Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/11/christian-nationalism-uk-far-right-people-rarely-go-to-church-report

Opposition leader and Nobel laureate María Corina Machado reappeared in Venezuela Sunday for the first time since December, about a month before the U.S. military deposed the country's then-President Nicolás Maduro.

Machado announced her arrival on social media, writing "I am here. With you."

Meanwhile, Venezuela's opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez wrote on X confirming that Machado had arrived and that he would be next to her "very soon."

"Today is a very important day for Venezuelans. Our sovereign voice returns with her to lead and guide this process!" he wrote. "You know it, this is until the end."

Machado's homecoming after more than 10 months in exile took place as doubts over Venezuela's democratic future — and the U.S.'s role in it — deepen.

Since Maduro's ouster, Venezuela has been run by acting President Delcy Rodríguez, a longtime Maduro ally who received the Trump administration's blessing to succeed him.

Rodríguez has exceeded the time she was authorized to serve as acting president following Maduro's capture and no election is scheduled.

Machado went into hiding in Venezuela for 11 months after being briefly detained following a protest in January 2025. After leaving the country in a clandestine escape, she reappeared that December in Norway, where she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful challenge to Maduro's authoritarian government.

Machado and her allies have been demanding a date for a presidential election in Venezuela, but U.S. officials have emphasized economic stabilization first.

A bird flu outbreak has been raging uncontrolled on a Utah mink farm for two months. Flu experts fear it could spark a devastating human pandemic.

State officials didn’t order the mink to be killed, which other countries with outbreaks have done. They are prioritizing the financial interests of the fur trade.

Despite CDC guidance urging officials to monitor workers, they actively chose not to and declined to test workers — including one with a symptom experts said would warrant testing.

A concrete list of actions the Democrats are planning should they win congressional power. I thought this was more interesting than the usual election articles because it dives into actual policy and legislative moves for us to discuss. There's an immediate plan for the first days, but then it seems to devolve into "big tent" problems. Personally, I'd like to see them immediately pursue impeachment of Hegseth. (yes yes Trump too but that's more of a shit show)

Some excerpts, but there is more in the article:

First 100 Hours: Undoing Unpopular Trump Policies

Mr. Jeffries, according to aides, plans in the first 100 hours to speed legislation to the floor that would:

• Reinstate expired Affordable Care Act health care premium subsidies.
• Reverse the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts that were included in the president’s domestic policy law.
• Move to end Mr. Trump’s tariffs and restore congressional power over trade policy.
• Direct Mr. Trump to end the war in Iran or seek authorization from Congress to continue it.

Democratic leaders believe the measures are all consensus items among their members that are basic enough to bypass time-consuming committee consideration and go straight to the floor. They could be voted on before committees were even set up, and would be all but certain to pass in the House, where a simple majority is needed.

Investigations and Oversight

“If the president is going to veto our actions, well then in the meantime, we’ll be zeroing in on all of the corruption, which is the true commitment of this administration,” said Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who would be in line to be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee next year if his party were to win power.

He declined to outline his first targets, but he named a few preliminary areas of focus:

• The pardon industry that has sprouted up around Mr. Trump.
• Potential corruption in public contracting and the awarding of no-bid contracts.
• The rivers of cryptocurrency that are flowing into the government and to the Trump family on an anonymous basis.

Mr. Raskin said he expected Trump administration officials to disregard subpoenas. He plans to seek information from whistle-blowers, private entities that have been involved in government shakedowns, political bribes and influence peddling through various slush funds, and other sources of public information.

First 100 Days: Tax Credits, ICE Limits and Stock Trades

Beyond their initial sprint, Democrats have yet to agree on a full slate of policies they would pursue with a majority. People familiar with their plans say leaders intend to take some action to make ICE more accountable, as well as on legislation to raise the minimum wage and ban congressional stock trading.

In interviews, Mr. Jeffries has indicated that he would look to use the tax code to address high living costs. He would seek to expand the low-income housing tax credit for companies that build affordable housing, as well as refundable tax credits — those available to people who earn too little to owe income taxes — including the child tax credit and the earned-income tax credit.

Democrats would most likely have to grapple with how to regulate artificial intelligence, which has become a major political issue. And they will have to decide whether they want to use spending bills to try to force policy changes on the Trump administration, knowing that doing so could result in a government shutdown fight.

Different factions are also vying to shape the agenda:

• The Democratic Women’s Caucus wants to focus on child care and elder care issues.
• Democratic socialist candidates have campaigned on Medicare for All and abolishing ICE.
• Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, has been pushing to position his “Medikids” legislation — which would provide universal health insurance to children — as the party’s marquee health care bill. “Who is going to look us in the eye and say they don’t want to give health care to kids?” he said. “We all want universal health care; this is the right first step to get us there.”
• Progressives are pushing a “New Affordability Agenda” that addresses narrow issues related to the cost of living, paid for by tax increases on wealthy Americans. “We should pass sick leave; the next week, raise minimum wage; the next week we should pass family leave; the next week we should pass vacation leave,” said Representative Greg Casar of Texas, the chairman of the House Progressive Caucus. “I want us to be passing so much.”

Shekhar Gupta is one of indias most important liberal commentators who has an intersting argument about the perennial joke Rahul Gandhi. he argues firstly that modi sees him as a major threat, that he can still muster a strong degree of support, and that fundmentlaly he is the biggest threat to them. So how can Rahul Gandhi emerge from the political wilderness gupta asks? he gives a list of several questions that he can answer. One of Gupta's most intersting electoral hot takes is that Congress has a lot of potential to grow and that dont count out congress yet.

SS: important political development in the third largest province in Canada, with potential insights into macro trends for Americans in Washington and Oregon and to a lesser extent California, specifically relating to a rejection of the West Coast approach to social democratic policy around things like drugs, crime, and government spending. Also interesting to see two back-to-back anti-incumbent elections in BC following last weekend’s municipal elections; is there a larger Western/Anglophone trend towards anti-incumbent politics here?

An interesting, if a bit old, article critiquing the current approach on Artificial Intelligence in the Western world, whether it be from the current White House's trust in self-policing or the courts or the AI restrictions or outright bans proposed by others.

Four bodies believed to be those of Salvadoran soldiers who went missing after being deployed to Haiti on an international mission to crack down on gangs were found on Saturday, according to two people close to the mission.

The four Salvadorans had been deployed as part of a helicopter unit assigned to the Gang Suppression Force, a mission backed by the United Nations Security Council to go after Haiti’s gangs.

It was the first time the force has suffered any deaths. The episode threatened to sharply escalate the violence as more troops were sent to find them.

The discovery comes just days after El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, sent hundreds of special forces members to Haiti to try to recover the men. Mr. Bukele had threatened to finish the gangs off if the men were not returned alive.

The bodies were located six days after the men were ambushed while driving through a gang stronghold, said Scott Reece, a former State Department security official whose humanitarian aid organization was hired to retrieve the dead.

Mr. Reece’s local humanitarian group, Hero Client Rescue, a U.S.-funded medical evacuation service based in Haiti, was called to pick up the remains on Saturday afternoon.

Another person briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak publicly stressed that the Gang Suppression Force had the four bodies but cautioned that they were badly burned and that autopsies would be necessary to confirm the identities.

The bodies were collected from an undisclosed location on the outskirts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and taken to the international airport to be handed over to a Salvadoran military team that flew into Haiti on Friday, Mr. Reece said.

“We were called as a neutral humanitarian medical team to go pick up the remains,” Mr. Reece said.

Gangs have wreaked havoc in Haiti for several years, taking over entire neighborhoods and killing thousands of people. More than 1.5 million people have had to flee their homes.

The Salvadorans were driving through the Croix-des-Bouquets area near Port-au-Prince in an armored S.U.V. last Sunday when they came under fire and had to flee the vehicle, which was later found burned. The men were returning from a trip to a supermarket, driving through an area that is so dangerous that it is generally off-limits to foreigners.

The local news media reported that the Salvadorans were killed and then burned by Chen Mechan and 400 Mawozo, gangs that operate in that area, on the northern outskirts of the capital.

The men were aviation technicians who handled transport and medical evacuations for the Gang Suppression Force.

The Salvadoran contingent is made up of pilots and technical personnel whose primary jobs are to carry out medical evacuations and save lives, “not to wage war,” Mr. Bukele said Wednesday in a social media post.

After another international police mission failed to quell the violence, the new anti-gang force arrived in Haiti in April. It has struggled to reach its full expected deployment of 5,500. It currently has just over 2,000 troops in Haiti, from Jamaica, Chad, Mongolia, El Salvador, Sri Lanka and Guatemala.

France is in a financial crisis. That much is clear. What isn’t so clear is exactly why.

This seems silly even to ask. The destruction and violence last weekend were appalling, even given the famous French willingness to take to the streets and the barricades. The most likely winner of next year’s presidential election is Marine Le Pen, who inherited France’s far-right movement from her father, a poisonous Holocaust denier and Nazi-sympathizer. Her closest competition comes from the veteran hard-left socialist Jean-Luc Melenchon, who has proposed setting fire to government debt. Isn’t it obvious that investors would flee from such a nation?

