Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
There is enormous anger in Biddeford, Maine, a working class city of about 22,000, over the murder of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old worker from Colombia gunned down by federal immigration agents Monday morning as he drove to work. Guerrero, a husband and the father of a 3-year-old daughter, held a valid work permit, had been issued a Social Security number and had an active asylum claim. He was not the person Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was looking for.
Neighbors heard as many as seven gunshots ring out at about 7:15 a.m. at the corner of Pool and Hill streets. Eyewitness video shows agents dragging Guerrero from his bullet-riddled car and handcuffing him as he bled from his head. His last words, according to a witness, were, “I tried to stop.” His wife and daughter, still in her Bluey pajamas, watched from the sidewalk as he died. His body remained handcuffed on the pavement for five hours. None of the agents wore body cameras. Federal officials refuse to release the name of the shooter, who has been placed on administrative leave.
Guerrero, originally from Bucaramanga, Colombia, worked as a cleaner and DoorDash delivery driver.
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WSWS reporters visited Mechanics Park in Biddeford Tuesday, where flowers, candles, handwritten notes and a Bluey blanket and stuffed toy line the fence near the site of the killing. Hundreds of residents have rallied there since Monday, at one point flooding into the Main Street office of Republican Senator Susan Collins chanting “Vote her out!”
Kelsey lives and works a block from where Guerrero was killed. “I’m angry,” she said. “We’ve been screaming about this for a long time. We always do what we’re told. I attend meetings. I call. I email. I show up when I can, and they [the politicians] don’t listen.”
Kelsey’s remarks point to the social reality underlying the events in Biddeford: the ICE rampage is unfolding in working class communities already being hit by soaring rents, taxes and the destruction of jobs and local businesses.
Asked about the difference between the official narrative and what actually happened Monday, Kelsey replied, “They’re already trying to cover things up … But it doesn’t matter. Someone was murdered on my street, a block away from where I live, a block away from where I work. I’m gonna show up; I’m gonna show up for my community. It doesn’t matter who you are. We don’t kill people on the street. If someone’s guilty of something, we bring them in and we hold them accountable. You don’t just murder people. And it’s happened too many times.”
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The anger and determination to fight expressed by workers in Biddeford must be armed with a political program. The Socialist Equality Party and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees call for building independent workplace and neighborhood committees, uniting workers across industries, nationalities and immigration status, to prepare mass action, up to and including a general strike, against ICE terror and the drive to dictatorship.
2. Germany: DHL worker wins unfair dismissal case after anti-war speech at Palestine protest in Leipzig
DHL worker and Verdi union rep Christopher Tersch won his employment tribunal case on July 8 after being dismissed without notice for giving a speech against arms deliveries to Israel at a Palestine protest in Leipzig.
3. Altamira’s “left” critique of the PTS offers no alternative to Argentina’s working class
The PTS and its coalition partners are being called upon by the ruling class to channel the growing political radicalization behind bourgeois politics.
4. From the archives of Marxism: Twenty-five years since the Malvinas war
The WSWS is republishes an analysis of the Malvinas (Falklands) war written on its 25th anniversary, first published on June 21, 2007.
5. The Malvinas War and the British Workers Revolutionary Party
A chapter in How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism, “The Malvinas War: How Healy Worked as an Imperialist Stooge”, is republished as a means of taking forwards the political education of the younger cadres of the ICFI and the readers of the WSWS.
6. Teacher pay offer in England worsens financial crisis in education; unions offer no solution
Education workers need organizations that are prepared to challenge cuts and unite workers across the education and public sector.
7. Ten years since the Turkish military coup attempt targeting Erdoğan
Ten years have passed since the military coup attempt of July 15, 2016, which aimed to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. As the Erdoğan government marks the anniversary with “The Will is Ours, the Victory is Ours” events celebrating it as a “triumph of democracy,” the real lessons of that night and of the decade that followed lie entirely outside the official narrative.
Erdoğan’s “triumph of democracy” rhetoric is refuted by the political coup his government is mounting against the elected representatives of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP)—which emerged as the largest party in the 2024 local elections—and by the unprecedented erosion of democratic rights. As Erdoğan seeks to hold down through repression the social inequality and class tensions that have grown even sharper than a decade ago, Özgür Özel, the elected leader of the CHP that claims to be his “democratic rival,” meanwhile appeals to the very same imperialist powers that have sanctioned Erdoğan’s crackdown, while warning of a social explosion. The United States and European leaders—who were accused a decade ago of being behind the coup attempt—were welcomed with a red-carpet reception just a week ago at the NATO summit in Ankara, as hundreds of people who oppose war, genocide, and NATO intrigues were unlawfully detained.
