Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Israel’s war on Gaza continues, deliberately targeting children
Nine months after the Sharm el‑Sheikh peace agreement, signed with the Middle East regimes and major powers in attendance, Gaza lies in ruins, the Palestinians again face famine, and Israel has expanded its military control across most of the Strip.
The agreement was designed to secure the return of Israeli hostages while preserving Israel’s freedom to wage a war of annihilation against the Palestinians. Israel was merely asked to withdraw some troops, suspend military operations and allow the entry of 600 aid trucks per day into Gaza, coordinated by international organizations, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Crescent. Later phases would focus on assembling an International Stabilization Force to disarm Hamas.
Israel has been free to violate conditions without consequence since the agreement contained no enforcement mechanism. It was “guaranteed” by the Trump administration, Israel’s chief backer. Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, Israel’s allies, signed on as “monitors” to provide diplomatic cover while Tel Aviv continued with its declared aim of driving out the Palestinians.
Israel violated every term of Phase I. Verified reporting shows thousands of ceasefire breaches: airstrikes, raids, shelling, demolitions, shootings. More than 1,041 Palestinians were killed after the ceasefire began, with 3,372 others injured, bringing the total number killed since the start of the war to more than 73,000, with 173,480 people injured.
The most devastating evidence comes from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, which concluded that Israel’s campaign includes the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children. Israeli forces “deliberately carried out acts inflicting death and severe bodily and mental harm on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children, irreparably destroying the sanctity of childhood, including family ties, identity, innocence, safety and future,” the report states.
Children accounted for roughly 30 percent of the more than 73,000 people killed—an even higher proportion than in Israel’s 2008–2009 and 2014 assaults. Since the ceasefire, at least 265 children have been killed, many shot or shelled near the ill‑defined “Yellow Line”: a boundary Israel uses to justify lethal force.
Israel’s actions demonstrate an intent “to destroy the existence of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group,” the report explains, noting that children “embody the biological and social continuity of the group.” By attacking children, Israel is “eroding the foundational structure of Palestinian society, weakening the demographic vitality and overall capacity of the Palestinian people to sustain and exercise its right to determine its future.”
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Meanwhile, Israel has cut humanitarian aid to a fraction of survival needs. The agreement required 600 trucks per day; Israel immediately cut that to 300, and in practice has allowed far fewer. UN agencies have reported that about 77 percent of Gaza’s population were experiencing acute food insecurity, inadequate water supplies, repeated displacement, damaged infrastructure, and continuing constraints on humanitarian operations, while civilians, including aid workers, remained exposed to Israeli airstrikes, shelling and gunfire despite the ceasefire.
Gaza authorities report that only 25 percent of minimum food needs are entering the Strip, with UNICEF confirming that famine thresholds have been breached and children are dying from malnutrition.
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Even as the IDF violated the ceasefire, Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ensured that the flow of strategic goods to Israel continued uninterrupted, particularly energy. Türkiye remains the central transit route, via the pipeline to Ceyhan, for Azerbaijani oil, Israel’s single most important external fuel source.
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In May, Minister of Defense Israel Katz made clear his commitment to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza through large-scale migration of Palestinians, saying the government would implement a plan for them to leave Gaza “at the right time and in the right manner”. It follows Israel’s establishment of a bureau for “voluntary emigration” and the easing of travel restrictions for Palestinians who leave Gaza on a one-way ticket.
Israeli human rights organizations and lawyers have warned that Israel has created such horrific conditions in Gaza that no departure can be considered voluntary.
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According to a recent report in the Times of Israel citing an Associated Press investigation, the right-wing group Ad Kan secretly organized several flights taking Palestinians from Gaza to South Africa and Indonesia between May and November last year. It hid behind a company called Al-Majd, which claims to be a humanitarian Muslim charity supporting Palestinian lives.
2. Kenya and Tanzania deploy security forces against Gen-Z-led Saba Saba protests
Security forces were mobilized across Kenya and Tanzania on Tuesday July 7 to suppress Gen-Z-led Saba Saba Day protests.
Saba Saba—“seven seven” in Kiswahili—has a distinct history in each country, but in both it has become synonymous with confrontation between the state and the working class.
Both regimes have reacted with the same police terror tactics.
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Kenya and Tanzania’s youth opposition are part of a single continental and global process, driven by the same underlying conditions: crushing IMF-dictated austerity, a debt spiral that consumes more than half of many national budgets, youth unemployment that reaches into the tens of millions, and a ruling class whose fortunes depend on maintaining and deepening exactly the conditions young people are rising against.
In both countries the youth have shown they can transcend the ethnic divisions long exploited by the ruling class; in both, they confront a political establishment—from pro-business Chadema in Tanzania to Kenya’s discredited opposition figures, several of whom share responsibility for killings carried out while they themselves held state power—that offers no alternative to the capitalist order driving the crisis.
The events of Saba Saba 2026 make clear that the defense of democratic rights in East Africa depends on the independent mobilization of the working class across national borders, against austerity, police violence and the deepening authoritarianism of the region’s ruling elites.
For a fuller analysis underlying the Kenya’s Gen-Z insurgency in 2024 and those of Tanzania in 2025, readers are encouraged to read “Kenya’s Gen Z insurgency, the strike wave and the struggle for Permanent Revolution“ and “The December 9 protest in Tanzania, Nyerere’s ‘African Socialism’ and the struggle for Permanent Revolution”.
