https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japans-q3-revised-gdp-widens-contraction-annualised-23-2025-12-07/

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-how-daily-incomes-have-changed-in-top-economies-1994-2024/

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6977610

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1231…

A top Brazilian official is warning President Donald Trump that a US military attack on Venezuela could easily spiral out of control into a "Vietnam-style" regional conflict.

Celso Amorim, chief foreign policy adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said in an interview published on Monday by the Guardian that a US military strike on Venezuela would inevitably draw nations throughout Latin America into an armed conflict that would be difficult to contain.

"The last thing we want is for South America to become a war zone—and a war zone that would inevitably not just be a war between the US and Venezuela," he said. "It would end up having global involvement and this would be really unfortunate."

Amorim added that "if there was an invasion, a real invasion [of Venezuela]... I think undoubtedly you would see something similar to Vietnam—on what scale it’s impossible to say."

While acknowledging that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is disliked by many other South American leaders, Amorim predicted that even some of Maduro's adversaries would rally to his side in the face of destabilizing military actions by the US government.

He also predicted that anti-US sentiment would surge throughout the continent in the event of an invasion, as there is still major resentment toward the US for backing right-wing military coups during the Cold War in Chile, Brazil, and other nations.

"I know South America," he emphasized. "Our whole continent exists because of resistance against foreign invaders."

The Trump administration in recent weeks has signaled that it plans to launch attacks against purported drug traffickers inside Venezuela, even though reports from the US government and the United Nations have not identified Venezuela as a significant source of drugs that enter the United States.

The administration has also accused Maduro of leading an international drug trafficking organization called the Cartel de los Soles, despite many experts saying that they have seen no evidence that such an organization formally exists.

Trump late last month further escalated tensions with Venezuela when he declared that airspace over the nation was "closed in its entirety," even though he lacks any legal authority to enforce such a decree.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that Maduro is remaining defiant in the face of US pressure, as he is refusing to go into exile despite the threat of an attack on his country.

According to the Post's sources, Maduro's inner circle of allies "shows no signs of imminent collapse," even as he has limited his public appearances and beefed up his personal security amid fears that he could be the target of an assassination attempt.

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From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

https://www.bikeitalia.it/2025/12/05/ebike-vietate-nella-metro-di-brescia-ma-la-motivazione-e-assurda/

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6980575

"I will carry my soul in my palm,
And cast it into the abyss of death,

Either a life that pleases a friend,
or a death that angers an enemy."

When I asked my uncle Khader Shaat, 47, about the poetry verse that he inscribed on the embroidered, handmade notebook about 30 years ago in Asqalan Israeli prison, he told me that it was the fuel that made him survive.

"Clinging to a life of freedom kept me alive," he said, remembering the notebook he made out of black fabric and framed using many beads.

Khader Shaat was detained when he was 17, sent to prison as a child, and released as a very strong young man.

From 1948 until today, Israel has detained and attacked many iconic, educated thinkers and revolutionaries as a way to suppress their voices, lessen awareness, and hide the truth. But the Occupation doesn't discriminate. According to the 2023 report of the Palestinian Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, there are currently 4,850 detainees in Israeli prisons, among them 31 women, including eight mothers and 160 children.

Israel detains these children for nothing more than being Palestinian. You may be walking in the street, performing your prayer at a mosque or a church, doing your job at a company, studying for your exam to a school, or whatever and whenever. The accusation is homelove. They want the young Palestinians to grow up with fear, to stop raising their voices, to never defend their land.

Full Article

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1260…

An official U.S. military social media account on Monday shared a photo collage that included a symbol long affiliated with extremist groups — and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

In a post on X trumpeting the deployment of troops to the Caribbean, U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, shared an image that prominently displayed a so-called Jerusalem cross on the helmet of a masked commando.

The Jerusalem cross, also dubbed the “Crusader cross” for its roots in Medieval Christians’ holy wars in the Middle East, is not inherently a symbol of extremism. It has, however, become popular on the right to symbolize the march of Christian civilization, with anti-Muslim roots that made it into something of a logo for the U.S. war on terror.

Tattoos of the cross, a squared-off symbol with a pattern of repeating crosses, have appeared on the bodies of people ranging from mercenaries hired by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to Hegseth himself.

Now, the symbol has reared its head again to advertise President Donald Trump’s military buildup against Venezuela — an overwhelmingly Catholic country — and boat strikes in the Caribbean.

U.S. military forces are deployed to the #SOUTHCOM area of responsibility in support of #OpSouthernSpear, @DeptofWar-directed operations, and @POTUS' priorities to disrupt illicit drug trafficking and protect the homeland. pic.twitter.com/vLvg9fQ5Lx

— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) December 8, 2025

“As with all things Trump, it’s a continuation, with some escalation, and then a transformation into spectacle,” said Yale University historian Greg Grandin, whose work focuses on U.S. empire in Latin America.

The social media post came amid rising controversy over a series of strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, dubbed Operation Southern Spear.

[

Read Our Complete Coverage

License to Kill
---------------](theintercept.com/series/licens…)

Hegseth is alleged to have ordered a so-called “double-tap” strike, a follow-up attack against a debilitated boat that killed survivors clinging to the wreckage for around 45 minutes. The U.S. has carried out 22 strikes since the campaign began in September, killing a total of 87 people.

The Pentagon’s press office declined to comment on the use of the Jerusalem cross, referring questions to SOUTHCOM. But in a reply to the X post on Monday, Hegseth’s deputy press secretary Joel Valdez signaled his approval with emojis of a salute and the American flag. In a statement to the Intercept, SOUTHCOM spokesperson Steven McLoud denied that the post implied any religious or far-right message.

