Amid the immense confusion surrounding the US strikes on Venezuela, the seizure of the president, Nicolás Maduro, and Donald Trump’s announcement that the US will “run” the country and “take back the oil”, one thing is clear – they set a truly chilling precedent.
The US has a grim history of interference, invasion and occupation in the region, but the early hours of Saturday saw its first major military attack on South American land. “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Mr Trump declared. The decision to unilaterally attack another country and abduct its leader – days after he publicly sought an off-ramp – has still wider repercussions. It should alarm us all.
Venezuelans have endured a repressive, kleptocratic and incompetent regime under Mr Maduro, widely believed to have stolen the last election. They now face profound uncertainty at best. Mr Trump has suggested that Mr Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, would follow US instructions, and dismissed the rightwing opposition leader and Nobel prize-winner María Corina Machado as a plausible replacement. But Ms Rodríguez, now interim president, has so far struck a defiant tone – and other parts of the decapitated regime are more hardline.
A man who won power promising to abandon foreign wars now says he is “not afraid of boots on the ground”. Rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War was more than posturing. He does not see the world’s superpower as policeman; he is turning it into a rogue state. He believes the US’s might allows it to do as it wishes with minimal cost: witness the strikes on Nigeria, on Iran’s nuclear facilities and elsewhere. He promises that Venezuelan oil means this latest episode “won’t cost us a penny”.
Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who was given political asylum in Cuba after her 1979 escape from a U.S. prison where she had been serving a life sentence for killing a police officer, has died, her daughter and the Cuban government said.
As uncertainty simmers in Venezuela, interim President Delcy Rodríguez has taken the place of her ally President Nicolás Maduro, captured by the United States in a nighttime military operation.
A helicopter crash on Jan. 2 claimed the lives of four family members from Oregon in a remote area of Pinal County, Arizona. Officials said the aircraft struck a slackline stretched across a canyon just before 11 a.m. local time.
A day after the U.S. military toppled Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump appeared to have his eyes trained on the next target for American intervention: Greenland.
Thousands of tents supplied by China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to shelter displaced Palestinians in Gaza offer only limited protection against rain and wind, an assessment compiled by shelter specialists in the devastated territory has revealed.
The Kremlin is preparing to massacre civilians then use fake news messaging in state-run and co-opted international media to pin blame for the mass casualty event on Ukraine, Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (SZRU) said on Friday in a rare public statement.