Three weeks after Peruvian voters went to the polls, Keiko Fujimori was declared the winner of the presidential election. The National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) announced it had concluded counting 100 percent of the ballots, with Fujimori receiving 50.13 percent against 49.86 percent for her rival, Congressman Roberto Sánchez Palomino of the Together for Peru (JP) party. The margin was less than 50,000 votes out of nearly 20 million cast.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Fujimori within hours of the ONPE announcement, hailing “her important electoral victory.” The speed and warmth of the US response came after Ambassador Bernie Navarro had declared during the count that the US Embassy was “monitoring the electoral process”—when Peruvian law does not allow any such official capacity to foreign diplomatic missions.
Despite Sánchez’s record as a faithful administrator of bourgeois interests—as trade minister under Pedro Castillo, he never challenged the Central Bank, the mining concessions, or Peru’s IMF commitments—Peru’s ruling class calculated that even the ambiguity of a “left” nationalist government, arriving wrapped in the expectations generated by the Castillo experience, was a risk it could not afford. Squeezed between mounting US imperialist pressure from above and a combative working class from below, the bourgeoisie could not leave even an inch of space for illusions in social reform that could fuel the class struggle. Fujimori offers no such ambiguity.
4. Graham Platner and the fraud of “working-class” Democratic Party politics
The campaign of Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, is collapsing under the weight of a new sexual assault allegation, exposing not merely the personal degradation of the candidate but the political forces that manufactured and promoted him as a “working-class” tribune.
On Monday, Politico published an interview with Jenny Racicot, who accused Platner of raping her in 2021. Racicot repeated the allegation later that night in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. Platner has denied the allegation. Within hours, leading Democrats who had tolerated or excused months of earlier revelations, including his Nazi-linked Totenkopf tattoo and history as a soldier and mercenary for US imperialism, rushed to call for him to withdraw.
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Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who had been Platner’s most prominent national booster and appeared with him under the fraudulent “Fighting Oligarchy” banner, waited longer than others, but by Tuesday he posted on social media that he “recommended that he step aside.”
Under Maine election law, if Platner withdraws by July 13 the Democrats can select a replacement by July 27, a procedure that is now clearly being prepared.
The debacle confirms what the World Socialist Web Site explained from the beginning. After Platner won the June primary, the WSWS wrote that while the vote expressed real anger over inequality, “Platner’s promoters—large sections of the Democratic Party and the trade union apparatus, most avidly its so-called ‘progressive’ wing—present him as a genuine representative of the working class. He is nothing of the sort.”
Platner’s “working-class” identity was from the beginning a political marketing product. His supposed credentials for this position were the fact that he was a veteran, “oysterman,” and rural Mainer, combined with his vulgarity, tattoos, profanity and anti-billionaire demagogy. But this had nothing to do with the working class as a social force.
In fact, Platner is a small businessman, a former Marine, Army soldier and Blackwater/Constellis contractor, and a loyal Democrat. His social background and career belong not to the proletariat but to the upper-middle-class layers around the Democratic Party.
However, Platner’s manufactured persona was politically useful to Democratic-aligned consultants, the trade-union apparatus, Sanders/DSA operatives, and liberal media figures searching for a way to repackage the Democratic Party after its catastrophic loss of support within the working class.
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The most important question is not why Platner collapsed, but why he was promoted in the first place, and by what social forces. Sanders held events with him under the “Fighting Oligarchy” banner. Ro Khanna defended him after the Nazi tattoo revelation. Jacobin, the unofficial press organ of the DSA, published repeated defenses, including one by David Sirota that stated that the debate over whether Platner was sufficiently “working class” had ignored that he “enlisted in the military for multiple combat tours for his country.”
“Progressive” commentator Krystal Ball declared herself more “ride or die” for him after the Nazi tattoo revelation. The United Auto Workers bureaucracy, led by DSA darling Shawn Fain, likewise waved away Platner’s record and Nazi tattoo and presented him as someone who had “chosen to stand with the working class.”
Joining the UAW, DSA and “progressives” in boosting Platner’s campaign were Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times and David Remnick in the New Yorker. Goldberg wrote that Platner was “nothing like the edgelord caricature” she encountered online, called him “largely convincing” in person, and compared his campaign energy to Obama. In another column for the Times she favorably compared Platner to a “Democratic version of the Tea Party,” writing that voters were seeking “to upend a system that they believe has failed them.”
The WSWS proceeded on an entirely different basis. It began from the class character of the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, the Sanders operation and the imperialist state. In several articles, it exposed the character of the Platner campaign and warned of the debacle it would produce.
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Ten years ago, Hillary Clinton referred to Trump voters as the “basket of deplorables.” Now the ruling class manufactures “deplorable” personas to market to workers. Both express the same contempt for the working class.
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The responsibility for this political fraud rests above all with Sanders and those around him, including Khanna, Jacobin, the DSA milieu and the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. It is an important political lesson for workers and young people in Maine and across the country.
5. UAW white paper “Trade and the American Dream”: A brief for economic nationalism and imperialist war
On July 1, the Trump administration refused to renew the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) at the pact’s six-year joint review. The agreement remains in force, but Washington’s refusal converts every subsequent annual review into an instrument of extortion, allowing the United States to extract fresh concessions from Canada and Mexico.
Trump is using the threat of withdrawal, tariffs and restricted access to the US market to discipline Canada and Mexico, force them to line up behind Washington’s trade war, and subordinate the continent to the requirements of American “national security.” The same strategy underlies his threats to annex Canada, militarize the border, attack Mexico under the pretext of fighting drugs, and use executive power to tear up existing legal and constitutional restraints.
The Trump administration wants to transform North America into a closed economic and military bloc—a Fortress North America—as it escalates trade war against China and launches military aggression around the world.
The United Auto Workers bureaucracy supports this imperialist project and is offering its services. Days before the USMCA deadline, the UAW released a 36-page white paper, “Trade and the American Dream: NAFTA, the USMCA, and the Future of the Working Class.” Its purpose is to demonstrate that the UAW can help administer trade war, supply-chain restructuring and labor discipline across the continent.
The UAW claims it cares about protecting “American” jobs while it is helping the Big Three and parts makers destroy them. Thousands of Big Three autoworkers have lost their jobs since the UAW secured ratification of the 2023 contracts under false pretenses. Even as the white paper was released, the union was holding a contract vote at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan at proverbial gunpoint inside the factory, to force through a deal workers rejected three times. At the same time, the UAW was also pushing through an agreement allowing the closure of International’s truck assembly plant in Springfield, Ohio.
The white paper builds its case on struggles the bureaucracy itself betrayed. It celebrates the 2023 Mack Trucks strike without mentioning that workers rejected the deal Fain personally endorsed by 73 percent before the apparatus isolated the strike and shut it down. It invokes the 2021 John Deere strike, in which workers twice voted down UAW-backed agreements before the bureaucracy forced through a third.
In reality, it is the interests of the union apparatus, and not the workers, that animate the document. Far from opposing the annual reviews with which Washington will bludgeon Canada and Mexico, the UAW bureaucracy demands a “seat at the table” where the bludgeoning is organized.
The document also bears the political fingerprints of the Democratic Socialists of America and Labor Notes advisers in Fain’s inner circle, who have worked vigorously to present the bureaucracy’s accommodation to Trump’s trade-war agenda as “working class” politics. The document’s real content is disguised with “pro-worker” phraseology and feigned concern for Mexican autoworkers.
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The white paper demands a “top-to-bottom revamp” of the USMCA enforced by tariffs and concludes with an ultimatum indistinguishable from Trump’s own: a new deal on America-first terms, or “the United States must get out of NAFTA 2.0.”
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UAW President Shawn Fain states the document’s central argument in his introduction: “There is no future for the US working class that doesn’t address the free trade disaster ... trade is at the heart of the rise of global authoritarianism, wealth inequality, and the political weakness of the working class.”
This is not a “left” or “pro-worker” argument, but the classic position of the extreme right, which has always sought to counterpose workers supposedly rooted in the “national” soil to disloyal foreign or “international” bankers.
By “authoritarianism,” Fain does not mean the Trump administration, with which Fain is collaborating. In fact, his reference to the “free trade disaster” is lifted verbatim from the vocabulary of Trump’s trade war. He is using the standard euphemism for countries targeted for regime change by American imperialism, including China, Russia and Iran.
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Under the heading “Build Here to Sell Here,” the UAW demands that corporations balance production and sales across North America or face punitive tariffs. The white paper says companies seeking tariff relief would have to meet a “1-to-1 production-to-sales quota.”
The UAW poses as a friend of Mexican autoworkers, who, it says, are “too poor to buy the cars they produce.” But its proposal means mass unemployment and poverty for these same workers. The white paper complains that the US produces only 61 cars for every 100 sold domestically, while Mexico produces 249 for every 100 bought. A one-to-one quota would require a drastic reduction of Mexican auto production, wiping out hundreds of thousands of direct jobs and many more across export-dependent regional economies.
The white paper never answers the obvious question: how will Mexican workers’ living standards be raised by shutting their factories and throwing them into the streets?
The white paper’s discussion of “independent unions” in Mexico continues along the same lines. For decades, the old charro unions—state-backed company unions that signed sweetheart contracts, intimidated workers and suppressed strikes—served as the chief instruments of labor control in Mexico. These organizations are now hated and discredited. After explosive struggles such as Matamoros and Silao, Washington, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center and the union bureaucracies promoted a new layer of “independent” unions through the USMCA labor chapter and the Rapid Response Mechanism, seeking to contain Mexican workers within a framework supervised by American imperialism and its labor agents.
The UAW proposes to make American union officials paid overseers in the colonial exploitation of Mexican workers. Under the heading “Build a System of True Tri-National Labor Rights,” the white paper calls for a new agreement that “establishes the right of U.S. unions to provide technical support to Mexican workers and independent unions.” It complains that the US Department of Labor has “just five labor attachés in Mexico” to combat “labor abuse and unfair trade practices” and adds that “staff from U.S. unions could dramatically expand support for Mexican workers if tariff revenues were used to support their work.” The UAW boasts that it already has “dedicated UAW staff in Mexico City and Washington” through its Mexico Solidarity Project.
The American union bureaucrats would operate among Mexican workers not as representatives of a common struggle against the corporations, but as personnel of a US-dominated labor-policing framework. The same tariff regime that threatens mass unemployment in Mexico would create new paid positions, institutional authority and privileges for UAW officials, paid for by the US government revenues from tariffs against Mexico.
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The culmination of the bureaucracy’s program is the “tri-national commission.” The white paper proposes a body of “unions, governments and academic experts” to work with industry in “rationalizing supply chains.” In plain language, this means the joint administration of austerity: state-supervised capacity cuts, plant closures, wage controls and production mandates enforced over the heads of workers in all three countries. The unions would receive an official role in imposing across the continent the restructuring demanded by the corporations and the American state.
This is corporatism: the integration of the unions into the state and management to suppress the class struggle in the name of defending the nation. The historical origins of corporatism are in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, which created state-controlled syndicates and corporations that brought together employers, fascist officials and so-called labor representatives under the doctrine that class conflict had to be subordinated to the national interest.
The UAW proposes a North American variant adapted to present conditions: unions, governments, academics and industry jointly reorganizing production, imposing labor discipline and subordinating workers to the demands of “competitiveness” and “national security.”
