The embassy attempted to insert language into a routine application for the renewal of the embassy's commercial parking permits demanding that the city must align with U.S. federal "anti-discrimination" laws — specifically forbidding the promotion of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) — if it wished to do business with the embassy.

City officials were unamused and rejected the demands. Copenhagen’s technical and environmental mayor, Line Barfod, has labeled the demand “completely absurd” and “totally insane.” “It is central to our work to ensure equity and equal rights for all,” she remarked, “we are not going to change that”.

Barfod notes that embassies are expected to operate under host country rules — not rewrite them. She also stated that participation in the discounted commercial parking permit scheme is completely voluntary and noted that it is up to the U.S. embassy to decide if they want to be part of the scheme or if they want to pay full price for parking, it doesn't make any difference for the city.

Shortly after — likely sobered by retail parking rates in Copenhagen — the Americans came crawling back. In a mail to city officials the embassy claimed to have found a loophole, releasing them from their own harebrained demands: Although they are "required" to demand that foreign suppliers follow American laws prohibiting discrimination against bigots, they are conveniently still allowed to do business with woke suppliers as long as it is for "critical services". And what could be me more critical for Americans than car infrastructure?

This is not an isolated incident, U.S. embassies have reportedly issued similar directives to suppliers across Europe, urging them to disavow any workplace policies seeking to eliminate discrimination against marginalized groups if they wish to maintain business ties with the embassies.

From woke parking lots to harebrained trade wars, the constant demands for ever more hysterical far right virtue signalling is interfering with the smooth running of the empire. The competent imperialists of previous generations are long gone and has been replaced by the failsons of failsons who govern completely divorced from reality and who find their grand designs crashing and burning on the first contact with the real world.

Source: Amerikansk ambassade i U-vending efter "helt vanvittigt" krav til København, TV2 (state media), May 19th 2025

Redbird said it has reached an agreement in principle to become controlling owner of the Telegraph Media Group, ending a lengthy takeover saga for the conservative-leaning newspaper on Friday.

Gerry Cardinale, founder and managing partner of RedBird, said the sale “marks the start of a new era for The Telegraph as we look to grow the brand in the UK and internationally, invest in its technology and expand its subscriber base”.

The Telegraph group, previously owned by the UK’s Barclay family, was put up for sale two years ago to help pay off the family’s debts. It publishes the Daily and Sunday Telegraph newspapers and weekly newsmagazine The Spectator, which all are closely allied to the UK’s Conservative Party.

In 2023, there was an offer to buy the publications from RedBird IMI, a consortium backed by RedBird Capital Partners and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family and the vice president of the United Arab Emirates.

But the consortium pulled out last year following strong opposition from the UK government, which launched legislation to block foreign state ownership of the British press.

Under the deal, Abu Dhabi’s IMI will take a minority stake of not more than 15 percent in the Telegraph as a member of the consortium. The sale must be approved by British regulators.

RedBird has investments in football team AC Milan, the parent company of Liverpool football club and film production company Skydance.

Telegraph Media Group chief executive Anna Jones said that “RedBird Capital Partners have exciting growth plans that build on our success — and will unlock our full potential across the breadth of our business.”

The Spectator was sold in September to British hedge fund investor Paul Marshall

Regime change on the US agenda

In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the US Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work carried out by NED, of which he is now vice-chair. Carl Gershman, then president of the NED and giving evidence, was asked about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected with an increased majority two years prior. He responded: “Time for him to go.”

Seven years later, Trump took office and it looked as if the NED’s future was endangered. On February 12, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk froze disbursement of its congressionally approved funds. Its activities stopped and its website went blank. On February 24, Richard Grenell, special envoy to Venezuela, declared that “Donald Trump is someone who does not want to make regime changes.”

Washington’s global regime-change operations were immediately impacted and over 2,000 paid US collaborating organizations temporarily defunded. A Biden-appointed judge warned of “potentially catastrophic harm” to (not in her words) US efforts to overturn foreign governments. The howl from the corporate press was deafening. The Associated Press cried: “‘Beacon of freedom’ dims as US initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither.”

However, the pause lasted barely a month. On March 10, funding was largely reinstated. The NED, which “deeply appreciated” the State Department’s volte face, then made public its current program which, in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, includes over 260 projects costing more than $40 million.

