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  1. #1
    Thailand Expat HermantheGerman's Avatar
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    Venezuela ticking time bomb !

    Crisis-hit Venezuela near collapse, says new oil deal with China

    May 17, 2016 (LBO) – Venezuela says it has reached a deal with China to improve loan terms as falling oil prices have driven the oil-exporting country into economic crisis and collapsed its currency.
    Venezuelan Economy Vice-President Miguel Perez told Reuters that all conditions, including loan time frames, investment amounts and non-financial aspects, had been improved.
    China has lent some 50 billion dollars to Venezuela over the last decade, and markets are watching to see if Beijing will help President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government.
    Opposition leaders over the weekend protested a 60-day state of emergency declared by Maduro on Friday night, based what he called plots from Venezuela and the U.S. to subvert him.
    With the economy in freefall, hungry mobs have looted food stories, power and water are in short supply and hospitals are unable to care for newborns, CNBC reported.
    “Today we can say that we’ve agreed to new commercial conditions that are adapted to the country’s reality,” Perez said. He declined to elaborate.
    Venezuela’s struggling state-led economic model and the fall in oil prices have triggered severe shortages of food and medicine, triple-digit annual inflation, and a slowdown in local business activity.
    Maduro blames an “economic war” launched by right-wing businessmen and opposition politicians seeking to sabotage him, a Reuters report said.
    Perez is seen as more inclined toward reform than other factions of the ruling Socialist Party. But many economists express doubt he could turn around Venezuela given the severity of its crisis.
    Venezuela has two official exchange rates, with the bolivar having weakened past 400 per dollar on the new second system. The greenback is worth nearly 1,100 bolivars on the black market.
    Inflation hit 180.9 percent and the economy contracted 5.7 percent last year, according to central bank figures, and unofficial estimates for this year paint an even gloomier picture.
    Over the weekend Maduro said the government would take over idled factories, stoking rumors that Polar, the country’s largest food and beverage maker, might be targeted. The company had recently shut down several factories due to a lack of raw materials.
    CNBC reported that even if oil prices recover, Venezuela faces a long road back to political and economic stability.
    The International Monetary Fund, in its latest forecast, expects the country’s output to shrink by 8 percent this year and another 4 percent next year. The IMF predicts inflation will top 700 percent this year before surging to some 2,200 percent next year.
    The dire economic situation has led to market speculation that Venezuela, with the world’s biggest oil reserves, or its state oil company PDVSA could default.
    The company’s president has said PDVSA, which must pay around $4 billion this year to service debt, was in talks with international banks over refinancing debt.


    Crisis-hit Venezuela near collapse, says new oil deal with China ? Lanka Business Online

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    Thailand Expat HermantheGerman's Avatar
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    Angry streets, not recall, may be Venezuela leader's biggest risk

    Tue May 17, 2016 2:52pm GMT



    By Alexandra Ulmer
    CARACAS May 17 (Reuters) - Streaming down from hilltop slums in the dead of night, hundreds of Venezuelans join an ever-growing line that circles the vast "Bicentennial" state-run supermarket.
    By sunrise, there are several thousand, closely watched by National Guard soldiers, all waiting for the chance to buy coveted rice, flour or chicken at subsidized prices amid crippling nationwide shortages and inflation.
    Many of them used to be devoted supporters of Hugo Chavez, the late socialist president who brought his quirky brand of left-wing nationalism to the OPEC nation during a 1999-2013 presidency.
    Now, in the grumbling of pre-dawn lines, there is disillusionment with Chavez's "Beautiful Revolution" and undisguised anger at his successor and self-declared "son" Nicolas Maduro.
    Word that no price-fixed food - only diapers, detergent and deodorant - would be on offer this particular morning spreads quickly, further deflating and frustrating the crowd.
    The day before, when food ran out, there was a riot.
    "This is unbearable," says Wilson Fajardo, 56, a mechanic whose three children ate only bread for dinner the previous night. "We voted for Maduro because of a promise we made Chavez, but that promise has expired. Either they solve this problem, or we're going to have to take to the streets."
    It is these people - who struggle to find food or medicine amid worsening shortages, see their income gobbled up by runaway inflation, and suffer near-daily water and power cuts - who are arguably a bigger problem for Maduro than his formal opponents.
    For sure, the opposition coalition is organizing marches and trying to channel discontent into a drive for a recall referendum against the former union leader and bus driver.
    Yet they are failing to attract large numbers to protests and Socialist Party officials say the referendum will not happen this year, confident the government-leaning electoral body will drag its feet on the complicated paperwork needed.
    As institutional channels to remove Maduro close, anger is spilling over in other ways.
    Small spontaneous demonstrations are picking up: about 17 per day around the nation, according to the Venezuelan Observatory for Social Conflict, a rights group. It says looting, too, is becoming more common, with 107 incidents in the first quarter.
    In towns around the nation, it is becoming common for neighbors to block roads or gather near state utility offices to show their rage over power-cuts, food prices or lack of water. Videos of mobs breaking into shops, swarming onto trucks or fighting over products often make the rounds of social media.
    "I don't know if we can keep going like this ... I'm always in a bad mood," says construction worker Juan Carlos Cuello, 32, holding his sleeping four-year-old son in the line outside the Bicentennial where he arrived at 3.30 a.m.
    Around him, people swat mosquitoes, cradle babies and swap stories about skipping breakfast or surviving on plantains and yucca in what they now wrily call the "Maduro diet". Cuello, a former "Chavista," says his two children often go to school on an empty stomach and have lost weight.
    SHOWDOWN
    The month of May has not been kind to Maduro.
    First, the opposition submitted nearly 2 million signatures to kick off the recall referendum - way beyond the roughly 200,000 required. Nearly 70 percent of Venezuelans want him gone this year, a poll recently showed.
    Then, Brazil's leftist President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in Brazil, depriving him of another important ally in Latin America, where the right has made a comeback in recent elections.
    And in the United States, intelligence officials told reporters they were preparing for a "meltdown" in Venezuela.
    Outraged, Maduro responded by saying a foreign invasion was in the works and ordered a state of emergency and military exercises to protect the nation.
    "Washington is activating measures at the request of Venezuela's fascist right, who are emboldened by the coup in Brazil," he said in one of his daily speeches to the nation.
    The military, packed with Chavez loyalists, is seen as key to Maduro's survival.
    There is speculation that the economic crisis and Maduro's rambling speeches are costing him support in the inner circle. Unlike his predecessor, Maduro was not a soldier, but he often appears at army parades and has tapped several members of the military as ministers.
    He still enjoys the loyalty of a core among the population who adored his charismatic predecessor Chavez for tapping an oil bonanza to provide the poor with housing and pensions
    The government claims that a malicious right-wing elite is hiding food to stoke unrest and gain control of Venezuela's oil reserves, the world's largest.
    That message resonates among some in the food lines, where there are memories of a brief 2002 coup against Chavez and anger against Maduro does not necessarily equal support for the opposition.
    "I'm only half eating... (but) it's not Maduro's fault! There's an economic war going on," says Maria Perez, 55, in a special line for elderly, pregnant and handicapped people at the supermarket in east Caracas, in the shadow of Petare slum.
    "The opposition just wants to get power," she says of the referendum push, before repeating a familiar complaint that opposition leaders are elitist and out-of-touch. "When they were in charge, they didn't take the poor into account."
    Despite a decisive victory in December's legislative election, the opposition remains shackled by that image problem and squabbles among the two dozen parties in the coalition.
    Their struggle to mobilize Venezuelans and fears of more violence after 2014 protests that left 43 people dead may yet keep a lid on unrest.
    "I don't feel people are that ready, or they wouldn't be here letting themselves be humiliated," says Carolina Briceno, 35, who joined the line after her shift at a night club.
    "I can't stand Maduro. Of course I would protest. I don't know what we're waiting for." (Additional reporting by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Kieran Murray)


    Angry streets, not recall, may be Venezuela leader's biggest risk | Agricultural Commodities | Reuters

  3. #3
    Thailand Expat HermantheGerman's Avatar
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    By the way, where have all the CHAVEZ supporters gone to ?