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The UAW’s “America First” nationalism, which it has promoted since long before Trump ever ran for office, never saved jobs. It justified the destruction of jobs in the name of “competitiveness,” while scapegoating foreign workers for attacks the bureaucracy helped management carry out.
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The UAW’s program today develops the old nationalism of the bureaucracy under conditions created by the historic decline of American imperialism. The United States is driven into ever more ruthless conflict against its rivals abroad and class war at home, seeking to reverse its economic decline through trade war, militarism and dictatorship. This has already produced the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, US support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the war against Iran and advanced preparations for future war against China.
Fain has repeatedly invoked the UAW’s World War II alliance with the auto companies and the Roosevelt administration in the so-called Arsenal of Democracy—the years when the union enforced the no-strike pledge, policed speedup and victimized the leaders of wartime wildcat strikes, while the Roosevelt government jailed Trotskyist opponents of imperialist war.
Under Biden, Fain and the UAW apparatus functioned as semi-official partners of the administration. Biden appointed Fain to the President’s Export Council, an advisory body on trade policy that includes major corporate executives. In 2024, Biden gave a speech describing the AFL-CIO as his “domestic NATO.” This meant that the unions were to perform the role of disciplining opposition and preparing the country for war.
The same process extends across the union bureaucracy. The Teamsters under Sean O’Brien, the International Longshoremen’s Association and other labor apparatuses have embraced protectionism, tariffs and overtures to Trump. Their appeals to the would-be Führer are the highest expression of their integration with American capitalism and their hostility to the independent interests of the working class.
The DSA and Labor Notes milieu supplies the “left” credentials for this nationalist program. They have relentlessly defended Fain while he adapts to Trump’s trade war, presenting tariffs and national industrial policy as tools for workers rather than instruments of American capitalism. Their nationalism ideologically subordinates workers to Wall Street and the American state, leaving them politically disarmed before fascism, dictatorship and war.
This is the political service rendered by the pseudo-left not only to the bureaucracy, but to Trump and the extreme right. It takes workers and young people repelled by Trump and demobilizes their opposition back behind the union apparatus, the Democratic Party and the national interests of American capitalism.
Autoworker, socialist, and working class hero, Will LehmanOpposition to the nationalist and pro-war bureaucracy has been advanced by Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist who first ran for UAW president in 2022 and was nominated at last month’s UAW Constitutional Convention to stand again in 2026. In a May 2025 Newsweek editorial, Lehman wrote that Fain’s claims that Trump’s tariffs “would defend our jobs and livelihoods” were “a fraud and a deadly danger to the entire working class.” They are preparations for war with China, he said, whipping up hatred against Chinese workers “who are not our enemies but our class brothers and sisters.”
He continued:
Workers in the U.S. must reject the lie that we can only save our jobs at the expense of workers in other countries. We can only defend our interests by uniting with our class brothers and sisters throughout the world.
That’s why I urge autoworkers to form rank-and-file committees in every plant and to join the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The corporations are globally coordinated. We must be too.
We don’t need a trade war. We don’t need nationalism. We need a new strategy: internationalism and socialism. Not backing the nationalist competition between different corporations, but creating a society based on genuine equality, in which the global economy is controlled by the workers and for the workers.
6. Why the New York Times’ list of “definitive” movies about America is so unsatisfactory
...Unfortunately, eclecticism and pettiness prevail among the film writers, as they do in the broader milieu in which they circulate.
On the one hand, the writers apparently interpreted their task to involve considering primarily newer films, presumably the better to sum up 250 years more effectively. There is one movie from the 1930s, none from the 1940s and 1950s, one from the 1960s, three from the 1970s and one each from each of the past five decades.
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Filmmaking has played and continues to play an outsized role in American social and cultural development, yet none of the writers thought to view it in the light of the issues and events bound up with the 250-year anniversary–equality and democratic rights, aristocracy and monarchy, insurrection and revolution, life-and-death social and political struggles.
That would mean, first of all, coming to terms with the contemporary crisis of political and social life, the decades of war, the lurch to the right by the entire establishment, the death-bed of bourgeois democracy that has placed a fascist in the White House. The Times specializes in soothing its readers’ nerves and reassuring them nothing decisive has changed, nothing requiring radical measures.
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A chief difficulty is that the various Times writers and critics have no substantive or objective criteria for making their selections.
None of them appears to have a meaningful theory about American society and its historical development. The result is a collection of relatively arbitrary and subjective shots in the dark. The overall outlook owes something to what Friedrich Engels termed an “essentially pragmatic” approach that “divides men who act in history into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious.” Therefore, “nothing very edifying is to be got from the study of history.”
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... A writer describes Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point as “a hypnotic meditation on American ideals,” and that should be enough by itself to set off alarm bells. Film critics resort to the phrase “a meditation on” when they have no idea what a work is saying or what they themselves think about it.
The birth of the movies in the US coincided almost exactly with America’s emergence as an imperialist power. The ensuing 125 years have witnessed earthshaking upheavals and many different stages in the struggle between the social classes. The vicissitudes of the social conflict have profoundly influenced filmmaking and art as a whole. As we have suggested before, perhaps because it is an art form bound up with modern industry and mass society, filmmaking tends to be most fresh and original, and ground-breaking, under conditions of intense popular mobility and activity. Strikes, protests, social discontent often propel the filmmakers, in ways that the artists themselves may not fully understand.
