Water companies paid to pollute UK waterways while consumers face steep rise in bills

Margot Miller

The water industry in England and Wales has told customers to brace themselves for a steep rise in bills from April, when the next five-year pricing plan comes into effect.

The privatised water companies are mired in controversy, responsible for polluting Britain’s rivers and coastal waters with sewage on a grand scale. Supply outages occur due to ill-maintained, leaky pipes after years of underinvestment, while shareholders are rewarded generously at the expense of growing company debt.

The Thames as it flows through east London, with the Isle of Dogs in the centre [Photo by Mai-Linh Doan / CC BY-SA 3.0]

Public health is endangered, with industry regulator Ofwat reporting contamination of domestic supplies and advising against swimming in swathes of Britain’s fresh and coastal waters. Hospitalisations from water borne contaminants are on the rise.

Ofwat has nevertheless determined that the 11 water only and 11 water and wastewater companies can raise customer bills by up to 40 percent over the next five years—to deliver “improvements for customers and the environment”. The customers, not shareholders, are expected to pay for rank corporate malpractice, when there are already 2.5 million people in debt to water companies.

The Labour government led by Sir Keir Starmer came into office in July backed by the trade unions promising to tackle the cost-living crisis, with a “plan to grow the economy and cut your bills for good.”

Not only are water bills set to rise, however, but also energy prices, mortgages and rents, the TV licence and council tax. Analysis by Sky News calculated that average household bills will rise by £270 in April.

The next financial year will see an average rise in water bills of 26 percent, an increase from £408 to £603 or £10 a month, with the steepest rise coming for Southern Water’s customers—an increase of 47 percent (£224) to £703 a year, meaning the cost of water to a household reaching almost £2 daily. The largest supplier, Thames Water, with 16 million customers (including the population of London), will increase bills by 31 percent to £639.

Southern Water, which supplies 4.6 million people, was responsible for secretly dumping 16-21 billion litres of sewage over six years. Owned by infrastructure investment funds, the majority stakeholder at 62 percent is Australian firm Macquarie—Thames Water’s previous owner. Southern Water paid out a total of £2.3 billion in dividends since privatisation in 1989. It now has debts of £6 billion.

Thames Water—now owned by investors from four continents, with Canadian pension fund OMERS holding the largest stake—is on the verge of securing a £3 billion emergency loan to stave off collapse. It’s debt is £15.2 billion, or roughly 80 percent of the company’s value.

Thames Water HQ by the Thames In Reading, Berkshire [Photo by Jim Linwood / CC BY 2.0]

Contrary to company claims that shareholders have received no dividends since 2017, Thames paid £200 million to companies within its owners’ group in the past five years—passed on as interest payments to companies which loaned the group money.

Water privatisation has not befitted the population one iota, only a handful of profiters. Since privatisation in 1989, water companies in the UK paid a total £72 billion in dividends to their shareholders while accumulating £60.6 billion debt as of March last year. According to the Green Party, they paid £1.8 billion a year to shareholders over the last decade. In 2022, 22 company executives received £24.8 billion in salaries and bonuses.

Research in 2017 by the University of Greenwich calculated that consumers in England were paying £2.3 billion more each year in water bills than before privatisation.

Around 20 percent of the average water bill in the UK goes in servicing debts accrued by the water companies. An April 2024, Financial Times reported that in 32 years since privatisation £78 billion has been paid out of utilities, in dividends, and that expenditure on capital investment comes from borrowing to protect dividends. The FT noted that the “£78bn payout is nearly half the £190bn the companies spent in the same three decades on infrastructure. The utilities meanwhile chalked up more than £64bn net in debt over the same period, despite being sold at privatisation with no borrowings.”

Yet head of Southern Water Lawrence Gosden had the gall to tell parliament’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee this month that what he claimed were 15 years of “flat bills” were a “lost opportunity for investment.” Chief executive of industry body Water UK David Henderson even accused Ofwat of restricting companies’ investment by limiting the latest price rise to 40 percent.

It is corporate looting which has produced the UK’s sewages crisis, with the industry discharging raw sewage into rivers and seas for at least 3.6 million hours in 2023.

Thames Water was responsible for pumping at least 72 billion litres of sewage into the River Thames which runs through London, the equivalent of filling 29,000 Olympic swimming pools with the toxic waste. It has also released raw sewage into a chalk stream near St Albans for 1,000 hours over six weeks since December, and into the River Ver for 85- hours last April.

A new study by researchers from the University of Manchester accused nine water companies—including United Utilities which serves Greater Manchester and the North West—of lying to the public about the harm they cause to the environment and public health. Professor Jamie Woodward told the Manchester Evening News that “colossal volumes of sewage” were released into the rivers of Greater Manchester. They discharged 12,000 times into the River Irwell—which runs through the centre of two large cities (Manchester and Salford)—the highest rate in any river in England.

The River Irwell, Manchester

According to a court case currently being taken against Thames Water, Severn Trent Water, Northumbrian Water, United Utilities, Anglian Water and Yorkshire Water, the companies “significantly or systematically” underreported their sewage discharge for a decade, allowing them to charge higher bills—costing customers between £800 million and £1.5 billion.

Fines imposed by Ofwat are in any case minimal: just £151 million since 2015, though an additional £168 million is now being sought. A Liberal Democrat analysis of Companies House data found that water companies saw their pre-tax profits soar by 82 percent since 2019, with profits almost doubling after tax.