    Hiding behind a Teakdoor ?

  4. #4
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    Look what Leftist idealism did to Venezuela



    The country was held up as an example of 21st-century socialism. Now its economy is as bad as Syria’s

    Ian Birrell

    To understand why the thought of Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister is so alarming, take a look at the unfurling chaos in Venezuela.

    This is the place praised by the Labour leader as an alternative global model, with its promise of “21st‑century socialism”. Six years ago, he hailed it for “seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting the neoliberal policies of the world’s financial institutions”.

    Less than 12 months ago, he was still urging us to celebrate its “achievements” in jobs, health and housing.

    He is not alone on the hard Left in sanctifying this Latin American country.

    His spin doctor, Seumas Milne, claimed the regime in Caracas offered “lessons to anyone interested in social justice and new forms of socialist politics”; it was, he wrote, proof of an alternative to the West’s “failed neoliberal system”. Self-styled revolutionaries in showbiz and the media acclaimed its progress.

    Venezuela “shows that another way is possible”, said Diane Abbott, contrasting it with British austerity.

    She is right, although perhaps not in the way she intended. For what Venezuela shows is the dismal failure of the kind of Left-wing politics idealised by the Corbyn camp.

    The consequences of this century’s most famous experiment in socialism, first under President Hugo Chávez and then his risible successor Nicolás Maduro, are as devastating as the nightmares induced around the world last century with similarly misguided policies.

    A spendthrift, divisive government trying to fix prices and subsidise goods has wrecked a once prosperous, middle-income nation.

    Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, which have earned more than $1 trillion since 1999. Yet such is the crisis in the country that the only contemporary comparison that can be made is with Zimbabwe’s meltdown under Robert Mugabe
    .
    Venezuela has the world’s worst inflation, currently about 180 per cent and predicted to rise almost tenfold next year. Yet for all the money being printed, there is almost nothing to buy in shops, with shortages from flour and nappies to medicines and underwear. Desperate people queue from the middle of the night outside supermarkets; tear gas had to be fired to disperse hundreds of looters after a lorry carrying salt and shampoo crashed.

    How Venezuelans must yearn for a dose of “failed neoliberal policies”; capitalism and consumerism have lifted millions from poverty around the planet this century, while socialism has done the precise opposite in this country of 30 million people.

    Seven in 10 are of them in poverty, many reduced to smuggling goods over borders to survive. Cities are cursed with violent crime. Corruption is rife. Amid power cuts, the government had to plead with women not to waste energy by using hairdryers while public sector workers were put on a two-day working week.


    To put the country’s plight into hideous perspective, ponder this: the only country suffering more extreme economic contraction is conflict‑ridden Syria.

    Both countries have stopped reporting official data. Little wonder, given the surreal situations some Venezuelan firms must endure. The biggest beer producer shut down production due to the lack of barley imports, only for bosses to be threatened with jail for “sabotage”. Another firm went to extreme lengths to find black market toilet paper for staff, then was accused of joining Yankee-backed economic war.


    This is a place where the president once personally sacked 20,000 state oil firm workers and replaced them with 100,000 supporters.

    As part of his proclaimed mission to lift people from poverty, the posturing Chávez promised above all to transform health care. He sent oil to his idol Fidel Castro in return for thousands of Cuban doctors. Yet such is the shattered state of Venezuelan hospitals that a report revealed a hundredfold rise in deaths of infants below one month old since 2012. Maternal mortality has returned to rates last seen 40 years ago.


    A New York Times investigation has found that hospitals do not even have enough water to wash the blood from operating tables. Now the president, blaming foreign agitators and hit by falling oil prices, has imposed a state of emergency while locked in stalemate with an opposition-dominated parliament; there is growing talk of insurgency.

    This country, with its flat-topped mountains, wondrous jungle, gaping prairies, gorgeous beaches and welcoming people, is among the most amazing I have visited. Yet it has descended into darkness, a modern tragedy driven by deluded Leftists.

