#venezuela

#venezuela

Young was promised that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would appear before the Foreign Relations Committee in a public hearing after next week's recess and assured that the administration will come to Congress first if U.S. military forces are needed in Venezuela, he said. He cited his talks with Rubio as influential in his decision. "To have the secretary of state be at my disposal - really, I mean, countless phone conversations and text exchanges - was very reassuring to me," he told reporters.

When news broke of U.S. forces attacking and seizing Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro earlier this month, Barry Blacklock's phone began buzzing. The Calgarian had lived in Venezuela for 17 years, becoming a permanent resident and working in the energy sector before leaving in 2009. That night I was getting emails from friends in Canada and since then, 50, 60 different WhatsApp messages, emails, phone calls from people, he said, during a video call interview from Mexico.

According to Trump, Maduro was responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs and fueled the overdose deaths of countless Americans. Critics have pushed back on this, arguing even Drug Enforcement Administration data shows virtually no fentanyl comes from Venezuela and very little cocaine comes in compared to Mexico, a country where a large percentage of fentanyl does come from.

There was once a time when the White House Press Secretary retweeting accounts of the novel deployment of high-tech weaponry against human targets would have been global news, but what goes unsaid is that in this previous timeline, the press secretary would have been citing an actual source, with a real story to share, rather than a piece of propaganda that has clearly been manufactured for an obvious purpose.

The scene in the East Room of the White House last Friday was almost like something out of a medieval court. At the center was an emperor U.S. President Donald Trump euphoric after his country's military operation in which U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, and surrounded by his top advisers. Around him were executives from the major multinational oil companies, who had come from around the world to pay homage and vie for a piece of Venezuela's energy sector.

Trump has made no secret of his strongly held desire to be awarded the Nobel peace prize, the winner of which is selected by an independent five-person committee in Oslo. After the US launched airstrikes and a raid in Venezuela that led to the seizure of its leader, Nicolas Maduro, Machado last week told Fox she wanted to give it to him [Trump] and share it with him on behalf of the Venezuelan people.

The word loot entered the English language from Hindi in the late eighteenth century, as the rapacious East India Company plundered its way across the subcontinent. It was a trading company, not a state but it had the imprimatur of the English crown and its own large private army, mingling commerce and military force and opening the way for British imperial dominance of India.