 Hello and welcome to News Clicks International Roundup. Today, we discussed recent developments in Venezuela and Syria. And to talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Prakas, the editor-in-chief of News Clicks. Hello, Prabir. Prabir, let's start with Venezuela. As we know yesterday evening, certain sections associated with opposition leader Juan Guaido, who is a self-proclaimed president, sees certain facilities in the United States, both in New York and Washington, belonging to the Venezuelan government. So they removed Maduro's portrait, replaced Guaido, and they have declared that in a few days, they'll be seizing the Venezuelan embassy in Washington itself. So how do you see this recent development as part of a series of developments or a series of stages in which the U.S. and various Western powers have tried to support Guaido and Maduro? It's very clear that the regime change operation which started in Venezuela has actually failed in Venezuela. In the attempt to have this Branson concert get starting with numbers like 400, 300, 200, 1000, they got barely 10,000 to 12,000 people over there. The most optimistic estimates being 20,000, then this whole idea that they could march them into Venezuela and therefore the National Guards over there, the Venezuelan military police would not be able to stop them. All of that fell apart. We now have pictures which New York Times has accepted in its report, which it didn't initially, that this was actually the burning of the vehicles, carrying some of the same percent on fire by Guaido supporters. All of this seems to indicate that this whole regime change operation vis-à-vis Venezuela has at least very little internal support. And that's not surprising because Guaido, shall we say, was not the most well-known or popular person in Venezuela himself. So this has not been a surprise, that he has not got any traction. So now there is a desperation of how does this regime change operation proceed? And the only way it can proceed is if the Lima Group or the United States military intervenes in Venezuela, the Lima Group modelists have said no, though it is behind the regime change, but military steps no. The United Nations has actually said that aid should not be militarized, that it should be neutral whenever such, if aid is being provided to a country which has, shall we say, similar turmoil. And United Nations has said we are interested in actually negotiations and rather than this kind of one-sided approach to the problem. So I think given this, how does Guaido keep his moment of a life? He's not getting any traction in Venezuela. So the only option is taking the US help to try and seize some properties of the Venezuelan government, which would be against diplomatic rules of any kind because the host state has to provide those, shall we say, protections to Venezuelan properties, embassies in the United States. But again, the United States would say, oh, you know, it's an illegal government, therefore we are actually not protecting what is an illegal government's property, therefore this is okay. So these are the kind of things which international law is not being only stretched. It is actually broken severely and I don't think this kind of things have happened earlier. We also have the recent case where the North Korean embassy was raided in Spain and it was done by what was claimed to be North Korean shadowy organization, which is fighting against the North Korean government, while the Spanish sources, government sources say this appears to be rogue CIA operation. So I think the United States has decided it's a law unto itself. It always has. It has no respect for the national law and this attempts to seize property shall be say of the government of Venezuela, which the host countries are duty bound under international law to protect is being violated is really more of the same shall be said. And it also comes after a couple of weeks after the massive cyber assault on the Guru hydroelectric plant and which again Guaido and the US establishment sought to use as some sort of a staging board maybe for what they hoped would be massive protests and of course nothing of that sort happened. So this again reveals some sort of a particular desperation in terms of every single stage failing as of now. Well, as you know, the US is the first country in the world which launched what would be called a military cyber attack. When it attacked the centrifuges in the Natanz centrifuge plant in Iran, it was accepted that this was an act of war as defined in national law because damage to property and human beings would qualify as a equivalent to a kinetic attack. Now the Guru hydroelectric project, we don't have similar evidence that it was attacked in terms of which we have in Natanz, but that takes time to come. So you need forensic evidence to be able to say what really happened. The possibilities are that the cyber attack because the US has a history of doing it and also there is documentation about that which Guaido and the groups which have supported him in the past that the Grey Zone project, Max Blumenthal is a detailed piece on this that one of the suppositions in that if electricity grid fails, then there could be a civilian protest and therefore civilian uprising. And one unfortunate problem in Venezuela, this really goes back to how the Venezuelans never foresaw all of this is a militarized issue that they have one project which supplies the Guru hydroelectric project to talk about supplies Venezuela with 80% of its electricity. Therefore there is a vulnerability of the electrical system over there and therefore taking down a centralized system which supplies 80% of the power of the electricity of the country is relatively therefore an easier target than if it had for instance five such plants in five different locations. So of course unless we said we have forensic evidence, we can't really talk about whether it's convincing evidence or not, but given what the United States is doing, given that the NSA and the CIA have really shall we say very high order of this kind of militarized cyber attacks, yes I think it's not, it would not be surprising if it turned out that this was a cyber attack which led to the taking out of the stations. I don't expect it to last too long that increasingly Venezuelans will be able to sanitize their system and this is a single point of vulnerability if they can protect that and I think then there is only some, there is only so much that the United States can do through cyber attacks. The question is that whether they will escalate it to a military attack at the moment signs seem to show unless there is widespread shall we say unhappiness, demonstration, appraisings of different kinds in Venezuela, the United States and the Lima group don't think they can militarily intervene. So I think there is some ratcheting down of this kind of things at least from other countries which had supported Guaido initially. I even start seeing now reports which indicate they are talking about President Maduro again and this is I think a new one because for about a couple of months President Maduro was always addressed differently as one of the presidents or claiming to be presidents and so on and who won in the fraud election is something which always would be appended to his description. But I start seeing now a recognition that perhaps things have worked out the way that they thought they would when the supported Guaido. And moving on to Syria where the Syrian government strongly responded against the U.S. proposal to continue helping the White Helmets, the controversial group which has been associated with various controversies. So how do you see this move in the context of the recent developments in Syria where on the one hand of course the ISIS is increasingly getting isolated and on the other hand there has been increased discussions between Syria, Iran, Russia, even Turkey to bring some sort of a final closure to the conflict? Well in the final closure the conflict really depends on whether the United States will get out of Syria or not and at the moment it is saying that it is going to stay there. It is going to stay there because it wants to stabilize in some form the northern border with Turkey which means of course the conflict with Turkey and supporting to the Kurds. The Kurdish forces have to now decide which way they want to go and I think increasingly the issue is that American support is really a, shall we say, a long term danger to the Kurds as well because it means that you are depending on the country which can sacrifice you at will and which does not have any contiguous border with you. Well you have your strong countries like Turkey, you have Iraq, you have Syria which are your shall we say neighbors as well as Iran. So all of them if they combine against Kurds, I don't think the Kurds really have too much of an option than to resist. So I think that's been the problem, we talked about the White Helmets. Well White Helmets is a publicly known funded organization of both the United States as well as the British intelligence. In fact originally it was set up by British intelligent person who was virtually officially a part of the British military intelligence and it has been funded openly by the British government as well as other NATO powers including the United States. Therefore it is a foreign funded organization which is acted as mouthpiece, the main weapon as with the camera and they have been in close shall we say partnership with the various insurgent groups over there and extremely rabid Islamist forces and they are not Islamic forces, they are Islamist forces that means they are really using Islam as a cover for a political agenda. My problem is at the moment the enclaves within which United States is still sitting they are giving protection to this kind of forces and they are also trying to maintain their long term presence. Though Trump has announced that they are going to withdraw, at the moment on the ground we don't see such moves and therefore it is something which we will go to continue. The United States can act as a spoiler but United States has lost the plot in Syria. I don't think it has any chance of being able to destabilize Syria again. It can only prolong the conflict and it can only play in the troubled waters but I don't think it has the ability to do anything significant in Syria or even in Iraq anymore. Thank you Praveer. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching NewsClick.