Individual filmmakers encounter and represent life differently, but not as free-floating atoms doing as they please. Generalized national, generational, institutional, class features and pressures shape them as they do everyone, the uniqueness lying in the particular “welding together” of the latter. What “serves as a bridge from soul to soul,” in other words, “is not the unique, but the common.” And the common is configured in humanity by the “the deepest and most persistent conditions which make up his ‘soul,’ by the social conditions of education, of existence, of work, and of associations. The social conditions in historic human society are, first of all, the conditions of class affiliation” (Trotsky).
An orientation to “class affiliation” and to the history of the struggle that erupts on the basis of class affiliation does not solve the problem of creating an artistically striking and memorable work (or criticizing one), but it does push to the forefront the questions and problems that inspire the sharpest artistic perceptions and inspirations, because they are the “deepest and most persistent conditions which make up [mankind’s] ‘soul.’” The filmmaker is neither a “free-floating atom” nor an empty machine for producing form. He or she is a participant in social life, tied to his or her social environment and times by the strongest and most necessary ties.
It is illuminating that the Times writers manage to avoid choosing a single work from the years in which Hollywood filmmaking was at the height of its realism and social and aesthetic seriousness, the late 1930s to the early 1950s, before the fully chilling effect of the anti-communist purges and the virtual illegalization of left-wing thought in the American cinema. During that decade and a half, writers, directors, actors and producers created scores of films that grappled with varying degrees of success with the conditions and challenges of life, not simply for the upper middle class, but for broader layers.
The Times piece cuts away at the social connections and responsibilities of the artists, reducing the filmmaker to a version of the social type in which the writers see themselves: “independent-minded,” beholden to no one, “spiritual” rebels, wry and skeptical (and passive) observers of the passing scene. From our point of view, they come across for the most part as “dazed and confused” in their own right, with very little grasp of America’s past or present.
7. NATO warmongers meet in Ankara
Against the backdrop of the summit, the United States again bombed Iran on Tuesday. That evening the US military announced “a series of powerful strikes against Iran,” hitting air defenses, coastal radar and missile sites near the Strait of Hormuz, hours after the Treasury cut off Iran’s oil sales. It was the latest escalation of the war that began on February 28, when US and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and has now dragged on for more than four months.
The bombing fell as vast crowds mourned Khamenei in Qom and the Iraqi city of Najaf. Iranian state media reported explosions at Bandar Abbas, Qeshm and Sirik, where shrapnel wounded several people at a commercial pier. US President Donald Trump had declared on Monday, in the Oval Office: “We’re either going to make a deal, or we’re going to finish the job.” He added, “It won’t be tough to finish the job.”
The summit’s main business is the escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. The opening of the summit followed a sustained barrage of long-range strikes by Ukraine deep inside Russian territory, which the assembled powers openly celebrated. “Ukraine has a window of opportunity and is changing the dynamics on the battlefield,” NATO Deputy Secretary General Radmila Shekerinska told the summit. “Russia, for the first time, is faced with the reality of war.”
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Even as they plotted war around the world, the imperialist gangsters quarreled among themselves. Trump renewed his threat to annex Greenland, the territory of NATO member Denmark, calling it “an important part for the United States” that “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” and warned that Washington could “remove all of our soldiers out of Europe.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen answered that a US seizure of the island “is not going to happen.”
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locked down Ankara for the summit. In the weeks beforehand, Erdoğan’s government banned all demonstrations in the capital for thirteen days and detained 225 people—among them leftists, lawyers, a university professor, a gay-magazine editor and a comedian who had mocked the president—jailing 103 of them. On Sunday, police detained scores of anti-NATO protesters and fired tear gas to break up their march.
8. Police shoot patient inside Southern California hospital
The Los Robles shooting belongs to a documented pattern of police applying street-level compliance tactics—verbal commands, physical domination and lethal force—to patients suffering severe trauma, medical disorientation or acute psychiatric crises. In March 2023, Irvo Otieno, a 28-year-old Kenyan émigré experiencing a severe mental health crisis, was killed by seven Henrico County sheriff’s deputies and three hospital employees during intake at Central State Hospital in Virginia. Video footage showed as many as ten people piling onto a shackled and handcuffed Otieno for twelve minutes until he stopped breathing.
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The conditions inside HCA hospitals have been the subject of repeated complaints from nurses and healthcare workers. At Los Robles itself, nurses fought HCA in 2023 over out-of-ratio assignments and unsafe staffing. SEIU Local 121RN reported at the time that nurses were demanding stronger contract language to prevent the hospital from placing nurses out of ratio and putting patients at risk. Rosanna Mendez, the union’s executive director, said then that nurses had “sounded the alarm” over unsafe assignments that endangered patients and produced enormous stress.
In another Los Robles case, SEIU reported that former RN Jacqui Rum worked in HCA’s StaRN program and faced “routine unsafe staffing” for 13 months, under conditions so intense that she resigned. HCA then sought to make her repay $4,000 for what it called training. In 2025, SEIU reported that HCA agreed to pay penalties and restitution over its training repayment agreement program, including approximately $83,000 in restitution to California nurses and more than $1.16 million in penalties to the state.
This provides significant context to the Los Robles shooting. Nurses and hospital workers confront real danger in emergency departments and inpatient units. They are placed in unsafe conditions by understaffing, overcrowding, inadequate psychiatric resources, management pressure and the general collapse of social supports outside the hospital.
The response of SEIU Local 121RN to the Los Robles shooting has been to accept the “law and order” framework of the police. Mendez issued a statement blaming “a series of failures and missed protocols.” She said Code Grey and Code Silver alarms were not activated, hospital security did not immediately respond and questions remained over whether the patient was properly restrained while in police custody.
The same logic underlies California Assembly Bill 2975, the “Secure Hospitals for All” Act, which Governor Gavin Newsom signed in 2024 after a campaign led by SEIU. The union celebrated the law as a measure to reduce or eliminate weapons in hospitals.