According to the indictments, more than 8,600 soldiers took direct part in the coup attempt, roughly 3,000 of them enlisted soldiers and military cadets who did not know what they were doing. In the subsequent purge, 40 percent of the generals were removed. A team was dispatched to seize Erdoğan in Marmaris but failed. Erdoğan’s call, through the media, for the population to take to the streets against the coup was a critical turning point in its defeat. Yet the appeal to the masses subsequently and deliberately avoided targeting the imperialist-capitalist machinery behind the coup—a machinery of which Erdoğan, though discarded by it for the time being, was an important part.
The coup officers used more than 200 armored vehicles, dozens of tanks, helicopters and F-16s. The Turkish Parliament, the Presidential Complex, the Special Operations Department and TÜRKSAT satellite company were bombed by warplanes. According to official figures, 287 people were killed, 253 of them while resisting the coup. Incirlik Base, used jointly by US-NATO, was used to refuel the coup jets in mid-air; and when the attempt collapsed, the Turkish commander tried to take refuge at the US headquarters on the base.
After the coup was defeated, more than 125,000 public employees were dismissed, tens of thousands were arrested, and hundreds of associations, media outlets and unions were shut down. Having defeated the coup attempt, Erdoğan used it as the basis for a counter-offensive to build a presidential dictatorship in which he crushed all of his opponents. The purges and arrests targeted not only the coup-plotters but also leftists, Kurdish politicians and the workers’ movement.
Immediately after the coup, Labor Minister Süleyman Soylu declared that “the United States is behind the coup,” while Erdoğan attributed it to a “mastermind” at work since 1960. This was a reference to the undeniable role the United States had played in previous military coups, above all that of September 12, 1980. The fact that tens of thousands took to the streets during the coup attempt, and that the overwhelming majority of the population did not support the coup, was bound up with the fact that these bloody coups remain vivid in the consciousness of the working masses.
The official narrative, however, was quickly narrowed to a framework focused entirely on the US-based Islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen and his organization; no effort was made in the trials to expose the hand of the US and NATO; any withdrawal from NATO or seizure of US-NATO bases and interests in Türkiye was out of the question. Adil Öksüz, alleged to be Gülen’s right-hand man, who was captured at the Akıncı Air Base near Ankara on July 16, was released on July 18 and vanished. Berlin allegedly declined to confirm or deny claims that he is in Germany.
That these matters were all swept under the carpet by Ankara is the political expression of the Turkish bourgeoisie’s powerful orientation to restabilize its military-strategic alliance with the US and NATO.
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The responses of NATO’s principal powers during the coup made clear that, even if they did not directly organize it, they turned a blind eye to it. US Secretary of State John Kerry’s first official comment was an evasive one that did not condemn the coup and merely expressed the hope for “stability, peace and continuity” in Türkiye. Washington and Berlin declared their support for Erdoğan’s “elected government” only after it had become clear that the coup would fail.
There was no sign that these powers would have greeted the coup’s success with displeasure. In the days after the coup, the American and German political and media establishment, rather than condemning the coup attempt and its plotters, focused on condemning Erdoğan’s suppression of them, hypocritically emphasizing their “democratic rights.” On July 18, the Washington Post reported Kerry’s remarks at a press conference, saying, “NATO will be scrutinizing Turkey in coming days to ensure that it fulfills the alliance’s requirement that members adhere to democratic governance.”
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The coup was the product not merely of a power struggle between Erdoğan and Gülen, but of the deepening crisis of the global capitalist system. Before the coup, Ankara had entered into sharp conflict with the US and its other NATO allies over fundamental geopolitical questions. In 2013, when the administration of US President Barack Obama gave full backing to the military coup in Egypt against the elected Islamist president, Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Erdoğan sharply condemned it.
In the regime-change war launched in Syria in 2011, in which Ankara was deeply involved, Washington’s growing reliance on Kurdish nationalist militias in place of its Islamist proxies was seen as a major threat by the Turkish bourgeoisie and state: the emergence of a US-backed Kurdish enclave on the southern border could produce similar consequences in Türkiye, home to the largest Kurdish population. The Erdoğan government responded by ending its ongoing negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Ankara’s Islamist proxies in Syria were backed against the US-supported Kurdish forces, and a violent crackdown was launched against elected Kurdish politicians at home. This conflict in Syria could allow Iran and Russia, Washington’s real targets, to increase their influence in the country and across the region. Indeed, after the coup attempt Ankara established a tripartite mechanism with Iran and Russia in Syria and placed the goal of suppressing the Kurdish movement ahead of its effort to topple the Damascus regime. While NATO leaders awaited the outcome of the coup attempt, the leaders of Iran and Russia were among the first to condemn it.
