The most significant increase in these losses in relation to GNI was also visible in the US, where losses measured in terms of GNI rose steeply from decade to decade up to the last five years – by which time they were roughly five times the level between 1980 and 1989. There was a similarly sharp increase in Germany, due in no small part to the losses caused by the Ahr Valley floods in 2021.

The Defense Department has spent more than a year testing a device purchased in an undercover operation that some investigators think could be the cause of a series of mysterious ailments impacting spies, diplomats and troops that are colloquially known as Havana Syndrome, according to four sources briefed on the matter.

Trump has reportedly asked special forces to prepare contingency plans for a possible invasion of Greenland, a move that has faced resistance from senior US military officials over legal and political concerns.

Platform has restricted image creation on the Grok AI tool to paying subscribers, but victims and experts say this does not go far enough

Venezuelan guard recounts horrific effects of mystery sonic weapon used by US forces during raid that captured Nicolás Maduro, leaving soldiers bleeding from nose and vomiting blood.

The alleged use of sonic weaponry in the Maduro raid represents a significant escalation in demonstrated US military technology

US shale bosses have warned President Donald Trump that his mission to seize Venezuela’s oil sector and drive down crude prices will put American output on the chopping block.

Trump is set to meet US Big Oil chiefs on Friday, but executives at large independent drillers — who are not on the attendee list — are seething over the president’s plan to flood America with Venezuelan crude.

“We’re talking about this administration screwing us over again,” said a top executive at one of the country’s leading shale groups, describing the plans as “against American producers”.

“If the US government starts providing guarantees to oil companies to produce or grow oil production in Venezuela I’m going to be . . . pissed.”

Trump’s drive to open up Venezuela’s oil riches, potentially subsidising investors, has further strained relations with oil executives in Texas, who have been angered by his dogged pursuit of ever-lower crude prices.

The ire in the shale industry — where many executives bankrolled the president’s return to office — echoes a frustration in the Maga movement that Trump is neglecting his “America First” mantra.

But problems in Texas’s oil industry are mounting, as cheaper oil forces producers to idle rigs needed to keep production ticking higher.

The US is the biggest producer in the world, but its pivotal shale production requires continuous drilling to keep growing. The number of operating US oil rigs last week was just 412, down by 15 per cent in a year.

The Energy Information Administration forecasts that the US’s record-high output will fall by about 100,000 barrels a day in 2026 as drillers retreat — the first annual drop since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump flew to Texas multiple times in 2024 to tap deep-pocketed oil barons for cash, making executives angry at what some describe privately as a “betrayal”.

“To me, the signal from the administration is: we’d rather spend our American money on propping up a Venezuelan oil business than supporting our current independent businesses,” said Kirk Edwards, chief executive of Latigo Petroleum, a private producer based in Odessa, Texas, who donated to the president’s re-election campaign.

Only the biggest energy groups, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, have access to the tens of billions of dollars in capital, teams of lawyers and security protection needed for a foray into Venezuelan oil.

For smaller US operators, a revitalised Venezuelan industry — if Trump can pull it off — means worsening the market glut.

Shale drillers need a barrel of West Texas Intermediate, the US benchmark, to trade above $60 to turn a profit. Its price fell below $56 a barrel this week and the EIA said it would average $51 a barrel this year — a forecast made before Trump’s Venezuela move opened the prospect of a new wave of supply.

Exporters in the Opec cartel, including Saudi Arabia — which has launched two price wars in just over a decade to recapture market share from the US — have been adding production in recent months, triggering more alarm in Texas.

“I think it’s an appropriate reaction by US shale to be miffed,” said Dan Pickering, founder of Pickering Energy Partners. “Not just because Venezuelan production might go up but because the US government, in theory, is going to subsidise that.”

He added: “These guys are already worried about price. They live in a country where the president wants the price of their output to go down.”

Shares in the leading independent US oil groups tumbled this week as traders bet the Venezuelan oil surge would hit them hard. Diamondback Energy, APA Corp and Devon Energy each lost as much as 9 per cent.

“Somebody’s looking at these stocks today going, why would I own this if in a few years, they’re going to be competing against Venezuela for oil, for our refineries in the United States?” said Edwards.

The price of crude has halved since mid-2022 when WTI surged past $120 a barrel following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Gasoline prices have fallen to about $2.80 a gallon. As Trump looks ahead to midterm elections this year, he would prefer crude prices closer to $50 a barrel and gasoline below $2 a gallon.

US energy secretary Chris Wright said on Thursday that Big Oil’s arrival in Venezuela could push up its output as much as 50 per cent to 1.2mn barrels a day within 12 months.

“I think you’ll see more downward pressure on the price of gasoline,” he told Fox News.

Shale executives said Wright, a former oilfield services boss whose appointment by Trump was cheered in Texas, had abandoned his roots.

“He gets it [but] he is just toeing the party line,” said one Midland shale executive, who noted industry relations with Wright had grown strained.

But the executive placed more of the blame on Trump, saying there was “absolute frustration” in the industry at the president.