The law requires California’s occupational safety standards board, by March 1, 2027, to amend hospital workplace violence standards to mandate weapons-detection screening policies. The law requires screening devices that automatically scan people at specified hospital entrances, including the main public entrance, the emergency department entrance and a separately accessible labor-and-delivery entrance. It also requires trained personnel to operate the screening system and protocols for alternative searches and responses when a weapon is detected.
But the gun fired inside Los Robles did not enter through the emergency department waiting room in the hands of a visitor. It was brought into the hospital by the police.
9. Three children die of carbon monoxide poisoning in Michigan after massive power outage
Three children died of carbon monoxide poisoning in metro Detroit over the holiday weekend, as families struggled to cope with a massive power outage, which left 400,000 households without lights, air conditioning, refrigeration and other necessities after a storm Friday evening.
All three were killed after their families, left in the dark for days, ran gasoline-powered generators to restore electricity, generators that filled enclosed spaces with lethal carbon monoxide.
The deaths of these children were the consequence of deliberate policies that allow hundreds of thousands of people across metro Detroit to lose power during routine summer storms due to chronic under-investment in vital infrastructure.
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The immediate cause of the outage was a severe storm system. Thunderstorms with wind gusts exceeding 60 miles per hour swept across southeast Michigan over the holiday weekend, downing trees and power lines and knocking out electricity to more half a million utility customers statewide. At its peak, this including 120,000 customers of Consumers Energy. At its peak, nearly 400,000 DTE Energy customers lost service. DTE restored power to more than 325,000 customers within 48 hours, a figure the company has prominently publicized.
For working class families living paycheck to paycheck, the refrigerator and freezer represent weeks of careful financial planning. Families purchase meat and other expensive food when it is on sale and freeze it because it is the only way to stretch budgets gutted by inflation, rising utility costs and stagnant wages. Several days without power during a Michigan summer can destroy all of it.
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In 1993, seven children died in a Detroit house fire after the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department shut off the family’s water over a $225 bill. Similar tragedies followed, including the deaths of three children in Sylvia Young’s Detroit home after DTE cut off heat and a 2009 Detroit family killed by carbon monoxide poisoning after using a generator following a power shutoff. The circumstances vary, but the pattern is the same: When electricity is treated as a commodity rather than a necessity, working class families are forced into dangerous choices.
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The deaths in Metro Detroit occurred amid official claims of a Detroit revival. The “Detroit renaissance” narrative is built around luxury developments, downtown projects, stadiums and corporate investment. It does not reflect the material conditions of working class neighborhoods throughout the city and surrounding communities.
Poverty, inflation and deteriorating public infrastructure continue to shape daily life for millions of workers. Food prices remain high, utility costs have increased, and many families have little or no financial cushion when disaster strikes. A storm that should be a temporary inconvenience becomes a life-threatening event when families lack the resources to protect themselves.
10. German government adopts historic war budget
On July 6, one day before the NATO summit began in Ankara, the Merz-Klingbeil government set in motion the largest rearmament budget in the history of the Federal Republic. The government draft of the 2027 federal budget adopted by the cabinet places the whole of society on a war footing.
The regular budget of the Defense Ministry will rise within a single year from €82.7 billion to €109.7 billion—a leap of 32.7 percent. No other ministry will see anything approaching such an increase. Added to this are €30 billion from the so-called special fund for the Bundeswehr and €11.6 billion for support to Ukraine. These three items alone amount to €151.3 billion. In addition, 6,000 new military posts and 2,100 civilian positions are being created in the Defense Ministry.
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The political connection between the war budget and the NATO summit is unmistakable. The day after the cabinet decision, the meeting of heads of state and government began in Ankara, accelerating the implementation of the 5 percent target agreed in 2025 and the expansion of the European armed forces.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte describes this course as “NATO 3.0”—a “stronger European NATO” in which the European powers take over a larger share of conventional warfare and military burden-sharing with the United States is reorganized. He explicitly cited Germany as the leading example. “Germany is leading, and Germany is delivering,” he declared in Berlin at the beginning of July. Even before the presentation of the current draft budget, Rutte pointed out that Germany would increase its annual military expenditure to more than €150 billion by 2029.
In fact, no other major European power is proceeding as aggressively as Germany. Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) has repeatedly declared that the Bundeswehr is to be built up “as quickly as possible into the strongest conventional army in Europe.” When he took office, he explicitly justified this claim with Germany’s population size, economic strength and geographical location at the center of Europe.
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War abroad and class war at home are two sides of the same policy. A society that permanently spends hundreds of billions of euros on military violence cannot guarantee democratic rights. The more opposition grows to conscription, social cuts and war, the more aggressively the state will proceed against strikes, protests and socialist opposition.
The NATO summit itself provides a clear warning. The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan banned protests and transformed Ankara into a fortress with tens of thousands of police and security personnel. More than 100 participants in an anti-NATO demonstration were arrested. At the same time, the authorities carried out so-called anti-terror raids against hundreds of other people; with more than 100 of them placed in pretrial detention.
All NATO powers support this repression because they need the Erdoğan regime as a partner for their wars against Russia and Iran and their preparations against China. The measures in Ankara simultaneously illustrate the dictatorial methods with which the ruling classes in North America and throughout Europe will themselves suppress growing opposition to war, conscription and social devastation.
11. Ford fired worker over a $1.95 cookie. The UAW told him to say sorry
Ford Motor Company fired the 60-year-old electrician with a perfect attendance record over the allegation that he took a $1.95 chocolate chip cookie without paying during his overnight shift on May 9. The worker, Kurt Kromm, was an 11-year veteran at the Kentucky Truck Plant (KTP) in Louisville. Co-workers described him as “an excellent worker…attentive and very helpful.”