There have been calls for the Labour government to renationalise the water industry. But Starmer’s Thatcherite party is dead set against doing so, to the point of citing a report commissioned by the private water companies themselves as an argument against it last September. If it is forced to take on control of a bankrupt Thames Water, this will be done to salvage some of the stakeholders’ investments and prepare the company for resale to new private owners in the future.

The example of Scotland, where water was not privatised, shows that government ownership is no guarantee against sharp price rises. Bills there are set to increase by 9.9 percent or an average of £44 a year.

Western-backed HTS Islamists organise executions in Syria

Johannes Stern

Members of the new Syrian security forces stand outside a security building in Nawa, near Daraa, Syria, January 4, 2025. [AP Photo/Mosa'ab Elshamy]

Reports of excessive violence and executions of members of religious minorities are increasing following the seizure of power by the Islamist HTS militia in Syria. According to a report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) from earlier this week, 35 extrajudicial executions took place in just 72 hours. The perpetrators were fighters from the ruling HTS (Haiat Tahrir al-Sham–Levant Liberation Organisation) and other Islamist terrorist groups associated with HTS.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights stated that the fighters “took retaliatory measures and settled old scores with members of the Alawite minority, to which [ousted President] Bashar al-Assad belongs,” taking advantage of “the state of chaos, the proliferation of weapons and their links with the new authorities.”

The monitoring centre spoke of “arbitrary mass arrests, cruel mistreatment, attacks on religious symbols, mutilation of corpses, summary and brutal executions of civilians,” which “show an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence.” The victims were “members of minority sects such as Alawites, Shiites and Murshids in villages throughout the [Homs] region,” the centre said.

In a statement, the Civil Peace Group also announced that there had been civilian casualties in a “security operation” in several villages in the Homs region. The group “condemned the unjustified violations,” including the killing of unarmed men. According to SOHR, arrests were made after the “serious violations and mass executions that have claimed the lives of 35 people in the last 72 hours.”

A US-backed opposition fighter steps on a broken bust of former Syrian President Hafez Assad in Damascus, Syria, Sunday December 8, 2024. [AP Photo/Hussein Malla]

Apparently, the HTS authorities, who regularly justify the Islamist terror against minorities as a crackdown on alleged supporters of the Assad regime that collapsed in early December 2024, felt compelled to distance themselves from the violent excesses to a certain extent. Several people have been arrested for unspecified “violations” in the area west of the city of Homs, which is home to over a million people, according to government sources.

The official Syrian news agency SANA reported that the authorities had accused members of a “criminal group” of posing “as members of the security services.” “Dozens of members of local armed groups under the control of the new Sunni Islamist coalition and who participated in the security operations have been arrested,” the SOHR report said.

In fact, the terror reveals the character of the HTS regime, which is supported and courted by the West. The militia is the successor organisation of the al-Nusra Front, which was formerly allied with al-Qaeda. Its former emir, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who was appointed Syrian transitional president on 29 January under his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, swore “allegiance” to the then al-Qaeda leader Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri in a video message in 2013. In response, al-Qaeda provided al-Julani with fighters and weapons that al-Nusra used for deadly terrorist attacks that killed countless civilians.

Another notorious Islamist terrorist in al-Julani’s transitional government is Justice Minister Shadi al-Waisi. In his role as an al-Nusra Front judge, he personally took part in and organised public executions. A video recorded in Hafasraja in 2015 shows al-Waisi ordering the execution of a woman he had previously convicted of prostitution. In the video, he can be seen first personally pronouncing the sentence and then giving the executioner a sign to carry out his bloody work. The execution was carried out with a shot to the head. 

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Since taking power in Damascus last December with the support of NATO forces, the HTS leaders have continued the terror despite their publicly more moderate rhetoric. The latest executions are just the tip of the iceberg. Since the beginning of 2025, “there has been a dramatic escalation of attacks and retaliatory actions by armed groups in various Syrian provinces,” according to another SOHR report. Some of these groups are affiliated with the Military Operations Administration, i.e., the new government, and “attack civilians for political and sectarian motives.”

Since the beginning of the year, SOHR has documented 91 murders and eliminations as a result of reprisals in various Syrian provinces, killing 190 people, including five women, the report said. Among others, there have been deaths in Damascus (3), Rif Dimashq (14), Homs (91), Hama (46), Latakia (15), Aleppo (6), Tartus (9), Idlib (4), al-Suwaida (1) and Deir Ezzor (1). 

It is significant that the Western media hardly report on Islamist terror in Syria. The reasons for this are obvious. On the one hand, the NATO powers see the new rulers in Damascus as important allies in the imperialist subjugation of Syria and the entire Middle East. As with the genocide against the Palestinians, the main aim is to strengthen Israel’s military position and to eliminate Iran and Russia as power factors in the region. At her meeting with al-Julani in Damascus at the beginning of January, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) called for Russia to give up its military bases in Syria.

Another reason for the silence, especially in the German media, is the plans of the ruling class to deport hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. Chancellor Olaf Scholz stated in the Bundestag (parliament) on Wednesday, in a session which was dominated by anti-refugee agitation and the boosting of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD): “We are also looking very closely at developments in Syria. As soon as the situation on the ground allows, we will also carry out deportations of criminals there.” He said he was discussing this “with the heads of government of the federal states, just as we have repeatedly made far-reaching decisions in this circle in recent years.”

