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For over two decades, Venezuela has served as a critical outpost for Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere, with reports detailing the group's entrenchment on Margarita Island and ties to the former regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. U.S. intelligence assessments and media investigations describe this presence as evolving from fundraising networks among the Lebanese diaspora in the 1980s to sophisticated operations involving training, smuggling, and financial schemes by the 2000s. Margarita Island, once a bustling tourist spot, has been highlighted as a primary hub, surpassing even the Tri-Border Area in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay for Hezbollah's regional activities. Training...

Confirmed Royal Jet flights from Abu Dhabi into Iran have intensified scrutiny of unverified claims that the United Arab Emirates released billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, including gold, to reduce its exposure to future Iranian attacks. The allegations, attributed exclusively to anonymous senior sources in Tehran, describe financial transfers designed to preserve an apparent pause in Iranian missile and drone strikes against Emirati territory during the wider 2026 United States-Iran confrontation. Flight-tracking data confirms that a Royal Jet Boeing 737-7KK Business Jet, registered A6-RJA, conducted short return flights from Abu Dhabi to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and Karaj’s Payam...

Over the past eighteen months, nearly every condition analysts have long said would erode the dollar's dominance arrived at once. War broke out in the Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz has closed, reopened, and closed again, and remains shut as this is written. Iran began charging transit tolls denominated in yuan. Indian refiners started settling Russian crude in yuan and dirhams, the first time a top-five oil importer structurally routed around the dollar for energy. China's cross-border payment system posted record volumes, clearing 1.22 trillion yuan in a single day in March. Central banks bought gold at a pace...

GFN – BEIJING: China imported about 173 tonnes of gold in June, the highest monthly total since March 2024 and the third straight monthly increase, according to Bloomberg and Chinese customs data. Ironically or not, this is after the western media has been pulling its hair out, saying that China has made retail purchases of gold illegal due to its deleveraging of trading on the SGE. The June increase pushed China’s gold imports for the first half of 2026 to roughly 820 tonnes. That was nearly double the total from a year earlier and the second-highest first-half figure on record,...

A former CIA officer in Virginia is accused of stealing tens of millions of dollars in gold bars and foreign currency from the very agency he worked for, according to an FBI affidavit and a source familiar with the matter. David Rush was arrested last week in Virginia on one charge of theft of public money. He has not yet entered a plea and remains behind bars pending a detention hearing in the case. The FBI alleges Rush became a senior executive government employee with top-secret clearance by lying repeatedly on applications about his military service and education, falsely saying...

Q: Have you visited Fort Knox? BESSENT: I am happy to say, all gold is present and accounted for! The US has the LARGEST pile of gold in the world, over $1 trillion.

The Number You Need To Understand First Before we start, one number puts everything in context. Fort Knox contains 147,341,858 fine troy ounces of gold. At current market prices near $4,000 per ounce, these reserves represent around $600 billion. But at the legal book value of $42.22 per ounce, fixed since 1973, the assets are officially valued at only $6.22 billion on the Treasury’s books. America owns $667 billion worth of gold. But it is recorded on the books at $6 billion. That $660 billion gap is the thread that connects everything that follows. January 2025: The Audit That Was...

This video explores the spectacular remains of the Roman mines at Las Médulas, Spain. The Roman Gold Mine that Ate Mountains | 9:09 toldinstone | 21,693 views | July 10, 2026

Precious metals investors saw their holdings skyrocket in value in 2024 and 2025, which was great news for them, but bad news for some dealers, such as Rosland Capital LLC. Rosland Capital filed for a Chapter 11 liquidation facing distress from declining profitability compounded by an unsustainable order fulfillment model amid record precious metals prices.

Central bank gold statistics: Central banks remain committed to gold PDF 0.24 mb Central banks were back in buying mode in May – and with a little more spring in their step. Based on the latest reported data, official gold reserves increased by a net 41t during the month, with purchases once again concentrated among a familiar cast of buyers (Chart 1). Much of the activity was driven by Poland (18t) and China (10t), with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan also continuing their monthly net gold buying activity. Singapore also rejoined the list of buyers, reporting a net purchase of 4t, its...

Russia is now "so deeply invested in the Maduro regime that the only realistic option is to double down." Financial Times' Alexander Gabuev says that Rosneft owns two offshore gas fields in Venezuela and holds stakes in assets boasting more than 20 million tonnes of crude. Caracas owes Rosneft USD 3 billion. Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido last month declared himself interim president, winning the backing of the United States. Russia, meanwhile, supported Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolás Maduro, who has led the oil-rich nation since 2013. The Kremlin is extending help to Maduro while the United States is imposing sanctions...

