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Jose Luis Sanchez Valera, a 43-year-old retired Venezuelan police officer, was lured to a hotel by two women, then robbed and murdered on November 28.. The killers tortured Sanchez to hand over his apartment keys, then raided the property: they told his niece, with whom he lived, they were Tren de Aragua.. Tren de Aragua is one of the most feared gangs in Latin America: it was born in Venezuela around 2012, and the Miami murder is the first by the gang in the US ... A former Venezuelan police officer lay dead in his silver Toyota 4Runner in a...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.” That disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own...

Heavily armed criminal groups have moved in the past month to residential and commercial areas from slums in the city’s hills, and violence has exploded over the past 24 hours with firefights breaking out in at least five populous neighborhoods. President Nicolás Maduro’s government has not mentioned any casualties as a result of the clashes. Human rights activists in the area have said at least four civilians were killed on Wednesday and half a dozen have been wounded. The gangs want to control one of the main corridors linking the capital with the west of the country, said a human...

[MercoPress.com] VENEZUELA : Mysterious outbreak of hemorrhagic fever syndrome in Venezuela kills ten "An outbreak of a mysterious hemorrhagic fever syndrome in the Venezuelan state of Aragua and the country’s capital Caracas has left ten people dead in the last three weeks." Similar to Ebola, this syndrome causes patients to experience high fever, skin rashes and bleeding. It has been described as an aggressive disease that leads to a fatal deterioration of health within 72 hours. Doctors have urged government authorities to declare a state of emergency in Aragua state; however they have received resistance from a surprising source. The...

The electoral council in Venezuela says a fire in its main warehouse near the capital, Caracas, has destroyed most of the voting machines held there. Almost 50,000 voting machines and 582 computers used in the country's elections went up in flames, electoral council chief Tibisay Lucena said. She did not say if parliamentary elections due later this year could be affected by the loss of the machines. She also asked prosecutors to investigate the cause of the fire.

Nicolás Maduro, the embattled leader of Venezuela, said Monday that authorities in Caracas captured 13 “terrorists”—including two U.S. citizens-- in a failed invasion attempt that he said was no doubt orchestrated by the Trump administration. Maduro made a nationwide broadcast on state television and held up a pair of U.S. passports that he said were recovered. He read off the names and birthdays of the two Americans.

A former Green Beret has taken responsibility for what he claimed was a failed attack Sunday aimed at overthrowing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and that the socialist government said ended with eight dead. Jordan Goudreau’s comments in an interview with an exiled Venezuelan journalist capped a bizarre day that started with reports of a pre-dawn amphibious raid near the South American country’s heavily guarded capital. An AP investigation published Friday found that Goudreau had been working with a retired Venezuelan army general now facing U.S. narcotics charges to train dozens of deserting Venezuelan soldiers at secret camps inside neighboring Colombia....

FROM ME: Social Media has been reporting today that Miss Philippines, Samantha Lo, is really a US Citizen and was trying to travel from France to Venezuela with a FAKE Filipino passport. ARTICLE: The 2019 Miss Grand International held its welcome ceremony and press conference with its official candidates at TELEVEN TV Station in Caracas, Venezuela on October 15, 2019. Filipino beauty pageants were worried why Samantha Ashley Lo, 26, of the Philippines was not among the candidates who participated in the event. Neither Miss Grand International nor Binibining Pilipinas Charities, Incorporated has released a statement about Lo’s absence. According...

Widespread electricity outages could become the new normal in Venezuela, experts have warned, as the country struggled to restore power after a massive blackout that left millions without power or access to the internet. Blackouts plunge Venezuela into chaos as minister blames saboteurs Energy minister Freddy Brito said on Tuesday morning that power had been restored in Caracas and at least five states after the outage which the government blamed on an “electromagnetic attack” at hydroelectric dams in the south of the country. Around 80% of Venezuela’s grid is served by hydropower. But energy analysts were deeply suspicious of government...