After Moscow intervened in the war to defend the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Türkiye’s downing of a Russian aircraft on the border in November 2015 brought the two countries to the brink of war. In June 2016 Erdoğan sent a letter of apology to Putin, turning toward rapprochement with Moscow and toward a settlement in Syria outside Washington’s control.
The threat that the largest army on NATO’s southern flank would shift toward an alliance with Moscow was unacceptable to the imperialist powers. Just eight days before the coup, on July 8, 2016, the NATO summit in Warsaw devoted its central focus to escalating the confrontation with Russia. Barely two years had passed since the anti-Russian, far-right coup of 2014 in Kiev, and the NATO powers were increasingly moving to provoke a war with Russia through Ukraine.
All these conflicts arose from the fact that the US-led imperialist aggression unleashed after the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991 was drawing Türkiye into its vortex. The Turkish bourgeoisie had been complicit, in pursuit of its own interests, in the aggression of the US and its allies against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and in NATO’s eastward expansion targeting Russia and was being forced to confront the consequences.
After the coup was suppressed, Erdoğan escalated the drive to crush the Kurdish movement in Türkiye and Syria; direct military operations were launched into Syria and the country’s northwest was brought under control. This was a move directly against US policy.
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The regime-change war in Syria succeeded in December 2024 through an operation spearheaded by Islamist proxies backed by the Erdoğan government, toppling Assad and dealing a heavy blow to the influence of Iran and Russia in the region. As Ankara increasingly abandoned its balancing policy with Moscow, the Black Sea became an arena for Ukraine’s NATO-backed attacks on Russian military and commercial assets. The NATO summit held in Ankara in July 2026 glorified both rearmament and Ukraine’s growing strikes deep into Russia.
Today, Türkiye under Erdoğan is also seen as indispensable to the US war against Iran and to its drive for full domination of the Middle East; despite its growing rivalry and conflict with Israel, Ankara participates in Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza. Türkiye is considered vital to US aggression aimed at China and its major economic projects such as the Belt and Road.
Ten years after the July 15 coup attempt, the international geopolitical and class tensions that gave rise to it have grown sharper than ever. In the United States, the center of world imperialism, Trump’s failed coup of January 6, 2021 was the sharpest expression of the collapse of democratic forms of rule globally. Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 was made possible only because the Democrats, far from prosecuting and jailing him, cleared his path. Both coup attempts have proven once again that no faction within the bourgeoisie can consistently defend democratic rights or oppose imperialism.
As Leon Trotsky explained in his Theory of Permanent Revolution, in this epoch of imperialist war and the world socialist revolution, these tasks can only be accomplished through the working class’s seizure of power and on an international scale. It is based on this perspective that the Sosyalist Eşitlik Partisi (Socialist Equality Party), Turkish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, was founded on the basis of a relentless political struggle aimed at mobilizing the working class against both the imperialist powers and the Erdoğan regime and the bourgeois opposition.
8. Two months since the Ebola outbreak, response in Congo losing ground
Two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the epidemic has entered a devastating new phase. Just back from a week in Ituri province, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, delivered the starkest assessment yet at a July 14 briefing in Geneva. The virus, he warned, “continues to outpace the response efforts by the national authorities, international partners, including WHO, and the communities most affected.”
WHO modeling now indicates the true number of cases is “at least two to four times the number of cases that we have found.” The official tally is a floor beneath a far larger epidemic. Roughly 80 percent of new cases are detected outside any known chains of transmission. “Perhaps the most alarming finding,” Ihekweazu said, “is that many newly reported cases are individuals who died in their communities, without ever reaching a health facility and receiving care.” The case fatality rate has climbed rather than fallen as the response matures, from roughly 23 percent in mid-June toward the mid-30s, signifying that the response is falling behind the disease.
9. Australia: Survey reveals determination of Victorian educators to fight as union calls 1-day strike
The union leadership is desperately seeking to regain control of the dispute, having entered backroom negotiations with the government shortly after its sellout deal was rejected by teachers.
This public lecture, hosted by the SEP and IYSSE, will discuss the lessons of Sri Lanka’s 2022 mass uprising for working people entering into struggles against the JVP/NPP government’s implementation of IMF austerity, authoritarian measures and the unfolding world war.
11. Perspective: Trump’s police state crackdown and the onslaught against Iran: Two fronts of one war
In the face of mounting popular opposition, Trump is escalating his attacks on democratic rights. Trump responded to mourning protests against the ICE murders Wednesday by doubling down on allowing federal immigration thugs to carry out the type of traffic stops that led to the murder of the two innocent men. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” he posted on Truth Social, telling the agency: “go back and do your very important job.”
In every respect, the killings of Araujo and Guerrero were as violent and brutal as the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The Trump administration treats murder at the hands of the agencies of the state as part of normal operations.
Abroad, US forces have carried out five consecutive days of airstrikes against Iran through Wednesday, reimposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports Tuesday and struck coastal defense and missile sites from Bushehr to Greater Tunb Island. Iran’s government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said Wednesday that the strikes on southern Iran had killed more than 30 civilians. The Health Ministry counted more than 260 wounded.
These are two fronts of the same war. American imperialism wages war abroad to subjugate Iran. It wages the war at home against the class that must pay for it and whose opposition must be broken. The police state erected at home is the domestic requirement of the wider war carried out abroad.
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A ground invasion of Iran would mean American dead and wounded on a scale not seen in decades—not since the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The Pentagon acknowledged 14 American dead and 414 wounded as of Monday, a count that is systematically understated and completely ignored in the media.
The Pentagon publicly puts the war’s cost at some $30 billion, but NBC News reported Tuesday that the department’s internal estimate—counting damaged bases, destroyed aircraft and expended bombs and missiles—runs as high as $100 billion. In estimates published in Fortune in late June, Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School put the war’s long-run cost above $1 trillion, including $200 billion to $300 billion to repair 228 damaged American military sites. All of this would be a down payment on the cost of a ground invasion of Iran.
Where is the money to come from? The US government is functionally bankrupt. The federal debt stands at $39.4 trillion. Debt held by the public has passed 100 percent of the country’s annual output. In this fiscal year’s first seven months, the Treasury paid $628 billion in interest, which is more than it spent on Medicare.
The American ruling class can finance such a war only through massive attacks on social programs. These attacks will provoke enormous opposition to a deeply unpopular war. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed Sunday, just 37 percent of Americans backed the resumption of the bombing.
American imperialism can achieve its aims only by escalating the war against Iran and slashing social spending, and it can impose both only through a frontal assault on democratic rights.
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At 9:00 p.m. Thursday, Trump will deliver a prime-time address billed as a speech on election integrity and voting machines, while the bombing of Iran continues. The administration is building this apparatus ahead of the November elections, which will take place amid an immense political, social and economic crisis. But the elections are only the occasion. Social inequality is soaring, the war is swelling the oil companies’ profits while workers pay for it at the pump, and a police state is the only means of defending such a social order.
The Democratic Party opposes none of this. It is a faction of the same ruling class, and its criticisms of Trump are that he is not effectively defending the interests of American imperialism. When US and Israeli forces assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, the war’s first day, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer welcomed the murder from the Senate floor, declaring, “I will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was killed in the initial rounds of airstrikes.”
As the failure of Trump’s war aims has become clear, the Democrats have turned to condemning the administration for failing to achieve victory against Iran. Schumer denounced the “ceasefire” Trump signed in mid-June as the “art of surrender.”
When the killings of Good and Pretti produced mass outrage, the Democrats arranged a deal with Trump that kept ICE funded without a single condition. When millions joined the “No Kings” demonstrations against the administration, the Democrats and their political allies worked systematically to exclude the question of war from the protests. This is a party of war and Wall Street, and its function is not to fight the establishment of a dictatorship, but to contain the opposition to it.
The defense of democratic rights falls to the working class, and it cannot be separated from the fight against war. Both dictatorship and war arise from the same source: a capitalist oligarchy that can no longer rule by democratic means or maintain its world position by peaceful means. The struggle against ICE terror and against the war on Iran must be unified in an independent movement of the working class, in the United States and internationally, directed against the capitalist system itself.
12. Super Typhoon Bavi leaves a trail of death and destruction in the Pacific
At least 26 people have been reported dead in the Philippines from landslides and flooding associated with Super Typhoon Bavi, while the enormous storm forced millions to evacuate and caused widespread disruption from the US-controlled Mariana Islands to Taiwan and China.