DeepSeek has shattered basis of US AI stock market surge

Nick Beams

The bleeding on Wall Street caused by the emergence of the hitherto relatively unknown Chinese AI company DeepSeek has been staunched, at least for now, with the market regaining some of the $1 trillion loss it incurred in the selloff on Monday.

The Icon for the smartphone apps DeepSeek is seen on a smartphone screen in Beijing, Tuesday, January 28, 2025. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]

But much as some would like to dismiss the losses as a mere flesh wound there is no question that the emergence of DeepSeek, providing AI based on chips below the top range and at a lower cost than the US tech giants, has shattered the assumptions on which the AI boom of the past two years has been based.

The key assumption was that with the development of advanced AI chips by Nvidia and massive investments by the major tech giants in the establishment of data centres for AI development, US companies would enjoy global superiority and accumulate continuously elevated profits due to their monopoly position.

This was reflected in the rise of Nvidia which went from a mid-sized company involved in the development of graphics to the largest company in the world by market capitalisation—more than $3 trillion—in the space of just two years.

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang predicted that $1 trillion worth of AI processing centres, using chips from his company, would be built by the high-tech giants over the next few years.

Of course, there was always the risk that some other company would develop a competitive technology. But such risks were ignored in the market hype which saw the tech-heavy NASDAQ index rise by 92 percent in two years, increasing market capitalisation by $14 trillion.

And the last place any significant competition might have been expected to come from was a start-up Chinese firm. After all the US was the dynamic innovator and China was a mere imitator.

To reinforce its position the US, initially under the first Trump administration and to a much greater extent under Biden, imposed a series of export controls and other restrictions on China to deny it access to the top-level chips.

But using lower-level Nvidia chips to which it had access, DeepSeek was able to develop an AI system comparable to, and in some cases better than that produced by the US tech giants. And this was accomplished in little more than two years.

DeepSeek was initially developed by Liang Wenfeng as a side project for his hedge fund in 2023. He began accumulating a stockpile of lower-grade Nvidia chips and developed a strategy for overcoming the export control bans imposed by the US.

This involved recruiting graduates from top Chinese universities and tasking them with developing methods to “train” AI systems without having to use the latest banned Nvidia technology. Liang said he preferred less experienced graduates because they were not bound by the perceived way of doing things.

Whatever the immediate movements on the stock markets, the assumption that deploying massive piles of cash to create new facilities using the most advanced chips creates an unassailable position in the market has gone by the board.

As AI venture capitalist Mike Volpi told the Financial Times (FT): “If you’re Anthropic or OpenAI, attempting to be at the forefront, and someone can serve what you can at a tenth of the cost, that’s problematic.”

The problems extend well beyond the AI industry. They reach into the stock market and the financial system more broadly because the boom in AI stocks has been the driving force behind the rise of Wall Street over the recent period.

The seven largest companies, mainly hi-tech, with Nvidia at the forefront, account for at least 34 percent of the market capitalisation of the S&P 500 index, the highest figure on record according to Goldman Sachs data going back to 1980.

Nvidia alone accounted for 6.8 percent of the S&P 500 on Friday last week, up from 1.1 percent at the end of 2022 when the AI boom began. It contributed almost a quarter of the index’s total return in 2024, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Last Monday Nvidia’s share price tumbled by almost 17 percent, leading to a loss of nearly $600 billion in its market capitalisation, the biggest single-day loss by any company in history.

The broader implications of Monday’s events were outlined by billionaire Ray Dalio, the founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater, in an interview with the FT earlier this week.

He likened the present situation to the collapse of the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century with the development of the internet.

Dalio warned that “pricing has got to levels which are high at the same time as there’s an interest rate risk, and that combination could prick the bubble.”

There are of course similarities with what took place a quarter of century ago, but the present situation is much more serious. This is because the past 25 years has seen a massive injection of money into the financial system, the result of so-called quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, the rise of private credit and the escalation of debt to unprecedented levels.

Dalio raised an important distinction between AI and the stock market. He said there was a “major new technology that certainly will change the world and be successful. But some people are confusing that with the investments being successful.”

In other words, while AI has the potential to bring enormous advances in the productive forces of society, its development under capitalism, amid rampant speculation, can bring about a market collapse.

The US high-tech giants have taken a major hit as has the US political and military establishment which considers the suppression of Chinese technological development an existential question for US global dominance.

Accordingly measures to counter DeepSeek are already being rapidly prepared.

Responding to Monday’s events, Trump said: “The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.”

Given Trump’s record during his first term when he introduced measures to try to bankrupt the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, the threat contained in his words is clear.

Summing up the significance of DeepSeek’s advances, an FT editorial noted that “China is managing to make technological leaps in AI despite export controls by the Biden administration intended to deprive it of both powerful chips and the advanced tools needed to make them.… Far from stifling Chinese innovation, Washington may have stimulated it.”

That is, it has kicked an own goal to use an analogy from soccer.

The ability of domestically trained Chinse engineers to increase efficiency and develop workarounds “raises questions over whether the technological ‘moat’ established by high-spending US groups such as Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic is as wide and impregnable as they had thought,” the editorial continued.

A recent article in the WSJ cited the remarks of Dmitri Alperovitch, a writer on US-China security issues, which point to the direction of possible counter-measures—an all-out offensive denying Chinese access to any US-made chips.

