DAVID W. PEAR—Hugo Chavez and his successor Maduro are exuberantly despised by the elite white-supremacist minority. They still call Chavez negro, savage, monkey and ape. Maduro gets the same; and the media never fails to remind the public that he was a former bus driver, which is code for “low-class”. Maduro is proud of his humble beginning as a bus driver and his Afro-Indigenous ethnicity. Chavez was proud of his poor Afro-Indigenous background too, and his final resting place is in the barrio where he and Maduro came from.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Trump has been continuing and expanding all of the depravities of his predecessors, but he’s been doing so openly, making it look exactly as ugly and disgusting as it is. His supporters try to justify this by claiming he’s making brilliant 4-D chess maneuvers against the Deep State, but Trump isn’t playing chess. He isn’t even playing checkers. He’s playing Uno, and he’s playing it with his hand fully exposed on the table, with his only defense being to point at a red card and say “This one’s green” and point at an eight and say “That’s a two. It’s the best two, absolutely terrific two.”

In an article explicitly dedicated to uncovering alleged foreign interference in Venezuelan state and society, it is ironic that Casey entirely omitted the most egregious form of external intervention: US sanctions. Since 2017, Trump’s financial sanctions have battered the healthcare system directly, with recurring cases of medicine shipments blocked or assets destined for imports frozen as a result of US financial crimes enforcement directives, according to Torino Capital chief economist Francisco Rodriguez. In one such case, the Venezuelan government denounced the freezing of $1.6 billion of its assets by Brussels-based financial services agency Euroclear, half of which was reportedly destined for medicine imports.

TIM SHORROCK—My award was doubly significant because my stories had grown directly out of events that took place on the very square where I stood. There, in the shadow of Gwangju’s old Provincial Capital, the last voices of the city’s rebels had been stilled on May 27, 1980, by a Korean Army division dispatched from the DMZ marking the border with North Korea. They were sent with the approval of the US commander of the US-Korea Joint Command, Gen. John Wickham. That decision, made at the highest levels of the US government, forever stained the relationship between the United States and the South. For the people of Gwangju, many of whom believed that the US military would side with the forces of democracy, it was a deep betrayal that they’ve never forgotten.

P. PAVIMENTOV—One of the more absurd notions is that the ruling classes would be stupid and/or afraid. It is reading the situation entirely through a glass darkly as this already was demonstrated in the French Revolution to be wrong, where many heads were chopped off, but where the majority of the nobility and clergy remained in power as soon as the major revolutionary wave drained off and they re-established themselves during the Directorate and the Napoleonic empire and later by marrying into the rising industrial bourgeoisie.

MoA—Under threat of U.S. sanctions the European partners stopped buying Iranian oil and also ended their exports to it. The new financial instrument that was supposed to allow payments between European countries and Iran has still not been implemented. It is also a weak construct and will have too little capacity to make significant trade possible. Russia and China each have their own problems with the United States. They do not support trade with Iran when it endangers their other interests.

Meanwhile the Trump administration increased the pressure on Iran. It removed waivers it had given to some countries to buy Iranian oil. It designated a part of the Iranian armed forces, the Revolutionary Guard Corp (ICRG), as a terrorist entity. On Friday it sanctioned Iran’s biggest producer of petrochemical products because that company is alleged to have relations with the ICRG.

CRAIG MURRAY—That Iran would target a Japanese ship and a friendly Russian crewed ship is a ludicrous allegation. They are however very much the targets that the USA allies in the region – the Saudis, their Gulf Cooperation Council colleagues, and Israel – would target for a false flag. It is worth noting that John Bolton was meeting with United Arab Emirates ministers two weeks ago – both ships had just left the UAE.