    So when you hear Corbyn and his chums pontificate about “progressive” policies, remember Venezuela.

    Follow Ian Birrell on Twitter @ianbirrell; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
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  5. #5
    Excommunicated baldrick's Avatar
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    venezuela is in a hole because of corruption and mismanagement

    But why? It’s not that the country lacked money. Sitting atop the world’s largest reserves of oil at the tail end of a frenzied oil boom, the government led first by Chavez and, since 2013, by Maduro, received over a trillion dollars in oil revenues over the last 17 years. It faced virtually no institutional constraints on how to spend that unprecedented bonanza. It’s true that oil prices have since fallen—a risk many people foresaw, and one that the government made no provision for—but that can hardly explain what’s happened: Venezuela’s garish implosion began well before the price of oil plummeted. Back in 2014, when oil was still trading north of $100 per barrel, Venezuelans were already facing acute shortages of basic things like bread or toiletries.

    The real culprit is chavismo, the ruling philosophy named for Chavez and carried forward by Maduro, and its truly breathtaking propensity for mismanagement (the government plowed state money arbitrarily into foolish investments); institutional destruction (as Chavez and then Maduro became more authoritarian and crippled the country’s democratic institutions); nonsense policy-making (like price and currency controls); and plain thievery (as corruption has proliferated among unaccountable officials and their friends and families).
    Venezuela Is Falling Apart - The Atlantic

  6. #6
    Days Work Done! Norton's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by baldrick
    (as Chavez and then Maduro became more authoritarian and crippled the country’s democratic institutions); nonsense policy-making (like price and currency controls); and plain thievery (as corruption has proliferated among unaccountable officials and their friends and families)
    Appears common behavior for leaders promoting the benefits of utopian socialist states.

  7. #7
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    Well Venezuela is in better shape than oil producer Angola. Venezuelan poor are richer than Angolas poor.
    Angola doesn't make the news, wonder why.

  8. #8
    I am in Jail

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    No models

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    ^

  10. #10
    Excommunicated baldrick's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Allotafargina
    No models
    limited Knowledge

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_...(Miss_Universe)


  11. #11
    Thailand Expat

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    Nice looking bloke.
    It's tough to tell these days

  12. #12
    Thailand Expat

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    Okay...maybe doesn't have a cock.
    What was I thinking. Carry on please.

  13. #13
    Thailand Expat harrybarracuda's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by PeeCoffee View Post
    Okay...maybe doesn't have a cock....
    ....any more, no.

  14. #14
    R.I.P
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    The bomb has already been detonated , thats what the UK will be like after 3 years of Corbin should the Labour party be elected in the next GE , ahh yes the red flag of socialist utopia , the last time it fluttered in the breeze was in 79 "the Winter of discontent " I remember it all too well , and for all those who say Labour has been in office since then ,I would simply say , Are you trying to inform me that Blair was a Socialist? Venezuela: The world's worst-performing economy - Al Jazeera English

  15. #15
    Thailand Expat HermantheGerman's Avatar
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    Still waiting to hear from the Chavez supporters


    Can we not just blame the U.S. ?




    Mob burns Venezuelan man alive over $5 as justice fails

    By HANNAH DREIER



    May. 19, 2016 2:06 PM EDT




    CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The mob didn't know at first what Roberto Bernal had done, but he was running and that was enough.
    Dozens of men loitering on the sidewalk next to a supermarket kicked and punched the 42-year-old until he was bloodied and semi-conscious. After all, they had been robbed of cell phones, wallets and motorcycles over the years, and thought Bernal had a criminal's face.
    Then a stooped, white-haired man trailing behind told them he'd been mugged.

    The mob went through Bernal's pockets and handed a wad of bills to the old man: The equivalent of $5. They doused Bernal's head and chest in gasoline and flicked a lighter. And they stood back as he burned alive.