“The piecemeal half-in, half-out approach to export controls is a failure,” he said.

Michigan Republican Congressman John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told the WSJ: “We must work to swiftly place stronger export controls on technologies critical to DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure.”

The propaganda campaign for the escalation of economic warfare against China is already in motion, like a well-oiled machine, spewing out the claim that DeepSeek’s advances are the result of theft.

David Sacks, a big investor in internet and high-tech firms, who has been appointed as Trump’s AI and crypto czar, told Fox News it was “possible” that intellectual property (IP) theft had occurred.

“There’s a technique in AI called distillation… when one model learns from another model [and] kind of sucks the knowledge out of the parent model.

“And there’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI models, and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this.”

Sacks, however, provided no evidence for this claim. In any case, all AI companies train their models through the use of information culled from the internet, if not through distillation from competitors.

The initial response of OpenAI chief Sam Altman was to call DeepSeek’s RI an “impressive” model and say that it was invigorating to have a new competitor.

Within days, however, he was singing a very different song as the implications of what had happened started to sink in.

A statement issued by OpenAI said it knew that China-based and other companies were constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI firms.

“We engage in countermeasures to protect our IP… and believe as we go forward that is it critically important that we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology.”

Numerous comments have pointed to the use by OpenAI of technology and intellectual property developed elsewhere and the hypocrisy of its claims that DeepSeek has stolen its IP.

One of the most strident came from American AI journalist and author Ed Zitron in a recent newsletter.

“Personally, I genuinely want OpenAI to point a finger at DeepSeek and accuse it of IP theft, purely for the hypocrisy factor. This is a company that exists purely from the wholesale industrial larceny of content produced by individual creators and internet users, and now it’s worried about a rival pilfering its own goods?”

The same issue was raised, albeit in somewhat more measured tones, by FT columnist John Thornhill.

“As with other Chinese apps, US politicians have been quick to raise security and privacy concerns about DeepSeek. And OpenAI has even accused the Chinese company of possible breaches of intellectual property rights. Given the cases against OpenAI for infringing others’ copyright, though, that might strike some as rich,” he wrote.

Beyond the issue of hypocrisy, there is a much deeper question which goes to the very nature of the capitalist profit system and its fundamental incompatibility with the development of the productive forces of society.

There is no question that AI provides the basis for tremendous economic and social advancement.

But within the social relations of capitalism, based on private ownership of the means of production and private profit, this advance, arising not from the supposed “genius” of the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks but through the collective labour of millions all over the world, is monopolised for profit.

And if that is challenged in any way, then the monopolies and the imperialist governments which serve their interests resort to economic warfare which, inevitably and necessarily, contains within it the germinating seeds of military war.

New Trump executive order tightens noose on free speech at American universities

Eric London

Police in riot gear stand guard as demonstrators chant slogans outside the Columbia University campus, Thursday, April 18, 2024, in New York City [AP Photo/Mary Altaffer]

Late Wednesday, the Trump administration announced an executive order aimed at transforming American universities into a surveillance and enforcement arm of the military-intelligence-immigration enforcement apparatus.

Titled “Additional measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” the order declares the administration’s goal of “using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.” Trump and his fascist advisers have falsely equated all criticism of Israel as antisemitic and “terroristic.”

The latest order contains a section aimed at chilling all speech critical of Israel among students and faculty. Section 3(e) reads:

In addition to identifying relevant authorities to curb or combat anti-Semitism generally required by this section, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Education, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with each other, shall include in their reports recommendations for familiarizing institutions of higher education with the grounds for inadmissibility under 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3) [security and terrorist grounds] so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.

There is hardly a clause of this paragraph that does not bristle with hostility to free speech and democratic rights. Employing threatening language, it notes that universities must be “familiarized” with the most draconian part of the Immigration and Nationality Act pertaining to terrorism and “unlawful activity.” Section 1182(a)(3) renders a non-citizen inadmissible to enter the US if they engage in “terrorist activity,” “any other unlawful activity” or “any activity a purpose of which is the opposition to, or the control or overthrow of, the Government of the United States by force, violence, or other unlawful means.”

In a fact sheet published Thursday accompanying the latest executive order, Trump made clear that the order is aimed at chilling speech across all campuses: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathisers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

The fact sheet continues: “Immediate action will be taken by the Department of Justice to protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”

By pressuring universities to “monitor” and “report” students and staff to the Department of Homeland Security for deportation, the Trump administration’s order is directed not only against the speech of non-citizens (including green card holders), it also targets citizens by eviscerating the First Amendment right to listen to and discuss the left-wing views of non-citizens—a right recognized by the 1972 Supreme Court case Kleindienst v. Ernest Mandel.

Moreover, section 2 of the latest order calls for criminally prosecuting “perpetrators” without language limiting its application to non-citizens. Its reference to “otherwise holding to account” pro-Palestinian and left-wing students and staff has concerning and extra-legal undertones.

The order was praised by war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who posted on X: “On behalf of Israel and the Jewish people, I thank President Trump for his executive order to fight antisemitism and support for terrorism on American campuses.”

Students have begun to denounce the orders, noting that the attack on democratic rights has been prepared by university administrations in the 16 months of protest against the Gaza genocide since Israel’s response to the events of October 7, 2023.