US “soft power”

Created in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan following scandals involving the CIA’s covert funding of foreign interventions, the NED was to shift such operations into a more publicly palatable form under the guise of “democracy promotion.” As Allen Weinstein, NED’s first acting president, infamously admitted in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In short, NED functions as a “soft power arm” of US foreign policy.

The NED disingenuously operates as a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit foundation. However, it is nearly 100% funded by annual appropriations from the US Congress and governed mainly by Washington officials or ex-officials. In reality, it is an instrument of the US state—and, arguably, of the so-called deep state. But its quasi-private status shields it from many of the disclosure requirements that typically apply to taxpayer-funded agencies.

Hence we encounter verbal gymnastics such as those in its “Duty of Care and Public Disclosure Policies.” That document loftily proclaims: “NED holds itself to high standards of transparency and accountability.” Under a discussion of its “legacy” (with no mention of its CIA pedigree), the NGO boasts: “Transparency has always been central to NED’s identity.”

But it continues, “…transparency for oversight differs significantly from transparency for public consumption.” In other words, it is transparent to the State Department but not to the public. The latter are only offered what it euphemistically calls a “curated public listing of grants” – highly redacted and lacking in specific details.

NED enjoys a number of advantages by operating in the nether region between an accountable US government agency and a private foundation. It offers plausible deniability: the US government can use it to support groups doing its bidding abroad without direct attribution, giving Washington a defense from accusations of interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is also more palatable for foreign institutions to partner with what is ostensibly an NGO, rather than with the US government itself.

The NED can also respond quickly if regime-change initiatives are needed in countries on Washington’s enemy list, circumventing the usual governmental budgeting procedures. And, as illustrated during that congressional presentation in 2018 on Nicaragua, NED’s activities are framed as supporting democracy, human rights, and civil society. It cynically invokes universal liberal values while promoting narrow Yankee geopolitical interests. Thus its programs are sold as altruistic rather than imperial, and earn positive media headlines like the one from the AP cited above.

But a look at NED’s work in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba suggests very much the opposite.

Venezuela

Venezuela had passed an NGO Oversight Law in 2024. Like the US’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, but somewhat less restrictive, the law requires certification of NGOs. As even the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) – an inside-the-beltway promoter of US imperialism with a liberal gloss – admits: “Many Venezuelan organizations receiving US support have not been public about being funding recipients.”

The pace of Washington’s efforts in Venezuela temporarily slowed with the funding pause, as US-funded proxies had to focus on their own survival. Venezuelan government officials, cheering the pause, viewed the NED’s interference in their internal affairs as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. In contrast, the US-funded leader of the far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, begged for international support to make up for the shortfall from Washington.

WOLA bemoaned that the funding freeze allowed the “Maduro government to further delegitimize NGOs” paid by the US. Hundreds of US-funded organizations, they lamented, “now face the grim choice of going underground, relocating abroad, or shutting down operations altogether.”

With the partial reinstatement of funding, now bankrolling at least 39 projects costing $3.4 million, former US senator and present NED board member Mel Martinez praised the NED for its “tremendous presence in Venezuela… supporting the anti-Maduro movement.”

Nicaragua

Leading up to the 2018 coup attempt, the NED had funded 54 projects worth over $4 million. Much of this went to support supposedly “independent” media, in practice little more than propaganda outlets for Nicaragua’s opposition groups. Afterward, the NED-funded online magazine Global Americans revealed that the NED had “laid “the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.

One of the main beneficiaries, Confidencial, is owned by the Chamorro family, two of whose members later announced intentions to stand in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections. The family received well over $5 million in US government funding, either from the NED or directly from USAID (now absorbed into the State Department). In 2022, Cristiana Chamorro, who handled much of this funding, was found guilty of money laundering. Her eight-year sentence was commuted to house arrest; after a few months she was given asylum in the US.

Of the 22 Nicaragua-related projects which NED has resumed funding, one third sponsor “independent” media. While the recipients’ names are undisclosed, it is almost certain that this funding is either for outlets like Confidencial (now based in Costa Rica), or else is going direct to leading opponents of the Sandinista government to pay for advertisements currently appearing in Twitter and other social media.