    "We wanted to teach this man a lesson," said Eduardo Mijares, 29. "We're tired of being robbed every time we go into the street, and the police do nothing."
    Vigilante violence against people accused of stealing has become commonplace in this crime-ridden country of 30 million, once one of the richest and safest in Latin America. The revenge attacks underscore how far Venezuela has fallen, with the lights flickering out daily, and food shortages fueling supermarket lines that snake around for blocks.
    The ebbing price of oil has laid bare years of mismanagement. The economy is unraveling, and with it, the social fabric.
    "Life here has become a misery. You walk around always stressed, always scared, and lynching offers a collective catharsis," Violence Observatory director Roberto Briceno-Leon said. "You can't do anything about the lines or inflation, but for one moment, at least, the mob feels like it's making a difference."
    Reports of group beatings now surface weekly in local media. The public prosecutor opened 74 investigations into vigilante killings in the first four months of this year, compared to two all of last year. And a majority of the country supports mob retribution as a form of self-protection, according to polling from the independent Venezuelan Violence Observatory.
    Amid the general haze of violence, Bernal's killing didn't even stand out enough to make the front pages or provoke comment from local politicians. Venezuela now has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and it's hard to find a person who hasn't been mugged.
    A quiet man with a muscular build from his time in the army, Bernal lived his whole life in a maze of narrow staircases and cheerfully-painted cinderblock shacks built into the hills above Caracas. This kind of slum is home for about half of Venezuelans, who are bearing the brunt of the country's collapsing economy.
    The shantytowns draped over the capital have not seen running water for months, and residents have begun raiding passing trucks for food. Bernal had been out of work, and recently confided in his sisters that he and his wife were struggling to feed their three children. He wanted to find a way to move to Panama.
    Bernal spent the days before his death presiding over his sister's kitchen, preparing Easter stews and candied passion fruit. He chuckled softly when he won at dominos.
    His six siblings thought of him as the one who made it, attending a cooking school and becoming a professional chef. He liked to turn on the TV as soon as he got home from work, and would leave the room at the first sign of an argument. Many people who grow up deep in the slums assimilate some parts of street culture, sporting tattoos or jewelry, but not Roberto.
    "He was so on the straight and narrow, he didn't even have a nickname," his aunt Teresa Bernal said.
    A regular church-goer who often sent around religious text messages, Bernal set his relatives' phones dinging the night before the burning with a series of prayers for God to fill their day with blessings.
    That morning, he left the family's windowless shack before dawn and walked into an acrid smog that had descended over the city from grass fires in the mountains above. He took a twisting bus ride out of the slum, dropped his daughter at school, then boarded the metro.
    By the time he emerged next to a bustling thoroughfare near the center of town, fat blue and gold macaws were crisscrossing overhead. He walked past security guards sitting outside sparsely-stocked shops and apartment buildings protected by the electric fencing that denotes a middle-class Caracas neighborhood.
    Bernal had told his wife he was on his way to a new job at a restaurant. But he stopped near a bank beneath a billboard advertising door-to-door delivery of scarce goods from Miami, a three-hour flight away.
    A man in his 70s walked out, tucking a stack of bills worth $5 into a baseball cap that he then hid in his jacket.
    It would have been a lot of money for Bernal. It could have bought his family a week's worth of food. Or a plastic dining table. Or a proper school uniform for his daughter, whom the other kids were calling "stinky."
    Bernal grabbed the cash and started running toward a taxi line where dozens of motorcycles were parked, the robbery victim later told investigators. The man pursued him, crying "thief!" People watching from a distance assumed they were racing to get in line to buy groceries.
    In the meantime, the motorcycle drivers were sitting on a low wall in front of the supermarket, fiddling with cracked cellphones and drinking coffee from small plastic cups. They watched the pair come toward them.
    When the beating began, workers at the curbside candy stalls and hotdog stands left their booths, not wanting to see what was coming. Other people stayed to watch and cheer.
    Someone had the idea to siphon gasoline from a motorcycle tank into a soda bottle. As the smell of burning flesh filled the air, the crowd's shouting turned to silence. Some onlookers took cellphone video of Bernal trying to stand as tall flames consume his head.
