"None of this is new in Cuba. The island's crisis is structural, largely the result of decisions made by Cuban leaders themselves, most notably their reluctance to abandon a centrally planned economic model that has failed everywhere else in the world"

If a company is making a profit but getting subsidized and receiving grants, it is time for them to pay it back.

President Trump confirmed late Friday that the U.S. reached a deal with Venezuela to secure control of a big chunk of the Latin American country’s oil reserves...

Since ousting [former President] Maduro in January, Trump has pushed U.S. oil companies to plow money into the country in a bid to shore up oil production. But many have been hesitant to do so.

Friday’s deal would give the U.S. a foothold in some of the most promising oil-and-gas fields. The country says it has some 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest in the world. In comparison, the U.S. has about 46 billion...

[Delcy] Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, has granted a private company—a joint project of the U.S. government and a private operator in Venezuela—a 100-year lease for the oil fields, a U.S. official said. The entity would be the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco.

The U.S. government would hold a 55% share, split between equity ownership and oil production. As the company scales production, the oil would help fill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the official added.

Direct U.S. involvement in foreign oil production is rare.

From the article:

The proposal drew the disdain of NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Bureaucracy has already throttled space exploration,” he noted on X, “and this article proposes creating a UN-affiliated ‘Planetary Stewardship Council?’ As a species, there are few things we actually agree upon here on Earth, so how could this possibly advance progress in space?”

Isaacman is spot-on. More importantly, there is a pretty good chance that such a council would be dominated by nations inherently hostile toward the U.S. and its allies. Peter Hague, an astrophysicist, software engineer, and a space industry analyst, suggests that such a council would place undue restrictions on space exploration and would likely prohibit the colonization of the moon and Mars. The proposed council would be staffed by people who would prefer to keep outer space a protected preserve for scientific study, much like Antarctica.

Besides, an excellent model already exists for governing in space. The model is called the Artemis Accords.