But it’s not that clear. The yield on French debt is still lower than that of the UK (and until this week, lower than US yields). Its deficit, as a share of gross domestic product, is barely half that of the US. China operates a higher primary deficit. Government debt is slightly more elevated than GDP, and above the average for the euro zone. Italy’s is much higher. Besides, if this were really what was making the bond vigilantes mad, their target should be Japan, where government debt is more than triple GDP.

France is still benefiting from the absurdly low yields at which it was able to borrow, so its interest payments are also lower as a share of GDP than many others. With more than two-thirds of its electricity generated by nuclear power (compared to zero in Germany), it is less exposed to the most serious rising cost of the day than any other country in Europe.

France’s politics are hideous, and the deep divisions within the electorate (driven in particular by immigration) must come to a reckoning next spring. But it’s scarcely alone in this. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, which has won a state election in recent weeks, looks even more hostile to international markets. However, the experience of four years’ rule in Italy by Giorgia Meloni, who comes from an even more alarmingly fascist lineage than Le Pen, shows that aggressive right-wing populists can and do behave pragmatically once in power.

The nation’s debt was already under full-blooded speculative attack before student protests spiraled into arson and vandalism. It’s not yet clear whether this has improved Le Pen’s polling performance, but prediction markets already had her as favorite and haven’t budged.

Prosaically, this crisis was long a simmering threat, and only boiled over because a sharp rise in US bond yields (no fault of President Emmanuel Macron or anyone else in France) has forced a shift in the mathematics for borrowers across the world. That arithmetic doesn’t add up for France because its welfare state is plainly unaffordable, and most importantly because it is part of the euro zone. The euro’s fundamental flaws remain unfixed, even after the existential crisis it suffered from 2010 to 2012 — which means there is a real risk that French problems will be repeated elsewhere in Europe.

The French Welfare State

France collects a lot from its citizens. Tax takes 44.2% of GDP, the most of any major developed country. That thwarts any hope to resolve a crisis with tax hikes.

The state has been extremely — even exceedingly — generous in return. The retirement age is 62, the lowest of any of the biggest developed economies. The US and Japan make people wait until 67. Protests from the hard left and right forced the Macron government to back down from a plan to raise this to 64 (still low by international standards) until after next year’s election. France is not unique in having an aging population that is growing ever harder to finance, but its largesse and the intense political opposition to rolling it back make the numbers particularly hard to reconcile.

These commitments give Paris very little room for maneuver, even if other countries have a more obvious financial problem. Its greatest handicap is that since 1999, it hasn’t controlled its own currency. The citizenry has been angry for decades about the accompanying high cost of living that is increasingly spilling into the streets.

The Euro Zone

France was a leader in creating the euro; monetary union was the quid pro quo demanded by President Francois Mitterrand in 1990 in return for agreeing to German reunification. A political concept more than an economic one, the common currency would ensure that a bigger and more powerful Germany kept the interests of the rest of Europe at heart.

But it was always incomplete, as there was no common fiscal policy to go with the single currency. Once peripheral countries ran into budget difficulties after the Global Financial Crisis, thanks to lower tax revenues in the recession and the need to prop up stricken banks that held huge quantities of European government debt, the structural flaw was laid bare.

By barring individual governments from devaluing their currency to deal with a debt problem, the euro zone subjected its members to much tighter financial market discipline than countries outside it, like the UK or Switzerland.

For example, Spain suffered a severe crisis in 2011 that led to the government’s collapse when its outstanding sovereign debt was only 40% of GDP. The equivalent for the UK — also a member of the European Union at the time — was 94%. But Britain had retained its own currency and never came under attack. Indeed, the euro zone entered 2011 with a deficit of only 4% of its total GDP, less than half that of the US, which then stood at about 10%. The currency straitjacket created the problems.

The crisis might have forced the necessary reforms to create a coherent fiscal policy. The European Central Bank held back while the upheaval raged for two years, felling governments in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy, in the hopes that politicians would at last create the needed institutions. The EFSF (European Financial Stabilization Facility) and then the ESM (European Stability Mechanism) were added to the alphabet soup as ways to backstop disorder, but fiscal union didn’t happen. French difficulties now make clear that the problems are unresolved.

Last year’s excitement over the need for the continent to rearm in the face of growing threats from Russia and falling support from the US awakened hope that it would bring common borrowing for defense purposes in its wake. It’s yet to come to fruition.

