Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Haitian asylum seeker Daphy Michel’s death ruled a homicide after ICE release in Pittsburgh
Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian asylum seeker released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into winter weather without adequate support, froze to death in a Pittsburgh bus shelter on March 2. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office has ruled her death a homicide.
Michel died of hypothermia three days after ICE released her from federal custody. The ruling confirms what was already clear from the known facts of the case: her death was not an accident or an inexplicable personal tragedy, but the outcome of official decisions made by the courts, Washington County Jail, ICE and the political establishment that oversees them.
According to the medical examiner’s statement, “Ms. Michel was a vulnerable adult, suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier when she was released from federal custody.”
The medical examiner concluded: “Based on all available information during the investigation, the pathologist ruled Ms. Michel’s death a homicide.” The ruling does not by itself assign criminal guilt, but it does establish that Michel’s death was caused by the action or inaction of others.
2. David Hockney and the art of seeing in an age of upheaval
David Hockney’s death at 88 closes one of the most remarkable careers in modern art. He was admired by critics, loved by the public, and endlessly curious about what painting could still do. Few twentieth‑century artists combined such technical brilliance with such broad appeal. His exhibitions, numbering over 200, drew record audiences, his images entered everyday visual memory, and his restless experimentation made each new phase feel like renewal rather than repetition.
Unlike many celebrated contemporaries, Hockney never seemed remote. Friends recall him with fond astonishment: a man whose humility survived fame, whose quick, mischievous humour animated every room, and whose warmth made people feel instantly recognised. To them, he was not only a major artist but a joy to be around.
His paintings invited rather than excluded. The Californian pools, the elegant portraits of friends and lovers, the Yorkshire lanes and explosive spring blossom all possessed an immediacy that made looking itself a pleasure, at a time when much contemporary art required theoretical explanation before it could be enjoyed.
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No British artist of the post‑war period looked more intently at the visible world. He believed painting should concern itself with love, friendship and beauty—commitments that gave his work its warmth but also limited it. The world he chose to paint remained deliberately small. The same anarchistic spirit, more properly the same extreme individualism, that rejected restrictions on his life, sexuality and methods accepted a self‑imposed limitation on content: a belief that private experience was sufficient, even as the world around him was reshaped by deindustrialisation, class conflict, war, economic crisis, neoliberal restructuring and widening inequality. These forces, which transformed the society that produced him, remain outside the frame.
Yet what he preserved endures. Hockney’s art holds fast to moments of attention, to the fragile brightness of things glimpsed before they vanish. His legacy is to remind us that careful looking is the beginning of understanding—but not its end. The task for those who follow is to widen the gaze, to bring beauty and history back into the same frame, and to see the world with the fullness that Hockney, for all his gifts, chose not to claim.
3. United Kingdom: Burnham wins Makerfield by-election, clearing path for Labour leadership challenge
Andy Burnham’s clear-cut victory in Thursday’s parliamentary by-election in Makerfield, Wigan, has paved the way for the former Greater Manchester mayor to launch a bid to replace Keir Starmer as Labour leader.
Under Labour’s rules, only sitting MPs can mount a challenge to the party leader. With Starmer polling at record lows and despised by millions, Burnham is expected to move against him in short order.
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Burnham’s landslide was, as the WSWS noted earlier, made possible by his good fortune of having spent the past decade in the north of England, away from too-obvious association with Starmer and his pro-war, austerity-enforcing party.
So toxic is the Labour brand—with the ruling party down to 18 percent in national polls—that Burnham’s centered his campaign on the message “Vote Andy for Us.”
Burnham proclaimed himself the candidate of a “new politics,” with his campaign based on “place not party.” As the Telegraph documented, Burnham used the word “Labour” in fewer than 3 percent of his Facebook adverts—just two of them, despite the party spending some £36,000 on 98 posts and videos over the four-week campaign.
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Burnham has presented himself as the antidote to four decades of scorched-earth policies that have left northern towns such as Wigan as de-industrialized wastelands. But such rhetoric was reserved for his campaign videos and social media clips. All such language will be discarded the instant Burnham crosses the threshold of Downing Street.
In an interview with the Times published a week before polling under the headline “Andy Burnham: I’ll cut welfare bill to fund defense,” he declared, “I am not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill. Not at all.”
The Times, which has insisted for two years that Starmer move more quickly to slash welfare and public spending to fund the military war chest, concluded approvingly, “Burnham’s plan is about reducing the benefits bill, and increasing defence spending in the long term.”
