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Venezuelan President Grants Himself New List of Powers in Response to "Threats" Last Friday, May 13, the President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro signed a new decree establishing an economic emergency that extended the original decree made in January 2016, but which included something called a “state of exception” this time around. The state of exception is intended to allow the government to take “exceptional” measures to control the country’s crisis, as well as to protect the Venezuelan people from whatever the government may consider a threat. But it’s still not clear what Maduro is going to do with such tremendous...

If nations could have biographies, Venezuela's would read something like this: After a rocky adolescence, Vennie got his life straightened out, got an education, a good job, and lived a fairly comfortable life. However, in his dotage, he was suckered by a succession of con artists and blew through all his savings, ending his days penniless and bitter. That, in a nutshell, is pretty much what Hugo Chavez and his socialist caudillo successors have done to the country. By Latin American standards, Venezuela used to a prosperous and stable nation. Venezuela possesses one of the largest petroleum reserves in the...

Citizens turned out in massive crowds to add their signatures to the recall referendum against Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro. And for good reason. The country is in a state of paralysis: frequent blackouts; food, medicine and vaccine scarcities; closed-down factories and frequent looting. Chaos and anarchy hang over the nation that not so long ago was the most rich and advanced in Latin America. Without a doubt the fault of the country's dire situation is on the late president Hugo Chávez. His socialist policies devastated Venezuela's flourishing economy. But in a less obvious way, Venezuelan citizens are also to blame....

Life isn’t much fun these days in the world’s socialist paradise. If you had to choose a country you didn’t want to live in, Venezuela would be near the top of the list. Corrupt, dysfunctional, bankrupt, crime-ridden, drug-infested, short of practically every basic commodity, it can’t keep the lights on, keep the government running or brew its own beer. Last weekend six army officers were arrested for stealing goats from a farm because they were hungry. Venezuela has become the basket case of the western hemisphere, a case study on how not to run a country and a living example...

It's come to this: The country with the largest oil reserves in the world can't afford to brew its own beer, stay in its own time zone, or even have its own people show up to work more than two times a week. Venezuela, in other words, is well past the point of worrying that its economy might collapse. It already has. That's the only way to describe an economy that the International Monetary Fund thinks is going to shrink 8 percent and have 720 percent inflation this year. And that's not even the worst of it. No, that's the...

The Socialist Utopia has come to Venezuela and so has triple-digit inflation. Inflation is soaring at about 65%, murder rates are the second highest in the world, they don’t have food, chocolate,cooking oil, sugar, beer, shampoo, chicken, beef or even toilet paper. Businesses put the blame on the socialist government’s economic policies and the government blames it on everyone else. A number of U.S. movie stars have gone to Venezuela many times to applaud their regime and compare their economy to ours. Sean Penn was one. ... American leftists cheered the Socialist government and the social justice he forced on...

Under Bernie Sanders, the United States of America would become a failed state such as Venezuela If nations could have biographies, Venezuela’s would read something like this: After a rocky adolescence, Vennie got his life straightened out, got an education, a good job, and lived a fairly comfortable life. However, in his dotage, he was suckered by a succession of con artists and blew through all his savings, ending his days penniless and bitter. That, in a nutshell, is pretty much what Hugo Chavez and his socialist caudillo successors have done to the country. By Latin American standards, Venezuela used...

The U.S. government on Friday barred its employees from traveling to the Mexican resort city of Acapulco, where a rise in homicides attributed to drug gangs has made it one of the world’s deadliest cities in recent years. The new travel guidelines posted online by the State Department extended a ban that already covered nearly the entire state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located and which has been a flashpoint of drug violence. American government employees previously could go to Acapulco as long as they traveled by air instead of land. They are still allowed to visit the Guerrero state...

One America News Network and Gravis Marketing, a nonpartisan research firm, conducted a random survey of 857 likely Republican Primary voters and 1,134 likely Democratic Primary voters. The poll has a margin of error of ± 3.3% for Republicans and ± 2.9% for Democrats, all at the 95% confidence level. The poll was conducted on April 5th and 6th. The total may not round to 100% because of rounding. The polls were conducted using automated telephone calls (IVR technology), with the results weighted by relevant voting demographics. The poll was conducted for One America News Network.