CARACAS (Reuters) - As Venezuela’s five-day power blackout left homes without water, Lilibeth Tejedor found herself looking for it on Monday in the last place she would have imagined - a drain pipe feeding into a river carrying sewage through the capital, Caracas. Tejedor, 28, joined dozens of people who had flocked to the Guaire river, which snakes along the bottom of a sharp ravine alongside Caracas’ main highway, to fill up a four-gallon (15 litre) plastic container. Unlike the fetid liquid flowing through the Guaire river, the water emerging from the pipe was at least clear. Those who gathered...

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos and members of his team have been detained in Caracas, Venezuela after dispute President Nicolas Maduro "didn't like the questions" they were asking during an interview, the network tweeted Monday night.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela plunged deeper into turmoil on Monday as security forces put down a pre-dawn uprising by national guardsmen that triggered violent street protests and the Supreme Court outlawed the opposition-controlled congress’ defiant new leadership. The mutiny triggered protests in a poor neighborhood just a few miles (kilometers) from Venezuela’s presidential palace. It was dispersed with tear gas as residents set fire to a barricade of trash and chanted demands that President Nicolas Maduro leave power. The military said in a statement said that it had recovered all the weapons and captured those involved in what it...

Refiners in the United States are stocking up on heavy crude, pushing prices higher, as the Trump administration prepares to slam more punitive measures on Caracas after the inauguration of Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela for a second term after elections considered illegitimate by Washington. Reuters reports that officials from the presidential administration met with oil industry executives to discuss the measures on the table, including the suspension ofrefined product exports to Venezuela or Venezuelan crude oil imports into the United States. Gulf Coast refiners have a limited choice of supplier when it comes to heavy crude. Besides local...

(PHOTOS-AT-LINK) Agustin Otxotorena, a Basque executive living in Caracas, grew tired of constant calls from friends and relatives in Spain telling him that there was no food in Venezuela, so on May 20 he began publishing photos on Facebook of supermarkets in upscale sectors of Caracas filled with goods. In addition to showing evidence of an abundance of food stuffs, Otxotorena also analyzed the situation. He concluded that there are two countries in Venezuela—one where "there are many people having a hard time, who don’t have the money to live,” and another where there is "an upper class that has...

More than 400 positive cases and 50 deaths have been reported since the outbreak of the virus in the last few months. Frankfurt, Germany and Caracas, Venezuela have been worst hit. However, doctors say, if we fail to come up with a vaccine against Clade X, the global health will be at stake and the virus will emerge as a killer disease for the entire world. Fever, cough and confusion are the key symptoms of this virus. This virus causes encephalitis, swelling in the brain that can make a patient fall into fatal coma. While it appeared to spread through...

Claiming he was just trying to free Josh Holt, a devout young Mormon from Utah held hostage by Venezuela's Maduro regime on phony charges, left-wing Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin isn't exactly credible about his real mission in his secret visit to Caracas this past week. Rep. Pete Sessions, a Dallas-based Republican, isn't exactly believable, either, given that he called his secret trip with Durbin "a peace mission" to Caracas last week.

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.

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...

White-clad opposition supporters from all corners of Venezuela were descending on Caracas on Thursday for rallies intended to press for a recall referendum this year against unpopular socialist President Nicolas Maduro. With protestors coming in from the Amazon jungle to the western Andes, the opposition hopes a million people will gather in a show of anger at Maduro and Venezuela's deep economic crisis. Maduro, 53, says the opposition-dubbed "Takeover of Caracas", disguises a US-fomented coup plan, akin to a short-lived 2002 putsch against his mentor and predecessor Hugo Chavez. Edgy authorities arrested some well-known activists in the run-up, with 13...

Take a Walk Down the Atrocity Covered in Wallpaper "The simplest explanation is usually the correct one." ~ Occam’s razor "Why can’t you get things? It is very difficult to explain. I understand you are upset, but you can’t give the oligarchy the upper hand. It’s a matter of being united … another economy is an option, the community economy, the one stemming from small producers … do not give these racketeers (the entrepreneurs) resources. You have to wait in line with us as well, but at least in the end you don’t pay as much." The above message is...