Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Perspective: Trump’s speech on the elections: A ruling class in crisis lurches toward dictatorship
The speech itself, manic and at times barely coherent, was the expression of an administration and a ruling class in the grip of a staggering crisis. Trump rambled through a litany of absurd and unsubstantiated allegations—that China had stolen the files of 220 million American voters, that “burn bags” of incriminating documents left behind by Obama had escaped incineration through “gross incompetence,” that voting machines had been rigged in league with Venezuela “in ways that could not be detected even with an audit.”
2. US broadens bombardment of Iran to civilian infrastructure
The United States military bombed bridges, a railway station, an airport and the control tower of Iran's only deep-water ocean port on Friday, the seventh consecutive day of strikes, extending its assault from military targets to the infrastructure of civilian life.
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Iran’s energy ministry asked citizens Friday to use less electricity and air conditioning, as American strikes on the power system strained the grid in extreme heat. Since the fighting resumed, the strikes have killed at least 38 people and wounded more than 400, Iran’s Health Ministry said Friday.
Attacks on civilian infrastructure are war crimes. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines “intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives” as a war crime, and customary international law—binding on Washington and Tehran alike, though neither ratified the treaties—specifically protects “drinking water installations and supplies.”
A spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Friday that Guterres is “particularly concerned about attacks on civilian infrastructure in Iran and across the region,” adding, “Such attacks are unacceptable.”
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The bombing of Iran is part of a broader war. In Gaza, the Health Ministry counted 73,250 dead as of this week, and Israel has sharply escalated its strikes—more than 40 in June, the most of any month since the ceasefire that took effect in October 2025.
On Friday a drone strike on a funeral procession outside a mosque in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed eight people, Al Jazeera reported. The Times of Israel wrote Thursday that the Israeli military “ramped up its strikes” in Gaza after the first round of the war against Iran wound down in April.
The line of mourners wrapped around the building, cars continued to pull into the parking lot throughout the evening, and people brought flowers and condolence cards and spoke together in Spanish and English as they waited.
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As mourners were arriving, newly-installed US Attorney Aaron Reitz released the federal government’s first detailed “account” of the shooting. He said officers had been looking for two Guatemalan men associated with a white van when they encountered Salgado’s work vehicle.
According to Reitz, agents tried to stop the van twice. During the second encounter, their vehicles “successfully surrounded” it. He said Salgado shifted into reverse and then forward while an officer was “partially inside the van or immediately next to it,” after which the officer fired a single shot.
Significantly, his formulation omitted the earlier Department of Homeland Security claim that Salgado had tried to ram an agent, indicating the government’s story is shifting as earlier claims fall apart.
The account flatly contradicts eyewitness testimony that ICE vehicles struck and boxed in the van, after which an agent fired almost immediately in to the passenger side.
The three other men in the van remain locked inside the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe. They face no criminal charges. The evident purpose of their detention is to prevent them from exposing the government’s account.
An attempt by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to smear Salgado by claiming they discovered a bags of a “white crystalline substance,” implying narcotics, in his van has quickly been exposed. Ruby Powers, an attorney for Salgado’s family, said the bags contained salt prepared each morning by Salgado’s wife. The workers mixed it with lemon and water to replace electrolytes while working construction in the Texas heat.
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Local and national Democrats have postured as opponents of the national ICE rampage, but their role as enablers and supporters of it was exposed in a Houston Police Department report released Friday. Houston’s city government is controlled by Democrats.
Between April 1 and June 30, [the Houston Police Department (HPD)] encountered 103 people with civil warrants. Police turned 19 of them over to ICE. Fourteen percent were charged with new crimes, while 57 percent were released. Officers detained people for an average of 39 minutes, with some detentions lasting nearly two hours. According to councilwoman Alejandra Salinas the monthly rate of HPD calls to ICE had doubled.
The report appeared three months after Whitmire and the City Council abandoned nearly all of an ordinance limiting HPD collaboration with ICE when Republican Governor Greg Abbott threatened to withhold $114 million in state funding. The quarterly reporting requirement was the lone provision left standing.
Mayor John Whitmire, a Democrat who has close working relations with the extreme-right Texas Republican Party, attended Salgado’s viewing. So did Letitia Plummer, the Democratic nominee for Harris County judge.
One woman at the viewing told the WSWS the Republicans and Democrats “all work together.”
“I’m not even going to blame a party,” she said. “I think there’s one side that is actively causing the disease, and then there’s another side that keeps selling us the medicine every single cycle.
The Committee for Public Education, a rank-and-file educators’ network, calls on teachers and educators to repudiate the government-AEU conspiracy against their rights, including by voting “no” in the union’s rushed ballot.
5 As wildfire smoke engulfs factories and workplaces, workers demand lives before profit
As hazardous wildfire smoke filled the air and workers collapsed from the heat and contaminated air, production continued full tilt at factories and worksites across the affected regions with the full support of the all the various trade union bureaucracies.
6. PEN America president resigns over organization's pro-Zionist statement
The president of PEN America has resigned over an article published by the organization that blames discrimination against Israeli and Jewish writers on cultural boycotts by anti-genocide activists.
7. Berlin: multiple protests against Rheinmetall armaments factory
The streets of Berlin have become the center of a growing confrontation with the German state over the presence in the heart of the city of the Rheinmetall armaments factory.
Federal health officials identified the agribusiness giant behind the worst parasite outbreak in American history, then left it to the company to decide when to tell the public and what to withdraw.
9. The fight against the far-right in Australia: Lessons from One Nation’s history
The far-right and anti-immigrant One Nation is a toxic byproduct of the reactionary program implemented by Labor and the corporatized trade union bureaucracy.
