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Sep 4, 2026 - World

Russian drone and missile attacks in Kyiv have intensified, disrupting daily life with constant air-raid sirens

Sep 4, 2026 - World

Argentine President Javier Milei is escalating his country’s dispute with Britain over the Falkland Islands

Sep 4, 2026 - World

Jordan, a staunch U.S. ally that hosts American forces in the Mideast, has paid a price for its relationship with Washington

Sep 4, 2026 - World

Fears that President Donald Trump could freeze foreign assets are driving billions in gold out of New York's vaults, an economics journalist warned.In a Thursday article for The Bulwark, economics editor and columnist Catherine Rampell described the gold retreat as a signal of how far U.S. relationships, in particular with its European allies, have deteriorated."In a frightening sign of just how much trust has been lost between the United States and its erstwhile allies, billions of dollars of gold reserves are being repatriated or otherwise moved out of Trump's reach," Rampell wrote.The Dutch central bank announced on Wednesday that it had moved roughly $12 billion in gold, most of it held in New York, to vaults in London, Rampell noted. France's central bank recently sold about $15 billion in bullion stored in New York and replaced it with bars kept in Paris. Germany and Italy, which are the second- and third-largest holders of gold reserves behind the U.S., have spent the past year weighing whether to bring theirs home too, Rampell added.The concern is less that Trump would seize the gold than that he might freeze it, Rampell explained. Washington and its allies did the same with Russia's reserves after the invasion of Ukraine, she pointed out.A German member of the European Parliament, Markus Ferber, warned that the risk is impossible to dismiss, she noted."Trump is erratic, and one cannot rule out that someday he will come up with creative ideas how to treat foreign gold reserves," Ferber said, per Rampell.Rampell admitted the scale of the fear caught her off guard."It hadn't really occurred to me that investors might be diversifying away from U.S. dollar-denominated assets because they also feared losing access to them," she wrote.The nervousness has built during a string of Trump moves, including his "Liberation Day" tariffs, his threats to annex Greenland, his push to take "golden share" stakes in private companies, and his stated wish to personally inspect Fort Knox, according to Rampell.Because gold sits inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Trump's campaign to control the Federal Reserve feeds fears that foreign reserves could be next, Rampell wrote. A representative of Germany's Taxpayers Federation put it bluntly, she noted."It's our money," the representative said. "It should be brought back."

Sep 4, 2026 - World

Will Saletan from The Bulwark unloaded on Thursday about President Donald Trump's new oil deal with Venezuela — a turn of events that, he said, lays bare how "absolutely disgusting" Trump's plot has been all along.Trump, said Saletan, "said it more than doubles American oil reserves ... and he wrote this: 'One of the things I'm going to do with the Venezuelan oil is fill up the strategic national reserves,'" which were depleted severely by Trump's war with Iran. He claims that this oil is a "gift from Venezuela to the people of the United States."Right-wing outlets aren't even trying to hide what this is anymore, said Saletan. They aren't claiming that Trump's operation to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro was about liberating the people, he added, leading him to conclude that it was always about oil.For example, Saletan noted, right-wing commentator Ben Ferguson said of the deal, "I think this vice president and president understand this is a moment in Venezuela where you could have a lot of leverage, and you could get something good, and clearly they're willing to play ball. Now, that's big — they're willing to play along because we have leverage." The leverage, Saletan noted, is the fact that America just attacked their country.Meanwhile, he said, Rachel Campos-Duffy, the wife of Trump's Transportation Secretary, acknowledged on Fox News, "I think in Venezuela, the reviews on this are very mixed — mostly negative — among them, not because they're not happy about the potential economic upsides, but they don't trust Delcy Rodríguez" — that being the acting president the U.S. installed in place of Maduro, despite her having all the same policies as her predecessor apart from being more open to do oil deals.Even Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) — who has talked a big game about genuine liberation for Latin American countries — is now saying, "The United States helped them liberate themselves from Maduro. So the reward is to give fair benefits to the oil companies," including "100 years" of being able to exploit the country's oil reserves. "This is the way Trump and his allies in Congress think — it's always, always about the money," said Saletan.But perhaps the most damning admission, said Saletan, came from former Trump deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates, who said Venezuelan oil contracts should "enshrine this deal so a change of government will not imperil those billions of dollars of investment we're going to have to see out of our private sector to make this work." In other words, it needs to be set up so even if the current regime is replaced with a democracy, the oil still flows no matter what the Venezuelan people want."Look, I don't know what your political views are. Maybe you believe in capitalism, maybe you don't," concluded Saletan. "But one thing we should all agree on is that this corrupt, coercive deal is disgusting and ruthless, and it's wrong. It is a total perversion of capitalism combined with the worst kind of socialism." - YouTube www.youtube.com