By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, AP Staff Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Venezuela’s oil industry has been in the spotlight since President Donald Trump used military force to capture the country’s leader, President Nicolas Maduro.

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In the days that followed, Trump said the U.S. would run Venezuela and tap its oil reserves. He said Venezuela stole U.S. oil, a reference to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s move decades ago to nationalize hundreds of foreign-owned assets, including those owned by American oil companies.

Trump floated a plan for those companies to return and rebuild Venezuela’s beleaguered oil industry. He later announced Venezuela would provide 30 to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S. Then the administration “selectively” removed sanctions to enable the shipping and sale of Venezuelan oil to markets worldwide, saying the proceeds would settle in U.S.-controlled accounts and be disbursed to the American and Venezuelan populations, according to the Energy Department.

The moves may be part of a long-term strategy to gain a foothold in a nation with vast oil reserves.

Interest in Venezuela’s vast oil reserves

Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, and some energy analysts predict there won’t be enough oil to meet global demand in coming years.

The South American nation has an estimated 303 billion barrels of crude oil in the ground, which is about 17% of the world’s supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Unlike other parts of the world, where geologists have to search for untapped oil, the reserves under Venezuela’s soil are largely mapped and known, experts say. But because of dilapidated infrastructure, the country only produces about 1% of the world’s oil.

“Venezuela has enormous reserves,” said Claudio Galimberti, global market analysis director and chief economist at Rystad Energy. “If you ask any oil company around the world, go to their exploration team, their geologists, and ask them where is oil going to come from in the 2030’s and 2040’s, their answer is a rather scary, ‘We don’t know.’ So there is going to be a problem of finding oil in the next few years.”

In the short term, the global supply of oil exceeds demand, so increased production from Venezuela isn’t critically needed. But the International Energy Agency estimates that under current policies approximately 25 million barrels per day of new oil supply projects will be needed by 2035 to keep markets in balance.

A ship named Ithaca Patience, Panama, is docked on Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Edgar Frias)

Possible help for U.S. refineries and consumers

The oil in Venezuela is heavy, sour crude, which is what refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast process, and there are only a handful of countries that produce it. By contrast, most oil produced in the U.S. is light, sweet crude. If Venezuelan oil flows freely, it could potentially reduce the price of oil and gasoline.

American refineries could benefit financially from processing more crude oil, and it could increase the availability of diesel and jet fuel, said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners.

“There seem to be two objectives. The first is to overall lower energy prices by adding to global supply, and second is to produce more of the heavy, sour crude that is currently in short supply relative to other grades,” Book said. “The first generally benefits end-users everywhere because lower prices reduce transportation and energy costs.”

More Venezuelan crude wouldn’t necessarily help U.S. oil producers, though, because having more oil on the market can lower oil prices, discouraging production and making it harder for those companies to remain profitable.

The options for major U.S. oil companies

After Chavez nationalized hundreds of private businesses and foreign-owned assets in 2007, including oil projects run by Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, international arbitration panels ordered Venezuela to repay billions of dollars to both companies, but the debts have yet to be collected.

In theory, if sanctions were lifted and Venezuela was under new leadership, major oil companies could invest in infrastructure and profit from the sale of oil.

Trump said he thinks Venezuela’s decimated oil industry could be rebuilt in less than 18 months with U.S. support. He envisions major oil companies returning to Venezuela to make those investments and profit from its oil industry.

But given the unrest and decades of badly damaged infrastructure, it’s unlikely to top the list of places oil companies would choose to invest, experts said.

“Imagine you are Exxon and you have global operations. Where are you going to put your money? Where it’s going to give you most return,” Galimberti said.

Companies also need assurance that assets won’t be taken again by a future government, said Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

“You need to start with basic political stability before you’re going to have companies that are interested in making those kinds of investments,” Sternoff said. “We have more questions than answers over what the government of Venezuela will be.”

A ConocoPhillips spokesman said the company is monitoring developments in Venezuela and their potential implications for global energy supply and stability. “It would be premature to speculate on any future business activities or investments” he said.

Exxon Mobil did not respond to a request for comment.

Production hurdles

Infrastructure and equipment that the oil industry needs to maintain and increase production has been badly damaged in recent years.

“There was a lot of chaos and looting, and so therefore there’s a tremendous amount of damage to the surface equipment for producing oil all around the country,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University. “There are a lot pipelines that are leaking, and it requires a massive cleanup, there’s just a lot of physical devastation.”

There are also massive fuel shortages and electricity blackouts frequently across the country, and “to really produce oil, you need to have a stable grid,” Jaffe said.

In addition, many workers with technical expertise have left the country. Millions of Venezuelans fled as a consequence of Chavez and Maduro, and “there has been tremendous brain drain,” Sternoff said.

Rystad Energy estimates it would take $54 billion of oil and gas investment over the next 15 years to keep Venezuela’s oil production flat at around 1.1 million barrels per day, and that with additional investment over two to three years an additional 300,000 barrels per day could be added. Going beyond 1.4 million barrels per day would require an additional $8 billion to $9 billion per year, the group said.

There’s also no precedent where a regime change in a major oil producing country has led to a rapid increase in output, Sternoff said. In most cases, such as Iraq, Iran, Libya and the Soviet Union, oil output fell significantly, often for years, before returning to prior peaks, he said.

“One of the lessons from Iraq is that the companies did go back, but that it was very difficult to operate when there was a difficult political and local backdrop that can range from insurgency to governance issues and corruption to infrastructure challenges,” Jaffe said.

