The Venezuelan government and food producers have outlined a plan to guarantee the distribution of food if the South American nation’s energy crisis worsens, an industry official said on Friday.
Venezuelan Pork Federation president Alberto Cudemus said government and private-sector representatives met the previous evening for talks on how to insulate the food sector from power outages. He said the plan involves reducing water use and investing to make food producers self-sufficient in energy within 90 to 360 days.
How long it takes will hinge on both the private sector’s willingness to make the investments, and the government that is managing permits to import electrical generators and giving access to foreign currency to purchase the equipment, Cudemus said.
“We are sort of racing against the clock in the food sector and do not want to let the country down,” he added.
Venezuela has implemented power rationing and rolling blackouts in some states to prevent a collapse of the electrical grid as water levels behind the Guri Dam — which supplies roughly 70 percent of the nation’s electricity — fall precipitously amid a severe drought.
Opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accuse the government of failing to invest in electricity production over the last decade amid rising demand; Chavez denies that.
State news agency ABN reported that the government committed to exempt food producers and plants from power cuts as part of its energy rationing plan.
Energy and Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said on Friday that the government was bringing in gas and diesel generators with an output of 1,200 megawatts to cover demand from state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA.
“Before the end of the year is the time frame we estimate for electrical self-sufficiency,” Ramirez told ABN.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS