Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he ordered the recall of John T. McNamara, the acting ambassador in Bogotá, on Thursday “following baseless and reprehensible statements from senior Colombian government officials.” The State Department also called Colombia an “essential strategic partner” but said it would pursue “other measures to make clear our deep concern over the current state of our bilateral relationship.”

In response, Petro said he would call back Ambassador Daniel García-Peña from Washington in order to “brief us on the progress of the bilateral agenda to which I committed myself from the beginning of my government.”

Although Rubio did not elaborate on the alleged “reprehensible” statements, Colombian newspaper El Tiempo on Thursday published a letter allegedly sent to the U.S. House Committee on Ethics calling for an investigation into House Republicans, including Florida lawmakers Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, Rep. María Elvira Salazar, and Rep. Carlos Antonio Gimenez. The letter was signed by 30 Colombian representatives.

In it, the congressmen expressed “deep concern” about the lawmakers’ conduct and said that “any unjustified interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country undermines” the principles of mutual respect between nations.

Representatives Díaz-Balart and Gimenez were mentioned alongside Trump advisors including Rubio in recordings leaked to the Spanish newspaper El País that purport to show Petro’s former Foreign Minister, Álvaro Leyva, seeking U.S. pressure to oust his old boss.

“I was in the United States with a top-tier figure: Mario Díaz-Balart. The Díaz-Balarts are the ones behind the Secretary of State,” Leyva allegedly told an unknown person in the recording. (Rep. Salazar was not mentioned in the recording but Colombian lawmakers accused her of making public comments aimed at delegitimizing Petro).

According to El País, the White House never considered Leyva’s proposal, and Díaz-Balart dismissed the claims, saying he meets with all kinds of groups including officials in Colombia’s current government. “I laugh at so many fabrications, nonsense, and hypocrisy. It reminds me of the saying ‘every fool with his own agenda’”, he said.

Gimenez sloughed off the accusations as a “media circus by Gustavo Petro and his henchmen” and said they shouldn’t complain if the U.S. denies later denies them visas.

Concrete evidence of an actual coup plot remains elusive and analysts see the rhetoric from Colombia’s government as problematic.

“The only proof that we have [of a coup plot] are Leyva’s recordings… We do not even have real evidence of this happening from Leyva associates, which is problematic because it is not clear if these individuals were actively conspiring, especially as many of them have strongly denied these allegations,” said Sergio Guzmán, director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a consultancy.

“The U.S. Congress doesn’t want to remain silent nor let this slide,” he added.

The recall of ambassadors is the most severe escalation yet in the tense relationship between Trump and Petro that has been brewing for months. Guzmán points to a number of factors deteriorating the relationship including Petro’s treatment of the opposition; lack of political protection for presidential candidates; Colombia joining the BRICS development bank, and rising coca cultivation which could lead to U.S. aid cuts to combat drug trafficking.

The analyst said that Petro’s impulsive foreign policy has made “Colombia increasingly isolated and less credible” with its ally the United States. His current Foreign Minister, Laura Sarabia, also announced her resignation on Thursday.

Senator Paola Holguín from the opposition Democratic Center party told the Miami Herald that Petro’s “repeated disrespectful statements, lack of commitment to fighting drug dealing and terrorism, and the alignment of our country with anti-democratic regimes and U.S. rivals are creating growing hardships” between the two countries.

Meanwhile, Petro’s supporters demand U.S. politicians respect Colombia’s sovereignty and its democratically elected president. “Calling him a narco-terrorist and drug addict is more than an insult; it’s also an unacceptable fallacy; it’s an affront to our nation and its sovereignty,” wrote Senator María José Pizarro Rodríguez of Petro’s Historic Pact for Colombia political party on X.

Colombia and the U.S. have built strong bonds over two centuries but the relationship has been strained in the past - namely over Cold War politics and the war on drugs. This latest diplomatic row, however, is disconcerting for those who study the relationship.

“We are very worried over the current state of the diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Colombia,” said Holguín. “The U.S. has been our main commercial partner, a great ally in our fight against narcotrafficking and terrorism, and an important humanitarian supporter.”

