Free Republic

Colombian right-wing and centrist candidates obtained sweeping victories in Sunday’s regional elections, dealing a huge blow to the leftist government coalition led by President Gustavo Petro, the nation’s first leftist president. The Colombian electorate headed to the polls on Sunday to elect 32 governors, 1,102 mayors, and more than 19,000 other regional legislatures and public office positions nationwide, featuring over 125,000 candidates on the ballot. The voter turnout rate in Colombia was tallied at 59.08 percent, meaning 22.98 million of Colombia’s 38.9 million voters participated in the election.

Many protestors concerned about climate change stormed the stage where U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was being interviewed Thursday in Baltimore. Buttigieg was in town at a daylong conference to discuss new transportation updates for the state. The conference, iMPACT MARYLAND, was hosted by The Baltimore Banner and intended to focus on the future of the state. In a series of posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Buttigieg said the updates include an expansion of the Baltimore airport, converting the University of Maryland’s bus fleet to electric vehicles, replacing diesel trains with battery-powered ones, and updating a...

They were leaving a social event in the south-western department of Huila when their vehicle hit a road mine. They were then shot dead in the ambush, a police spokesperson said. It is the worst attack on security forces since former guerrilla Gustavo Petro was sworn in as Colombia's first left-wing president less than a month ago According to the national police and attorney general's office, three of the officers who were killed were aged 20 or younger. Mr Petro condemned the attack, calling it "a clear act of sabotage against peace" in a tweet. Late on Friday he travelled...

It turns out that President Biden is not the only president with a son in the news. Down in Colombia, recently elected President Gustavo Petro is getting questions about his son too. This is the story: Colombia's attorney general's office said on Friday it will begin an investigation into accusations that President Petro's oldest son took money from drug traffickers in exchange for including them in his father's peace efforts.Nicolas Petro, a lawmaker in Atlantico province, has said he has had nothing to do with the president's efforts to make peace or surrender deals with rebels and criminal gangs, and...

Several Republican former leaders from around Ohio are coming out in support of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tim Ryan as they condemn the actions of former President Donald Trump. Phil Heimlich, former Cincinnati City Council member and Hamilton County Commission member, described himself as a staunch conservative who looks to the polices of former President Ronald Reagan as a guiding principle. “Whether we're talking foreign policy, whether we're talking law and order, whether we're talking fighting extremism, if Ronald Reagan were here today, he wouldn't have anything to do with J.D. Vance. And I believe that we, as Republicans shouldn't...

Turns out Nicolás Maduro's still the guy the world has to talk to in Venezuela. But recognizing Juan Guaidó as the country's legitimate president is still a useful tool. This week Colombia’s leftist President-elect Gustavo Petro said he recently discussed bilateral issues with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — despite the fact that Colombia does not recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate head of state. But even top aides to President Biden are visiting Caracas lately to talk with top Maduro aides, even though the U.S. doesn't recognize Maduro, either. (On Thursday, the Biden Administration said it would make it easier for...

Ideas run the world. Good ones create freedom and wealth; bad ones, oppression and poverty. You are not what you eat, but what you think. Politicians in particular fall under the sway of ideas. As John Maynard Keynes put it, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.” The...

Iran awaiting European guarantees on the sale of Iranian oil and banking relations, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Saturday, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA). […] “We are still waiting for Europe to take action on the sale of Iranian oil and the preservation of banking channels,” the Iranian foreign minister said. Zarif also defended the European Union’s decision on Thursday to provide €18 million ($21 million) in aid to Iran to offset the impact of U.S. sanctions, part of efforts to salvage the 2015 deal to limit Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. […] The top U.S. envoy...

SAN FRANCISCO — Pete Roberts of Nottingham, England, was one of the many risk-takers who threw their savings into cryptocurrencies when prices were going through the roof last winter. Now, eight months later, the $23,000 he invested in several digital tokens is worth about $4,000, and he is clearheaded about what happened. "I got too caught up in the fear of missing out and trying to make a quick buck," he said this week. "The losses have pretty much left me financially ruined." Mr. Roberts, 28, has a lot of company. After the latest round of big price drops, many...

As the Trump administration tightens sanctions against Iran and Russia, and as the imposition of tariffs against China as a means of negotiating a more favorable trade arrangement continue, all three nations are moving away from the U.S. dollar primarily when it comes to oil sales, as a way of circumventing the punitive measures. “There is a common understanding that we need to move towards the use of national currencies in our settlements. There is a need for this, as well as the wish of the parties,” Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak said earlier this month when discussing the move....

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.

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...

Trump met Erdogan at a Nato meeting early in June. Their discussions were very friendly, and after they ended, Trump thought they had made a deal: Trump would ask Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to release a Turkish citizen, Ebru Ozkan, arrested because of alleged terrorist links to Hamas, and then Turkey would release pastor Andrew Brunson, who was arrested in Turkey on October 2016 on charges of espionage, which the US considers are bogus charges. So on July 14, Trump called Netanyahu and requested that Ozkan be released, and she was released the next day. But Brunson was not...

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.

An estimated 2.3 million Venezuelans had fled the crisis-wracked country as of June, mainly to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil, the United Nations said Tuesday. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that those fleeing — about 7 percent of Venezuela’s 32.8 million people — cite lack of food as the main reason for leaving. U.N. humanitarian officials report that 1.3 million of those who fled were “suffering from malnourishment,” he said. Oil-rich Venezuela has been sinking deeper into an economic and political crisis. Hyperinflation and widespread shortages of food and medicine are battering the country, and the International Monetary Fund...

Once the inevitable collapse of Citgo happens, the ruling drug cartel in Venezuela will inevitably enter it’s final phase. Today, Venezuela is unable to refine oil into gasoline, so in turn it is purchased from Citgo and all but given away for domestic consumption. This has given rise to a vast network of gasoline smuggling, often by the military itself, which steals the gasoline in transit then sells it in other nations for a huge profit while remaining well under the market price. Gasoline is so cheap in Venezuela, one can purchase around 875,000 gallons of 87 octane for $1....

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...