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Por Sebastián Jiménez Valencia, CNN Español El empresario colombiano Alex Saab, colaborador cercano del derrocado presidente de Venezuela Nicolás Maduro, fue desplazado del Gobierno por la mandataria encargada, Delcy Rodríguez, en otro capítulo de la nueva relación entre Caracas y Washington, por la que se detuvo, extraditó y luego liberó al hombre acusado de ser The post ¿Quién es Alex Saab, el empresario colombiano aliado de Maduro al que Delcy Rodríguez quitó del Gabinete de Venezuela? appeared first on KRDO.

Let me begin by quoting, in full, a letter that the president of the United States of America sent yesterday to the prime minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. The text was forwarded by the White House National Security Council to ambassadors in Washington, and was clearly intended to be widely shared. Here it is: Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.[Eliot A. Cohen: How to understand Trump’s obsession with Greenland]Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.For the past year, American allies around the world have tried very hard to find a theory that explains Trump’s behavior. Isolationism, neo-imperialism, and patrimonialism are all words that have been thrown around. But in the end, the president himself defeats all attempts to describe a “Trump doctrine.” He is locked into a world of his own, determined to “win” every encounter, whether in an imaginary competition for the Nobel Peace Prize or a protest from the mother of small children objecting to his masked, armed paramilitary in Minneapolis. These contests matter more to him than any long-term strategy. And of course, the need to appear…

The massive scandal around welfare fraud in Minnesota became a big story the same way the character Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises describes going bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly.” Federal prosecutors first filed criminal charges in 2022 against the fraudsters at a Minnesota nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, who stole hundreds of millions of dollars while supposedly serving meals to low-income children and adults. Nearly 80 people have already been convicted or pleaded guilty, and more are expected. But only in recent months has this case—which the lead prosecutor has described as “industrial-scale fraud”—become a national fixation.President Trump is cannily exploiting this matter to push his anti-immigrant agenda, given that many of the convicted offenders are Somali Americans. Trump has also turned Minnesota’s failure, under Governor Tim Walz, to adequately supervise its social-benefit programs into a broader indictment of financial mismanagement in Democrat-led states. The White House announced earlier this month a plan to freeze billions of dollars in federal social-services funding to five blue states until they delivered reams of data on recipients, providers, and the measures they’re taking to combat fraud—a move that a judge has temporarily blocked. Some Republicans have joined the president in dismissing the entire welfare system as little more than institutionalized theft.Given the politics involved, it might seem best for Democrats to simply downplay what happened in Minnesota as the product of a few proverbial bad apples. Accusations of welfare fraud have been a staple of right-wing discourse for decades, after all. Ronald Reagan famously rode into office in 1981 with speeches about the wasteful, slothful cunning of a “welfare queen.”It would be a mistake, though, for Democrats to try to duck and dodge this case. What happened in Minnesota is a disgrace, and one that should prompt reforms to how states handle and monitor social-welfare benefits. The people leading the fight against fraud should not be those who want to dismantle the social safety net but those who want to keep it.Problems of fraud and abuse are more likely in the United States than in other Western countries because the U.S. has chosen to outsource to private businesses and nonprofits social services such as health care, child care, food banks, and help for the disabled. This move, driven by a faith in the private sector to offer better services at lower costs, isn’t inherently problematic, but it creates incentives for people to game the system. Firms and organizations can juice their federal reimbursements either by falsifying client data to make more people eligible for benefits or by making fraudulent claims about how many clients are being served or what services they are receiving. Feeding Our Future, for example, received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government thanks to fake invoices and meal-count data.[Kevin Carey: Scammers are coming for college students]When Elon Musk’s DOGE sought to crack down on instances of government waste, fraud, and abuse last year, the narrative was that Uncle Sam was ripping off taxpayers, when many cases of fraud actually involve businesses and schemers ripping off the government.In principle, both parties should be interested in fighting fraud. In practice, Republicans rarely want to spend more money on government programs that they’d prefer to shrink, and Democrats are reluctant to amplify concerns that fraud is a significant problem at all. Some also worry that ham-fisted attempts to counter fraud can end up denying worthy people necessary services. In 2013, Michigan used a fraud-detection algorithm to strip benefits from about 40,000 people, yet more than 90 percent of these recipients were, in fact, eligible.Other hurdles include the fact that many data-technology systems at government agencies are outdated, unwieldy, and hard to change. Keeping track of every program and…

Belzoni, Mississippi, a town of about 2,000 people, is known as the “Catfish Capital of the World”; it is also known as the site of one of the first civil-rights-era lynchings. On May 7, 1955, two members of the local White Citizens’ Council shot into the cab of Reverend George Lee’s car; the bullets ripped off the lower half of his face. Lee had been a co-founder of the town’s NAACP chapter and the first Black person to successfully register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction. He’d also registered about 100 of his fellow Black citizens to vote, a remarkable feat given Belzoni’s size and the ever-present threat of violence against Black people throughout the South who dared to exercise their franchise during the Jim Crow era.The Mississippi NAACP, led by Medgar Evers, began to investigate the death as a murder. But the county sheriff rejected the idea that there had been any foul play, instead suggesting that Lee had died in a car accident and that the lead bullets detected in his jaw were simply dental fillings. The local prosecutor refused to move forward with the case, and the white men went free.I learned this story recently, after visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—known to many as the National Lynching Memorial—in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial consists of more than 800 rectangular steel pillars, each representing a different county in which a lynching took place. One of them is Humphreys, in Mississippi.[From the June 2024 issue: The lynching that sent my family north]It was a cold, rainy day, and my first time seeing the memorial. The space is haunting in its stillness, and overwhelming in its scale. Some of the steel pillars are suspended from above, while others are closer to the ground, forcing you to walk among them, through a steel labyrinth of racial terror.A man named Lee Perkins was also at the memorial that day, being pushed around in a wheelchair by his son-in-law Chris Brown. Perkins was born in Belzoni in 1937. He was 17 when the lynching took place. As he told me about growing up as a Black child in the Mississippi Delta, he looked up, his eyes tracing the pillars’ long, still bodies. He had a coarse voice with a warm southern drawl. “I never thought I would see something like this,” he said, his neck craning to read the names on each piece of steel. Dusk began to settle around us, and the sky slowly darkened at its edges.“I pray to God they never get rid of this history,” Brown said. “We as a Black race went through so much, and they’re trying to erase that.”The lynching memorial has two sister sites in Montgomery—the Legacy Museum, which traces the history of Black oppression in America from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre site that uses both contemporary sculptures and original artifacts to illuminate the lives and experiences of enslaved people. All three were created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal organization founded in 1989 that has expanded into narrative and public-history work over the past decade and a half under the leadership of its founder and executive director, Bryan Stevenson.Stevenson began his career as a public-interest lawyer, and went on to argue in front of the Supreme Court on five occasions, winning favorable judgments in all but one. He successfully argued, for example, against mandatory life sentences without parole for children, and for incarcerated people with dementia to be protected, in some cases, from execution. But he has said that as time passed, he came to understand that his legal work would not be enough on its own to effect meaningful criminal-justice reform. The American public, he felt, needed a deeper understanding of how the realities of the country’s history shaped the present-day system.The Legacy Museum, which opened almost eight years ago, is perhaps the closest thing America has to a national slavery museum. Crucially, however, it is completely…