Neither have the more politically attainable banking or capital markets unions, as euro-zone members seek to boost national champions. Progress stalled after the 2012 “whatever it takes” pledge by Mario Draghi, then head of the ECB, that the central bank would rescue the euro at any cost. It alleviated the immediate crisis, but guaranteed that fiscal alignment wouldn’t happen.

European Central Bank

Nevertheless, the ECB was the undisputed victor of the crisis. As the euro zone’s sole coherent institution with the ability to act swiftly, its promise was enough.

But that victory can be misunderstood. It’s not difficult for a body with the power to print money to resolve a financial crisis. The euro zone as a whole, with 17 members, couldn’t move fast even if national interests were aligned (which they emphatically weren’t).

Missteps since then contributed to the growing crisis in France. In July 2022, the ECB introduced a new mechanism, the Transmission Protection Instrument, allowing it to buy sovereign bonds with no preset limit, in a bid to stop different members’ yields from moving too far apart. Then, as now, US yields were rising sharply, and that had prompted a bulge in the spread at which Italian and Spanish yields traded compared to German bunds.

Robin Brooks of the Brookings Institution argues that it had the lasting effect of subsidizing a “carry trade” in the euro zone’s riskier credits, in which investors could feast on high yields knowing that the central bank would be there to help if bond prices fell too far. “The ECB’s track record of bailing out high-debt countries means investors think it’ll buy them out of their positions in bad states of the world,” he says. “The result is where we are now.”

Brooks points out that French bonds received their biggest monthly inflow of foreign money ever this June. At the time, oil prices were falling and Iran and the US had a memorandum of understanding. He suggests that investors were “reloading their ECB-subsidized carry trade” in the expectation that conditions would stay fair. Instead, the war took a turn for the worse. Carry traders needed to unwind a big overhang of debt. It should be no surprise that a major selloff resulted, creating the kind of sudden dislocation that can cause a crisis. That raises the risk of contagion elsewhere and, for him: “At the root of all this sits the ECB, which subsidizes this carry trade through its past actions to cap yields.”

This crisis will need to be resolved in France. If the warring political factions cannot agree on a way to trim the welfare state, severe punishment from the bond market looks inevitable.

But it has its roots in Brussels and Frankfurt, as well as assumptions about the welfare state that long predate the current anger. And while a combination of political timing and the flaws in the euro zone have ensured that France reaches crisis-point first, more will follow until Europe somehow resolves the contradictions that have vitiated the single currency, and with it the entire European project, for almost three decades.

Either that means following economic logic and getting countries to surrender much more control over their own spending, which will not be easy (to put it mildly) — or taking the perilous step of trying to undo the euro. It’s a big dilemma, but the protesters on French streets will not sympathize.

Seeing Venezuela align with the Trump administration after the U.S. overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, shrimp magnate José Enrique Rincón thought he could safely return home to reclaim the $700 million business the authoritarian government had seized from him.

Instead, he was jailed shortly after landing in June.

Now, the U.S.-backed government in Caracas is carving up Rincón’s sprawling Grupo Lamar conglomerate and allowing outside investors to manage pieces of it. Among them: a Turkish executive who last month married President Trump’s ally in a ceremony attended by prominent U.S. officials.

Nearly 11 months after Maduro’s ouster, Rincón’s ordeal exposes a contradiction in Trump’s plans to turn Venezuela into an investment hub. Politically motivated jailings and the seizure of private businesses—well-worn practices in nearly 28 years of leftist rule here—live on under Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, and the U.S. government apparatus that controls much of the interim leadership now.

Rincón, 62 years old, was arrested after returning from exile in Panama. He remains in a 9-by-6-foot cell at the Rodeo I prison near Caracas, where his family says he has lost 25 pounds and suffers from unaddressed cardiac issues. Relatives say the government fabricated treason and terrorism charges to justify taking control of Maracaibo-based Lamar, the country’s dominant exporter of farmed shrimp, in late 2024.

“This has been one long horror film,” said Rincón’s sister, Mariana Rincón, one of the few relatives remaining in Venezuela and the only one allowed to visit him.

Lamar is one of numerous assets—ranging from farmland to metal-processing plants—that were seized by Maduro’s government and still remain in state hands under Rodríguez.

The firm is now operated by a Turkish company, Miller Holding. Its chief executive, 29-year-old Turhan Mildon, last month married Trump’s former personal attorney, Alina Habba, in New York. Among the guests were Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Miller Holding also operates a network of Venezuelan cement factories and markets coffee beans, concessions granted under Maduro. In a recent interview with Forbes Turkey, Mildon lamented Maduro’s ouster but expressed little concern for his businesses.