In the Philippines, where Bavi was named Inday, the storm did not make landfall. However, its vast circulation intensified the southwest monsoon producing days of torrential rain. As of Wednesday, the Office of Civil Defense reported 26 deaths from drowning and landslides, with 14 people still missing. More than one million people were affected, about 22,000 remained in evacuation centers, and 766 houses had been destroyed.
The heaviest loss of life was on the impoverished southern island of Mindanao. Ten deaths were recorded in Sarangani, seven in Lanao del Sur, four in Davao Occidental and two in Bukidnon. These deaths occurred in areas with fragile housing on floodplains and unstable slopes, without adequate drainage, protective works or ready access to safe accommodation, meaning these deaths were not simply the inevitable product of extreme weather.
The disaster comes amid a far-reaching corruption scandal over Philippine flood-control infrastructure. At least 9,855 projects worth more than 545 billion pesos ($8.8 billion USD), undertaken since the Marcos administration took office in 2022, are under investigation. The scandal involves allegations of substandard, overpriced and non-existent works, as well as demands for political kickbacks.
While no direct connection has yet been established between projects under investigation and the communities struck by Bavi, the scandal underscores that infrastructure essential to protecting human life has been subordinated to contractors, political patronage and private enrichment.
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As much as 90 percent of the Pacific Ocean has been experiencing marine heat-wave conditions since January with persistence hot spots lasting for six months. There is a high probability that climate change is the major contributor to the warming along with a developing El Niño weather pattern in the regime.
Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker in Macungie, Pennsylvania running for UAW president, issued a statement this week on the federal criminal investigation into UAW President Shawn Fain.
“What the investigation confirms is what many of you have long known and what my campaign has said since I first ran for this office,” Lehman wrote in a statement posted on his website. “This bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished, and power must be transferred to workers on the shop floor. That is what I am running for UAW president to do.”
Speaking to workers, Lehman wrote, “Disgust with corruption is not enough. The question is: What are we going to do about it? It is not enough to complain. We must act.”
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In his own July 12 statement, Fain postured as a martyr, declaring, “This is what happens when you go against corporate America and their allies, and I’m not going to be intimidated or harassed out of serving our membership.” He claims the [federal] Monitor is persecuting him over the UAW’s stance on Gaza.
“These claims deserve nothing but contempt,” Lehman responded. “When anti-genocide delegates chanted ‘Ceasefire now’ at the conference he assembled to endorse Joe Biden, the man supplying Israel the bombs, Fain watched as Secret Service agents and UAW thugs dragged them out.”
Far from defying the war machine, “the UAW bureaucracy strangled the University of California strike and blocked action at Columbia” in defense of protesting students, Lehman continued. “When GE Aerospace workers struck a major defense contractor supplying weapons to Israel, Fain shut them down within weeks.”
Lehman also castigated the Monitor, saying he was installed not to defend the democratic rights of UAW members but to refurbish the image of the union bureaucracy. The Monitor, he said, “knew about Fain’s conduct before the convention, sat on his findings until Fain was already nominated, and let stand Fain’s sworn certification that he had not engaged in corrupt conduct, which Barofsky knew was a lie.” Lehman continued, “This is the same monitor who signed off on the 2022-23 elections, rejected my documented evidence of deliberate voter disenfranchisement, and blessed an outcome in which Fain won with the votes of just 6 percent of the membership.”
Lehman insisted that workers’ anger over the scandal must be transformed into organized action. “I am not running for UAW president to reach the top of the garbage heap at Solidarity House,” he wrote. “This campaign is not about replacing one official with another. It is about abolishing the bureaucracy and transferring power to the rank and file.”
The growing opposition of the rank and file to every faction of the bureaucracy is already expressed in the mass rejection of UAW-backed contracts and in overwhelming strike votes. “What that fighting spirit needs is organization: rank-and-file committees in every plant, independent of the apparatus and answerable only to you,” Lehman concluded.
14. Comrade K.S. Ganeshadev (1939–2026): A fighter for Trotskyism
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Ganesh—as he was known among party comrades—joined the RCL in 1970. He quickly became a full-time cadre and was elected to the RCL’s Central Committee and Political Committee (PC). He played an important role in the struggle to build the Trotskyist movement in the Indian subcontinent, but had been unable to carry on active political work for nearly a decade and a half due to difficult health issues.