Kromm, who is diabetic, had gone to the break room during a 12-hour shift after feeling lightheaded from low blood sugar. When the first self-service kiosk, operated by Aramark, flashed a red “payment failed” screen, he moved over to a second terminal, a transaction that his bank statement confirmed.
A week later, Kromm was called into his supervisor’s office and was informed by his UAW representative that he was being fired for theft under the company’s zero-tolerance policy. He was escorted from the plant immediately, barred from retrieving his own tools from his work station.
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The Aramark vending system at KTP operates through self-checkout payment kiosks located in plant break rooms, where food and beverage items are displayed in the open and workers are expected to scan and pay using debit or credit cards.
In practice, however, the kiosks are notoriously unreliable. Workers report that the machines routinely fail to process payments, display red error screens even when transactions have gone through, decline cards on first attempt only to accept them on a second or third swipe at a different kiosk, and frequently fail to produce receipts.
These malfunctions have created a situation in which workers are uncertain whether a purchase has been completed, and in multiple documented cases, the payment discrepancies generated by the defective equipment have been used by Ford and Aramark as the basis for termination proceedings against employees.
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KTP is the crown jewel of Ford’s global operations. The Louisville facility, employing over 8,000 workers, builds the Super Duty pickup Ford Expedition and the Lincoln Navigator — vehicles that together generated an estimated $25 billion in revenue in 2023 alone. The Super Duty anchors Ford’s commercial truck division, Ford Pro, which posted a staggering 12.4 percent profit margin that year, helping drive the company’s overall 2023 profits to $10.4 billion.
Workers at KTP report that the Aramark payment kiosks have been malfunctioning for years and that the company and union are well aware of the problem. Kromm’s coworker Victoria Thomas, a 34 year Ford electrician, told Shifting Gears that the kiosk payment glitches are “well known” at the plant and have happened to her personally. “I have friends who were terminated because they bought a $2 drink.”
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Ford and the UAW have responded to these complaints with evasion. Ford spokeswoman Jessica Enoch offered a carefully worded statement acknowledging only that “there are times when we look into things and realize it could have been handled differently.”
Aramark, the $16 billion food service contractor that operates the kiosks refused to address the malfunction issue at all, with its spokesman issuing a vacuous assurance that the company remains “focused on providing convenient, flexible snack options.”
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Only after Kromm fought his case on his own did the UAW belatedly inform him that Ford would change its policy from immediate termination to suspension in cases of disputed kiosk transactions — a tacit admission that the system has been destroying workers’ livelihoods on the basis of defective equipment with the union’s full complicity.
The UAW’s refusal to defend Kurt Kromm does not represent the failure of the union apparatus, it is the apparatus functioning exactly as intended. The UAW long ago abandoned any defense of the workers it supposedly represents in favor of unlimited collaboration with management, suppressing strikes and imposing management’s dictates inside the plants. For these services it is well rewarded. It sits on a $1.25 billion strike fund, extracted from the dues of workers it refuses to defend, while its officials collect six-figure salaries, vacation at luxury resorts, and serve as de facto personnel managers for Ford.
When Kromm was hauled into the labor office and told he was being fired for stealing a cookie, the union bargainer did not challenge the accusation, did not raise the years of documented kiosk failures, did not demand that Ford produce evidence. He told Kromm to apologize. That is the UAW’s role: not to fight the company, but to manage the workforce on the company’s behalf.
This will not change through appeals to the bureaucracy or through elections that the apparatus controls. The corporatist partnership between the UAW and the auto companies is a class alliance against the workers, part of the broader war drive of American imperialism.
Workers must take power into their own hands by forming rank-and-file committees, independent of and opposed to the union bureaucracy. Against the authority of management and their UAW overseers workers must assert their own authority through the use of their collective strength. These rank-and-file committees must unite workers across departments, plants and industries to halt victimizations, monitor line speeds and enforce health and safety standards, including the right to refuse to work under unsafe conditions.
Despite mass public support for the striking workers, the union apparatus quickly shut the strike down after three days, having reached a paltry tentative agreement.
13. Sri Lanka: Negombo Prison riots leave at least 20 people dead
At least 20 prisoners were killed and nearly 100 people, mostly prisoners, were wounded on July 6 in clashes that erupted at the prison in the coastal town Negombo. It is a grim reminder of past prison massacres in Sri Lanka’s history.
The carnage came just one day after an earlier clash at the same facility claimed two lives on July 5, bringing the death toll from the unrest to at least 27. Seven of the deceased were prison officials.
A number of the seriously injured were transferred to the National Hospital in Colombo for specialist treatment, while others were treated at Negombo Hospital. While the government says it has begun investigations into the riots and the causes of the deaths, available evidence indicates that at least some inmates were killed by gunfire. Dr. Pushpa Gamlath, director of Negombo Hospital, told Agence France-Presse: “There are some victims with gunshot injuries, some with cuts and severe bruises.”
According to Prisons Commissioner and Media spokesperson A. C. Gajanayake, the official account is as follows: Violence first erupted on July 5 between remand prisoners and convicted inmates after the exposure of an alleged prison drug-trafficking network orchestrated by an underworld-linked trafficker. Although the unrest was temporarily contained, clashes resumed the following morning during breakfast. Authorities claim that the inmates attacked prison officers and attempted to breach the main gate, prompting officers to use what they described as the minimum force necessary to restore order.
