By Cynthia Miller-Idriss | Foreign AffairsUSA: America’s Epidemic of Hate – Cynthia Miller-Idriss | Foreign Affairs
The murder of seven parade attendees on July 4 in Highland Park, Illinois, was horrifying — and all too predictable. Over the past decade, there have been scores of mass killings across the United States. In 2012, a shooter murdered seven Sikh worshipers in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. In 2015, an assailant massacred nine Black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. An attacker killed 23 Walmart shoppers in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. And on May 24 of this year, a shooter killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas.
These episodes have no single formula, but recent assailants typically share a similar set of toxic traits: A history of murderous fantasies, violent nihilism, self-harm, or suicidal ideation; withdrawal from friends and family; and streaks of cruelty expressed through the torture or killing of animals, the stalking or harassing of women, or threats of rape and other physical harm. Investigators are still learning about the Highland Park assailant and his motive, but they know that the 21-year-old alleged shooter had threatened to kill his family and commit suicide. Similarly, the man charged with murdering ten Black Americans in June 2022 at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, had threatened to commit a murder-suicide and had written about stabbing and beheading a cat. Continue reading
Venezuela: Illicit Trade Represents 21% of Venezuela’s GDP: Is This Our Post-Oil Future?
Venezuela – Click to enlarge
Tony Frangie Mawad | Caracas Chronicles
After calculating the current annual worth of drug, gold and gasoline trafficking and port smuggling in Venezuela, a study by the local chapter of the anti-corruption nonprofit Transparency International — with estimates from Ecoanalítica, a Venezuelan economic consulting firm — concluded that these illegal economies made up 21.74% of Venezuela’s GDP last year.
“This means they are more powerful than any other economic sector right now, including oil,” says Mercedes De Freitas, Transparencia Venezuela’s executive director. “And we are talking only about the size of four of these economies, the most important ones. THERE ARE OTHER ILLICIT TRADES: Certain types of food smuggling, diesel smuggling, cooking gas trafficking, human trafficking or timber trafficking, which could be important in some regions.” Continue reading →
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