    He would likely have died there, begging for water to quench the fire in the middle of some two dozen onlookers, if not for Alejandro Delgado. The youth pastor arrived for his part-time job as a motorcycle taxi driver just as the frenzy was reaching its peak. Horrified, Delgado whipped off his sooty black jacket and smothered the flames.
    "These guys I work with every day had turned into demons," he said. "I could hear the man's skin crackling and popping. When I put the fire out, they threw bottles at my head."
    Bernal was taken away in an ambulance on a cross-city quest to find a hospital with enough medical supplies to deal with his injuries. The videos spread across social media, but they drew curiously little condemnation. Even the trauma nurse who attended to Bernal thought a kind of justice had been carried out.
    "If the people grabbed him and lynched him, it's because he was a thug," said nurse Juan Perez, who has himself been robbed too many times to count.
    When Bernal's wife got the call, she assumed he had been burned at work. Arriving at the hospital, she walked right past his charred body, and then doubled back to ask, "Are you Roberto?"
    His eyes had been seared shut, and his trachea was so scorched that he could only speak in whispers. He told her that the old man had mistaken him for the real thief, and his accusers had not given him time to explain. He died two days later.
    His murder was not the first in his family. A cousin was shot when he spooked a home intruder, and a nephew was killed last year in a domestic abuse case.
    And it was far from the only attack in the neighborhood.
    Elisa Gonzales, 59, watched the mob beat Bernal from her window. That night, she spied another group of men kicking another alleged thief in the head.
    "It makes me sick to see this stuff. I don't go downstairs anymore," she said.
    Police tend to approach mob violence like bartenders dealing with a fistfight; they'll sometimes step in to break it up, but aren't going to spend much time looking into how it got started.
    Increasingly under attack themselves, police recently put up a thick brick wall around their station here. In the weeks after the killing, the taxi drivers who beat Bernal joked that they were waiting for officers to come by to ask for money and then go back to their bunker.
    Robberies are so rarely investigated that most victims don't bother to file a report, government surveys have found. And while police used to make 118 arrests for every 100 murders, they now make just eight, according to the Violence Observatory.
    Bernal's family was desperate for his case to be different. They began making regular trips to the prosecutor's office, toting mementos of Saint Anthony, patron of the poor. They hoped their presence would shame officials into holding someone accountable for the April 4 murder.
    To their surprise, it did.
    "We have to prioritize cases," explained public prosecutor Regino Cova. "It really matters when a family comes every day like, 'please, please, please.'"
    A month after Bernal's death, Cova charged 23-year-old law school dropout Maickol Jaimez with pouring the gasoline. He told the family that the other men who appeared in the video would now be off the hook. Overwhelmed by a murder rate on par with a war zone, prosecutors can't afford to chase after people for getting in a few kicks, he said.
    Jaimez lived in the same hillside slum as Bernal and worked next to the supermarket guarding shoppers' parked motorcycles, one of the many security-related jobs that have proliferated amid the violence. Like Bernal, he had never been in trouble with the law before. But co-workers say he'd been upset lately because people had been stealing helmets and motorcycle batteries, and he'd had to pay.
    He told prosecutors they will never be able to convict him because no clear shot of his face appears in the video.
    He could be right. Last year, the state charged 268,000 people with crimes ranging from robbery to murder; a threefold increase from the year before. But only 27,000 were sentenced.
    Bernal's blood still stains a motorcycle taxi sign above the cracked sidewalk where he was burned. The men here say they won't wash it off; it's their trophy from the time they stood up to one of the criminals who have made city life a cauldron of stress and fear.
    "People can try to make us look bad," said Francisco Agro, 29, a taxi driver who participated in the beating. "But the truth is, the courts, the police, they don't work. It's not the way things should be, but it fell to us to protect an old man from a thug."
    Bernal's wife and children have been sleeping huddled together since the murder, afraid someone might come for them, too. His 11 year-old son has stopped going to school and is spending more time with the older kids in the slum's dirt alleys, wearing fake tattoos on his spindly arms.
    The family still does not believe Bernal robbed anyone, but they agree with his killers on one point: There is no justice here.
    "Everyone needs to be scared," said his nephew, Alfredo Cisneros. "People need to know there is no law here anymore. No one is safe."