10. Hyundai autoworkers in South Korea take strike action
The Korean Metal Workers’ Union is isolating the Hyundai strike from other sections of the working class and limiting its impact while orchestrating a sell-out deal behind the scenes.
11. Wages plummet in New Zealand
Wages fell 6.4 percent between 2021 and 2026, the biggest decline among OECD countries, while the banks made tens of billions of dollars and the fortunes of the super-rich hit record levels.
12. Oppose nationalist chauvinism following England-Argentina FIFA World Cup game!
Rebecca Bill Chavez, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Barack Obama, articulated the function of the Malvinas issue with inadvertent candor: “This is an issue that unites everyone. It doesn’t matter in Argentina: left, right, center—you’re all for the Malvinas.”
That unity is precisely what Milei’s government requires. It is four general strikes deep into a political crisis, with poverty growing and social anger mounting. The Malvinas theater performs the same function now that the 1982 invasion performed under the Leopoldo Galtieri military junta: substituting a territorial claim for a class confrontation, channeling the fury of an enraged population away from the Argentine ruling class.
Milei’s posturing is pure hypocrisy. He has openly praised Margaret Thatcher—the prime minister who sent the fleet in 1982—and previously appeared to accept the 2013 referendum in which 99.8 percent of the islands’ Kelpers voted to remain British. His government has worked with Trump and the US Southern Command to convert the South Atlantic into an area under Washington’s imperial control.
The jingoism, moreover, came hours after Reuters reported that an internal Pentagon memo had floated reviewing US diplomatic support for the British position on the Falklands—in retaliation for perceived lack of British support on Iran.
There is a deeper process that runs across the exploitation of sport internationally. As the WSWS wrote following the New York Knicks’ championship celebrations earlier this year, sporting fervor of this intensity reflects deeper social contradictions:
[T]he fervor reflects the absence of any mass progressive outlet for the social anger and desire for solidarity that exist within the working class. In an earlier period, broad layers of workers and youth were connected to mass working-class organizations and socialist political movements.
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The colonial crimes of the British seizure of the islands in 1833 and the military invasion by the Royal Navy in 1982 are real, and the working class has a legitimate interest in the question of the Malvinas.
But that struggle can only be waged by a working class that maintains irreconcilable political independence from its own bourgeoisie. Wherever a tendency calling itself Trotskyist proposes instead to stand in the “same military camp” as that bourgeoisie, whether the camp is a fascist junta in 1982 or the patriotic clamor of the fascistic Milei, it is assisting imperialist oppression. It delivers the working class, bound hand and foot, to its class enemies at home and abroad alike.
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Workers in Argentina, Britain, the United States, Iran and every other country are connected by globalized production in ways that make the resolution of every major social question—mass unemployment, poverty, war, the drive toward fascism—a matter of international class struggle, not national competition.
Today, workers globally are joined by a million threads through the production process and the great social questions of our time, which can only be resolved by making workers conscious of this objective connection around a revolutionary socialist program.
The antidote to the nationalist poison being dispensed through this World Cup is not contempt for the genuine popular enthusiasm behind football. It is political class consciousness: the recognition that workers everywhere hold the levers of a globalized economy and are exploited by the same international financial oligarchy that has turned this tournament into an instrument to divide them. That oligarchy must be expropriated, its control over sport, culture, media and every social institution broken, and replaced by the democratic control of working people internationally.
13. Far-right Alternative for Germany sets out blueprint for power in Saxony-Anhalt
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is poised to take power in September’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt. Its government program reads like a fascistic wish list for authoritarian rule.
14. Burnham promises Labour’s “last chance for change” he can’t deliver
Burnham’s path to party leadership was laid down because Britain’s ruling class had determined that Starmer failed to fully implement its dictates. In particular, he had balked before the savage cuts to social spending required to ramp up military expenditure and pursue Britain’s predatory war aims.
Burnham has promised to do precisely that, while also claiming that he can deliver “growth in every postcode” and address the mounting social problems faced by millions of working people through a combination of devolution and partnerships with private capital. Such claims will not withstand their first encounter with economic and political realities.
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Not only will Burnham continue in all fundamentals Starmer’s agenda of austerity and war, he will escalate it. Whatever temporary reprieve he may or may not bring to the government, the next period will see a further alienation of broad masses of workers and young people from Labour.
Required now is the development of a new socialist political leadership of the working class, prepared for escalating class struggles between workers and the oligarchy which Labour serves just as surely under Burnham as Starmer. It is to the task of building this leadership and equipping it with a socialist internationalist program that the Socialist Equality Party is dedicated.
15. The Panama Canal crisis and US imperialism’s neocolonial drive against Latin America
This crisis is a landmark in the decomposition of the post-Cold War order and the descent of the capitalist powers into military conflict over the re-division of the world.
16. Ninety years since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
July 17 marked the ninetieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The coup was a decisive event in the Spanish Revolution (1931-39). The defeat of the revolution was a seminal experience of the 20th century whose lessons are critical for the class struggle in the 21st century.
Police detained 52 teachers in Ankara on Thursday as they marched between ministries demanding a legal base salary. The government says there is no money — while military spending reaches $US30 billion.
18. WSWS begins posting highlight clips from webinar on the American Revolution
On June 25, the World Socialist Web Site hosted an extraordinary panel of eminent historians at a webinar to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
The full webinar, “The American Revolution and Its Place in History: From the War Against Monarchy to ‘No Kings,’” can be accessed at wsws.org/1776.
Here is another clip:
19. Workers Struggles: Asia and Australia
Australia:
Bangladesh:
India:
Sri Lanka:
20. 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.
