Gold mining is central to the Turkey-Venezuela relationship. Since at least 2018, Turkish entities have partnered with Caracas in state-run mining ventures in southern Venezuela’s Orinoco Mining Arc, a region plagued by illegal mining, environmental devastation, and severe human rights abuses. That same year, Turkey imported nearly $900 million in Venezuelan gold, helping Caracas convert illicitly mined bullion into hard currency while bypassing sanctions.

The gold trade has been closely linked to Venezuelan corruption networks. Businessman Alex Saab, later arrested and charged by US authorities, used Turkish companies to sell Venezuelan gold and purchase overpriced food imports for the regime’s food subsidy program, known as CLAP, enriching elites amid widespread malnutrition.

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At conservative current prices, Venezuela’s proven oil reserves carry a notional value of roughly $18 trillion–comparable to the combined market capitalization of Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla, the Magnificent Seven.

That comparison establishes scale.

What is less appreciated is that oil is not Venezuela’s only latent asset. The country also sits atop one of the largest undeveloped gold provinces in the Western Hemisphere.
[…]
Venezuela’s official gold holdings are modest. However, geological estimates for the Orinoco Mining Arc frequently cite on the order of 7,000 to 8,000 tons of gold as potential in-ground resources.

At current gold prices, that translates into roughly $0.5 trillion of notional value.

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The Pentagon controls nearly $4.65 TRILLION Dollars, but can not account for it. The Pentagon literally doesn’t know where the money has gone.

The worst part about these audits is that they never go back and cure the previous audits. They just move on to the next year and fail it again as if there’s no repercussions. No one gets demoted and no one gets fired. Business as usual… There are so many people that are going to refuse to pay their taxes this year. WE ARE DONE!!

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All the extant economic models are artifacts of bygone eras. The economic models of the 19th century–all based on the implicit assumption that resources were endless–were modified in the 1930s into Keynesian hallucinations still based on endless resources: let’s just pay people with freshly printed “money” to dig holes and fill them. This presumes endless resources to squander on digging holes and filling them, as if that is a productive use of labor and resources.

This hallucination continues to be the dominant paradigm: resources are endless because we’re clever and there will always be a substitute for whatever is depleted, so the “solution” is just print “money” to pay people to dig holes and fill them.

The “problem” is “growth” of consumption, and so if we “solve” that problem by goosing consumption by any means available, we enter “Mouse Utopia,” an artificial world of never-ending abundance.

The book Money, Blood and Revolution: How Darwin and the Doctor of King Charles I Could Turn Economics into a Science takes a stab at turning economics into “science,” but that’s not actually “the problem.” The real problem is all models have intrinsic limits and end up hallucinating, but those controlling the gearing of the model depend on it to maintain their own power, so they are blind to the failure of their precious model to track the real world and generate authentic understanding.

So we’re told that all is well because GDP and the stock market are rising, and since we have lots of natural gas to power AI data centers, we’re entering a “Mouse Utopia” of endless abundance. That these are all hallucinations is lost on those clinging to collapsing models as the means of maintaining their power.

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For years, Maduro and his inner circle systematically looted Venezuela—billions in oil revenue, gold reserves, and state assets—and, according to sources with direct knowledge of the operation, converted much of it into cryptocurrency.

The man who allegedly orchestrated that conversion, who built the shadow financial architecture that kept the regime alive under crushing sanctions, is not on that ship.

His name is Alex Saab.

And he may be the only person on Earth who knows how to access what sources estimate could be as much as $60 billion in Bitcoin—a figure that, if verified, would make the Maduro regime’s hidden fortune one of the largest cryptocurrency holdings on the planet, rivaling MicroStrategy and potentially exceeding El Salvador’s entire national reserve.

The claim comes from HUMINT sources and has not been confirmed through blockchain analysis, but the underlying math is provocative.

Venezuela exported 73.2 tons of gold in 2018 alone — roughly $2.7 billion at the time. If even a fraction of that was converted to Bitcoin when prices hovered between $3,000 and $10,000, and held through the 2021 peak of $69,000, the returns would be staggering.

Sources familiar with the operation describe a systematic effort to convert gold proceeds into cryptocurrency through Turkish and Emirati intermediaries, then move the assets through mixers and cold wallets beyond the reach of Western enforcement.

The keys to those wallets, sources say, are held by a small circle of trusted operatives—with Saab at the center.

