Trump's declaration to "run Venezuela" after Maduro's capture is a seeming promise of a sudden cure to Venezuela's ills. However, it ignores the nation's terminal diagnosis of a century of plunder. The rhetoric of imminent revival on the basis of the speedy return of international oil capital and the promise of 100 billion US dollars in reconstruction funds made the intervention seem like a unique opportunity.
Although the SDMA does not identify an adversary, effectively functioning as a deterrent, it cannot be viewed in isolation from the Israeli belligerence in the Middle East. Israel’s war against Hamas has expanded beyond the genocide of Gaza; it has bombed the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and recently Qatar. Tel Aviv’s campaign under the banners of ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘terrorism’ has engulfed the whole Middle East in a war-like situation, which has generated new enemies and has deepened the instability of the region.
On 15 January 2026, the Pakistani defence production minister confirmed that an agreement for a new trilateral defence deal between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye is in the pipeline, other than the Pakistan-Saudi bilateral deal announced last year.
In October 2025, a JetBlue Airbus A320, flying from Cancun to Newark, encountered an inadvertent pitch down, creating panic and injuries onboard. The crew managed to regain control of the aircraft and made a safe emergency landing at Tampa, Florida. Initial investigations attributed the incident to a malfunction of the aircraft's ELAC flight computer software, responsible for controlling primary flight controls (elevator and aileron surfaces).
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