Momodou Taal, a Cornell student who overcame the university administration’s threat to report him to DHS for protest activity last year, told the World Socialist Web Site: “Cornell’s heavy-handed approach to peaceful protest has paved the way for this executive order. If it wants to salvage its reputation as a harbor of free expression, Cornell must act now and forcefully defend its students.”

Prahlad Iyengar, an MIT engineering student who has faced discipline for allegedly making Lockheed Martin representatives “feel unwelcomed” at a career fair event, told the WSWS:

Deportation for international students who stand for Palestine is a pretext to open the door for all critique of American empire. Most importantly it’s an attempt to flood the news narrative in order to obscure their true goal: if you don’t fit Trump’s right-wing vision of “America” you will be deported, attacked, or threatened regardless of citizenship. It’s rule by force and not by justice and dignity. These attempts to intimidate our movement by creating artificial divides which target international and undocumented community members will not deter us. We will continue to agitate for Palestine and for global liberation, and we will take care of our own. Our demands are popular, and supported by the supermajority of the MIT community, the Boston and Cambridge community, and the entire world. We are on the right side of history.

This is the second order since Trump’s inauguration targeting freedom of speech. On January 20, Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Secretary of State, Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence to:

recommend any actions necessary to protect the American people from the actions of foreign nationals who have undermined or seek to undermine the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people, including, but not limited to, our Citizens’ rights to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment, who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands, or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists. (Emphasis added)

DR Congo breaks relations with Rwanda as Rwandan-backed M23 militia seizes Goma

Alejandro López

M23 rebels patrol the streets of Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025 [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]

On Monday, Goma, the largest city in the mineral-rich northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire), fell to the Rwandan-backed M23 militia. Situated near the Rwandan border, Goma serves as a key transport hub within a critical mining region.

According to AFP, between 500 and 1,000 Rwandan special forces reinforced M23 near Goma, while other sources estimate up to 4,000 troops. Despite support from mercenaries, Burundian troops, 12,000 UN peacekeepers who have reportedly avoided joining in the fighting, and a military mission of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the DRC has been unable to halt the M23 offensive. Congolese forces are retreating, and AFP stated that 'more than 1,200 Congolese soldiers have surrendered and are confined to the [UN base] at the airport” in Goma.

Tens of thousands of people are fleeing Goma, home to approximately 1 million people. Earlier this month, about 400,000 people fled fighting elsewhere in the region and headed toward Goma, joining about 7 million internally displaced people across DRC. Goma hospitals are overwhelmed by hundreds of casualties, and bodies lay on the streets. The Red Cross has warned that the unrest in Goma could lead to the spread of diseases, including the deadly Ebola virus.

The conflict between Rwanda and the DRC risks spiraling into full-scale war. Kinshasa has broken relations with Kigali, and DRC Foreign Minister Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner accused Rwanda of 'frontal aggression, a declaration of war” at Sunday’s UN Security Council meeting. Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi has already threatened to go to war with Kigali, with Rwandan President Kagame responding: “We are ready to fight.”

Rwanda and the M23 militia now control nearly all of North Kivu province, a region rich in strategic minerals such as coltan, cassiterite (tin ore), gold, and wolframite, which are essential for manufacturing mobile phones, laptops, electric vehicle batteries, and advanced weaponry. The economic and strategic stakes are very high, particularly after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president, amid surging US-China competition for access to key raw materials and for strategic influence, particularly in Africa, and growing displeasure in Washington at China’s ties with the DRC.

Kagame has framed Rwandan actions in DRC as protecting Congolese Tutsis from the Democratic Liberation Front of Rwanda (FDLR), which emerged in the eastern DRC from remnants of forces that committed the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda. However, the International Crisis Group states: “the goal appears less to root out the FDLR than long-term territorial expansion including grabbing mineral-rich regions. The M23 and Rwandan troops have remade areas under their de facto control by embedding their own administrations and pushing out local civilian leaders who oppose them.”

Rwanda has illicitly benefited from the plundering of DRC mineral wealth for decades, particularly coltan and gold, via smuggling. Analysts estimate that Rwanda's mineral exports, which surpass $1 billion annually, include a significant portion of resources illicitly sourced from the DRC. M23 is facilitating the smuggling of coltan and gold into Rwanda, where these minerals are then exported as Rwandan products. Jason Stearns, a DRC expert told Reuters that Rwanda's mineral exports had doubled over the past two years, saying “a fair chunk of that is from the DRC.”

The fighting today threatens to ignite a Third Congo War. The First Congo War (1996–1997) began when US-backed Rwanda and Uganda supported Laurent-Désiré Kabila in toppling the French-backed dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu had provided refuge to former Hutu-extremist Rwandan officials, ex-Rwandan army soldiers, and members of the Interahamwe militia responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed 900,000 lives. After a brief truce, a Second Congo War (1998-2003) erupted, drawing in African nations including Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

These two Congo wars, sometimes dubbed “Africa’s World War,” left over 5 million dead, mostly through starvation and disease.

Two decades later, these conflicts are not developing as a proxy war between US and French imperialism, but as the imperialist powers seek to counter the growing commercial and industrial weight of China in Africa. This context makes the conflict particularly explosive, as it comes together with rising US-China rivalry and the threats of military aggression from the second Trump administration. Trump has called to annex the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada and demanded Europe double its military spending in exchange for continued US “protection.”

