Venezuela’s oil in three dimensions

If all of Venezuela’s oil were stored in a single cylindrical tank, the structure would rise 1.6km (1 mile) into the sky and have a diameter of 6.2km (nearly 4 miles).

One mile is roughly equal to the height of three One World Trade Centers stacked on top of each other. It is the tallest building in New York City at 541m (1,776ft)

To place that scale in context, the tank would cover roughly half of Manhattan.

Global proven oil reserves, which measure the quantities of crude oil that are economically recoverable with current technology, total about 1.73 trillion barrels, which means Venezuela has roughly one-fifth of these reserves.

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Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein told a Qatari businessman that Doha needed to “sing and dance” for Israel to get on US President Donald Trump’s good side during a blockade of the small Gulf state.

The email, part of the US Justice Department’s tranche of documents released over the weekend, shows Epstein inserting himself into a rift that erupted in the Gulf between Qatar on one side and the UAE and Saudi Arabia on the other.

Epstein told a man identified as “Jabor Y” that Qatar could apparently come in from the cold if it was able to normalise ties with Israel.

“If the people would allow your country to recognize israel. ,could be interesting to discuss. If not maybe consider putting 1 billion into a fund to benefit the victims of terrorist acts. asking the other gcc memebers to match it,” Epstein wrote on 9 July 2017.

In other emails, Jabor Y appears under the name Jabor Yousef Jassim Al Thani. He is a Qatari businessman and member of the royal family. In a 2016 document, he appears to ask for permission for Epstein’s plane to land in Doha.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia led Arab states in severing diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed a land, air and sea blockade on the gas-rich monarchy in June 2017. Trump backed the blockade.

Epstein suggested that Qatar’s problems could go away if it stopped “kicking and arguing” and forged closer ties to Israel. He said Qatar needed to follow India’s example, which has emerged as a close Israeli partner.

“The Indian Prime minisiter modi took advice. and danced and sang in israel for the benefit of the US president. they had met a few weeks ago.. IT WORKED.!” Epstein wrote to Jabar.

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Why are America’s super-rich backing Tommy Robinson?

Robinson – real name: Stephen-Yaxley Lennon – is the UK’s best known Far Right influencer.

He’s attempting a glossy re-brand from “fringe extremist with a criminal record” to a self-styled “anti-Islam citizen journalist” with the ability to command large – sometimes violent – crowds.

That transformation is – in part – being turbo-charged by millionaires and billionaires in the United States.

In this two part special we profile Robinson’s rise and his relationship with the world’s richest man Elon Musk.

But first, we reveal the Conservative US pro Israel backers boosting his operation.

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Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers, a former US Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard University, are shown chatting about President Donald Trump during his first term in office in a number of emails that were made public on Friday. “How guilty is Donald?” Summers inquired in a May 2017 email, where he went on to explore the possibility that Russia helped Trump win in 2016, which Summers thought “plausible but not certain.” – Trump has repeatedly denied any collusion with Russia in that election.

Epstein replied, “your world does not understand how dumb he really is.”

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Ministers suppressed a report after intelligence chiefs warned that climate change could drive mass migration to Britain and trigger a nuclear war in Asia.

The study, entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, was put together with the help of the joint intelligence committee, which oversees MI5 and MI6.
Initially due to be published last autumn, it was blocked by No 10 for being too negative.
[…]
But a full, internal version of the report, seen by The Times, goes further, suggesting that the degradation of rainforests in the Congo and the drying up of rivers fed by the Himalayas could drive people to flee to Europe, leading to “more polarised and populist politics in the UK” and putting “additional pressure on already strained national infrastructure”.

It noted that Britain’s large south Asian diaspora could make it an attractive destination to people from the region.

The internal version also warned that collapsing ecosystems could motivate acts of eco-terrorism in Britain, as well as drawing Nato into conflicts over remaining breadbaskets in Russia and Ukraine.

Described as a “reasonable worst case scenario”, the report said that many ecosystems around the world were so stressed that they could soon pass a tipping point, after which they would inexorably degrade no matter what humans did to protect them. Forests in Canada and Russia might pass a tipping point by 2030, as might glaciers in the Himalayas that fed rivers on which two billion people depended, the report suggested.

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Full report [PDF}:

Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security

Sailors at Sausalito’s Schoonmaker Marina noticed that “Izanami” spelled backwards is “I’m a Nazi.” The German-built detail made it worse. Ellison quietly renamed the yacht to Ronin and later sold it to Venezuelan banker Victor Vargas.

This 1999 footnote is resurfacing now because Ellison’s family recently acquired Paramount and TikTok’s U.S. operations. At 81, the world’s fourth-richest person has spent lavishly on anti-aging research in hopes of reaching 150, a $30 million safari park in Florida, $24 million in Pierre Hotel units, and 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi.

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Unlike the 1976 nationalization, Chavez’s approach rewrote established agreements, undermining foreign confidence and operations. Western energy companies reduced their exposure or exited altogether, taking capital, technology, and expertise with them. This was especially damaging because U.S. Gulf Coast refineries were uniquely suited to process heavy crude, having adapted to it over decades. American refiners replaced Venezuelan oil with Canadian heavy crude and domestic shale production, weakening Venezuela’s most natural export market.