“He’s definitely not pro oil as far as independent oil companies’ survival and vibrancy. The message will have to come in US production declining,” the person said.

Trump’s comments this week that US taxpayers could help reimburse big oil groups that invest in Venezuela sparked more ire in the shale patch.

“We should not subsidise the big companies in trying to retool Venezuela’s infrastructure and develop their reserves for them,” said another prominent shale executive.

Trump, he said, did not care if smaller oil groups “drill their way into oblivion” and did not “give a damn if they went bankrupt”.

Analysts said the fallout made clear that as the prospects for future production moved beyond US shores, America’s well-resourced oil giants were now solidly in the ascendancy.

“All of this points to the advantage of being larger,” said Maynard Holt, chief executive of Houston-based energy consultancy Veriten.

“Because many of the opportunities that are coming — whether it’s Venezuela or Algeria or some other complicated place — you will be able to consider them more seriously the larger you are.”

One neighbor at Ross's 10-house cul-de-sac told the Daily Mail that until recently Ross had been flying pro-Trump flags and a 'Don't Tread On Me' Gadsden Flag, an emblem of the Make America Great Again movement.

"Firms don't appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale," the firm said. It suspects some are trying to "dress up layoffs" as good news

"Firms don't appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale," the firm said. It suspects some are trying to "dress up layoffs" as good news.

This interaction could help explain both why quantum processes can occur within environments like the brain and why we lose consciousness under anesthesia.

Alexander Dugin, the fascist philosopher known as “Putin’s Rasputin”, said: “The capture of Maduro demonstrates that international law no longer exists — only the law of force applies.”

Alexey Pushkov, a Russian senator, accused the US of returning the world to “the savage imperialism of the 19th century”, adding: “Won’t the ‘triumph’ turn into a disaster?”

“The United States carried out a coup in Venezuela, struck the country, and demonstrated that international law means nothing to a nation that considers itself a hegemon,” said Igor Girkin, a former soldier and FSB officer turned commentator.

According to Michael Kofman, a Russian military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Trump administration’s decision to strike Venezuela without even the “veneer of justification” “substantially frays” any sense of international order.

He adds that it “will make it much harder in the future for the US to convince other states that this type of behaviour should be punished”.

“By using force to assert its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, the US is trading these short-term gains for a long-term structural cost to its overall position in the international system and to the advantages it enjoys over its rivals Russia and China,” he said.

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

The statements by the two men amount to an explicit declaration of gunboat diplomacy and an embrace of the kind of 19th-century U.S. imperialist policy in the Western Hemisphere that has been widely criticized across Latin America.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that decades-long efforts by the United States to prove it is not a colonial power in the Americas has been “all thrown out” now, and that Mr. Trump’s actions could “potentially turn the whole region against us.”

He added that the administration’s aim of dominating the Western Hemisphere — including forcibly seizing leaders in the region — could spur China and Russia to try to do the same in their perceived “spheres of influence.”

That’s why, long after the shock has worn off, the enduring lesson for China will be a sense of vindication. Operation Absolute Resolve is a confirmation of what the CCP has always believed — that there is no such thing as a rules-based international order; that it’s a jungle out there.

Now Beijing will feel vindicated that America has shed the pretence. Whether Trump’s actions are the death knell of the rules-based world order, or merely reveal that it never existed, doesn’t truly matter. What matters is that the US and China, as the two most powerful nations on Earth, the two countries with the most capability to uphold the rules for everyone else, share a disdain for them. Like the fairies of Neverland, these laws only ever existed if they were believed in.

America’s greatest successes after the second world war came not from extracting resources from Europe or Japan, but from providing public goods: security, institutional rebuilding and a rules-based order that allowed societies to prosper.

The world order as we knew it has been overturned.

By seizing a sitting head of state and announcing direct American administration over a sovereign country – without international authorisation, coalition partners or even the language of temporariness – he crossed a boundary the post-1945 international system was meant to keep intact.

No fewer than 717 companies filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy between January and November, according to S&P data reviewed by The Washington Post. This marks a 14 percent increase from the same period in 2024 and the highest rate since 2010, when the country was recovering from the Great Recession

Last year, before capturing President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration designated a Venezuelan slang term for drug corruption in the military as a terrorist organization and said he led it

One such study, conducted by Lee Epstein of Washington University in St. Louis and Mitu Gulati of the University of Virginia, concluded that over the century ending in 2021 the court ruled for businesses an average of 41 percent of the time. But the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. since 2005 decided for businesses 63 percent of the time.

The study showed a growing partisan divide between the justices. In 1953, the study’s authors wrote, “Democratic and Republican appointees are statistically indistinguishable, deciding on average about 45 percent of the cases in favor of the rich.” By 2022, they wrote, “that share is about 70 percent for the average Republican justice and 35 percent for the average Democratic justice.”

Minnesota child care centers at the center of widespread fraud allegations fueled by a viral video were operating as expected when visited by investigators, the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families said in a news release Friday.