Over the past decade, China has deepened its economic ties with the DRC, primarily through extensive investment in mining, particularly cobalt and copper. Chinese companies, such as CMOC Group and Zijin Mining, have major stakes in Congolese mines. The 2008 Sino-Congolese infrastructure-for-minerals deal, renegotiated in 2023, remains a cornerstone of the relationship, involving Chinese-built roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure in exchange for mining rights. China remains DRC’s largest trading partner and a key financier of infrastructure projects.

Influential voices within the US establishment are calling on Trump to crush Chinese influence in Africa and specifically in the DRC, using military force. Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the influential American Enterprise Institute think-tank penned an article titled “If Trump Is Serious About China, He Can’t Ignore Africa.” Rubin wrote:

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt will be to the economy of the coming decades what Saudi Arabia’s oil was to the late 20th century. Cobalt is essential for the lithium-ion batteries that power the technology upon which the modern, industrialized world depends. The DRC also has tantalum necessary for everything from mobile phones and televisions to inkjet printers, digital cameras, and medical devices, and the germanium essential for the semiconductor industry. Add rare earths, such as copper, gold, diamonds, and uranium, into the mix, and the true possible wealth of the DRC becomes obvious. The DRC is home to almost $24 trillion in resources, much of it untapped.

Nor is the DRC alone. Somaliland, the Western-oriented democracy seeking international recognition of its statehood, has gas, oil, and rare earths. Mozambique’s liquefied natural gas discovery catapults the southern African country above Iraq, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, and the Republic of Congo are also resource rich.

Simply put, the defeat of China on the continent begins with wresting away the DRC. While the State Department praised DRC President Felix Tshisekedi as a democrat during Trump’s first term, he is a dictator and a stooge for China.

The European imperialist powers are also being drawn into war. Last year, the European Union signed the Critical Raw Materials Partnership with Kigali, a strategic agreement aimed at securing Rwanda’s supply of critical minerals—such as tantalum, tin, tungsten, and rare earth elements—many plundered from DRC, for the EU’s green and digital transition. The agreement explicitly aims to reduce dependence on China for critical raw materials.

China’s DeepSeek model is a major advance in AI technology

Bill Shaw

The logo for the app DeepSeek [AP Photo/Jon Elswick]

Last week, DeepSeek, a startup company based in Hongzhou, China, released its newest artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek R1. Within days, the chatbot became the most-downloaded app in Apple’s App Store.

DeepSeek’s performance meets or exceeds that of state-of-the-art AI models from American companies such as Meta and Open AI, surpassing all open-source models previously available and many closed models on most standard benchmarks.

The achievement sent shockwaves through Wall Street, wiping out approximately $1 trillion in market value for corporations in one day. It also represents a major blow to US plans for sustaining AI dominance as part of its objective to prevent China from usurping the US as the top economic and military power in the world.

In addition, DeepSeek’s phone app connected to R1 quickly topped the charts on the Apple Store, surpassing the ChatGPT app. On the Google Play Store, it has already been downloaded 10 million times.

Model performance gains

Academia and industry measure how “good” an AI model is using standard benchmarks. These benchmarks are predefined tasks for which the answers are known. The model is applied to the tasks, and its outputs are compared to the known answers. Generally speaking, the greater the number of correct answers on the tasks, the better the model performs. A shared set of standard benchmarks enables comparing models against one another.

The DeepSeek team tested its R1 model on 21 benchmarks and compared the results to those achieved by industry-leading AI models from Meta, Open AI and others. The benchmarks included English-language, Chinese-language, software-programming and mathematics tasks.

They compared R1 to four industry-leading AI models as well as their previous version of DeepSeek. These models included Claude-3.5-Sonnet-1022 from Anthropic; three Open AI models—GPT-4o, o1-mini, and o1-1217; and R1’s predecessor DeepSeek-V3.

DeepSeek R1 outperformed the other models on 12 of the 21 benchmarks. For the remaining nine benchmarks, it placed second on eight and fourth on one.

It should be noted that o1-1217, given its purpose and design, was applicable to only 11 of the benchmarks. For those 11 benchmarks, R1 was the best model for four tasks, whereas o1-1217 was the best model for six tasks and Claude was the best model for one task. R1 bested o1-mini on 20 of 21 benchmarks.

Dramatic reduction in computation

What makes the DeepSeek achievement particularly dramatic is the massive reduction in the computational resources needed to build R1. DeepSeek used far fewer computational resources than required for the creation of its competitors.

Building R1 required approximately 2.8 million compute hours on a graphics card from NVIDIA called an H800. Such graphical processing unit or GPU cards are used to build AI models because they efficiently execute the complex mathematical computations required. DeepSeek used a computing infrastructure with 2,048 H800 cards.

By contrast, Meta required 30.8 million GPU hours to build its popular Llama-3.1 model, meaning the DeepSeek R1 model took only 9% as long. Because DeepSeek R1 is a larger model than Llama-3.1, the speedup is even greater than a 91% reduction.

Model size is typically given as the number of numerical parameters that comprise the model. DeepSeek R1 is 671 billion parameters compared to Llama-3.1’s 405 billion, or 66% larger.

The speedup in model construction is made even more impressive by the fact that the H800 GPU is a stripped-down version of NVIDIA’s H100 GPU to comply with United States export control restrictions to China. Meta’s estimate of 30.8 million GPU hours to construct Llama-3.1 405B is based on the faster H100 GPU card. Tests of the performance difference between the cards show that the H800 is approximately 11.5% slower than the H100.