This version of events is being uncritically regurgitated by the corporate media, despite serious gaps. It does not explain how a supposedly controlled situation on the first day erupted into a deadly clash despite the presence of significant security forces, including members of the notorious Special Task Force (STF) who had been brought in to “control” the situation. In fact, the STF and Sri Lanka Police, under successive governments, have a well-documented history of provocation—deliberately or recklessly triggering violence in prisons and communities—followed by lethal crackdowns, systematic cover-ups, and near-total impunity for perpetrators.
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A video widely circulated on social media showed a prison officer outside the closed main gate firing through a narrow opening toward the area where the clashes were taking place. Questioned about the footage on July 7, Acting Commissioner General of Prisons Prasad Hemantha Kumara defended the officer’s actions, claiming the shots were fired to prevent a catastrophic prison breach and to protect officers trapped inside. His remarks make clear that prison officers and security forces deliberately opened fire to disperse prisoners gathered near the main gate.
Angry relatives, including mothers and wives of prisoners, most of them poor villagers, denounced the government and police for failing to protect the prisoners and for refusing to give any information.
Justice Minister Nanayakkara sought to justify the use of lethal force by claiming that inmates had attempted to “sabotage the smooth functioning of prison operations” after the government had “taken stern action to prevent drugs and other illegal contraband from entering the prisons.” He pointed to the destruction of a body scanner and CCTV cameras during the unrest.
This narrative functions as a political cover for the killings, folding them into the government’s escalating “war on drugs.”
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The claim that prison massacres result from inter-gang violence or drug-related conspiracies is a well-worn tactic of the Sri Lankan state. When 11 inmates were shot dead at Mahara Prison in November 2020, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government blamed psychiatric medication, drug dealers and shadowy conspirators. Prison Reform Minister Sudarshini Fernandopulle ludicrously invoked “an invisible hand which activated suddenly.”
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The Sri Lanka College of Psychiatrists was compelled to issue a statement debunking these fabrications, noting that the claimed connection between psychiatric drugs and violent behavior was “without any rational basis.” The government’s story was a lie from start to finish, designed to obscure the fact that prison guards and STF officers had opened fire on unarmed inmates demanding COVID-19 protections.
Sri Lanka’s prisons are overcrowded, under-resourced, and resemble a living hell, creating conditions in which tensions can easily erupt into clashes. Negombo Prison, built to accommodate about 900 inmates, currently holds nearly 2,400.
The severe overcrowding has also heightened the danger of infectious disease outbreaks. On July 5, alongside the unrest, a group of women prisoners climbed onto the rooftop to protest a dengue outbreak and demand treatment for about 20 infected inmates. Essential medicines were unavailable, and infected prisoners had reportedly not been isolated. In a video circulated on social media, the women appealed for urgent medical care. Pro-government media, however, falsely portrayed the protest as support for one of the rival prisoner factions.
Overall, Sri Lanka’s prisons—built to accommodate just 11,762 inmates—now hold more than 42,000, over four times their intended capacity. In its 850-page 2021 report, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) documented conditions in which prisoners are forced to sleep standing, defecate into shopping bags, and survive on food that, as one inmate stated, “even cats and dogs” would reject.
The overwhelming majority of prisoners come from the poorest layers of society, with many held on remand simply because they cannot afford bail or legal representation. Around 75 percent of Sri Lanka’s prison population consists of remand prisoners awaiting trial.
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The Negombo killings follow prison riots and massacres at Mahara in 2020, Welikada in 2012, Anuradhapura in 2011, and Kalutara in 2000. They are the logical expression of a government that has strengthened the architecture of a police state since taking office in 2024 and is responding to increasing popular unrest with brutal force.
14. Hypocritical condemnation from US Pacific allies over Chinese missile test
A chorus of criticism from the US and its allies in the Asia-Pacific has followed China’s testing of a ballistic missile in the Pacific Ocean on Monday.
Few details of the test itself are available. Senior Captain Wang Xuemeng, a spokesman for China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) navy, confirmed that a Chinese nuclear submarine had launched a strategic missile carrying a dummy warhead which “accurately landed within the predetermined sea area” in the Pacific.
Wang described the missile test as routine, adding: “It complies with international law and international practices and is not targeted at any specific country or target.” China’s state-owned Global Times cited Chinese defense experts as saying the test was likely of the JuLang-3—the country’s most advanced submarine-launched missile.
The immediate reaction of US military allies in the region has been censure even as the Trump administration accelerates the decade-long preparations for war with China through a vast military build-up and a strengthening of alliances and bases throughout the Indo-Pacific.
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Barely mentioned in the outpouring of criticism in the political establishment and media throughout the region is the fact that the US military regularly conducts ballistic missile tests in the Pacific Ocean. Two launches have taken place just this year. On March 3 and again on May 20, an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California into the Marshall Islands region.
By comparison, China has only ever conducted three missile tests into the Pacific Ocean—in 1980, 2024 and the latest this week.
In addition to the cacophony of criticism of China, the media is replete with speculation by various security analysts as to the military significance of Monday’s test—the first of a submarine-launched missile into the Pacific. Their chief concern is the expansion of China’s nuclear capability. In reality, however, the US nuclear arsenal dwarfs that of China in size and sophisticated delivery systems.
15. Australia: What professional staff face at Western Sydney University
The professional staff enterprise agreement proposed by the trade unions at WSU is even worse than the academic staff version, laying the groundwork for further destruction of jobs and conditions.
16. WSWS begins posting highlight clips from webinar on the American Revolution
On June 25, the World Socialist Web Site hosted an extraordinary panel of eminent historians at a webinar to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
The full webinar, “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings,’” can be accessed at wsws.org/1776.
Here is one clip:
17. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