Ganesh was born on May 15, 1939, in Malaysia, where his family had settled. When Ganesh was 16, the family returned to their native village of Alavai in northern Sri Lanka, about 30 kilometres from Jaffna city. He completed his studies in the science stream in the English medium at Nelliady Central College, near his hometown.
The decade following the family’s return to Sri Lanka was marked by sharp political upheavals. The Sri Lankan ruling elite, fearing the growing influence of the Trotskyist movement in the working class, resorted to vicious campaigns of anti-Tamil chauvinism to divide workers on communal lines. That began soon after independence in 1948 when the United National Party (UNP) government abolished the fundamental citizenship rights of hundreds of thousands of Indian-origin Tamil-speaking plantation workers.
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When Keerthi Balasuriya visited Madras at the end of 1985 and held discussions with Ganesh and other comrades, Ganesh enthusiastically supported the ICFI’s positions. In 1986 and 1987, David North, now chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, visited Madras with Balasuriya and held extensive discussions with Ganesh and other comrades on the issues involved in the split.
Ganesh and the group of ICFI supporters issued a statement on December 12, 1986 that fully endorsed “the struggle waged by the majority sections of the International Committee against the renegade clique of Healy, Banda and Slaughter [WRP leaders] who, through their attacks on the political and theoretical foundations of the ICFI, sought to subordinate the vanguard of the international working class to Stalinism, Social Democracy and the national bourgeoisie and thereby to imperialism itself.”
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Ganesh was very enthusiastic about the ICFI’s important advance in launching the World Socialist Web Site in 1998. He wrote articles himself and co-authored others on important issues for the WSWS in the years that followed.
Those who worked with him recall his dedication, energy and persistence under difficult conditions. Even in his later years, when increasingly incapacitated by illness, he remained active, bringing his experience and determination to the task of educating younger comrades and defending the principles of Trotskyism.
Indian supporter Akash Dev, who helped Ganesh during his last years and his final hospitalization, explained to this writer: “Ganesh was very enthusiastic about the political analysis developed by the WSWS on a daily basis. He used to ask me to explain what was in the WSWS because he was unable to read the site. He had great confidence in Trotskyism and the ICFI.”
The memory of comrade Ganeshadev’s lifelong dedication to the fight for Trotskyism in the working class will live on among workers and party comrades in Sri Lanka and internationally.
15. Australian court upholds censorship of acclaimed pianist for comments about Gaza genocide
Pianist Jayson Gillham has shown himself to be not only an acclaimed artist but also a principled one, willing to take a stand against imperialist barbarism and official censorship.
16. White House seeks extradition of American philanthropist and Palestinian supporter
The attempt by the Trump administration to extradite American philanthropist James “Fergie” Cox Chambers Jr. from Spain is part of the state-led campaign to criminalize support for the Palestinian people and attack basic democratic rights under the guise of “counterterrorism.”
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The US indictment accuses Chambers of “international money laundering” and providing material support to foreign organizations designated as “terrorist.” US officials point to financial transfers from US bank accounts to Tunisia, where Chambers has resided since late 2023. His supporters say these transfers funded legal activities, including local investments and sponsorship of Club Africain, the Tunisian football club that recently won the national championship.
Family members and close associates have denounced the arrest as a politically motivated attack on his democratic rights, directly tied to his support for Palestine and his outspoken condemnation of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. His partner, actor Stella Schnabel, stated that “Fergie is being imprisoned because he uses his wealth to support Palestine and people suffering genocide in Gaza,” explicitly connecting the case to the Trump administration’s drive to criminalize solidarity with Palestinians.
Chambers is an heir to Cox Enterprises, a vast US-based conglomerate in media, automotive and telecommunications headquartered in Atlanta. In mid-2023, after a political and personal break with his family, he received a payout of roughly $250 million representing his share of the Cox fortune. This separation freed him from direct corporate control and enabled him to channel significant resources into social, artistic and explicitly political causes.
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One of the most serious charges in the sealed US indictment is allegedly tied not to any violent act but to his transfer of money to Tunisia and his sponsorship of Club Africain, which the Trump Justice Department claims as evidence of funding Palestinian resistance. Chambers and his supporters insist that this is a political fabrication designed to turn legitimate international solidarity—financial, cultural and athletic—into evidence of “terror support.”
The defense of James “Fergie” Cox Chambers is a matter of principle for the working class and all defenders of democratic rights, regardless of his personal wealth or elite family background. The key question is not his social origin but the precedent being set: a billionaire who uses his resources to oppose imperialist genocide and is then pursued internationally as a “terrorist financier” by the US state.