Open source

The fact that DeepSeek R1 is open source means that the full set of 671 billion parameters and the software used to operate the model are freely available to download, inspect and modify. Open-source models are often preferred by software developers and AI engineers because they are easier to modify and adapt to various purposes.

Despite its name, Open AI’s leading models are not open source. AI engineers cannot inspect or modify Open AI’s leading o1 model, for example, or its immediate predecessor GPT-4o.

Additionally, R1 implements a “chain of thought” procedure, a technique originally developed by Open AI for its o1 model. Whereas o1 and other Open AI models hide the “reasoning” steps in the chain of thought, R1 lets the user see all the steps it takes to reach an answer.

Because open-source models can be used and modified by anyone, an industry of companies that host models has risen. For example, Meta’s open-source Llama-3.1 model is hosted by several different companies that compete on the cost of using the model.

Observers quickly noted that queries to the DeepSeek-hosted version of R1 refused to answer queries such as “what happened at Tiananmen Square?”. The open nature of the model does not imply that China is becoming less authoritarian. However, it does enable anyone outside China to host the model themselves without such restrictions and censorship.

Furthermore, the criticism also applies to Open AI models, which refuse to answer questions about the Gaza genocide when prompted. Censorship of closed models is much more difficult to overcome than with open-source models.

Low cost to use

DeepSeek also charges far less for the usage of R1 than its competitors. The largest models are too computationally expensive to run on personal computers or even most servers. The same large GPU infrastructure that is used to build the models is also typically used to run these models.

The result is that AI companies stage the models on their large GPU clusters and accept requests—known as prompts—over the Internet, input the prompts into the model and then return the model’s output back to the user.

Running R1 via such application programming interface or API calls over the internet is far cheaper than for other leading AI models. DeepSeek is currently charging for R1 less than 4% of what Open AI charges to run its o1-1217 model. Specifically, o1 costs are $15 per million tokens (MT) input and $60 per MT output, whereas R1 costs $0.55 per MT input and $2.19 per MT output, a reduction of 27 times. A token is approximately equivalent to a word.

To achieve the lower costs to operate R1, DeepSeek uses an architecture called “Mixture of Experts.” This means that for each token generated, only a fraction of the model (37B parameters of the 671B, i.e. an “expert”) is activated. This reduces the computing power required for model output, resulting in the lower costs.

In addition, modifications to models through a process known as quantization can dramatically reduce the computational resources necessary to run a model. Although quantization does reduce model performance, various quantization schemes can dramatically lower computational requirements while only decreasing model performance somewhat.

Already two researchers, taking advantage of the open-source nature of R1, created multiple quantized versions of it. One version can run on a desktop or laptop computer with as little as 20GB of RAM, albeit slowly. These researchers published their modified versions of R1 as open source on an AI model repository known as Hugging Face.

Implications for US dominance in AI

The week prior to the DeepSeek news, President Trump announced a planned $500 billion initiative called StarGate to invest in technology to ensure United States dominance in AI. Stargate LLC, a company with investments from Open AI, Oracle, SoftBank and the investment firm MGX, seeks to build multiple AI data centers across the country, beginning with 10 centers in Texas. Trump also announced he would eliminate regulations on generating the massive quantities of electricity required to run the data centers.

In addition, Open AI announced on January 21 the pending release of its next AI model, o3-mini, in “a couple of weeks.”

The DeepSeek achievement immediately eclipsed the StarGate initiative and Open AI’s plans for o3-mini, turning the AI industry in general on its head. The perception that the US has a long lead in AI—whether previously justified or not—has vanished practically overnight, raising questions about the ability of the US to create or maintain dominance in AI. DeepSeek and its R1 model have become the central topic of conversation, shifting the work focus of vast swathes of the AI industry.

The Biden administration had not only put in place the export controls that resulted in the DeepSeek team using H800 instead of H100 GPUs, but it also expanded those restrictions in its final days in office. President Trump was already expected to ramp up economic and military confrontation with China further, but the DeepSeek achievement is likely to accelerate and intensify the planned escalation.

Dozens of civilians killed in Nigeria in government airstrikes against armed gangs

Alice Summers

Dozens of civilians have been killed by the Nigerian government in air raids on alleged armed gangs in recent weeks.

Over the weekend of January 11–12, around 20 civilians were killed in the village of Tungar Kara in the northwestern state of Zamfara, after local self-defense groups set up to protect residents from armed gangs were reportedly misidentified as gang members and targeted by the Nigerian Air Force. The incident follows another airstrike on a village in nearby Sokoto State on Christmas Day, in which 10 civilians were killed.

A Nigerian JF-17 [Photo by Wikimedia / SimTheSynonym / CC BY-SA 4.0]

These attacks are the latest in a series of aerial bombardments carried out as part of a protracted campaign against armed groups and insurgents in the north of the country, much of which is effectively outside of federal government control. Since 2021, the Nigerian government has intensified its military campaigns across the country, with armed forces now deployed in two-thirds of its 36 states.

Government airstrikes have regularly killed civilians. In September last year, an attack in the northern state of Kaduna killed 24 people, while in December 2023, more than 120 civilians were killed and another 66 injured after a drone strike targeted a religious gathering, also in Kaduna. According to research firm SBM Intelligence, based in Nigeria’s largest city Lagos, military air raids have killed at least 400 civilians since 2017.