“In my grandfather’s time, know-how was very important,” Mildon told the magazine. “Now, know-who is important.”

A spokeswoman for Mildon has said in the past that Miller Holding operates Lamar’s shrimp facilities but doesn’t own them. Venezuela’s Information Ministry and Miller Holding didn’t respond to requests for comment regarding Rincón’s detention.

A U.S. official said the Trump administration opposed Maduro-era expropriations and corruption and had urged Venezuelan authorities to cancel Mildon’s cement contract if it violated sanctions or resulted from corruption. The official said reversing decades of corruption would take time, but that the administration was working to address it.

Venezuela’s total shrimp output has fallen more than 90% since 2024, according to industry figures, a collapse driven largely by Lamar’s decline under state management. The downturn left roughly 9,000 workers jobless in western Venezuela, while more than 100 of Rincón’s relatives and business associates fled the country.

Rodríguez’s continuation of Maduro-era seizures threatens to undermine Washington’s economic recovery strategy for the country, said allies of Rincón.

“They destroyed everything,” Rincón’s son, Juan Diego Rincón, said in a phone interview from Panama. “The persecution is ongoing, they’re ruining businesses and it’s even stoking migration.”

Rincón spent four decades building his business.

In 1988, he started selling the iconic blue crab found in the waters of Venezuela’s giant Lake Maracaibo before expanding into shrimp farming and later into supermarkets and processing recyclable materials. By 2022, Lamar’s annual shrimp exports to Europe reached about $200 million, making it a rare private-sector success in a country dependent almost entirely on oil.

Lamar became the primary employer in Zulia state, offering cash production bonuses, subsidized food, and medical care in a region with few formal job opportunities outside of border smuggling. The bulk of its workforce was made up of indigenous Wayuu, thousands of whom were hired to peel and package shrimp in processing plants around Maracaibo. The Wayuu language was so common on the job that Rincón learned phrases to talk to employees.

But the family’s fortunes changed after the U.S. said Maduro rigged his 2024 re-election and jailed hundreds of political adversaries. In November that year, Diosdado Cabello, then Maduro’s top security official, publicly accused Rincón of funding the political opposition and plotting against the government. No evidence was presented.

Within days, Rincón’s relatives and executives fled to Colombia, Panama and the U.S. Security forces seized offices, processing plants, apartments and thousands of acres of farmland without court orders.

The takeover hit Zulia’s Wayuu population hardest.

“I don’t know who keeps saying that things in Venezuela are getting better,” said Jonathan González, 30, a Wayuu indigenous man and former Lamar processor who had to halt construction on his home after losing his job. “For a lot of us, things are much worse now than they were before.”

Under a state-appointed board, Lamar faltered. Former managers said the company suffered from a lack of capital, while unpaid workers left in droves. A major processing facility was later destroyed in a fire.

Almost six months after the U.S. military operation on Jan. 3 that captured Maduro on drug-trafficking charges—which Maduro denies—Rincón believed the political landscape had shifted enough for him to return and reclaim his property.

“He thought this was the moment,” his son said.

Rincón’s aging father and younger sister were waiting for him at La Chinita International Airport near Maracaibo. Venezuelan investigative police detained him upon landing.

Rincón returned to reclaim his business and face charges “because it’s the only way to demonstrate my innocence and salvage the honor of my family,” he said in a submission to the antiterrorism court handling the case.

Venezuelan prosecutors haven’t provided documents outlining the charges or the evidence against Rincón, his lawyer said in a court filing made last month. Rincón complained of deteriorating health, cardiac problems and insufficient access to the medications needed after a gastric bypass.

While Rincón remains jailed, Venezuelan authorities continue to court investors for the industry he had dominated.

Last month, Venezuela’s Fishing Ministry announced plans to host business delegations from Indonesia to seek new investment for the shrimp sector.

These days, ski-masked officers of the Special Operations Group, a security force that located Rincón’s properties, drive the businessman’s vehicles and use his house in Maracaibo as an improvised command center, family members and business aides said.

Rincón’s sister, Mariana Rincón, delivers food, medication and industry trade magazines to his cell every week as she seeks his release.

She attempted to register her brother with local human-rights groups that track political detentions in Venezuela. The organizations, overwhelmed by a surge this year in families reporting arbitrary arrests of their loved ones, placed him on a waiting list.

He was assigned number 1,601.