Free Republic

Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death. His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals. Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid...

SAN CASIMIRO, Venezuela — Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death. His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals. Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families...

Michael Morell, former acting head of the CIA, became a political animal in August 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. This month, he came to grips with the consequences of that decision -- that it might have played into President Donald Trump's distrust of the intelligence community. It is possible, he told the Review Journal, "I played a role in that." Back to last year. In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Morell not only endorsed Clinton, he also warned that, to the eyes of an intelligence analyst, candidate Trump could be considered "an unwitting agent...

Venezuela is rapidly collapsing under its dictator’s extreme folly and malevolence. Changing market conditions will accelerate the demise. What next? Some further research confirms that sanctions are unnecessary. Shortages to the Point of FamineThe situation is so desperate in the capital that the zoo animals that are not starving to death are being routinely rustled and slaughtered for food. Venezuelan journalist Sabrina Martín reports in the Panama Post that dogs, cats, and pigeons are being hunted in Caracas (and we assume most everywhere else). Through Twitter, Muchacho (Mayor of Chacao in Caracas) reported… …there are people “hunting” cats and dogs...

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro looked to the world of digital currency to circumvent U.S.-led financial sanctions, announcing on Sunday the launch of the "petro" backed by oil reserves to shore up a collapsed economy. The leftist leader offered few specifics about the currency launch or how the struggling OPEC member would pull off such a feat, but he declared to cheers that "the 21st century has arrived!" "Venezuela will create a cryptocurrency," backed by oil, gas, gold and diamond reserves, Maduro said in his regular Sunday televised broadcast, a five-hour showcase of Christmas songs and dancing. The petro, he...

The health crisis in socialist Venezuela is now reaching apocalyptic proportions as hospitals and pharmacies have just a fraction of the medicine and resources required to give people adequate medical treatment. This according to an extensive report from the independent newspaper El Nacional, entitled “Venezuela’s Health Holocaust,” which tells the stories of Venezuelans suffering at the hands of the country’s collapsed hospital system.

A Nobel Prize-winning economist says that Bitcoin should be outlawed. He states that the currency holds no real function and can easily be brought down by regulation. ROUGE CURRENCY The 2001 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Joseph Stiglitz, voiced some strong opinions about Bitcoin in his latest interview with Bloomberg Television. Stiglitz is a former economic advisor to the Clinton Administration and chief economist of the World Bank; he currently serves as a Professor at Columbia University. Stiglitz told Bloomberg that “Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight.” He continued,...

North Korea’s ambassador to Venezuela, Ri Sung Gil, offered the fellow leftist nation financial advice at a discussion hosted by the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) last week. On Monday, North Korean state media praised Venezuela for showcasing works complimentary of the tyrannical Kim family at a recent book fair. According to BCV’s official site, Ri told the bank’s officials “that the government of the United States has expansionist interests in order to acquire the riches of strategic nations like Venezuela and North Korea, which have chosen a socialist economic and social model.”

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro looked to the world of digital currency to circumvent U.S.-led financial sanctions, announcing on Sunday the launch of the “petro” backed by oil reserves to shore up a collapsed economy.The leftist leader offered few specifics about the currency launch or how the struggling OPEC member would pull off such a feat, but he declared to cheers that “the 21st century has arrived!”

Venezuela has lots of Socialism, no food and no money. And when I say, "no money", I mean that literally. The Socialist failed state can't afford to pay to print its own money. Flashback: Socialism works until you run out of money to pay for the paper to print your moneyMillions of pounds of provisions, stuffed into three-dozen 747 cargo planes, arrived here from countries around the world in recent months to service Venezuela’s crippled economy. But instead of food and medicine, the planes carried another resource that often runs scarce here: bills of Venezuela’s currency, the bolivar. The shipments...

Former Caracas Mayor and prominent opposition leader Antonio Ledezma has escaped house arrest and fled to Colombia. Colombian immigration authorities say in a statement that Mr Ledezma entered the country legally on Friday by crossing the Simon Bolivar bridge separating the two countries.