Asked by the newspaper whether he agreed with the resigned defense secretary John Healey that the £13.5 billion pledged by the prime minister for the military was insufficient, Burnham answered that “the world has changed” and that “we are going to have to change the assumptions on which we’ve been working,” adding that the priority was “defense and security but also resilience.”
4. Preventive arrests targeting anti-war activists ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara
The Erdoğan government is preparing for the Ankara summit by stepping up repressions against anti-NATO and anti-war opposition groups at home.
5. Mamdani promotes DSA candidates in New York Democratic primary election
Mamdani’s hypocrisy and opportunism are in the service of what? The promotion of the fiction that the Democratic Party—a party of the same corporate-financial oligarchy that controls the Republicans--can be reformed, as can the capitalist system.
The Istanbul Anatolia Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office carried out a wide-ranging operation against Adalar (Büyükada, and other islands) Municipality Friday morning. More than 40 people—including the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) Mayor Ali Ercan Akpolat, his deputy mayors, department heads, council members and municipal staff—were detained in simultaneous raids.
The World Socialist Web Site and the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi–Dördüncü Enternasyonal (Socialist Equality Party–Fourth International) condemn this police-state operation by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and demand the immediate and unconditional release of all those detained, including Akpolat. Without concealing our political differences, we stress that this is part of the ongoing, politically motivated judicial campaign against the CHP and demand an end to this political witch hunt.
Büyükada (Prinkipo) is an island of historical importance. It is the island where Leon Trotsky—who, together with Vladimir Lenin, co-led the October 1917 Revolution—spent his years of exile from 1929 to 1933, where he wrote My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution and his unparalleled warnings against the rise of fascism in Germany. He issued the call to found the Fourth International in 1933 on this island.
Since 2023, the World Socialist Web Site has developed a principled collaboration with Adalar Municipality for the preservation of Trotsky’s historical and cultural heritage. In the week of August 21—the date on which Trotsky died after being assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940—the “International Commemoration of Leon Trotsky” was held, with WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North as the keynote speaker. This began in 2023 under the previous Adalar mayor, Erdem Gül, and has continued since 2024 under Akpolat’s administration. A new commemorative event has also been planned for this August.
Although Akpolat is a member of the CHP, he took a stance on the historical and cultural significance of Trotsky and the years he spent on Büyükada that went far beyond his party’s class and historical basis. In his opening remarks at the 2024 event, he said the following:
We are here today for an event of historical and contemporary political importance. It has been 91 years since Leon Trotsky, the indomitable defender of the working class who fought for an egalitarian world and lost his life for this cause, left Büyükada.
It is also the 84th anniversary of his assassination in 1940. On this occasion, I remember him with respect.
Trotsky settled in Büyükada in 1929 and spent four years here on our island. He wrote the most important of his works based on a free and egalitarian world in his house on the island. His life was intertwined with the ups and downs of the class struggle. And today we will talk about the world in chaos in the light of Trotsky’s dream, struggle and works.
We have an internationally important historical and cultural heritage left by Trotsky that has been neglected for many years. Our aim is to restore the house where Trotsky lived on Büyükada and turn it into an international library and museum house. Our research and work in this direction is ongoing. Wouldn’t it be great if this house, which has been abandoned to its fate for years, is transformed into a cultural center that opens its doors to the whole world?
As I conclude my speech, I respectfully salute Leon Trotsky and all revolutionaries who fought and paid a price for a better world.
Akpolat’s administration became an important supporter of the project to restore the Trotsky House in a manner worthy of this great Russian revolutionary and to transform it into an international cultural center open to workers, youth and intellectuals from around the world. Today’s operation also objectively threatens this project of historical memory and culture of international significance.
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In Türkiye, the ruling class is sitting on a social powder keg. Police-state repression is increasingly targeting the emerging workers’ movement. At the same time, Erdoğan is deepening his collaboration with US imperialism under Donald Trump, who is hated by the overwhelming majority of the population. Preparing to host the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8, the government—by preventively arresting more than 30 anti-war activists in recent days—is declaring that it will suppress every form of opposition to imperialism.
This demonstrates that the struggle for democratic and social rights and the struggle against imperialism are inseparable. It is precisely for this reason that the CHP—which has itself become a target of the Erdoğan regime’s police-state repression—is incapable of leading this struggle: It represents the interests of the same ruling class as Erdoğan’s AKP and is bound to the same imperialist powers. This struggle requires the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program, against both the Erdoğan regime and the ruling class and imperialism behind it.