During the oil boom of the 2000s, this appeared sustainable, with the country’s per capita income rebounding and Chavez’s social programs winning broad popular support. However, the policies also steadily hollowed out the oil industry’s capacity, while hundreds of thousands of the country’s skilled workers emigrated. The “oil strikes” in Venezuela to overthrow Chavez in 2002 and 2003 led to the country facing large layoffs in PDVSA. “This was the beginning of the large brain drain in Venezuela when many highly skilled industry workers left their home country to work for multinational corporations like ExxonMobil and Chevron,” according to the Borgen Project

Political conditions worsened sharply in the 2010s, as Venezuela drifted further toward Moscow and Beijing. After Maduro took office in 2013 following Chavez’s death, the U.S., under former President Obama, began targeting Venezuelan officials with sanctions in 2015. The sanctions later expanded under Trump to reduce PDVSA’s access to financial markets, insurance, spare parts, and technology. Cut off from the West, Venezuela leaned more heavily on China and Russia, often accepting discounted deals that provided short-term liquidity but little long-term investment or capacity expansion.

When oil revenues collapsed mid-decade, the government resorted to money printing to cover deficits, fueling hyperinflation in the late 2010s that wiped out savings, wages and purchasing power. Strict currency controls also required export earnings to be converted at artificial exchange rates and deprived PDVSA of dollars. With demand from China and other countries never replacing that of the United States, Venezuela’s oil industry was effectively cannibalized to sustain the state. “Until 2017–2018, national access to international wealth was subsidized at the expense of PDVSA’s viability. Since then, through monetized credit from the Central Bank and the reorientation of the exchange rate policy, an attempt is being made to save the oil company at the cost of an abrupt internal adjustment,” stated a 2025 study in the journal Resources Policy.

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The National Confederation of Disabled People called the action “incomprehensible,” and said pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants.

The Labor Ministry said categories added to the expanded list – that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists – were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

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On Thursday, Ritter wrote on his website that “today my banking institution of 26 years, Citizens Bank, declared that they were ending their banking relationship with me.”

“My accounts were zeroed out without explanation,” he added.

Ritter said the move may have been a unilateral de-risking decision by Citizens Bank, but that it “does not preclude federal involvement.”

He noted that the “Northern District of New York empaneled a Grand Jury targeting me back in August 2024,” on suspicion of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He believes federal authorities had obtained all his banking information through Grand Jury subpoenas.

“What I am beginning to suspect is that someone in the FBI, fully armed with the totality of my banking transactions… “tipped off” Citizen’s Bank about “suspicious activity” that resulted in Citizen’s Bank issuing a SAR [Suspicious Activity Report],” Ritter wrote.

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The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug WarAccording to former DEA official Michael Levine, the Mexican drug Cartel was a “family affair”. Both Carlos and Raul were prominent members of the Cartel. And this was known to then US Attorney General Edward Meese in 1987 one year prior to Carlos Salinas’ inauguration as the country’s president.

When Carlos Salinas was inaugurated as President, the entire Mexican State apparatus became criminalised with key government positions occupied by members of the Cartel. The Minister of Commerce in charge of trade negotiations leading up to the signing of NAFTA was Raul Salinas Lozano, father of Raul Junior the Drug kingpin and of Carlos the president.

And it is precisely during this period that the Salinas government launched a sweeping privatisation program under advice from the IMF.

The privatisation program subsequently evolved into a multibillion dollar money laundering operation. Narco-dollars were channelled towards the acquisition of State property and public utilities.

Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies, testified to the US Congress (April 14, 1994) that

“billions of dollars in state assets have gone to supporters and cronies” (Dallas Morning News, 11 August 1994).

These included the sale of Telefonos de Mexico, valued at $ 3.9 billion and purchased by a Salinas crony for $ 400 million.(Ibid).

Raul Salinas was behind the privatisation programme. He was known as ”El Señor 10 por Ciento” [Mr. 10 Percent] “for the slice of bid money he allegedly demanded in exchange for helping acquaintances acquire companies, concessions and contracts [under the IMF sponsored privatisation program]”(The News, InfoLatina, .Mexico, October 10, 1997).
[…]
But there is more than meets the eye: while the Bushes and the Salinas have longstanding ties, Wall Street was also involved in the laundering of drug money:

“A U.S. official said the Justice Department has made significant advances in its money-laundering investigation against Raul Salinas de Gortari and has identified several people who can testify that the former first brother received protection money from a major narcotics cartel.

“If the U.S. were to indict Mr. Salinas, it could have implications for a Justice Department investigation into possible money laundering by Citibank, where Mr. Salinas had some of his accounts. Citibank, a unit of Citicorp , has denied wrongdoing.” (WSW, April 23, 2015)

The involvement of Citbank in the money laundering operation is documented by a Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs Report (US General Accounting Office “Private Banking: Raul Salinas, Citibank, and Alleged Money Laundering” Washington, 1998).

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See also: The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire

FTW October 24, 2000 – The success of Bush Vice Presidential running mate Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five year $3.8 billion “pig-out” on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a partial indicator of what may happen if the Bush ticket wins in two weeks. A closer look at available research, including an August 2, 2000 report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) at www.public-i.org, suggests that drug money has played a role in the successes achieved by Halliburton under Cheney’s tenure as CEO from 1995 to 2000. This is especially true for Halliburton’s most famous subsidiary, heavy construction and oil giant, Brown and Root. A deeper look into history reveals that Brown and Root’s past as well as the past of Dick Cheney himself, connect to the international drug trade on more than one occasion and in more than one way.