Power was gradually returning to Venezuela on Friday after a nationwide blackout that authorities blamed on sabotage of the national electrical grid.
The nation experiences frequent blackouts, although rarely on such a large scale, which Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government routinely attributes to conspiracies to overthrow him.
Authorities reported the outage across 24 states began shortly before dawn, but by late afternoon correspondents reported power began to return to parts of Caracas, the southwestern state of Tachira and western Merida.
Photo: Reuters
“We are normalizing, regularizing, step by step,” Maduro said on television on Friday evening, without specifying the extent of the outages or recovery.
“This is an attack full of vengeance, full of hatred, coming from fascist currents relying on political sectors pretending to be the political opposition,” he said, alleging US involvement.
Earlier, Venezuelan Minister of Communications Freddy Nanez reported “an electrical sabotage ... which has affected almost the entire national territory.”
Opposition leaders and experts reject the Maduro government’s conspiracy claims, instead blaming corruption and a lack of investment and expertise for the outages. The worst countrywide outage to strike Venezuela, in March 2019, lasted several days.
“It’s complicated to get around without electricity. We don’t know what’s going to happen during the day,” said Anyismar Aldana, a 27-year-old cashier on her way to work in Caracas.
When the power goes out “we don’t work, we don’t know what to do for food,” Aldana said.
Western regions such as Tachira and Zulia have daily power outages.
“We woke up to the blackout,” said Carlos Pena, 39, owner of a small chicken shop in the center of Caracas who went to work to “see if we can sell everything so that it doesn’t go to waste.”
Nanez said the government had put in place “anti-coup protocols” after the blackout, citing the recent July 28 election — the result of which has been widely disputed.
Maduro was proclaimed the winner, but the Venezuelan National Electoral Council has refused to release detailed data to verify the result.
The opposition says its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, won the election by a landslide, releasing polling station-level data to back up that claim.
Gonzalez Urrutia on Friday ignored a third summons to appear before prosecutors over his claims he was the rightful winner of the vote.
Prosecutors said if he failed to appear an arrest warrant would be issued.
Gonzalez Urrutia is accused of “usurpation of functions” and “forgery” for the opposition’s release of electoral results data.
The opposition candidate has accused Venezuelan Attorney-General Tarek William Saab of pursuing politically motivated charges and of not providing “guarantees of independence and due process.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
RSS