    Mob burns Venezuelan man alive over $5 as justice fails

  16. #16
    Thailand Expat HermantheGerman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by HermantheGerman View Post
    Still waiting to hear from the Chavez supporters


    [B]
    Finally a weasel came out of

    Venezuela ticking time... 20-05-2016 10:42 AM thaimeme fvck off

  17. #17
    Excommunicated baldrick's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by piwanoi
    thats what the UK will be like after 3 years of Corbin should the Labour party be elected in the next GE
    you have a habit of making ridiculous statements to back up some sort of fantasy.

    this is exactly the sort of hyperbole that is used by unsrcupulous scum politicions to influence people who are to stupid to examine anything beyond the specials on the macdonalds advertising hoardings .

    the idea that local corruption will increase in the pommy isles because of a change in political leadership is just retarded - it will stay pretty much the same and may even be less as technology allows much more transparency

    there is a reasonably correlation between repression of reporting/blogging and the increase of corruption , so unless you have indications of the smelly pommy tribe cracking down on the media , then you are just dribbling vapid sh1t

    even though your mainstreet media is moving toward the global standard or reporting bread and circuses , there is still enough information being released outside of those channels to show that publication of information is not being repressed
    If you torture data for enough time , you can get it to say what you want.

  18. #18
    Thailand Expat helge's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by HermantheGerman View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by HermantheGerman View Post
    Still waiting to hear from the Chavez supporters


    [B]
    Finally a weasel came out of

    Venezuela ticking time... 20-05-2016 10:42 AM thaimeme fvck off
    I liked Chavez

    Supporter ?

    He didn't need me

  19. #19
    Thailand Expat HermantheGerman's Avatar
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    No more Coke.

    Venezuela Crisis 2016: Coca-Cola Sugar Shortage Latest Blow To Big Companies Operating In Country On Brink Of Collapse

    As Venezuela’s economy spins out of control, global companies are finding it nearly impossible to do business in the South American nation. A slate of multinational firms in recent months have stopped production or ceased operations as raw materials vanish and access to U.S. dollars shrinks.

    Coca-Cola Co. this week became the latest corporate victim of Venezuela’s disintegrating economy after its Venezuelan bottler temporarily stopped production of sugar-sweetened beverages. Coca-Cola Femsa SAB said it ran out of sugar supplies at its four bottling plants due to a shortage in raw materials, Coca-Cola spokeswoman Kerry Tressler confirmed by email.

    The soda shutdown came just a day after tire maker Bridgestone Americas said it was selling its business in Venezuela in response to runaway inflation and strict currency controls. Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble and oilfield services giants Halliburton Corp. and Schlumberger Corp. have all either slowed or abandoned investments in Venezuela amid the country’s worst downturn in 70 years.

    “Production in Venezuela has on almost every front come to a complete stop,” said Dany Bahar, a Venezuela-born economist and fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “All the private companies are struggling to import, and that’s why they’re not able to produce anything.”

    Investment losses and falling earnings from Venezuelan operations are largely a blip on the balance sheets of multinational behemoths. But for Venezuela’s people, the cuts in manufacturing have resulted in thousands of layoffs at a time when inflation is soaring above 500 percent. Reduced production of basic goods, including pre-cooked cornmeal and cooking oil, is adding to broader shortages of food supplies and services such as electricity and medical care.
    Venezuela Crisis 2016: Coca-Cola Sugar Shortage Latest Blow To Big Companies Operating In Country On Brink Of Collapse

