Venezuela and the United States announced Thursday that they are restoring diplomatic and consular ties. The move signals a further thaw with the government of Acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who took power in the country after Washington’s ouster of the former President Nicolás Maduro.  The announcement came as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ended a two-day visit to Venezuela, where he said Caracas had pledged security guarantees for foreign mining investors and predicted oil and gas output would exceed 2026 targets. The State Department said renewed relations would “facilitate our joint efforts to promote stability, support economic recovery, and advance political reconciliation in Venezuela,” while Venezuela’s foreign ministry described the move as “positive and mutually beneficial.” The restoration of diplomatic ties will facilitate communication and commercial ties between the two countries, a helpful step for the Trump administration as it seeks to consolidate its influence in Venezuela and restore the country’s oil industry under American supervision. The post U.S. and Venezuela to Restore Diplomatic Ties appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage Shabana Mahmood Takes On the Rubber Boats Will Labour’s latest effort to tackle the immigration crisis run aground, as all the others have? UK Special Coverage In a widely reported London speech Thursday, the UK’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the most sweeping changes to British immigration policy in a decade, putting her on what the Guardian described as “a collision course with Labour MPs.” For the past 20 years or so it has been almost impossible to discuss immigration rationally in the UK. The debate has been confined by hate speech guardrails, academic sophistry, and official obfuscation. Ask whether asylum seekers and foreign nationals are more likely to commit sexual offences than the indigenous population and you’ll be accused of racism rather than given a considered response. (They are, by the way.) There’s no such thing as an “illegal immigrant,” we’re told. They are only arriving unlawfully on flotillas of small rubber boats across the English Channel because Britain doesn’t allow them “safe and legal routes”. It is as if the mercenary migrant-traffickers endangering their lives are white knights compensating for Britain’s denial of human rights. Refugee charities seem to believe exactly that. Politicians like the Green Party deputy leader, Zack Polanski, have actually been fetching up on the beaches of France and helping migrants onto those unsafe and unseaworthy small boats. The fact that Mahmood condemned this behavior in her speech perhaps reflects a significant change in the debate on immigration and asylum in the UK. But the liberal spell is far from broken. Mahmood tried to dispute the globalist ideology, almost universal in the UK media and on university campuses, which holds that, as she put it, “nation states are social constructs and that patriotism is a dirty word”. She rejected the dogma that attempting to restrict immigration, legal and illegal, is essentially racist. “If the left does not secure our borders,” she told the left-leaning IPPR think tank, “then the hard right will be given the chance to try.” Well, she’s not wrong about that. The anti-immigration Reform UK, which wants the detention and deportation of all illegal immigrants and the reduction of net migration to zero, has been leading the UK opinion polls all year. If Labour does not succeed in persuading British voters that it is serious about controlling immigration, then Nigel Farage could very well be in Number 10 after the next election. Mahmood has taken guidance from socialist Denmark. It has ignored the human-rights lawyers and started deporting unlawful immigrants en masse. It has also been bulldozing migrant ghettos to break up the “parallel communities” that sprang up during its open-borders days. The liberal Danes have even been seizing money and valuables from migrants crossing the border to pay for their keep. Labour isn’t going to do anything quite so draconian. But its leaders have finally woken up to the fact that immigration is the number one issue for most working-class and middle-class voters. They want their country back. Many ordinary Brits resent what has happened to their communities, which have changed out of all recognition since the 1990s. They resent even more that they can’t even talk about it. Mahmood has got the message. But she has also received a barrage of criticism from left-wingers in her own party today for her proposal to make refugees have their residency reviewed every 30 months. She is also restricting student visas, which were widely abused as a pretext to bring in entire families. The Home Secretary had already extended the period before which refugees can apply for settled status from five years to 10. And they get citizenship only if they prove they have contributed to the community, can support themselves and are fluent in English. More radically, she is also attempting to alter Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, and which often prevents even asylum seekers who commit crimes from being deported. The most controversial element is perhaps the offer of up to £40,000 to families of illegal immigrants to return to their home country. That’s not going to go down well with British families who can’t afford holidays because of the cost-of-living crisis. It all sounds hardline, and has been condemned by 100 Labour MPs as “Reform lite.”  It is perhaps only Mahmood, a Muslim herself and a second-generation immigrant, who could have made this speech today. It may sound benign from an American point of view—no ICE-style seizures here. But in Britain, few politicians dare say that mass immigration is undermining social cohesion, as Mahmood has. But even supporters of a tougher regime suspect that her measures, which are only “trials,” will be rapidly dropped if and when support for Reform peaks, or when they meet hostility from liberal judges. We’ve been here before, says the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch. The Labour left will always stymie attempts to control immigration. Successive Labour governments have accepted the Treasury view that Britain needs mass immigration to compensate for the aging population and the fertility crisis. Even the Tory leader Boris Johnson agreed with this economic argument and was responsible for increasing net migration to nearly one million in 2023. That is now widely referred to as the “Boriswave.” Even Keir Starmer last year called this “a failed experiment in open borders.”   But when he later said that Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers,” he was slapped down by his party. The Prime Minister subsequently claimed that it was just a phrase written by advisers that he didn’t actually agree with—even though he said it in a speech. The small-boat crossings are only a small element in the mass migration of recent years. But they have become totemic of the inability or unwillingness of the UK elites to control Britain’s borders. Legions of human-rights lawyers and sympathetic judges mobilize against the deportation of illegal immigrants even when they have committed serious crimes. The deportation of one Albanian criminal was famously halted because his child “could not get chicken nuggets” in the homeland. A tribunal judge agreed that it would be “unduly harsh” for his 10-year-old son, who had psychological difficulties, to live in Albania because of his difficulties with certain foods and clothing. That is a measure of what Mahmood is up against. She has not proposed repeal of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is the root of much of the problem because it gives every refugee—and there are currently around 80 million of them across the world’s conflict zones—the absolute right to come and stay in the UK. Nor has she cut Britain’s generous benefits, which are the main “pull factor” for migrants. Mahmood is a member of the conservative “Blue Labour” group, but party activists and many Labour MPs are moving rapidly to the left right now. They worry that the Greens are stealing the Muslim vote that they think is theirs by right. So Mahmood has her work cut out. She is standing, Canute-like, before an unstoppable tide. Even as she spoke, hundreds of migrants were reportedly gathering on French beaches and heading for the ever-awaiting rubber boats. The post Shabana Mahmood Takes On the Rubber Boats appeared first on The American Conservative.

We’ve celebrated International Women’s Day since 1911. From how it started to this year’s theme, here’s what you need to know about the event, which is held annually on March 8.

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The following article, James Talarico: Demonic Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. While we celebrate Jasmine Crockett’s loss in the Texas primary, the Democrat that won is far worse. James Talarico is literally a demonic wolf-in-sheep’s clothing. He claimed that “God is non-binary”. He stated that he wanted abortion for every state office in Texas. He is a climate change nut who frightened his students with his … Continue reading James Talarico: Demonic Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing ...

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