Cuba

In Latin America, Cuba is targeted with the highest level of NED spending – $6.6 million covering 46 projects. One stated objective is to create “a more well-informed, critically minded citizenry,” which appears laughable to anyone who has been to Cuba and talked to ordinary people there – generally much better informed about world affairs than a typical US citizen.

Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez criticized the NED’s destabilizing activities, such as financing 54 anti-Cuba organizations since 2017. He advised the US administration to review “how many in that country [the US] have enriched themselves organizing destabilization and terrorism against Cuba with support from that organization.”

Washington not only restored NED funding for attacks on Cuba but, on May 15, added Cuba to the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with its anti-terrorist efforts.”

Its ship-borne fifth-generation J-35 stealth fighters, fitted for catapult launch, have also carried out tests and flights, according to a Saturday report by state broadcaster CCTV.

The report did not specify whether the J-35 jets were being launched from the Fujian.

A local maritime safety administration issued traffic control warnings for Wednesday morning for the area near the mouth of the Yangtze River as the Fujian left the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai and sailed towards open waters.

The Fujian is the People’s Liberation Army’s third carrier, and its first equipped with advanced electromagnetic catapults. The report said the Fujian would “greatly enhance” the abilities of the Chinese navy in offshore defence as well as long-distance sea escort operations once it entered service.

The so-called penal reform includes doubling sentences for “particularly severe” violent offenses, increasing penalties for certainremoveds by 50%, and constructing over 2,000 new prison cells. Some younger or lower-risk offenders will be diverted to forced labor in agriculture or manufacturing instead of traditional incarceration. The regime also plans a massive new high-security facility and a second women’s prison. Denmark’s colonial outposts, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, are also slated for new incarceration infrastructure.

Nearly DKK 3 billion (RMB 3.3 billion) will be poured into the carceral system over the next decade. But whether anyone will be left to staff these facilities is another question entirely. The prison service already faces a deep staffing crisis: over 700 guard positions are unfilled, and morale is cratering. Building more cells while bleeding personnel borders on delusion.

Asked whether research supports the harsher penalties, Hummelgaard replied with startling candor:

“I don’t have any research backing it. We do this because we want it politically.”

No data, no proof, just the pure Will to Power. “I’m sure it will work,” he added, brushing aside the scientific consensus that tougher sentencing has little effect on crime rates. “I reject that premise,” he said, dismissing the research as being made “from the perpetrator’s perspective, not the victim’s.” He also issued a thinly veiled warning to academics, stating, “It is not me who awards research grants,” implying that funding should favor those willing to reinforce the far-right myth of a Swedish crime apocalypse.

While Hummelgaard wages war on academic freedom, others warn of the consequences. “It’s not hard to throw people in jail,” said Signe Færch, head of the Social Workers’ Union. “The hard part is helping them out again in a good way.”

Perhaps most surreal was Hummelgaard’s repeated invocation of Sweden—a stable Nordic welfare state—as a cautionary tale of multicultural ruin and migrant-fueled crime.

“We don’t want Denmark to become Sweden in any way,” he declared.

Once the stuff of fringe far-right message boards, the fantasy of migrant-fueled Swedish crime chaos has become an official talking point. According to Hummelgaard, Denamrk must not end up as Sweden whose welfare state has been “undermined” by lenient sentencing and “lax immigration policies.”

As expected, no evidence was provided for these lofty claims. But in the echo chamber of Danish crime politics, vibes matter more than facts—and Swedish vibes, it seems, have been ruined because of woke.

Some gestures — like a limited debt relief scheme for younger former inmates and vague promises of better rehabilitation — earned cautious praise from NGOs. But these are dwarfed by the scale of the punitive turn. The regime’s aim is not safer communities or social repair, but appeasing a reactionary public mood — what ministers call the “sense of justice,” a conveniently nebulous concept unmoored from tangible outcomes, yet endlessly hungry for ever-harsher punishments.

In an era of late capitalist regimes no longer able or willing promise hope, cruelty becomes the currency of power. Borders harden. Prisons grow. The message is clear: we are not going to make your life better, but we will punish the people you hate. The spectacle is the solution and the cruelty is the point.

• Source: Regeringen vil fordoble straf for grov vold og øge fængselspladser, DR (state media), May 22nd 2025