Benjamin Gedan, Director of the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program, echoed the concerns, stating, “For decades, Colombia has been the most strategic U.S. partner in the region, so it is troubling to see yet another diplomatic crisis.”

The Army recently told Congress that 155mm production currently stands at 40,000/month. This is of course a decrease from the 50,000/m LaPlante stated last year.

We now have a likely explanation for why it fell. The new shell body production facility in Mesquite, TX is massively behind schedule. The first two of three production lines are still not fully completed, and the third is likely to miss its due date. The Army has formally notified General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems that their management of the facility is being reviewed for breach of contract. They have until July 10 to detail how they might be able to get things back on track.

As a result, the Army’s Load, Assemble and Pack capacity exceeds their ability to produce the metal parts of the projectiles. Previously there was a stockpile of shell bodies that were being drawn on by the LAP facilities, but those must have been exhausted, so projectile production has now fallen to 40,000 which is what the other metal parts plants can produce. Mesquite’s 3 lines are supposed to produce 10,000 shell bodies each.

Once again, the West’s mockery of the Russians for relying on old stockpiles is . It’s Cold War era stockpiles all the way down!

More details on the potential breach of contract: Army ‘considering terminating’ General Dynamics’ oversight of new 155mm production lines

… the service is now “considering terminating” the GD deals for all three UPLA lines, according to a June 13 letter from Army Contracting Command (ACC) to the company. “GD-OTS has failed to complete the projects on time or make meaningful progress towards meeting the required completion dates of design and installation of the three (3) UAPLs,” the Army wrote in the letter. … “Because GD-OTS has failed to meet significant milestones for UAPL 1, leading to six (6) missed First Article Test dates spanning April 2024 through June 2025, resultant schedule impacts have continued to extend [to] UAPL 2 and UAPL schedules,” the Army explained. “Specifically, for Line 3, since January 2025 alone GD-OTS’ estimate for equipment installation slipped three (3) months, thus extending total installation timeframe and subsequent line prove-out activities into 2027.”

Additionally, the service said that even after it was determined that Line 1 equipment did not meet “technical requirements of the contract,” the company continued shipping Line 3 equipment. As a result, there is a “significant risk” that similar Line 3 equipment will also not be up to snuff. Compounding the issue, on May 29 GD-OTS notified Army officials that it had halted work on UAPL 3 “on its own accord,” a decision taken without direction or concurrence from the service.

yeah that contract I signed up for? yeah I’m just not gonna do like a third of it man, I just don’t feel like doing it

“Because GD-OTS has failed to perform the UAPL Task Orders… within the timeframe required by the contractual terms, the USG is considering terminating” the deals but a final decision has not been made, the Army added. The letter does not go into detail about what other companies could be tapped to replace GD-OTS.

Mette Frederiksen, the Nordic hermit kingdom’s iron-fisted leader, has insisted that such rooms serve as “mechanisms of oppression” against young women — and, for good measure, young men as well. Why not? When your claims float untethered from observable reality, there is little limit to whom they might implicate.

The campaign to close these spaces is spearheaded by something called the “Commission for the Forgotten Women’s Struggle,” a state body set up to weaponise feminism as a cudgel against Muslims. The commission claims, with impressive solemnity, that these rooms violate “basic principles of gender equality.” One might expect at least a shred of evidence to support this sweeping paranoia about “social control”. Yet, as so often in Denmark’s peculiar brand of cultural hygiene, evidence is optional. The head of the Moderate Party-controlled Ministry of Education, when pressed, struggled to name a single concrete example of oppression, gesturing instead at the faint possibility that somewhere, somehow, a young woman might have been forced to pray.

The students who used the room, some simply needing a moment’s escape from the industrial hum of modern education, will now seek refuge under staircases and in empty hallways. One wonders if the great Danish experiment in “hygge” extends to praying alone beneath a flight of stairs.

