Sunday, February 9, 2025
Austrian Police Detain Richard Medhurst; Accuse Him Of Being Hamas
https://popularresistance.org/austrian-police-detain-richard-medhurst-accuse-him-of-being-hamas-member/
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News.
February 8, 2025
United Kingdom Extends Probe Against Him.
The British journalist said he was accused by Austrian agents of encouraging terrorism, disseminating propaganda and being involved in organized crime.
British independent journalist Richard Medhurst said Thursday he was detained this week by Austrian police and intelligence agents and accused of being a member of Hamas.
Medhurst, who lives in Austria and is a fierce critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, said police raided his home on Monday, took his devices and interrogated him. “They essentially lured me into a trap,” he said on a video posted on X.
The journalist said immigration authorities called him to a meeting where they threatened to revoke his residency because of his reporting on Palestine and Lebanon.
When he thought the interview at the immigration office was over, he said a group of plainesclothes officers entered the room flashing their badges. He was detained and served with a search warrant.
Medhurst said he was accused by them of encouraging terrorism, disseminating propaganda and being involved in organized crime.
Last week, Medhurst said British police extended its investigation of him into alleged violation of the British Terrorism Act. “And then suddenly this happens in Vienna,” he said on the video. “I don’t think that is mere coincidence.”
Medhurst was arrested last August entering his own country at Heathrow Airport and detained nearly 24 hours for allegedly violating the British Terrorism Act by supporting a “proscribed organization,” namely Hamas.
Section 12 of the British Terrorism Act criminalizes holding certain opinions or beliefs. It reads:
“12 Support.
(1) A person commits an offence if—
(a) he invites support for a proscribed organisation, and
(b) the support is not, or is not restricted to, the provision of money or other property (within the meaning of section 15).
[F1(1A) A person commits an offence if the person—
(a) expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, and
(b ) in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.“
Medhurst said he found it difficult to believe that the British authorities had not communicated with the Austrian agents about him. The journalist said the Austrian warrant mentioned his arrest in London.
After the raid, he was brought down to the station to be fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated for seven hours, but he said he refused to answer their questions before he was released.
“I categorically deny all of these accusations by the Austrian and British governments, I’m a journalist, not a terrorist, and they bloody-well know it,” Medhurst said in his video. He added that he was a Christian being accused of belonging to Hamas, an Islamist organization resisting Israel’s occupation of Gaza.
Medhurst said the allegations by both countries were similar, but there has now been a “massive escalation” to accuse him of being a “member of a proscribed organization.” The British only accuse him of supporting the proscribed organization, Hamas, through his journalism.
“This is insanity,” he said. “This is an attack on the entire profession, on freedom of speech, on democracy itself.”
Medhurst said he could face up to 14 years of prison in Britain, plus 2-5 years if he doesn’t give them the passwords to his devices and perhaps 10 years in Austria.
On Thursday former British diplomat Craig Murray, who is also being investigated by British authorities under the Terrorism Act because of his journalism, reported that:
“Four U.N. special rapporteurs have written jointly to the U.K. government demanding explanation of its inappropriate persecution of journalists and political activists under the Terrorism Act."
They state that those persecuted:
‘appear to have no credible connection to “terrorist” or “hostile” activity.’
The cases taken up by the United Nations are those of Johanna Ross (Ganyukova), John Laughland, Kit Klarenberg, Craig Murray (yes, me), Richard Barnard and Richard Medhurst.”
The Empire Self-Destructs
https://popularresistance.org/the-empire-self-destructs/
By Chris Hedges, Scheer Post.
February 8, 2025
The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.
They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza. They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal. They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg monarch, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.
I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” Read it while you still can. Seriously.
These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianized” state led by a divinely anointed leader. They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt. They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.
Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.
“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book. “Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”
The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.” They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine. Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.
As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration. Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.
The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.
The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.
The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.
Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.
When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.
Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.
USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organizations and initiatives, including training programs so Bolivian youth could be taught American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.
Kennard in his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire,” documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.
Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programs, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.
The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programs facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.
Our tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialization lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically.”
“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”
Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.
“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the U.S., is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labor and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview. “You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”
These same U.S. institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the U.S. empire, for prime minister in Britain.
The U.S. disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.
Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by U.S. corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the U.S. military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child laborers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.
The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.
They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.
Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.
“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power”:
"Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe."
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”
“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.
The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarized police, the massive prison system, militarized drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.
The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.
Democratic Party Collusion, Race Baiting, And Death By Austerity
https://popularresistance.org/democratic-party-collusion-race-baiting-and-death-by-austerity/
By Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report.
February 8, 2025
Donald Trump began his presidency with unconstitutional and possibly illegal orders that put the minority Democratic Party on the sidelines.
Democrats have not utilized their own bully pulpit to fight back because they usually go along to get along when republicans are in control. Trump is exposing their subservience to deal making, the permanent government, and consequently, betrayal of their voters.
“You’re watching the Super Bowl next week. Wait till Trump’s tariffs raise your pizza prices.” – Senator Chuck Schumer , leader of the Democratic Party opposition
President Donald Trump is certainly a man of his authoritarian word. As he promised on the campaign trail he is very serious about changing the nature of the U.S. government, the U.S. role in the world, and promoting white nationalist sentiment. While he carries out unconstitutional and possibly illegal acts, Democratic Party leaders have been AWOL, stunned into silence as Trump has thus far chosen not to utilize the back room deal making they are accustomed to and moves ahead unilaterally with budget cuts, personnel cuts, and the elimination of entire agencies, circumventing congressional prerogatives as he goes.
