Free Republic

White farmers are being murdered and thrown off their land in massive numbers at the behest of their government. There is mass starvation in Venezuela. People have to eat their cats and dogs just to stay alive. In Myannmar, they're murdering Christians. They're also mass murdering Christians in India, as well as Sikhs, Muslims, Dalits, Assamese, Bodos, Manipuris, Dalits, and others. China is rounding up Muslims and forcing them into concentration camps, where they disappear, reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. They're also burning down churches and persecuting Christians. They previously expelled the Buddhists from Tibet. And throughout...

A major earthquake of magnitude 7.3 struck the northern coast of Venezuela on Tuesday, the U.S. Geological Survey said, and shook buildings as far away as the capital, Caracas, witnesses said. The quake, initially reported as a magnitude 6.7 and then 7.0, was centered near the town of Carupano. The U.S. Pacific Tsunami Center said the quake, which was fairly deep, could cause small tsunami waves along the coast near the epicenter, 23 miles (37 km) southwest of the town of Carupano.

Venezuela came to a standstill on Tuesday as the country tried to deal with its newly introduced currency. Thousands of businesses closed in order to adapt to the "sovereign bolivar", and many workers stayed at home. President Nicolás Maduro launched the new banknotes on Monday, revaluing and renaming the old bolivar currency. The government says this will tackle runaway inflation, but critics say it could make the crisis worse. The notes went into circulation on Tuesday.

The once-booming nation is now suffering from Soviet-style product shortages and a mass exodus of citizens fleeing for other South American countries. This stack of 14,600,000 bolivars, or about $2.22 U.S., would buy this chicken at a mini-market in Catia, a low-income neighborhood of Caracas on Aug. 16.

Maduro on Friday stunned the South American nation by announcing a 96 percent devaluation and vowing to peg the bolivar currency to Venezuela’s new ‘petro’, a cryptocurrency that experts have cast doubt on Maduro, who argues that he is the victim of a Washington-led “economic war” designed to sabotage his administration through sanctions, said that using the petro will abolish the “tyranny” of the dollar and lead to an economic rebirth in Venezuela, With the International Monetary Fund forecasting that inflation could reach 1 million percent by the year’s end, malnutrition is on the rise, as a monthly minimum wage...

As Brazilian troops move toward the Venezuelan border to sort that hell out, and Argentina of all places takes Venezuela to the World Court for crimes against humanity, and the U.S. sends out the USNS Comfort to aid thousands of Venezuela's starving, sick refugees desperately huddled in Colombia, there's obviously a whirlwind coming that that socialist regime is overdue to reap. Economically, they've just committed suicide, with dictator Nicolás Maduro's socialist solution for the country's economic meltdown a simple matter of lopping five zeros off the virtually worthless currency, as if that will fix the five-digit-going-on-a-million-percent inflation, devaluing it 95%,...

A few weeks ago we discussed the ongoing refugee crisis involving Venezuelans fleeing starvation, disease and violence in their home country. The majority of them have been attempting to travel through Colombia to Ecuador because there are more roads and civilization in general along that route. Some, however, have chosen to take the more dangerous route to the southeast through Brazil, likely heading for Peru and Chile. Unfortunately, while the government of Brazil is officially calling for peace, many Brazilian citizens are angry about the influx of Venezuelan travelers and have taken to attacking them. One group of Brazilian...

Venezuela is clearly having its moment in the American conservative mediasphere. The country’s catastrophic collapse is, we’re told, all we need to know about the terrifying dangers of socialism. First there was Meghan McCain turning Venezuela into Exhibit A in her screed against socialism on ABC’s “The View.” On Fox Business Network, Stuart Varney used Venezuela’s latest bout of instability as a “teaching moment” for Americans tempted by “pie-in-the-sky” socialism. Off on the fringes, it’s a popular theme, too: Remember that the priceless Infowars gotcha video with the world’s most unflappable sailor girl turned on the killer line: “You know...

Sunday's election of a hard-core conservative in Colombia has left the media elites and their pundits befuddled. Some are calling Ivan Duque, the 41-year-old new conservative president-elect a 'populist' as if to suggest that both President Trump and the late unlamented Venezuelan strongman, Hugo Chavez, are all dreadful peas in the same pod. Others are speculating that Colombia elected another Emmanuel Macron, as if France's youthful, namby-pamby president amounted to a comparable sea change that this election represents. We heard of the new president summed up as 'pro-business' by the Wall Street Journal, as if that was all he meant...

