On the third of this year, the United States launched an attack on Venezuela, unleashing several drone strikes on Caracas. During this attack several people were killed and President Nicholas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores were captured by the United States. Maduro has had a bounty in the United States for a few years due to several crimes against the United States he’s accused of. The United States has also been making efforts to gain control of Venezuela’s oil.
However many investors have noted Venezuela to be uninvestable due to the oil itself. While Venezuela has “the largest proven oil reserves” with over 300 billion barrels, that oil is heavy crude. Heavy crude oil takes a very long process to extract and clean into usable oil. It should also be mentioned that while Venezuela’s oil reserves were confirmed by the United States Geological Survey, the USGS sourced their results from the PDVSA, an oil company owned by Maduro. Given Maduro’s criminal background along with the fact he’d have the most to gain from this, it is possible that these results were exaggerated and/or fabricated. But this would only be the start of a wildly eventful January.
On the seventh, members of the U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed a woman known as Reńee Nicole Good. Good was a 37 year old U.S citizen living in Minneapolis, who was shot through the window of her vehicle as she attempted to flee ICE agents. This isn’t the only time someone was killed by ICE in Minneapolis though.
On January 24th, 37 year old Alex Pretti was at an anti-ICE protest when he was shot and killed by ICE agents. Along with these two, six other people have died due to ICE. But it has been a big month for ICE in other ways as well. ICE has detained a record amount of immigrants this month, with over 70,000 individuals detained. All of these things in combination with other things ICE has done in the past has led to several protests around the country, especially in Minneapolis. But before the month would end, arguably the most significant thing would happen all just before the end of January.
On January 30th, over 3 million pages of the Epstein list were released by the DOJ along with thousands of photos and videos. The DOJ said that this is the final major release of the Epstein files. These files contain several documents that confirms Epstein’s relationship with several high profile people. These people include (but are not limited to) Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Larry Summers, George Mitchell, and many other notable people.
This release of the files gave us by far the most information we’ve received from the DOJ. Though many people have mixed feelings about the files. While the evidence is overwhelming, from a technical standpoint this is all still alleged and cannot by themselves get anyone behind bars. However they can give us more information on who we should be investigating.
