October 2019

The rumour mill is in overspin regarding Rafael Ramirez. A prevalent gossip is that he is "collaborating" in the provision of information highly damaging to Nicolas Maduro, which is "being used" by the Trump administration to "advance" its agenda. Another line of gossip has it that ENI, the Italian oil conglomerate, is providing "legal protection" to Ramirez, who spends most of his time nowadays in Italy. Ramirez, Luisa Ortega Diaz and Hugo Carvajal, as per another line, form a triumvirate of "decent" chavistas, folks with whom the U.S.

A little update on Twitter's decision to permanently suspend my verified @alekboyd account. On 27 August, Twitter placed a temporary lock on my account. The intention was to get me to delete tweets that "violated" Twitter's rules. Since I didn't consider that I was in violation of Twitter rules, and I did not want to delete the tweet in question without first explaining why, I didn't delete the tweet. No communication was ever established with Twitter. No chance of arguing why I did not want to delete the tweet was ever given.

Medium has joined the fray of social media censors. As usual, the Derwick thugs are behind this move. No problem though: below I repost what Medium considers a breach of their rules. But what is Medium really censoring here? Reporting from Reuters, Bloomberg, Switzerland's Department of Justice and Police, and the Department of Justice.