Venezuela stepped up attacks on the US on Monday, threatening retaliatory measures affecting trade and energy if Washington resorts to sanctions in a row over the country’s disputed presidential election.
Vowing not to go back on former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s revolution, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said at a swearing-in ceremony for his new Cabinet that “there will be no pact here of any kind with the bourgeoisie. Make no mistake.”
He accused the US of threatening Venezuela and spoke with approval of the warning to Washington leveled earlier in the day by Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs Elias Jaua in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
“If the United States takes recourse to economic sanctions, or sanctions of any other kind, we will take measures of a commercial, energy, economic and political order that we consider necessary,” Jaua said in a television interview.
It came after a senior US Department of State official was quoted as urging Venezuela to recount the votes in the April 14 election to give the public confidence in the result.
The US has so far withheld recognition of the official election results, which gave Maduro a narrow victory over opposition candidate Henrique Radonski Capriles, setting off violent protests that left eight people dead.
An audit of the vote is supposed to begin as early as this week, but Venezuelan National Electoral Council vice president Sandra Oblitas on Saturday said it would not overturn Maduro’s victory.
US Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson was reported to have said over the weekend that the Venezuelan election council acted too quickly in proclaiming Maduro the winner, and that half of Venezuelans do not have confidence in the result.
Asked if the US would impose sanctions if Venezuela refused to recount the votes, Jacobson said she could not say one way or another, CNN en Espanol reported.
The US imports about 900,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela, which produces between 2.3 million and 3 million barrels a day. Venezuela, which depends on oil sales for 90 percent of its revenue, sits atop the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves.
Meanwhile, Maduro met with his Cabinet, which includes new finance and interior ministers, but is mostly made up of holdovers, particularly in the key foreign, defense and energy portfolios. Chavez’s son-in-law Jorge Arreazam was ratified as Venezuela’s vice president.
The changes made it clear Maduro wanted new approaches to two major sources of public discontent: an inflation-ravaged economy and a soaring violent crime rate.
“We have to control inflation,” Maduro said in announcing his so-called “government of the streets” late on Sunday.
He split the Venezuelan Ministry of Planning and Finance in two, naming Central Bank of Venezuela President Nelson Merentes the new minister of finance to replace Jorge Giordani, who was left in charge of the separate Ministry of Planning.
Giordani was the architect of a system of strict foreign currency controls that critics say have contributed to shortages, a sharp decline in investment and Latin America’s highest inflation rate, at more than 20 percent.
Maduro praised Giordani as “one of the most loyal men Chavez had,” but said Merentes would bring new ideas on how to control speculation and inflation.
He also named his chief of intelligence, Miguel Rodriguez Torres, as Venezuela’s minister of the interior and justice “to protect and build the foundations of peace” in a country with one of the world’s highest murder rates.
The reshuffled Cabinet comes as Maduro grapples with the implications of a near-loss at the polls. An estimated 700,000 voters swung to Capriles following his 11-point loss to Chavez in the presidential elections in October last year.
By contrast, Maduro won with a 1.8 percentage point-margin.
Venezuelan National Assembly speaker Diosdado Cabello, the second-most powerful Chavista figure after Maduro, on Sunday said he had ordered an internal review within the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela to try to understand what happened.
China has possibly committed “genocide” in its treatment of Uighurs and other minority Muslims in its western region of Xinjiang, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China said in a report on Thursday. The bipartisan commission said that new evidence had last year emerged that “crimes against humanity — and possibly genocide — are occurring” in Xinjiang. It also accused China of harassing Uighurs in the US. China has been widely condemned for setting up complexes in Xinjiang that it describes as “vocational training centers” to stamp out extremism and give people new skills, which others have called concentration camps. The UN says that
A racing pigeon has survived an extraordinary 13,000km Pacific Ocean crossing from the US to find a new home in Australia. Now authorities consider the bird a quarantine risk and plan to kill it. Kevin Celli-Bird yesterday said he discovered that the exhausted bird that arrived in his Melbourne backyard on Dec. 26 last year had disappeared from a race in the US state of Oregon on Oct. 29. Experts suspect the pigeon that Celli-Bird has named Joe — after US president-elect Joe Biden — hitched a ride on a cargo ship to cross the Pacific. Joe’s feat has attracted the attention
Australian scientists have raised questions over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca and University of Oxford COVID-19 vaccine in establishing herd immunity, calling for a pause on its widespread rollout as the country recorded one new case of the virus yesterday. Opposition to the vaccine casts a cloud over Australia’s immunization plans, with 53 million doses of the AstraZeneca jab already on hand. “The question is really whether it is able to provide herd immunity. We are playing a long game here. We don’t know how long that will take,” Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology president Stephen Turner said. Turner added
The Polish Supreme Court on Friday quashed a lower court’s green light for the extradition of a businessman to China for alleged fraud, a charge he has denied, saying that he is being targeted for supporting Falun Gong. Polish authorities took Chinese-born Swedish citizen Li Zhihui, now 53, into custody in 2019 on an international warrant issued by China for alleged non-payment in a business deal, Krzysztof Kitajgrodzki, his Polish lawyer, told reporters. Following the Supreme Court ruling, the case would return to a lower appellate court for review. Kitajgrodzki told reporters that it was still not a given that his client
RSS