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Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London, has blamed the turmoil in Venezuela on Hugo Chávez’s unwillingness to execute “oligarchs” after he came to power. ... “One of the things that Chávez did when he came to power, he didn’t kill all the oligarchs. There was about 200 families who controlled about 80% of the wealth in Venezuela,” Livingstone told Talk Radio. “He allowed them to live, to carry on. I suspect a lot of them are using their power and control over imports and exports to make it difficult and to undermine Maduro.”

US Ambassador Nikki Haley has called for international action to address the crisis in Venezuela, after a US-backed proposal for regional mediation failed to win support at the Organization of American States. (The US-backed proposal failed to overcome opposition from the 14 similar national jurisdictions that benefit from turmoil and discounted Venezuelan oil.) "The tragic situation in Venezuela calls out for action. The Venezuelan people are starving while their government tramples their democracy". //Snipp// The Judiciary has sold out and military command is wavering as the country, pummeled by the plunge in oil prices and the Hugo Chávez, legacy of...

Full title: New Homeland Security Records Reveal Top Officials Were Exempted from Strict Ban Placed on Web-Based Personal Email Accounts Despite Heightened Security Concerns Jeh Johnson granted special waiver on first day of official ban. Practice Continued Even After Clinton Email Revelations. (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced it obtained 693 pages of Department of Homeland Security records revealing that Secretary Jeh Johnson and 28 other agency officials used government computers to access personal web-based email accounts despite an agency-wide ban due to heightened security concerns. The documents also reveal that Homeland Security officials misled Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA)...

BARINAS, Venezuela, June 15 (Reuters) - He had just left his office by car and was passing a nearby church when the state security vans swooped in on Wilmer Azuaje. Put on a military plane hours later on May 3, the 40-year-old regional lawmaker - one of the best-known opposition figures in the rural home state of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - has not been seen since.

Bernardo Álvarez Herrera, a longtime ambassador to the United States who led Hugo Chávez’s diplomats in defending Venezuela’s socialist revolution to skeptical foreign governments, died on Thursday in Caracas. He was 60. President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela announced the death but did not give the cause.

Political junkies will recall with a giggle the less than distinguished career of Cynthia McKinney, the six-term congressperson from Georgia who was an embarrassment even to far lefties who are usually immune to embarrassment. (In fact, when she returned to the House in 2005 after having been defeated for re-election in the Democratic primary in 2002, the Democratic House leadership refused to restore her committee seniority. She was defeated again in the Democratic primary in 2006.) Among other things, McKinney was a 9/11 “truther,” and also speculated that the CIA had a role in the killing of rapper Tupac Shakur....

Venezuela’s embattled socialist government is steadily moving the country toward the abyss, and the escalating crisis is taking on increasingly ominous tones. Venezuelans are caught in a fast-spinning economic spiral that has already devastated living standards and created a large-scale humanitarian crisis. But as Venezuelans take to the streets, so far the government has responded with measures that exacerbate tensions and make a peaceful political solution increasingly difficult. President Nicolas Maduro, the heir to the late President Hugo Chavez, was elected by popular vote in 2013. But the Venezuelan system of government can no longer be called a democracy. The...

The Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez inaugurated the mural along with members of the community, artists and activists from the U.S. and Latin America. Rodriguez was also accompanied by members of the African American community in the Bronx. During the inauguration people shouted, “You can see him, you can feel him! Chavez is present!"

New evidence suggests Iran received help from Venezuela with its nuclear program despite a decade of U.N.-mandated sanctions aimed at curbing the rouge regime’s controversial nuclear and ballistic missile programs. A 2009 document obtained by Brazil’s leading weekly, Veja magazine, shows late dictator President Hugo Chavez signing off on the release of funds to help Iran with its nuclear ambitions. Specifically, the document states the funds were to be designated for the import of equipment for a gunpowder factory and the development of production plants for nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose, elements used in rocket propulsion for Iran’s government. There is also...