Attacks on Chambers are part of a broader assault on the right to political speech and association. If the government succeeds in extraditing and imprisoning him on fabricated charges, it will legitimize the use of anti-terror legislation to criminalize any substantial support for Palestinians or any movements resisting imperialist aggression.
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While the Spanish government of Pedro Sánchez has publicly criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza and clashed with the Trump administration for refusing to allow the US to use air bases in Spain to conduct the war against Iran, its security apparatus is now detaining a US citizen whose alleged “crime” is using his fortune to aid the very population being massacred.
Chambers’ arrest is part of a systematic pattern during Trump’s second term of targeting pro-Palestinian activists, especially students and non-citizens, through immigration, criminal and financial law. Since early 2025, the administration has wielded deportation proceedings, detention and surveillance as tools to chill outspoken public opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Hundreds of students had their visas revoked and were detained or threatened after participating in protests denouncing Israel, including Columbia University graduate students Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil. Mahdawi was pulled into detention during a naturalization appointment and later ordered deported by an immigration judge, while a federal court found that the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department “acted in concert” to misuse their powers to target non-citizen pro-Palestinian activists simply for their political speech.
Khalil, another Columbia graduate, spent months in immigration custody including around the time of his child’s birth and now faces renewed deportation proceedings after a federal appeals court ruled that a lower court lacked jurisdiction to order his release.
Similar repression has forced students like Tufts University’s Rümeysa Öztürk and Cornell’s Momodou Taal to leave the United States under pressure from the security state, while activists such as Leqaa Kordia have endured a year-long incarceration in ICE prisons for their participation in campus protests.
According to Mother Jones, newly unsealed documents show that federal authorities explicitly monitored and punished student speech critical of Israel, confirming that deportations and arrests were not incidental but designed to silence dissent and create a climate of fear. The attempt to extradite Chambers extends this campaign to high-profile US citizens, signaling that no one is immune from retaliation if they use significant resources to challenge the US-Israeli war policy.
The international workers’ movement must respond by demanding the immediate release of James “Fergie” Cox Chambers from Spanish custody, the rejection of the US extradition request and the dropping of all charges against him. Linked to this, the deportation and criminal cases against pro-Palestinian students and activists in the US must be opposed through a unified struggle that connects the defense of democratic rights with the fight against imperialist war and genocide.
17. United States: Democratic House leader Jeffries opposes cutoff of military aid to Israel
On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (Democrat-New York) sent a “dear colleague” letter to all 214 Democratic members of the House of Representatives informing them that he would vote “no” on an amendment to eliminate $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel. Reflecting the crisis in the Democratic Party over its support for Israeli genocide, Jeffries said in his letter that he would not “whip” the vote on the amendment, a tacit acknowledgment of popular hostility to the Zionist regime.
The amendment, sponsored by Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, was part of an annual foreign affairs spending bill called the National Security, Department of State, and Related Appropriations Act, 2027. The amendment did not affect $500 million in so-called “defensive” military funding, most of which goes to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
In the vote, held Wednesday, the Massie amendment was defeated, with 104 voting in favor and 314 voting against. A majority of Democrats failed to support cutting off military aid to Israel. 103 voted“yes” on the amendment, 98 voted “no,” 10 voted “present,” and four did not vote. Most of the Democratic House leadership, including Jeffries, Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, Vice Caucus Chairman Ted Lieu, and Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, voted against cutting off military aid.
Jeffries’ opposition to the military aid cutoff did not come as a surprise. He is a notorious defender of the Zionist regime and major recipient of campaign funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In this, he speaks for the Democratic Party leadership, which is fundamentally in agreement with the Trump administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza , itself a continuation of the policy of the Democratic administration of Joe Biden.
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In his letter, Jeffries demonstrated his solidarity with US imperialism’s criminal policy in the Middle East, writing that “the so-called Massie amendment would restrict our country’s ability to confront Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations in the region who are sworn enemies of both the United States and Israel.” He declared that the US and Israel needed a “new security arrangement” that would “undergird the maintenance of Israel’s qualitative military edge against Iran and other malign actors in the region.”
Three weeks before Jeffries’ letter, voters in New York City gave expression to their growing opposition to capitalism and disgust with the Democratic Party’s complicity in the crimes of the Trump administration by voting in Democratic primary elections for congressional candidates endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, in two cases ousting Democratic incumbents.
