MEXCICO CITY (Sputnik) - Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez has alleged that US oil giant Exxon Mobil sponsored preparations for the 2023 foiled assassination attempts on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with the aim of exploiting rich resources of the Essequibo region.
On Monday, Venezuelan Prosecutor General Tarek William Saab said that the country's security forces had thwarted preparations for five terrorist attacks and conspiracies, with 27 people detained in the case. The detainees are believed to have recruited Venezuelan military personnel and planned, in coordination with the US authorities, assassination attempts on Maduro, Padrino and Freddy Bernal, the governor of the Venezuelan state of Tachira.
"I dare say, this is funded by Exxon Mobil so that once the task of these conspiratorial actions is completed — the task of assassinating the Venezuelan constitutional president, our commander-in-chief, of killing him, taking him out — [the US can] come after the Essequibo region. These are not crazy ideas, this is a geopolitical analysis constantly carried out by the General Staff of the Bolivarian armed forces," Padrino Lopez said in an speech broadcast by the state-run VTV channel on Monday.........more below
China has suspended several 2025 export controls on strategic materials — including rare earths, superhard materials, and lithium batteries – for a year. Is this a concession to the US, or a move in a far more complex game?
"The first aim of China’s export controls was to consolidate its leverage in negotiations. The second was to establish a long-term framework for managing such controls," says Yana Leksyutina, deputy director at the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).
Сhina could activate this mechanism at any moment, and now everyone knows it’s a lever it holds, she explains to Sputnik.
Balancing the Mineral Market
"The moratorium on export bans to the US essentially resets the rare earth market to where it was previously," Jeff J. Brown, author of 'The China Trilogy' and founder of Seek Truth From Facts Foundation, tells Sputnik.
In the meantime, there will be a global rush by the US and its NATO allies to acquire as many rare earth ...
The Israeli regime has reportedly signed contracts worth millions of dollars in recent months to sway American public opinion as part of attempts to launder the occupying entity’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Friday that the multimillion-dollar campaign aimed to reshape US public opinion, both online and offline, through coordinated influence operations combining digital marketing, AI, geotagging, and religious messaging.
The contracts, signed between the Israeli regime and firms linked to US President Donald Trump, reveal a “hasbara [propaganda] campaign” and schemes to target millions of US churchgoers, deploy bots, hire influencers, and try to make ChatGPT more pro-Israel.
The largest contract, worth $6 million, was signed with Clock Tower X, owned by Trump’s former digital campaign chief Brad Parscale, to produce and distribute roughly 100 core pieces of pro-Israel content per month and thousands......