US Ambassador Robert Ford resigned from his State Department post a month ago, after a long and difficult time as the envoy to Syria. Ford showed great personal courage in his service while Bashar al-Assad instigated attacks on Western embassies and eventually provoked a massive civil war which has turned into a regional threat, thanks to the collapse of his power in large regions of Syria. The collapse of American policy in Syria over the past year was presumed to have prompted Ford’s departure, which he confirms with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview today.This is interesting for more...

Why Syria Can't Be Fixed The root cause of the conflict is Islam. December 17, 2015 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. Obama is betting the last of his foreign policy cred on beating ISIS by fixing Syria through a peace process that brings together Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and just about everybody who is anybody in the international terrorism and regime change racket to fight the ISIS war that he doesn't want to fight. There's just one little problem. Nobody on the guest list...

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban insurgency has spread through more of Afghanistan than at any point since 2001, according to data compiled by the United Nations as well as interviews with numerous local officials in areas under threat. In addition, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan over the past two weeks has evacuated four of its 13 provincial offices around the country — the most it has ever done for security reasons — according to local officials in the affected areas. The data, compiled in early September — even before the latest surge in violence in northern Afghanistan —...

Israel’s defense minister on Wednesday warned that Iran, an ostensible partner in the US-led fight against the Islamic State, has nothing but ill intentions toward Iraq and has cynically perpetuated the conflict in order to ensure that the country remains a failed state. “He who did not allow stability in Iraq since 2003 is Iran,” Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said at the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies’ annual security conference. “From its perspective, a strong Iraq runs counter to its own interests. From its perspective Iraq needs to be weak, bleeding.” Ya’alon said that Tehran’s primary goal...

In 2013, a blog post by CNN's Christiane Amanpour wondered whether America is a failed state. http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/01/is-america-a-failed-state/ America may be the only country that openly encourages foreigners to come to the country and violate its immigration laws. There is mass unemployment. There are riots in America's streets. The majority of American adults are not married. The current generation of politicians is more corrupt than any previous generation of politicians. What is happening to America?

The crisis in Yemen deepened on Thursday as officials reported that both the president and his government had resigned.

Houthi fighters entered Yemen's presidential palace after a brief clash with the compound's security guards, witnesses and security sources told Reuters, a day after some of the worst battles in the capital in years.... "This is a coup. There is no other word to describe what is happening but a coup," Saleh al-Jamalani, a Yemeni army colonel, told The Associated Press. He said that the rebels likely had the assistance of elements inside the current government, headed by president Abdu Mansour Haddi. ....Houthis have also received forms of assistance from Iran as well, turning Yemen into the latest battleground between...

When the Obama administration and NATO, acting under the purported “authority” of a United Nations resolution, backed al-Qaeda-linked jihadist rebels and helped overthrow the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, a former U.S. terror-war ally, Libya was supposed to have been “liberated.” Instead, it spiraled into deeper and bloodier civil war, and has now essentially become a terror state — with groups ranging from the Islamic State (ISIS) to al-Qaeda openly roaming the capital and operating training centers across large swaths of the nation under their control. Libya today, following what analysts and even former U.S. generals described as Obama “switching sides”...

Breaking News: Rebels in Yemen have seized the presidential palace in the capital city of Sanaa, according to the army commander. http://fxn.ws/1C2Q7Fq For further developments on this story, stay tuned to Fox News Channel.

In what Yemen's information minister described as an "attempted coup" Shia Houthi rebels (backed by Hizbollah and Iran) have surrounded the Yemeni Presidential Palace putting them, as The Telegraph reports, in direct confrontation with al-Qaeda and the Yemen government., Amid hopes of a compromise deal or cease-fire in the conflict that has been under way since September when the Houthis swept into Sana'a, the latest reports are the nation has gone from bad to worse... YEMENI PM SAID SURROUNDED BY HOUTHI MILITIAS: CNN YEMEN INFORMATION MINISTER SAYS GOVERNMENT HAS LOST CONTROL OVER COUNTRY -- CNN Oil prices, interestingly, fell on...

<p>The leader of a criminal gang suspected of conspiring with Mexican police to kill 43 missing students in the violent southwestern state of Guerrero has been detained, authorities said on Friday.</p> <p>The students went missing near Iguala, Guerrero on Sept. 26 after clashing with police and masked men, sending shockwaves across Mexico and prompting thousands to march in the beach resort of Acapulco on Friday to demand answers about their fate.</p>