Even an accident involving a commercial passenger jet and an army helicopter was fodder for overt Trumpian racism. This disaster was blamed on one of his obsessions, the performative and useless Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. He even declared this meritless conjecture to be true in a presidential assessment that is no substitute for a proper investigation. The proximate cause of the accident may be decades of austerity which is supported by both wings of the duopoly.
Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the air traffic control union and mass firings in 1981 had a lasting impact. Decades later there is still a shortage of air traffic controllers. This shortage is in part due to inadequate funding for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). A preliminary report indicated that two controllers should have been on duty, one to watch planes and the other to watch helicopters. But on that night, there was only one.
A majority of the FAA budget is paid for by the Airport and Airways Trust Fund (AATF) with airline fees , that is to say, by passengers themselves. This policy has been in place since 1970 and is an example of the unchanging political commitment to austerity. In this case, the flying public pays for most of the FAA budget instead of congress appropriating the necessary funding every year. In addition, congress has control over the Reagan National Airport and members advocated for more flights connecting to their districts, despite near accidents over the years. Trump can be blamed for making real and imagined people of color the villains in every story, but republicans and democrats are true wrongdoers who commit themselves to diminishing government programs and to making decisions that made them look good in the short term.
Trump’s response to the crash was not the least of his actions in less than two weeks in office. He has given Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and owner of the X social media platform, carte blanche with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is a white house office but not actually a federal agency. DOGE staffers have been given access to federal databases, including those authorized to spend trillions of dollars and firing anyone who tries to stop them. Musk was not elected to any office, nor was he confirmed by the Senate as high ranking officials are required to be. Instead he was made a special government employee , a vague title allowing him to work up to 130 days per year, but he doesn’t really need to be an employee. He uses X to incite Trump’s followers and adjusts algorithms to diminish anyone else’s ability to reach the public through social media.
As expected, federal judges blocked Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship and to freeze federal spending . What of congressional democrats? When Trump closed the offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), they held a press conference outside the agency and gave speeches condemning Trump. One senator attempted to show some degree of opposition. “We’re working with lawyers to try and get an injunction.” Washington has plenty of lawyers but has little fighting spirit among what passes for an opposition, who give the appearance of whining when they should take the gloves off and fight back.
The congressional protesters mentioned that Trump had usurped their authority in closing the agency but they also attacked him from the right in defending USAID. Congressman Don Beyer said of the USAID shut down, “Its elimination only helps our adversaries Russia and China, who want to see our global influence reduced at any cost. It’s no coincidence then that Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man with billions of dollars invested in China, is doing China’s bidding.”
There you have it in a nutshell. Congressional democrats are less upset about a president abrogating their rights, than they are about the U.S. being unable to flex its muscles against “adversary” states. It is true that USAID provides needed aid to people in crisis, but it is also a tool of soft power for the state. The USAID has done just that in eastern European color revolutions and in the ultimately successful effort for regime change in Syria. Money to Nongovernmental Organizations, the media, and individuals are used to undermine governments all over the world.
Trump isn’t going to do away with U.S. meddling in the affairs of other countries. It appears that the work of USAID will now be subsumed into the State Department, where he will have direct control of its activities. When he uses USAID to undermine China and Russia the democrats will likely have little to say. Imperialist intervention continues regardless of who is in office.
The leader of democrats in the Senate, Charles Schumer, may think that the price of pizza toppings is a motivator for political action, but he didn’t really need to say anything. The news that tariffs would be imposed on Canada and Mexico caused a stock market downturn and Trump backpedaled a bit with the announcement of a 30-day pause with both countries, but the trade war with China preceded him.
It was Joe Biden who imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and made them unaffordable to any U.S. resident who might want to buy them, or even medical equipment, solar panels, steel, or aluminum. Trump is continuing what was settled U.S. policy before he was elected.
It is extremely dangerous for unknown Elon Musk employees to be rooting around in federal databases carrying out unknown mischief. But how long does it take to file injunctions? Shouldn’t democrats have aggressive lawyers on standby and, most importantly, use the bully pulpit of public office to make their case?
But true opposition is unlikely to happen. The coziness between the two parties has been going on for a very long time. Voters are rightly concerned that a DOGE operative may have their social security information, but they cannot expect democrats to step up on their behalf. They are, in all likelihood, hoping that Trump will come to the negotiating table and free them from the need to be a pretend opposition.
Alibaba rolls out AI model, claiming it’s better than DeepSeek-V3
https://www.fastcompany.com/91269045/alibaba-ai-model-deepseek-v3
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release points to the pressure coming from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise.
BY Reuters2 minute read
Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models.
The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup’s purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States.
But DeepSeek’s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.
Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.
This echoed DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.
DeepSeek versus domestic competitors
The predecessor of DeepSeek’s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.
The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens – or units of data processed by the AI model – led to Alibaba’s cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models.
Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu, which released China’s first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country’s most valuable internet company Tencent.
Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup “did not care” about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.
OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities.
Liang said in his July interview that he believed China’s largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek’s lean operation and loose management style.
“Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants’ capabilities have their limits,” he said.
—Eduardo Baptista, Reuters
Saturday, February 8, 2025
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