Venezuela slipped inexorably towards a formal debt default Friday, with analysts saying it was all but inevitable for the sinking OPEC state... “One way or another, the government and PDVSA will default. We are in the end-game and it’s now become a matter of days, not weeks, until default is confirmed,” Edward Glossop of Capital Economics said in a note. A default would immediately cut Venezuela off from international financial markets, removing its capacity to borrow. Greatly complicating its situation, Washington has banned it from any new debt transactions in the US market.

Venezuela slipped inexorably towards a formal debt default Friday, with analysts saying it was all but inevitable for the sinking OPEC state which owes about $150 billion. "With Venezuela's state-owned oil company having reportedly failed to make a principal payment on a bond that has now matured, credit default swaps are likely to be triggered on Friday," market analysts Capital Economics said.

Longstanding fears of a Venezuela debt default crystallized Wednesday, as the political crisis engulfing the sinking OPEC state deepened with a meeting set at the UN Security Council and the EU eyeing an arms embargo. Investors were bracing for what looked to be an inevitable "credit event" that analysts said could arrive within days -- before a "refinancing and restructuring" of the debt called for by President Nicolas Maduro.

As if on cue, the work has begun to rehabilitate Fusion GPS’s image and normalize its dossier and its behavior. Axios wrote that this is all really normal, and that Glenn Simpson and others at Fusion GPS, many of whom are former senior Wall Street Journal reporters and editors, are just good old regular gumshoe ink-stained, unhappy people trying to make a living. Last week, Hillary Clinton went on the Daily Show to “explain” that it really was just opposition research. To be clear, there is neither anything normal about Fusion GPS dossier nor the way the firm goes about...

Just from the title, I bet you thought I was going to be talking about rabbits, right? Guess again. As the people of Venezuela continue to suffer from a lack of food and medical supplies under the yoke of their dictator, Nicolas Maduro did recently suggest that people begin eating rabbits. That idea didn’t go over very well, as most people consider them pets, though some of the more desperate certainly have resorted to that measure. But this is something different.Some of the people are hungry enough that they are breaking into the local zoos and slaughtering the animals...

The Fusion GPS news-for-hire scandal has not only led to the public identification of the source of the “Trump Dossier”—a for-profit company that provides opposition research to whoever could write big checks, which is staffed by four former Wall Street Journal reporters led by Glenn Simpson. The scandal has also lifted the lid off a sewer of corporate information warfare and opposition research that the flailing institutions of the mainstream press now regularly re-package as news, without ever saying where it came from—or who paid for it. While the idea that the products of paid opposition research are being main-lined...

President Nicolás Maduro on Thursday called for a restructuring of Venezuela’s foreign debt, blaming heightened U.S. sanctions by the Trump administration and potentially signaling a critical new phase in the country’s economic collapse. Maduro stopped short of declaring the kind of broad, messy default that analysts have feared in the oil-producing nation, and he said Venezuela would on Friday make a key $1.1 billion bond payment for its state energy firm, PDVSA.

Shelter is when your heart finds mine. So wont you come and abide deep within the covering of My armor against which there is no weapon and find "TRUE REFUGE " in the arms of Love . . . For as you call to me truly you shall find me and as you open your heart to me I will come in and it is then as one we share in the Kingdom I have promised you, for Zion is yours as is my undying love and as you enter into me you receive My everlasting promise of eternal forgiveness...

The confirmation this week that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid an opposition-research firm for a “dossier” on Donald Trump is bombshell news. More bombshells are to come. The Fusion GPS saga isn’t over. The Clinton-DNC funding is but a first glimpse into the shady election doings concealed within that oppo-research firm’s walls. We now know where Fusion got some of its cash, but the next question is how the firm used it. With whom did it work beyond former British spy Christopher Steele ? Whom did it pay? Who else was paying it? The answers are...