Source:

• SDU lukker fordybelsesrum permanent, DR (state media), July 4th 2025

The reform includes newly tightened residence and employment requirements to receive more than the lowest tier of benefits, a Kafkaesque hurdle demanding nine years of residence and two-and-a-half years of full-time work within the past decade. Previously reserved for those arriving after 2008, now, in a generous display of equal-opportunity cruelty, this barrier has been generously extended to all benefit claimants. Mette Louise Brix, a social worker and union coordinator in the municipal job centre in Gribskov, puts it starkly: “There are citizens whose monthly benefit is being halved… Some citizens can see they will have trouble staying in their homes. Others are asking how they are supposed to ensure food for their children.” She adds that this policy also targets people with substance abuse disorders and young people with severe mental illness. “Social workers are worried about what they might do,” she tells.

But Denmark’s benevolence does not stop at mere impoverishment. Those relegated to this basement-level benefit must now prove their “usefulness” through a mandatory 37-hour weekly work obligation. Failure to comply results in sanctions to their already skeletal benefits. This obligation may be fulfilled through Danish language classes, unpaid internships for private employers or through the Orwellianly named “usefulness jobs.” These are not jobs in any meaningful sense but rather penances in the form of unpaid labor for the public sector, such as park maintenance or cleaning public toilets, ritual humiliation designed to deter and discipline rather than to prepare for real employment. The subtext is clear: work will set you free, or at least keep you too busy and broken to complain.

Signe Færch, Chairwoman of the Danish Association of Social Workers, notes the bitter irony: “It is thought-provoking that they talk about de-bureaucratisation and yet introduce new bureaucracy where social workers risk having to control citizens’ commute times, attendance and job seeking efforts. … We know that usefulness jobs rarely lead to lasting employment.” She is concerned that the reform compels social workers to become overseers of “pseudo-work” instead of facilitators of real jobs.

Simultaneously, despite dire warings from 18 humanitarian NGO’s, the reform eliminates a crucial lifeline: the section 34 housing subsidy, until now an indispendable tool in efforts to reduce homelessness. This support was vital for benefit recipients facing high rents in a country experiencing a severe shortage of affordable housing, especially in large cities. Jeanette Bauer, head of the independent humanitarian organisation Danish Church Aid, has warned that scrapping this aid would be a “human catastrophe.” The homeless advocacy organisation SAND was blunter, stating its removal was like “setting a roadblock on the road from shelter to housing” and has stated that it is guaranteed to lead to more homelessness.

The human cost, predicted by experts and NGOs with near-unanimous dread, is stark. People battling addiction, severe mental illness, or simply the crushing weight of systemic disadvantage are deemed insufficiently “useful” or too racially impure to deserve adequate support. They face hunger, eviction, and destitution. Færch summarises the cruel paradox: “Necessities like rent, food, and transport are expensive in Denmark. You cannot live a dignified life on DKK 6,789 before tax… If a citizen is worried about whether they can pay their rent or electricity bill, it is difficult to muster the surplus to write a good CV.” The reform, she concludes, creates “another roadblock” for the most vulnerable.

This Danish experiment in punitive welfare “reform” is not an isolated incident. It resonates with a disturbing transatlantic trend. Across the North Sea, the Starmer regime is pushing for eugenicist cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP), a vital support for disabled people, insinuating that the sick and the disabled are simply malingering. In the US, the Trump regime’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gleefully gutted essential support systems for the most vulnerable. The shared logic is painfully clear: the disabled, the racialised, the poor, those least “productive”, are to be discarded.

Meanwhile, western leaders find no difficulty mustering funds for other priorities. The money that could have gone to help the civilian population are spent on balooning military expenses, with NATO recently planning to raise expenditures to an eye-watering 5% of GDP to fund agressive military buildup. While civilians are ordered to subsist on crumbs and scrub toilets to prove their worth, the Danish regime has embarked on a dangerous path of rearmament fueled by the slogan “spend! spend! spend!”.

Denmark’s sleek Nordic image remains a powerful export, candles, hygge and smiling cyclists. But beyond this curated postcard lies a ruthless machinery of surveillance and social discipline. Under the smooth slogans, one finds that the cruelty is the only point.

Sources:

• Reform sender tusindvis under fattigdomsgrænsen og gør flere hjemløse, Arbejderen, July 1st