A report by Human Rights Watch also found that Nigerian security forces had committed various human rights violations during such “counter-terrorism” operations. This includes extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrest, incommunicado detention and mass trials against suspected militants, primarily from Islamist group Boko Haram or its offshoot Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

Since 2009, Boko Haram and ISWAP (since 2015) have been conducting a violent insurgency in Nigeria’s northeastern state of Borno and in neighbouring Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Mali. Abductions, suicide bombings, torture, rape, forced marriages and the recruitment of child soldiers have become widespread, tens of thousands have been killed and at least 2 million displaced.

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s northwest and central regions have for years been plagued by waves of kidnappings, as armed gangs, known locally as “bandits”, raid schools and villages seizing students and local residents for ransom, as well as looting, burning homes and stealing livestock. Ransom demands have forced many families and even entire communities to sell property and take on debt. According to the Centre for Democracy and Development, a think-tank based in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, approximately 30,000 bandits organised in over 100 gangs operate in northwestern Nigeria.

In December, dozens of villagers were abducted in Zamfara State by armed groups. Eyewitnesses and local news sites claimed that between 40 and 50 women were taken from the village of Kafin Dawa as gunmen went door to door seizing local residents. And in late February, suspected Boko Haram insurgents kidnapped more than 200 internally displaced people from Ngala local government area, Borno State, while 287 students were abducted from a secondary school in the town of Kuriga, Kaduna State by bandits only a couple of weeks later.

The mass kidnappings in 2024 come 10 years after the internationally publicised abductions of 276 schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Chibok, Borno State in April 2014. This attack was used to justify military interventions by the imperialist countries, with Britain and the United States both sending security forces and “advisors” to Nigeria in May that year.

This was part of a broader “pivot to Africa” by the imperialist powers aimed at securing control of the continent’s huge mineral and energy resources, including oil, natural gas, cobalt, rare earth elements and uranium, which are critical to industries such as electronics and weaponry. Nigeria in particular holds immense oil reserves, at around 37 billion barrels, and is Africa’s largest oil producer. Oil accounts for 80 percent of the country’s export earnings.

The UK and US have continued to provide funding and training to Nigeria’s armed forces. Between 2000 and 2024, the US provided, facilitated or approved over $2 billion in military aid to Abuja, according to a report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and Washington-based think tank the Center for International Policy. This included the supply of 12 Super Tucano warplanes in 2017, as part of a $593-million package that also comprised bombs and rockets.

In October 2024, the UK government provided £450,000 of military materiel to the Nigerian armed forces, including counter–improvised explosive device equipment. Britain currently has 20 military personnel stationed in the northeastern city of Maiduguri providing training to the Nigerian Army.

Neither the military aid from the imperialist powers nor the Nigerian government’s campaign of terror have succeeded in quelling the violence, which has worsened since 2014. According to estimates from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which based its figures on online surveys conducted among a sample of Nigerian households, a staggering 2.2 million people were kidnapped across the country between May 2023 and April 2024.

Around three-quarters of these kidnappings took place in rural areas and more than half in the northwestern states, which have been the hardest hit by armed violence. Around 80 percent of victims were released, 13 percent were killed and 3 percent remain in captivity. Among households that had experienced an abduction, 65 percent paid a ransom to secure the hostage’s release, with an enormous 2.23 trillion naira (roughly $1.4 billion) paid out in total. Based on these estimates, if kidnapping in Nigeria were a single company, it would be the country’s eighth largest by revenue.

In the same period, over 600,000 Nigerians were also estimated to have been murdered across the country by insurgents, armed gangs or by other perpetrators known to the victim, with seven in ten households having reported a murder to the police.

These already horrific figures may in fact be a decline on previous years, with most available data indicating a peak in violence between 2021 and 2023, after sustained annual increases since 2018. According to data collected by US-based non-profit organisation Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), armed violence involving bandits in Kaduna State, by far the worst affected, rose from around 50 incidents a year in 2018 to more than 400 in 2021, before falling to about 200 by 2023.

However, the ACLED report also noted that the decrease in violent incidents does not indicate a lower level of coercion of local communities. In many cases, bandit groups have consolidated control over swathes of territory, allowing them to use alternative tactics to collect revenue, including imposing informal taxation on industries such as farming and artisanal gold mining, under threat of reprisals if payments are not made.

While armed banditry has a long history in northern Nigeria, it has surged in recent decades partly due to intense competition between Hausa farmers and nomadic Fulani herders over scarce land resources. Climate change has exacerbated conflict, forcing pastoralists from their traditional grazing lands and encroaching on farmland, leading to violence and ethnic tensions.

Banditry, abductions and ethnic tensions have also escalated as social conditions have deteriorated in Nigeria. Recessions in 2016 and 2020, followed by the government’s introduction of a raft of pro-market “reforms” since the election of Bola Tinubu as president in May 2023, have led to mass unemployment and triggered a severe cost-of-living crisis, pushing millions into poverty and forcing Nigerians to seek alternative forms of income.

In 2023, the NBS estimated that 33 percent of under-30s in Nigeria, who make up 60 percent of the country’s population, are unemployed. Around 40 percent of the country’s population live in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank—some 93 million people. And between October and December 2024, 25.1 million Nigerians were estimated to be acutely food insecure by the UN World Food Programme (WFP), a figure which is predicted to rise to 33 million this year.