Free Republic

A U.S. federal judge authorized the seizure of Citgo Petroleum Corp. to satisfy a Venezuelan government debt, a ruling that could set off a scramble among Venezuela’s many unpaid creditors to wrest control of its only obviously seizable U.S. asset.

Hardly anybody likes hospital food but in Venezuela, it's so awful -- monotonous, starchy diets cooked in filthy conditions, and newborns fed intravenous solution for lack of baby formula -- that experts call it an actual health risk.

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.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested Tuesday that countries facing sanctions like Iran, Turkey and Russia may start doing business in their national currencies, suggesting that the days of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency may be numbered. Perhaps no one would be happier about that than President Donald Trump. Here’s why: As Yale economist Robert Tiffin explained in the 1950s, if a country’s currency is the international reserve currency, then it has no choice but to run a current account deficit. If a replacement is found, as the dollar replaced the British pound in the 1920s, it...

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...