiveni Rabuka, the current prime minister, led two coups in 1987. In 2000, an attempted coup and hostage crisis unfolded, led by George Speight with military backing. Frank Bainimarama came to power in a coup in 2006 and ruled the country until 2022.
Section 131 of Bainimarama’s 2013 Constitution—which has not been altered—gives the RFMF commander unrestrained powers to ensure the “safety and security of the country,” a blunt assertion that the military ultimately remains in charge. RFMF officers routinely operate alongside the police and are often appointed as heads of corrections, police and other senior government roles.
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The main target of police and military repression is the working class. Successive regimes have imposed draconian anti-union laws, suppressed May Day protests, arrested locked-out and striking workers and trade union officials.
There remains the real threat of another coup. Bainimarama and ex-police commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho appeared in court earlier this month, accused of attempting to incite a mutiny in the armed forces, which they have denied.
The latest police-military crackdowns however prove that nothing fundamental has changed under Rabuka, despite his posturing as a liberal opponent of Bainimarama and claiming to undo aspects of his unpopular dictatorial regime. Whatever their differences, all factions of the ruling elite fear the rising anger in the working class over skyrocketing inflation and a social crisis that has worsened since the illegal US-Israeli war against Iran.
About a third of the population lives in poverty. According to the Fijian Broadcasting Corporation, 34 percent of children aged between five and 11 are engaged in child labor. Nearly one percent of the population—9000 people—are HIV positive, a crisis fueled by out-of-control drug use.
Fiji’s military-backed regimes have been protected by Australia and New Zealand, who have accommodated themselves to every illegitimate government. New Zealand’s announcement in 2019 of an “enhanced partnership” between the NZ and Fiji police forces was aimed at bolstering the repressive apparatus. Australia last month signed an upgraded security treaty with Fiji, aimed at integrating it into US-led war plans against China.
The principal concern of the two local imperialist powers is not democracy and “human rights,” but stability for investment and the exclusion of rival powers from the region, particularly China.
10. Sri Lanka: Residents in Colombo housing complex protest dilapidated conditions
Residents of the Sahaspura housing complex at Boralla, Colombo, in Sri Lanka, staged a protest on the morning of June 3, demanding the immediate repair of elevators that have been out of service for an extended period.
Gathering in an open area adjacent to the complex, they displayed placards bearing slogans such as, “Fulfil the demands of all Sahaspura residents!” “Repair the lifts immediately!” “Are the officials asleep?” and “People suffer because the elevators are not working.”
The demonstration reflected growing frustration among residents over the authorities’ prolonged failure to address a problem that has severely disrupted the daily lives of hundreds of working-class and urban poor families living in the high-rise housing complex. It is not an isolated issue. People have been angry for years and months over the failure to repair their houses.
Although the 14-storey complex contains 671 units housing more than 20,000 residents, only one of its six elevators is currently operational. Elderly residents, people with medical issues and schoolchildren have been forced to climb multiple floors, sometimes all 14 stories, on foot. Residents protested after repeated appeals to the authorities were ignored.
Like successive governments, the current Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government has broken the promises it made to residents at election time.
Officials from the government’s Urban Development Authority (UDA), who arrived at the protest site, urged residents to end the demonstration, claiming that all funds required for repairs had already been approved. However, when World Socialist Web Site reporters went to the area for the second time on Tuesday evening, people were still impatiently waiting in front of the only working lift.
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Sahaspura was the first high-rise housing project built for low-income people in Colombo, launched by the President Chandrika Kumaratunga government under the banner of providing better housing for shanty dwellers. As the WSWS explained at the time, the project’s real purpose was not to solve the housing crisis but to free up valuable real estate occupied by poor residents for industrial and commercial development.
Constructed in 2001–2002 under the World Bank-backed Sustainable Townships Programme, Sahaspura was managed by Real Estate Exchange Ltd. (REEL). Company documents openly stated the government’s objective: “To attract foreign direct investment, it is essential to provide cheap labour and suitable land areas and infrastructure, particularly within the city of Colombo.”
The housing units were not intended to provide decent living conditions. The units range from 335 to 600 square feet and were allocated according to the size of residents’ former houses. The bathrooms measure only one metre by one metre, and there are no proper kitchens. Instead, there is only a concrete slab for placing a gas stove and other items. In effect, the former shanty dwellers were moved from “horizontal slums” to what can only be described as “vertical slums.”
Far from providing safe housing, many apartment complexes have become death traps due to poor planning, inadequate maintenance, and the absence of basic safety measures. In February this year, a seven-year-old boy was killed at the Helamuthu Sevana housing complex in Mutuwal after a section of the cement ceiling from the building’s seventh floor suddenly collapsed on him. In November 2024, a fire caused by an electrical leak in an elevator damaged the Laksanda Sevana apartment complex in Kolonnawa, disrupting residents’ lives and destroying property. The incident triggered protests by residents, who accused authorities of neglecting essential maintenance and safety requirements.
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While many people now live in “vertical slums,” hundreds of luxury condominiums and major tourist hotels were built on the land from which they had been forcibly removed.
According to the recently published Sri Lanka Real Estate Market Outlook 2026 by LankaPropertyWeb, the average monthly net salary of a worker in Colombo is 70,452 rupees ($US210), while the selling price of one square foot of luxury apartment space in the city centre is 108,442 rupees ($US324).
On June 4, Deputy Minister of Urban Development Eranga Gunasekara held a media conference and blamed previous governments for conditions at Sahaspura. He declared that the apartment complexes had been built “not for humans but for animals” and had become “hellholes.”
Under the current government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the so-called Colombo Regeneration Project continues, with plans to construct 2,000 housing units for “dwellers living in underserved settlements.” The purpose is the same: to release real estate for corporations and confine the poor to poorly built complexes.
Gunasekara’s rhetoric was intended to hoodwink people. His JVP/NPP government is continuing to impose austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and placing the burden of the economic crisis, intensified by the US war on Iran, on working people, throwing many more into poverty. Public health, education and housing programs are all being starved.
More than six months after the devastating Cyclone Ditwah, thousands of families are still living in temporary shelters. According to UNICEF, the “National Disaster Relief Services Center (NDRSC) reports that by the end of May 2026, approximately 1,337 people remain displaced in 18 safety centres.” As of mid-April, 150,329 displaced persons were still being housed by family members or in other accommodation outside formal shelters.
The bitter experiences of workers and oppressed people demonstrate that the housing crisis, like all other social problems, cannot be solved through appeals to capitalist governments or within the capitalist system. Poor residents must build independent action committees and link up with the working class to fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government that will implement socialist policies to secure their social rights.
11. Australia’s Deakin University shelves job cuts to seek union consultation
In a tactical retreat, management has said that new cuts will be prepared after consultation processes in which the National Tertiary Education Union has signaled its readiness to play a central role.
A recently published book by University of Auckland researchers Chris Wilson and Michal Dziwulski sheds new light on the March 15, 2019 terrorist attack carried out by fascist shooter Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Motivated by racist hatred of non-white immigrants and Muslims, Tarrant massacred 51 people and severely injured dozens more when he opened fire during Friday prayers at the city’s Al Noor and Linwood mosques. He gunned down defenceless men, women, and children indiscriminately; the youngest victim was three years old. Ninety-two children lost a parent in the attack.
He Told Us: How an Australian Committed Far-Right Terrorism in Christchurch, New Zealand (Allen & Unwin) brings together much of the publicly available information about Tarrant’s activities in the lead-up to the attack. It also provides new details about his radicalisation as a right-wing extremist, based on the authors’ discovery of more than 400 messages posted by the terrorist on far-right message-boards on the website 4chan.
Most significantly, the book highlights glaring omissions and flaws in the report of the 2020 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attack. They dispute its main findings that Tarrant “was a lone actor” and that there was “no plausible way he could have been detected except by chance.”
In fact, Tarrant had spent years communicating with other far-right extremists and wrote several publicly accessible statements which made clear that he intended to commit a violent attack against Muslims in New Zealand. While these statements were anonymous, he did not go to great lengths to conceal his identity.
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He Told Us vindicates the analysis made by the WSWS that the Royal Commission’s report was a whitewash of the police, intelligence and other state agencies. At best, these authorities turned a blind eye to the threat of far-right and anti-Muslim violence. New Zealand’s intelligence agencies—the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)—reviewed the Commission’s report and had the power to veto the inclusion of information.
The report covered up the role played by successive New Zealand and Australian governments in creating the environment which fuelled the growth of the far-right—including both countries’ participation in US-led wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. These illegal imperialist wars were justified by relentless demonisation of Muslims by the media and political parties, including Australia’s One Nation and New Zealand First. Wilson and Dziwulski’s book does not mention these wars against majority Muslim countries, which would certainly have influenced Tarrant during his formative years.
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An extraordinary level of official secrecy surrounds Tarrant and his attack. One of the first actions of the NZ state was to ban possession of Tarrant’s manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” which elaborated his fascist ideology, hailed US President Donald Trump as a symbol of white nationalism, and laid bare the similarity of Tarrant’s anti-immigrant and anti-Marxist views to those of “mainstream” right-wing politicians in Australia and NZ. As the authors of He Told Us point out, the ban has not prevented the manifesto from being circulated by far-right extremists internationally, but it has contributed to suppressing public discussion and analysis of Tarrant’s views.
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Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared that she would never speak Tarrant’s name and told the media to restrict reporting on his statements in the event of a trial. Because Tarrant pleaded guilty he was never questioned in court about how he planned the attack and whether there were accomplices.
The Royal Commission’s hearings—including its solitary interview with Tarrant—were held in secret. The commissioners permanently suppressed the vast bulk of the evidence and submissions they received, a total of over 73,500 pages, including 15,000 pages from the police investigation. Its final report consists largely of assertions that cannot be checked against the evidence they are supposedly based on.
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The authors of He Told Us provide a scathing critique of the Royal Commission’s narrow terms of reference, its suppression of evidence and the gaping holes and contradictions in its report. Yet they do not offer any explanation for why the Commission proceeded as it did. They do not call it what it was: not a genuine inquiry but a cover-up and a whitewash of the state agencies.
The Auckland University researchers agree with the Commission’s most important recommendation: that the intelligence agencies must be given more resources. They state that if the NZSIS, the domestic spy agency, had been given “double the number of counter-terrorism staff” then it might have been more inclined to monitor far-right extremism, rather than focusing mainly on Islamic extremism.
This claim is utterly false. In actual fact, annual funding for the NZSIS increased dramatically from $11.5 million in 2000/2001 to $68.6 million in 2017/2018—a more than sixfold increase, which was justified on the pretext of preventing Muslim terrorism. For the 2026/2027 financial year the agency will get $142,196,000.
By the time the Christchurch terrorist attack occurred, the intelligence agencies in both Australia and New Zealand had the ability to conduct warrantless mass surveillance of communications, as did the police.
While Muslims, environmental groups, anti-war activists and others had all been targets of state surveillance, the fascist networks in Australia and New Zealand were allowed to operate without interference from the state. This remains the case today. In Australia, the National Socialist Network, the rebranded UPF, led by Sewell, last year led major anti-immigrant demonstrations.
The explanation is political. The function of the state is to preserve capitalist rule and prevent the development of a socialist movement in the working class. The promotion of far-right extremism and fascism serves the same purpose by dividing the working class and scapegoating immigrants and other minorities for poverty and social inequality.
Wilson and Dziwulski’s book briefly discusses the anti-immigrant demagogy stoked by Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard during the early 2000s and mentions the rise of the blatantly racist One Nation. But they say nothing about parallel developments in New Zealand’s political establishment—including the fact that NZ First, a far-right party which espoused anti-Muslim and anti-Marxist views similar to those in Tarrant’s manifesto, was a coalition partner in Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party-led government.