What Washington didn’t know—and what court documents would later reveal—was that Saab had been a DEA informant since 2016, even as he built Maduro’s shadow financial empire.

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While his involvement in the opium trade is indelible, it was Sassoon’s broader vision of India’s economic potential that truly left its mark on the country. In addition to his mills, Sassoon was instrumental in founding several financial institutions, most notably the Bank of India, established in 1906. The Bank of India was conceived in response to the Swadeshi Movement, a nationalist movement advocating the use of Indian-made goods in a direct challenge to British colonialism.

Alongside prominent figures such as Cowasjee Jehangir and R.D. Tata, Sassoon sought to create an institution that would promote Indian economic autonomy. However, despite its nationalist intentions, the bank’s legacy was not without controversy. It was accused of being elitist, with much of its management and oversight still dominated by the British.

In response to these inequities, one of the bank’s Indian accountants, Sorabhji Pochkhanawala, left in 1911 to found the Central Bank of India, a new institution aimed at promoting Indian control over the nation’s financial system. The rivalry between the Bank of India and the Central Bank reflected a broader struggle for economic independence that would define much of India’s fight against British rule.

The reach of the Sassoon family extended well beyond India’s borders. Sassoon’s influence was particularly felt in Shanghai, where his descendants would continue to expand the family’s business empire throughout the twentieth century. Victor Sassoon, the fourth generation of the family, was a pivotal figure in the empire’s expansion.

He founded over thirty companies in Shanghai, making his mark as one of the city’s most successful businessmen. Notably, Victor also offered refuge to Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, providing them with homes and work in Shanghai during and after World War II. The Sassoon family, by then firmly entrenched in international trade and banking, played a crucial role in shaping the economic landscape of East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Despite their prominence, the Sassoons have remained largely out of the public eye in recent decades, overshadowed by other, more visible dynasties such as the Tatas and the Godrej family. Yet, when one delves into the history of the Sassoon family, their influence on the development of modern India becomes clear.

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In a massive lawsuit seeking $10 million each, 510 women are suing the health system and senior executives for negligence, saying they were victimized by former OB-GYN Javaid Perwaiz, currently serving a 59-year prison sentence for Medicaid fraud correlating to the unnecessary operations.

Most of the procedures were covered by Medicaid, a government-assisted health plan for the less fortunate. With most of the women still being within childbearing years, Perwaiz allegedly removed the reproductive organs without their knowledge.

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Herrera “initially donated $2.5 million to MAGA Inc. in late 2024 as her father, Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, was facing federal charges for trying to bribe the governor of Puerto Rico in 2020,” said the report. “In May, a top Trump appointee at the Justice Department authorized a misdemeanor plea deal to settle the case, overruling career prosecutors who had pushed for a harsher sentence. In July, Ms. Herrera donated another $1 million to MAGA Inc.”

This comes after a report back in August detailed how MAGA Inc. is effectively operating as a platform to sell access and favor with the president, despite it ostensibly being an independent and distinct entity not under control of the president by law.

It also comes as Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who has been covering the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case for years, has speculated that donors to pro-Trump causes who may appear in the Epstein case files are leaning on Trump and the Justice Department to obscure their names in the Congressionally-required release of the documents.

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At the heart of the pollution-poverty nexus lies inequality. Poor communities disprop or tionately inhabit environmentally hazardous spaces – along polluted rivers, near landfills, industrial zones, highways, or mining belts. These locations are not chosen freely but imposed by unaffordable housing, insecure land tenure, and social marginalization. In urban India, slum settlements often emerge on floodplains or beside drains, exposing residents to contaminated water, toxic air, and recurring disasters. In rural areas, land degradation, pesticide overuse, and deforestation affect small farmers and landless labourers the most, stripping them of productive assets. Environmental pollution directly deepens poverty through health impacts.

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France is bracing for a major farmers’ uprising as anger explodes over the EU–Mercosur trade deal. With tractors blocking highways and banners accusing Brussels of sacrificing French agriculture, farmers are now threatening to take their protest to Paris and bring the capital to a standstill. The 25-year-old trade agreement, expected to be signed in Paraguay on January 12, could flood European markets with cheaper South American agricultural imports. Farmers fear this will crush local farms, weaken food safety standards and threaten livelihoods across rural France. With “Next Stop Paris” banners going up and blockades being planned, the battle over Europe’s agriculture has officially begun.

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