  20. #20
    Thailand Expat HermantheGerman's Avatar
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    Harrowing scenes of Venezuela on the brink of collapse
    Photos By Alejandro Cegarra. Writer Nick Miroff May 25 at 11:24 AM
    The lines outside Venezuelan supermarkets can stretch for hours, snaking down sidewalks and right[at]angling
    around corners. Each one is like a hissing fuse. Will they explode?
    Venezuela withers away a little more each week. Another food staple or medicine or industrial part goes missing,
    bringing the breaking point closer. The national guard troops policing the supermarket lines grip their riot shields
    and truncheons tighter, looking ever more jittery.
    It all is a waiting game. The government of President Nicolás Maduro is waiting for a rise in oil prices to save it
    from catastrophe. It is waiting for rainfall to rescue its hydroelectric plants and end the rotating blackouts that
    have cut the work week for state employees from five days to two. The government is holding on to hopes of
    another loan from China, or any other creditor willing to lend it a little breathing room.
    The government knows it better put something on the supermarket shelves for Venezuelans to wait for.
    Venezuela’s political opposition is also watching the fuse, and sometimes trying to fan it, but its street protests look
    small beside the food lines. The opposition took control of parliament in December, but that didn’t matter.
    Maduro disregards their laws, their votes, their condemnations and warnings. They’re bystanders too, for the most
    part. For how much longer?
    The waiting game goes on. Venezuela’s neighbors are playing it, too, wondering if the crash can be softened and
    how far it may ripple. U.S. officials think the end is close. But all manner of experts and outsiders have been saying
    that about Venezuela for a while now, and the lines just get longer.
    The weariness looks like exhaustion in these images from Venezuelan photographer Alejandro Cegarra. His
    pictures show the Caracas park where he played as a kid, now in ruins, and a nearby McDonald’s, empty of
    customers because runaway inflation means a Happy Meal costs nearly a third of an average monthly wage.
    There is no shortage of street crime and violence in this dystopia. While Cegarra found plenty of battle[at]clad
    guardsman to keep the supermarket lines in formation, the cop in a nearby park was a cardboard cutout.
    Venezuela is running on an empty tank. The government can’t stop the slide, and the opposition can’t stop the
    government. All that’s left to do is wait until something gives.
    More In Sight:
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ning-on-empty/

  21. #21
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    Article in the NY Times. It's beyond ugly there. More details at the link. Power is shut off across the country except for 2 half-days per week. There is a drought, and because of a lack of sugar, Coke is reducing production (the latter may be good).

    So, the govt blames "elitists" for hoarding. What is there to hoard? And the govt there also blames the US. Does the Obama admin care about dismantling Venezuela? There are a lot more pressing concerns.

    Venezuela Drifts Into New Territory: Hunger, Blackouts and Government Shutdown
    By NICHOLAS CASEY and PATRICIA TORRESMAY 28, 2016

    Venezuela’s government says the problems are the result of an “economic war” being waged by elites who are hoarding supplies, as well as the American government’s efforts to destabilize the country.

    But most economists agree that Venezuela is suffering from years of economic mismanagement, including over-dependence on oil and price controls that led many businesses to stop making products.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/wo...apse.html?_r=0

  22. #22
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    More news of it getting worse and worse.

    Where and when will be the bottom?

    Have any board members here spent time in Venezuela?


    Jun 17, 3:36 PM EDT
    NO FOOD, NO TEACHERS, VIOLENCE IN FAILING VENEZUELA SCHOOLS

    BY HANNAH DREIER
    ASSOCIATED PRESS


    CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Maria Arias slipped her notebooks into her backpack, scrounged for a banana to share with her brother and sister, and set off for high school through narrow streets so violent taxis will not come here for any price. She hoped at least one of her teachers would show up.

    But her 7 a.m. art class was canceled when the instructor called in sick. History class was suspended. There was no gym class because the coach had been shot dead weeks earlier. And in the afternoon, her Spanish teacher collected homework and then sent the students home.


    http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...06-17-08-02-55

  23. #23
    I'm in Jail

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    Violent streets mean many poor people doing anything to get money.

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    sounds like someone is planting stories of horrors to fill a certain a political agenda

    so familar,

    Venezuela is fine, Vive Chavez !!!

  25. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dragonfly View Post
    sounds like someone is planting stories of horrors to fill a certain a political agenda

    so familar,

    Venezuela is fine, Vive Chavez !!!
    Viva Chavez Eh , he kicked the bucket Mar 5 2013 .

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