In the seven years since the Christchurch massacre, as the crisis of capitalism has deepened, official politics in every country has lurched even further to the right. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza and their criminal war against Iran are supported by the Australian Labor government and the National Party-led coalition government in New Zealand.
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The Ardern government exploited the Christchurch terror attack to boost the intelligence agencies and the state censor’s powers. Ardern also launched the Christchurch Call to Action, an initiative involving dozens of governments and major tech companies, including Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Amazon, Google and X, to establish tighter censorship and state surveillance of the internet.
Governments are carrying out a global war on online anonymity. This has nothing to do with stopping the far-right, which has been elevated to state power in the US and controls social media companies like Elon Musk’s X. The aim is to suppress opposition to war and inequality among ordinary people, and to monitor and stop the spread of socialist ideas. Most notably, the WSWS has been heavily censored by Google, Facebook and Twitter/X—all of which support the Christchurch Call initiative.
Workers and young people must learn the great lessons of history, above all the Trotskyist movement’s struggle against fascism in the 1930s. This task cannot be entrusted to capitalist governments, which are the incubators of the fascist threat. It is necessary to build revolutionary parties in every country, as sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to lead the working class in a conscious fight to end capitalism, and in doing so put an end to nationalism, war and social inequality.
NHS Fightback calls on General Practitioners in England to vote NO in the referendum and reject the BMA’s privatization blueprint for General Practices; government attacks must be answered by the demand for full funding.
A strike, now well into its third week, by 300 signalmen and communications workers at the Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) railway has exposed once again the gaping, pro-company loopholes in labour law that allow employers to subvert and even break legal walkouts by federally regulated workers in key sectors of the economy.
After a 96 percent vote in favour of job action, the highly skilled workers, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), went on strike on May 31 in pursuit of wage increases, expense payments and measures to improve work-life balance.
But beginning a day after the workers walked out, strikers began filming instances of scab contractors illegally performing their work, in flagrant violation of recent amendments to the Canada Labour Code. Passed in June 2024, the amendments came into force a year ago. The have been celebrated by the Canadian trade union bureaucracy as a “solid” piece of anti-scab legislation shepherded through parliament by their friends in the big business Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and now his successor, Mark Carney.
15. Dockworker killed in 50-foot fall at Port of Los Angeles
On the afternoon of June 7, experienced hatch foreman Marc Salgado fell roughly 50 feet from an elevated catwalk aboard the container vessel C/V Ever Legion, moored at APM Terminals Pier 400 at the Port of Los Angeles.
Salgado was overseeing the loading and unloading of containers on a 9,604-TEU vessel operated by Evergreen Marine Corporation, one of the giants of the global shipping cartel. At approximately 4:45 p.m., Salgado plunged through an opening in the catwalk’s perimeter and struck a hatch lid below. Preliminary reports suggest a chain guardrail either parted or was left unsecured. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union issued a brief bulletin titled “Tragedy at APMT” the following day, and operations at the port continued with minimal interruption. Cal/OSHA and the Coast Guard have opened investigations.
Salgado’s death is the latest preventable fatality in a list stretching back years across the San Pedro Bay terminals and across the US, each one the predictable outcome of a system that subordinates human life to the velocity of container throughput.
16. Workers Struggles: Africa, Europe, & Middle East
Africa
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Portugal:
Early years and primary school teachers in national strike over low pay, staff shortages and overwork
Romania:
Healthcare workers and teachers strike and demonstrate over new public sector pay laws
Spain:
Doctors in further monthly nationwide stoppage against government’s cost-cutting health reforms
Türkiye:
Teachers face police hostility during protest in Ankara for improved pay and conditions
United Kingdom:
Local government craftworkers’ stoppage at several councils over pay
Strike by rail infrastructure parts manufacturing workers in Scunthorpe over pay
Strike by biomedical scientists at two hospitals over unpaid holiday pay
Hotel staff in Walsall, walk out over pay and union recognition
Middle East
Iraq:
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.