Venezuela is doing something completely unprecedented. Some even say illegal. As part of an attempt to stop skyrocketing inflation, the country is issuing a new fiat currency called the "sovereign bolivar," which will be backed by a cryptocurrency. But that cryptocurrency, called the "petro," does not trade, and Venezuela's own parliament says it's being illegally used to mortgage the nation's cash-strapped oil reserves. "This is a smoke-and-mirrors operation typical of Venezuela — I'll believe it when I see it," said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University and one of the world's leading experts on hyperinflation. "The...

White House National Security Advisor John Bolton met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his official residence in Jerusalem tonight.... Salih Khater, a Sudanese born UK national, will appear in court Monday charged with two counts of attempted murder over a terrorist incident last week in London.... The FBI and Oregon State Police handling of a January 26, 2016 "felony traffic stop" that killed one Oregon Standoff protestor, LaVoy Finicum, and injured another, Ryan Bundy, came under scrutiny from an esteemed mainstream media outlet this weekend..... In South Africa, white farmers fearful of the government seizing their land are...

There's word from the war Saudi Arabia is conducting in Yemen against the Houthis who heavily populate the northern part of the country and are supported by Iran. A bomb supplied by the United States was used in an air attack on a school bus recently that killed 51 people including 40 children. It was a laser guided Mk 82 bomb manufactured by defense contractor Lockheed Martin according to the lettering on it. This news report has political overtones since CNN is behind it noting that former President Barack Obama banned the sale of these kind of bombs after an...

A Chinese space force in Argentina, Russian control of Venezuelan gas and South American armies equipped with the latest Chinese and Russian hardware. Until recently, it might have sounded like the plot of a geopolitical thriller in a region once considered America’s backyard. But this is what Defense Secretary James N. Mattis faced on his visit this week to several South American nations, where economic and military posturing by Beijing and Moscow has been on the rise for the past decade. Analysts say Chinese loans in recent years have allowed authoritarian leaders to consolidate power in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua,...

MEDELLÍN, Colombia — Faced with nearly incomprehensible inflation — 32,714 percent as of Wednesday — Venezuelan officials thought they had a solution: They changed the color of the bank notes and increased their denomination. Then they said they would lop off three zeros. And when that didn’t seem enough, they announced they would cut off two more. The tactics have left Venezuelans like Yosmar Nowak, the owner of a coffee shop in Caracas, convinced that there is no solution in sight and that the government cannot even bring down the price of a cup of coffee, an eye-watering 2 million...

(CNN) - The Republican National Committee on Thursday took a heavy swipe at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- the 28-year-old Latina who unseated a long-serving Democratic congressman in New York's June primary -- comparing her to Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. A Bronx native with Puerto Rican roots, Ocasio-Cortez is a democratic socialist and -- as of less than two months ago -- a leading figure on the progressive left, which has notched a handful of high-profile Democratic primary wins in 2018 while advocating for programs like "Medicare-for-all" and tuition-free college. In their email, the RNC calls Ocasio-Cortez the "Mini-Maduro Foreboding The Future...

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (JTA) — Brazil’s front-running presidential candidate has announced he will close the Palestinian embassy in Brasilia in addition to moving his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “Is Palestine a country? Palestine is not a country, so there should be no embassy here,” Jair Bolsonaro, a lawmaker from the Social Liberal Party, declared on Tuesday when the National Congress reopened after a three-week recess. “You do not negotiate with terrorists,” he added.

Trump administration officials have made thinly veiled calls for a military coup that would topple the Venezuelan dictatorship and pave the way for democracy. But some well-respected academics are warning that a military coup would more likely produce a Russia or China-backed anti-American dictatorship. Evan Ellis, a Latin America expert with the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, and Brian Fonseca, a professor at Florida International University who has written extensively about the Venezuelan military, are among those who believe that a military coup in Venezuela would probably lead to a pro-Russian or pro-China regime, rather than to a...

At one of Caracas’ biggest public hospitals, most bathrooms are closed. Patients fill jugs from a tiny tap on the ground floor that sometimes has a trickle of water. Operations are postponed or canceled. The Central Venezuelan University hospital, once a Latin American leader, is reeling as taps run dry.

Venezuela faces payments of $1.1 billion in interest and principal on two bonds maturing on Wednesday, but investors expect the cash-strapped nation to continue its pattern of no payments. The government of President Nicolas Maduro has halted almost all foreign debt payments, leaving Venezuela, which has a debt load of around $60 billion in direct and subsidiary foreign bonds, in default.

With less than two weeks to go before Arizona's primary election Republican candidate US Representative Martha McSally is refusing to debate her rivals in the US Senate Primary set for August 28th. McSally is running against former State Senator Kelli Ward and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio's decision to enter the race this year appears to split the more conservative voters giving McSally a better chance of winning. The missing factor in the race is a clear cut endorsement from President Donald Trump. Trump did tweet praise of Ward within the last year. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte...