#venezuela

#venezuela

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.

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.

Pacing inside the Kremlin last weekend, as news feeds churned out minute-by-minute reports of Donald's Trump's Venezuelan coup, Vladimir Putin may have been wondering what it would mean for the price of oil. Crude oil has lubricated the Russian economy for decades far more than gas exports to Europe and so the threat of falling oil prices, prompted by US plans for control of Venezuela's rigs, will have been a source of concern.

This week: The Trump administration kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, Emily Peck, and guest Lizzie O'Leary, host of What Next: TBD, discuss Trump's rationale for the attack and the complex economics around Venezuelan oil that come with it. Then, Lizzie breaks down the unsettling trend of AI-generated nudes of real people, including many children, being created by X's chatbot Grok and Elon Musk's lackadaisical response to it.

The Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been removed from power-captured in the dead of night and arraigned before an American judge. That's the good news. But as is so often the case with the actions of Donald Trump, it isn't the only storyline. The United States president immediately threw cold water on the idea that the raid could pave the way for a rapid democratic transition under the leadership of last year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado.

At the White House, President Donald Trump vows American intervention in Venezuela will pour billions of dollars into the country's infrastructure, revive its once-thriving oil industry and eventually deliver a new age of prosperity to the Latin American nation. Here at a sprawling street market in the capital, though, utility worker Ana Calderón simply wishes she could afford the ingredients to make a pot of soup.

Several helicopters were dropping bombs, and the windows shattered from the shockwaves,

Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York on Friday introduced a bill called the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026, which would bar federal elected officials, political appointees, Executive Branch employees, and congressional staff from making trades on prediction markets when they have nonpublic information related to the transaction, or might be able to obtain it via their official duties.

US Southern Command said in a statement that Marines and sailors, working in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, launched from the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and captured the tanker, Olina, "without incident." It appears to be the first time that the US has directly acknowledged the Ford's involvement in the five boarding and seizure operations that began in early December. However, the government has indicated that the carrier was used for at least one of the other missions.

Donald Trump just carried out an external coup in Venezuela and kidnapped the president of that country-and he's only getting started. In the wake of this violent assertion of American dominance over the Western Hemisphere, Trump has started threatening other neighboring countries, promising interventions in Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia. And, most pertinently for Europe, he's renewing his vows to annex Greenland.

Molly Riley (White House) Donald Trump remains obsessed with drug trafficking despite having decapitated, according to himself, one of the world's largest drug trafficking organizations with the arrest of Nicolas Maduro in a lightning military operation in Venezuelan territory. The U.S. president stated in an interview on Fox News with host Sean Hannity: We have knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water. We are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels.

the only constraint to his power as president of the US is my own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me, Trump said, adding: I'm not looking to hurt people. He went on to concede I do in regards to whether his administration needed to adhere to international law, but said: It depends on what your definition of international law is.

This week, Sanchez did not wait for a joint EU statement to issue judgment on the US's illegal military intervention to capture the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro: he swiftly joined Latin American countries in condemning it. A few hours later he went even further, saying the operation in Caracas represented a terrible precedent and a very dangerous one [which] reminds us of past aggressions, and pushes the world toward a future of uncertainty and insecurity, similar to what we already experienced after other invasions driven by the thirst for oil.

U.S. forces invaded Venezuela on Saturday and abducted President Nicolas Maduro, who pleaded not guilty to federal drug trafficking charges in New York on Monday. Maduro's vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, has been sworn in as acting president. After the invasion, Trump has gushed about Venezuela's oil reserves. We're going to keep the oil, he said. The president has also suggested that the U.S. government will reimburse American oil companies who rebuilding Venezuela's energy industry.