7. Australia: Protester arrested in Sydney as Labor government starts demolition of public housing
The police attack demonstrates the Labor government’s determination to proceed with its plan to tear down around 150 homes by the end of June, as the first phase of demolishing all 750 homes in the Waterloo South estate over the next six to nine months.
The overwhelming no vote was registered despite anti-democratic mechanisms the AEU deployed in an attempt to ram the deal through.
9. Ebola surges in central Africa as funding collapses
At four weeks, the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda is three times larger than any previous epidemic at the same stage, with 894 cases and over 200 dead.
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Mass displacement is the primary accelerant. According to the United Nations humanitarian office, nearly a million people have been displaced by years of armed conflict in Ituri Province, forced to navigate dense forests, poor roads and remote villages that can take days to reach. Tracing is defeated further by the region’s mineral economy, with thousands of artisanal miners moving constantly among remote sites, a high-velocity movement of labor driven by extreme poverty and the demands of global supply chains and inextricably linked to the imperialist extraction of Congo’s wealth. The virus has now reached locations like the Kpangba displacement camp, which traps roughly 30,000 people who have fled inter-ethnic violence. Conditions are catastrophic, with hundreds sometimes sharing a single toilet and open defecation common. Caitlin Brady, country director for the Danish Refugee Council, warned that the virus will spread extremely quickly in such cramped conditions, sparking mass panic and flight.
10. Australian government backpaddles on cosmetic tax changes
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers fronted a media conference on Thursday to outline backflips on Labor’s minimal capital gains tax tweaks.
11. Actor and author Hannah Diviney denounces Australian Labor government’s attacks on the disabled
“If you remove a disabled person’s ability to participate in society, then inevitably many will question whether they have value, whether they belong, and whether there is a place for them in the wider community.”
12. US-Iran deal on the verge of breakdown 48 hours after being signed
The first round of nuclear talks, scheduled to open in Switzerland, was scrapped before it began after Iran refused to send its negotiator in response to a wave of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon.
13. Will Lehman’s nomination for UAW president: A milestone in the fight for rank-and-file power
On Wednesday, Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman was nominated as a candidate for president of the United Auto Workers at the union’s 39th Constitutional Convention in Detroit. The nomination of a socialist worker, running on a program to abolish the UAW bureaucracy and transfer power to the rank and file, is a major development with national and global significance.
The nomination by the maximum number of two delegates at the convention was the product of a sustained campaign to mobilize autoworkers behind this program. In the weeks leading up to the convention, Lehman appealed directly to workers and delegates to place his name in nomination. Supporters—including UAW members from Nexteer, Dana, Stellantis and Ford—campaigned for Lehman at the convention.
Workers backed his campaign because it expressed their own experiences with the UAW apparatus: sellout contracts, suppression of opposition, the defense of corporate profit and the subordination of workers’ struggles to the Democratic Party and the state.
Lehman’s nomination is the most conscious expression of a growing rebellion. Nexteer workers in Saginaw have rejected three UAW-backed agreements and authorized strike action by 86 percent. American Axle workers in Three Rivers walked out for the first time since 2008. Dana workers have resisted the same attempt to impose concessions behind their backs. Workers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis are fighting massive layoffs and plant closures, carried out with the collaboration of the UAW bureaucracy.
14. EU summit accelerates war course: Arms build-up, trade war, social cuts and anti-refugee measures
The EU summit held in Brussels on Thursday and Friday was in every respect a war summit. Behind the official formulations about “security,” “competitiveness,” “resilience” and “migration” lies a comprehensive program of rearmament, war escalation, social cuts and attacks on democratic rights.
15. Democrats back Trump’s frame-up of anti-genocide protesters at the University of Michigan
State and national Democratic Party officials have either endorsed the witch-hunt or remained silent.
16. German court tramples on freedom of conscience to protect military advertising
A Munich Labor Court has rated the “business freedom” of local transit operator MVG higher than the freedom of conscience of a driver who refused to drive a tram covered in advertising for Germany’s armed forces.
Ahead of her trial, Sarah spoke with the World Socialist Web Site, outlining the significance of her case. She explained, “There’s potentially really large and quite dangerous consequences if I get a guilty verdict.”
18. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
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.