Costa Rica’s illegal gold mining problem is no longer confined to the long-running Crucitas debate, the Colegio de Geólogos de Costa Rica warned, calling for a national strategy to track gold, strengthen state controls and respond differently to each mining region. The professional association said the country needs a technical plan for gold mining that goes beyond emergency police operations and political arguments over whether to reopen large-scale extraction. Its proposal centers on traceability, tighter regulation of processing plants, stronger oversight by the Dirección de Geología y Minas, and formalization in communities where mining is already a source of family...

The battle over what counts as money — and who gets to control it — just took a dramatic turn. China’s biggest banks are shutting down retail paper gold trading just as gold has pulled back sharply from record highs, signaling that the fight over gold is no longer only about price. It is about market structure, settlement power, and the future of money itself. In June, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China IDCBF -7.31% ▼ , one of the largest banks in the world, said it would stop offering intermediary services for individual precious-metals trading linked to the Shanghai...

There is an increasing amount of chatter regarding a surge in open interest for deeply out-of-the-money options on COMEX gold. Whether or not there's anything substantial behind these speculative trades remains to be seen. COMEX Gold Options Open Interest And Market Speculation Let's start with what we know. Below is a screenshot from the CME website that shows total open interest in call options on Dec26 COMEX gold. As I type, that contract is trading at about $4100, but as you can see, there are a substantial number of open call options from $10,000 to $20,000. For these to be...

Lava. Ash. Horrifying death. All are known and expected outputs from an active volcano. But one volcano deep in the farthest, frozen reaches of our planet marches to the beat of a slightly different drum. On Ross Island in the Ross Sea, a deep bay in Antarctica, Mount Erebus fumes about 1,350 kilometers (840 miles) from the Geographic South Pole. The world's southernmost active volcano, it bubbles with a permanent lake of blazing lava. And in the gas constantly pouring forth from this gate to the underworld, scientists found microscopic particles of crystalline, elemental gold. According to a 1991 research...

"People don't use it to make serious trades, they don't use it to buy their dinner and pay at the supermarket...What it does is allows crooks to move money around..."

In 1995, remarkable contents of a 17th-century shipwreck began to be discovered by divers of the South West Maritime Archaeological Group off Salcombe Bay. The finds consist of over 400 gold coins of the Sa'dian Sharifs of Morocco in addition to ingots, jewellery as well as other items including Dutch pewter and pottery subsequently acquired by the British Museum. Although the ship has not survived, the divers discovered remnants of wood, rope and lead that were parts of its infrastructure. The finds from this shipwreck are significant for several reasons: the gold is clearly a bullion hoard and the number...

Turns out all that glitters is not gold. Selling in the precious metal just keeps getting worse, with the GLD ETF now down 25% from its intraday record in February. Options trading in the fund has turned bearish in a hurry and is now pointing toward further downside. Even after another 3% drop on Wednesday, traders sold more calls than they bought and of the $200 million in options premium traded, $130 million was tied to puts, according to data from ThinkOrSwim and SpotGamma. Of the top 10 contracts traded, eight were puts, and more than half of the put...

The oval-set stone, deep blue in colour, was framed by exquisite filigree: thin gold wires twisted and soldered into spirals, accented with tiny granulated beads.Although the blue "stone" is likely coloured glass rather than sapphire, such materials were prized for their symbolic power -- believed to cool inner heat, preserve chastity, and confer divine protection.With its rich decoration and small size, experts believe the ring once belonged to a woman of high status.The discovery was made during extensive excavations in the Norwegian city of Tønsberg, specifically in Prestegaten and its surrounding streets, where archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural...

The late chairman of the Federal Reserve, who died this morning at 100, believed that ‘gold and economic freedom are inseparable.’… … In the strongest terms, Greenspan condemned those who would redistribute national income through fiscal overspending. He deemed it a scheme for the “hidden” confiscation of wealth. “Gold stands in the way of this insidious process,” he wrote. “It stands as a protector of property rights.” In Greenspan’s view, that explained the “almost hysterical antagonism toward gold” among big government statists.… … Here I am proud and grateful to acknowledge that I was considered by Alan Greenspan to be...