In the midst of economic crisis, the government a lot of money is spent on a cake for the "birthday" of Hugo Chavez, in a "celebration" that was held Thursday at the CDLM (Cuartel Mountain, January 23, Caracas) and also it included singers to llanera music. At least 1.20 meters and 90 kilos more ingredients were required for the "architectural replica" of the headquarters of the mountain that ended in the "whiskers" of Nicholas. Below is a list of the budget for the cake of "absent": Kilo of wheat flour: Approximately 2,000 Bolivars (Second-hand in Catia or Petare, by shortages)....

Not long ago, the regime that Hugo Chávez founded was an object of fascination for progressives worldwide, attracting its share of another-world-is-possible solidarity activists. Today, as the country sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how this regime — so obviously thuggish in hindsight — could have conned so many international observers for so long.

A humanitarian crisis, the likes of which have never been seen in the Western Hemisphere, is brewing in Venezuela and it will be inevitable in a few weeks. Much has been written recently about the crisis in Venezuela. During the last week, the world’s leading media outlets have amply reported the shortages of food, medicine and other basic supplies in the country. Unfortunately, despite some great reporting by various journalists, the true extent and the reasons for the country’s desperate situation have not yet been clearly understood by the media and the international community. The majority of those reporting on...

Venezuelans struggling through an economic crisis got a rare bit of good news Thursday when the country’s largest brewery announced it had obtained a loan to resume production. Polar breweries, maker of the country’s best-known beer brands, shut down production at its four plants in April, blaming a barley shortage. It said it was unable to import the key ingredient because it could not access dollars under socialist President Nicolás Maduro’s tight currency controls. But with bars and liquor stores running dry, Polar said it had reached a deal for a $35-million loan from Spanish bank BBVA, putting up its...

Venezuelans on Tuesday woke up to discover that the government-controlled price of corn flour -- used to make corn patty arepas, a staple of local cuisine -- has risen 900 percent. The socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro had kept the price of corn flour frozen for 15 months at 19 bolivares a kilogram (two pounds).

As pure desperation has set in, crime has becomes inevitable. A man accused of mugging people in the streets of Caracas was surrounded by a mob of onlookers, beaten and set on fire, who published a pixeled-out but still graphic video of the man burning as mob justice is now the supreme arbiter of who lives and who dies: "Roberto Fuentes Bernal, 42, was reportedly caught trying to mug passersby in the Venezuelan capital and before police arrived at the scene, the crowd took the law into their own hands." The video can be seen here. Now, in the latest...

As for March, there was an increase in yearly prices due to inflation — a 582.9 percent increase for food,

"He gave his life for the field worker," said Adan Ramirez.

Three years ago today, I wept for my friend Chavez and myself, for the people of Venezuela and the world.In 2006, shortly after my first peace camp in Crawford, Texas to confront the person who I felt murdered my son Casey: George Bush, I was invited to Caracas, Venezuela to attend the World Social Forum. Amazingly, at the time I really had no idea that the World Social Forum was about socialism, and I really didn't know much more about President Hugo Chavez other than that he was a very vocal opponent of my opponents: George Bush and the U.S....

It's easy to underestimate Donald Trump. The other Republican candidates in the race continue to do so, writing him off as a clown, a charlatan, a fool. Today, David French of National Review writes him off as a conventional Democrat: Trump doesn't threaten the Republican establishment because he's too conservative or too populist. He threatens the Republican establishment because he belongs in the other party. There's truth to this - there's a reason that Code Pink essentially endorsed Trump over the weekend, after Trump veered into Iraq trutherism and blamed George W. Bush for 9/11. And Trump, as I've written...

As if the politically charged streets of Venezuela's capital weren't plastered enough with the gaze of Hugo Chávez , supporters of the late socialist leader are now vowing to put up images of the "eternal commander" on every street corner. Caracas Mayor Jorge Rodríguez gave the order at a rally Thursday to protest the decision by the new opposition-controlled congress to banish from the neoclassical legislature building all images of Chávez and his mentor, independence hero Simon Bolívar. ... Opponents say the socialists' outrage is being feigned to distract from the economic crisis that led to the government's thrashing in...