A major issue in the leftward swing, with some 125,000 New Yorkers voting for self-described “socialist” and “progressive” candidates, was opposition to the US-backed Israeli genocide. The Mamdani-backed candidates denounced the Israeli war as genocide and attacked their opponents for taking campaign money from AIPAC. Separately, a majority of surveyed Democratic voters told AP-NORC (National Opinion Research Center) pollsters they believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Jeffries’ letter expresses the contempt, hostility and fear of the Democratic Party for the mounting opposition of broad masses of the population to the existing parties and economic system and growing interest in a socialist alternative. It is of a piece with the statement released recently by “centrist” House Democrats pledging support for capitalism, law and order, austerity and patriotism.
This is the party into which Mamdani and the DSA seek to channel mass opposition so as to block the development of an independent movement of the working class. Their so-called “democratic socialism” is not socialism at all, but rather the delusion that capitalism can be reformed—that the ruling corporate-financial oligarchy does not have to be expropriated and overthrown.
The relationship of Mamdani and the DSA to Jeffries exposes the hypocrisy of their denunciations of Zionism and their claims to be in rebellion against the Democratic Party establishment. Mamdani himself has repeatedly made clear that he will support Jeffries becoming Speaker of the House should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in the November midterm elections. Last November, following his election as mayor, Mamdani said on Meet the Press that he wanted to see Jeffries become House Speaker. That came just days after Jeffries was one of the signatories of a House resolution condemning socialism.
At Mamdani’s urging, the New York City DSA voted last November against endorsing a primary run in the 8th Congressional District by DSA City Council member Chi Ossé to unseat Jeffries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Ossé’s primary challenge was “not a good idea.” Ossé obediently withdrew his candidacy, allowing Jeffries to gain the nomination unopposed. More recently, Ocasio-Cortez, who voted last year in favor of $500 million in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, reiterated her support for Jeffries remaining the Democratic leader.
On June 25, two days after the primary sweep of his candidates, Mamdani met privately with Jeffries. According to a Jewish Insider report, Mamdani framed the meeting in advance as cooperative, telling reporters he was looking forward to working with Jeffries.
More than 130 doctors at Allina Health's Mercy and Unity hospitals in Minnesota have voted by 90 percent to authorize a strike while 65 hospice nurses held a one-day walkout, as Sacramento-based Sutter Health's takeover of Allina threatens AI-driven mass layoffs.
19. Trump orders ICE traffic stops resumed as a fourth immigrant dies in 8 days
The temporary suspension itself was a transparent fig leaf. It restricted only ICE-initiated vehicle stops, which account for a small minority of the agency’s arrests, and exempted stops involving criminal warrants and joint operations. ICE could continue workplace raids, arrests at homes and courthouses, detention operations and the rest of its nationwide rampage.
But Trump’s refusal to tolerate even this token restriction makes clear that the ICE killings have the backing of the federal government, who are using the immigration Gestapo to terrorize immigrant workers as part of a broader attack on the democratic rights of the whole working class. The administration is doubtlessly also seeking to provoke a confrontation, as it did when an ICE surge in Minneapolis led to mass protests following the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, which it can exploit to expand police state measures.
Meanwhile, another death in ICE custody has brought the total to four dead in eight days. On Wednesday, ICE announced that Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a 45-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, allegedly died of cardiac arrest Monday while agents were transferring him between detention centers in Georgia. ICE arrested him July 9, only four days before he died. His family and immigrant advocates say ICE denied him necessary medication. He was the 22nd person to die in ICE custody this year.
On Tuesday, a 28-year-old Mexican immigrant was chased into traffic by ICE and fatally struck by a tractor-trailer near St. Augustine, Florida.
The FBI is adding on to Salgado’s murder with smears after the fact. Houston Public Media reported an FBI search-warrant affidavit for Salgado’s impounded vehicle Wednesday for “what appeared to be a white crystal-like substance packaged in small bags,” which they claim was “consistent with methamphetamine.”
The bureau is using the insinuation of drugs to criminalize Salgado after his death and divert attention from the agents who killed him. In reality, Salgado and the other three occupants of his van were not even the targets of the operation. The pretext of the drugs smear is completely flimsy. The affidavit reports no chemical testing and the description of the “small bags of white crystal-like substances” could easily fit packets of table salt.
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WSWS reporters spoke with workers and young people at Tuesday’s demonstration outside Houston City Hall. Their comments expressed the outrage and fear spreading through immigrant communities, deep distrust of both capitalist parties and a growing conviction that only independent action by the working class can halt the ICE terror.
20. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