“The graphic you’re referring to was an illustration of service members in a ready posture during Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR,” McLoud told The Intercept. “There is no other communication intent for this image.”

The original image of the masked service member appears to have come from an album published online by the Pentagon that depicts a training exercise by Marines aboard the USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean Sea in October. The photo depicting the cross, however, was removed from the album after commentators on social media pointed out its origins.

Amanda Saunders, a spokesperson for the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, the Pentagon-run photo agency, said she was unable to comment directly but forwarded the request to the Marine unit involved in the exercise.

“Content on DVIDS is published and archived directly by the registered units,” she said, “so we don’t have control over what is posted or removed, nor are we able to comment on those decisions.”

Hegseth and the Cross

The Jerusalem cross’s popularity on the right has surged in part thanks to featuring in various media, including the 2005 Ridley Scott film “Kingdom of Heaven” and video games, according to Matthew Gabriele, a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech and a scholar of Crusader iconography.

“It supports the rhetoric of ‘defense of homeland.’”

“It supports the rhetoric of ‘defense of homeland,’” Gabriele told The Intercept, “because the crusaders, in the right’s understanding, were waging a defensive war against enemies trying to invade Christian lands.”

The symbol’s position of prominence in official military communications is just the latest example of a trollish extremism by the Trump administration’s press teams, which have made a point of reveling in the cruelty wrought on its perceived enemies at home and abroad, or “owning the libs.”

[

Related

Team Leader at Gaza Aid Distribution Sites Belongs to Anti-“Jihad” Motorcycle Club, Has Crusader Tattoos](theintercept.com/2025/08/06/ga…)

Monday’s post may also be intended as Hegseth putting his thumb in the eye of the Pentagon’s old guard. Hegseth’s embrace of the symbol — in the form of a gawdy chest tattoo — once stymied, however temporarily, his ambitions in the military.

Folling the January 6 insurrection, according to Hegseth and reporting by the Washington Post, Hegseth was ordered to stand down rather than deploy with his National Guard unit ahead of the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden. The decision to treat Hegseth as a possible “insider threat” came after a someone flagged a photo of a shirtless Hegseth to military brass, according to the Washington Post.

“I joined the Army in 2001 because I wanted to serve my country. Extremists attacked us on 9/11, and we went to war,” Hegseth wrote “The War on Warriors,” his 2024 memoir. “Twenty years later, I was deemed an ‘extremist’ by that very same Army.”

Hegseth was hardly chastened by the episode and has since gotten more tattoos with more overt anti-Muslim resonance, including the Arabic word word for “infidel,” which appeared on his bicep sometime in the past several years. It’s accompanied by another bicep tattoo of the Latin words “Deus vult,” or “God wills it,” yet another slogan associated with the Crusades and repurposed by extremist groups.

The use of the image to advertise aggressive posturing in a majority-Christian region like Latin America may seem odd at first glance. In the context of renewed U.S. focus on Latin America, however, it’s a potent symbol of the move of military action from the Middle East to the Western Hemisphere.

“They’re globalizing the Monroe Doctrine.”

The post comes on the heels of the release of the Trump’s National Security Strategy, a 33-page document outlining the administration’s foreign-policy priorities that explicitly compared Trump’s stance to the Monroe Doctrine, the turn-of-the-century policy of U.S. dominance in Latin America in opposition to colonialism by other foreign powers. Grandin, the Yale historian, described the document as a “vision of global dominance” based on a model of great-powers competition that can lead to immense instability.

“They’re globalizing the Monroe Doctrine,” Grandin said. “I’m no fan of the hypocrisy and arrogance of the old liberal international order, but there’s something to be said for starting from a first principle of shared interests, which does keep great conflict at bay to some degree.”

The post Official Propaganda for Caribbean Military Buildup Includes “Crusader Cross” appeared first on The Intercept.

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From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

Samsung is reportedly scaling down its HBM production, shifting focus of DRAM production to DDR5 modules because there's FAR more profits to be made.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/109259/samsung-shifts-focus-from-hbm-to-ddr5-modules-ddr5-ram-results-in-far-more-profits-than-hbm/index.html

A Pluribus ad displayed on a Samsung smart fridge led a UK woman to seek hospital care for a psychotic episode.

Woman hospitalized after Pluribus ad on smart fridge triggers psychotic episode

^{Zackerie Fairfax (Dexerto)}

The EU Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse, first published in May 2022, has become the "most criticized law of all time". Here's how to stop it now!

Huge Victory: Chat Control no longer forces us to break encryption! But: It now wants age verification. | Tuta

^Tuta

Moments after Luigi Mangione was handcuffed at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, a police officer searching his backpack found a loaded gun magazine wrapped in a pair of underwear.

The discovery, recounted in court Monday as Mangione fights to keep evidence out of his New York murder case, convinced police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that he was the man wanted in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan five days earlier.

https://apnews.com/article/mangione-unitedhealthcare-hearing-evidence-cb21b939cb6966c66b5b46546d75b7de

A federal judge on Tuesday granted the Justice Department’s request to publicly release grand jury transcripts and other material from Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking case, citing a new law that requires the government to open its files on Jeffrey Epstein and his longtime confidant, but he cautioned that people shouldn’t expect to learn much new information from them.

Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, who along with other judges had previously rejected Justice Department unsealing requests before the transparency law was passed, said the materials “do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor.”

“They do not discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s,” Engelmayer wrote. “They do not reveal any heretofore unknown means or methods of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s crimes.”

https://apnews.com/article/epstein-maxwell-sex-trafficking-case-records-8e3985dd977cb94ef41b9581115ef61b