By SYLVIE CORBET and THOMAS ADAMSON

PARIS (AP) — Brigitte Bardot’s funeral was being held on Wednesday with a private service and a public homage in Saint-Tropez, the French Riviera resort where she lived for more than half a century after retiring from movie stardom at the height of her fame.

The animal rights activist and far-right supporter died Dec. 28 at age 91 at her home in southern France.

She died from cancer after undergoing two operations, her husband, Bernard d’Ormale, said in an interview with Paris Match magazine released Tuesday evening. “She was conscious and concerned about the fate of animals until the very end,” he said.

Residents and admirers applauded the funeral convoy as the coffin of Bardot, once one of the world’s most photographed women and a defining screen siren of the 1960s, was being carried through the town’s narrow streets.

A service started to the sound of Maria Callas’ “Ave Maria” at the Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption Catholic Church in the presence of Bardot’s husband, son and grandchildren, as well as guests invited by the family and the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals.

“Sadness is overwhelming, and pain too,” Max Guazzini, a friend and secretary general of the Foundation, said in a speech.

“We’re going to dream about her as if we were sleeping. In our dream, Brigitte arrives in a great, white immensity and suddenly … thousands of seals arrive,” he said. “All the animals she saved and she loved form a procession behind her … Thousands of animals say: Brigitte, we will miss you, we love you so much, thank you.”

Hundreds of people gathered in the small town to follow the farewell on large screens set up at the port and on two plazas.

Bardot is to be buried “in the strictest privacy” at a cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

She had long called Saint-Tropez her refuge from the celebrity that once made her a household name.

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A public homage was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at a nearby site for admirers of the woman whose image once symbolized France’s postwar liberation and sensuality.

“Brigitte Bardot will forever be associated with Saint-Tropez, of which she was the most dazzling ambassador,” the town hall said last week. “Through her presence, personality and aura, she marked the history of our town.”

Bardot settled decades ago in her seaside villa, La Madrague, and retired from filmmaking in 1973 at age 39, during an international career that spanned more than two dozen films.

She later emerged as an animal rights activist, founding and sustaining a foundation devoted to the protection of animals.

While she withdrew from the film industry, she remained a highly visible and often controversial public figure through decades of militant animal rights activism and links with far-right politics.

She will be buried in the so-called marine cemetery, where her parents are also interred.

The cemetery, overlooking the Mediterranean sea, is also the final resting place of several cultural figures, including filmmaker Roger Vadim, Bardot’s first husband, who directed her breakout film “And God Created Woman,” a role that made her a worldwide star.

Lawyers representing the New York Daily News and an array of news organizations suing OpenAI for allegedly stealing and distorting their reporters’ work have asked a Manhattan judge to sanction ChatGPT’s parent company, alleging the tech behemoth deleted millions of conversations they were required to hand over as evidence of copyright infringement.

OpenAI continued to destroy output logs despite orders from two judges to preserve and provide them to the news organizations, new court filings allege. More than 1 million logs that had been requested — containing information the news outlets believe was based on their journalists’ reporting — were subbed out, according to court documents.

“[A]fter this Court ordered OpenAI to produce 20 million logs over OpenAI’s vociferous and repeated objections, OpenAI substituted millions of conversations that it was ordered to produce with other conversations – seemingly because it had deleted millions of the selected logs,” attorney Steve Lieberman wrote to the court in a Monday letter.

“OpenAI has refused to answer News Plaintiffs’ questions about the deleted and substituted logs.”

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The dispute has come up amid a complex lawsuit brought by The New York Times, The New York Daily News and other outlets affiliated with Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group. The news organizations allege OpenAI is stealing and distorting their copyrighted works, thus providing ChatGPT users stolen reporting that’s often inaccurate. They have been joined by the Authors Guild, and a litany of best-selling writers are also parties in the complex litigation.

As part of the litigation, OpenAI was required to hand over the logs per a November order by Manhattan Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, which was affirmed this week in a Jan. 5 order by Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein.

The A.I. company also engaged in “hashing,” meaning they changed the ID numbers of some 20 million anonymized ChatGPT user conversations, presenting an enormous challenge for the media lawyers sorting through the immense volume of materials, attorneys for the news organizations said.

In denying OpenAI’s objections to Wang’s order, Stein on Monday wrote that her “rulings were neither clearly erroneous nor contrary to law.”

“She adequately balanced ChatGPT users’ privacy interests against the relevance of the documents in light of the privacy protections already in place,” the judge wrote.

In challenging Wang’s November order, OpenAI had argued it was “clearly erroneous” for the judge to have rejected the company’s proposal to run search terms across a sample of 20 million anonymous chats, claiming it would better protect users’ privacy.

Stein said those arguments were “largely a repackaging” of the company’s failed argument that Wang failed to account for the privacy of ChatGPT users.

Lawyers for the news outlets say OpenAI also included billions of “grossly overbroad and inappropriate” redactions in the info they handed over, blacking out the names of news outlets cited to ChatGPT, bylines and other information critical to the case.

“Since this case was about our requests for content of certain publications,” Lieberman said in an interview, “It makes it rather hard to find the evidence we’re looking for.”

The news organizations’ request to the court asks the court to order the tech company to explain why it shouldn’t be held in contempt. They’re requesting an evidentiary hearing in the coming months.

The Daily News has reached out for comment to OpenAI, which did not immediately respond.

On Friday, a company spokesperson told the legal news outlet MLex, “As we’ve made clear to the Court, this is just another example of the Times distorting the facts and misrepresenting how our technology actually works.”

When security guards in downtown St. Paul accused downtown St. Paul’s largest property owner of wage theft, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office opened an investigation, which Ellison said was slowed by the company’s refusal to hand over payroll records.

The legal back-and-forth to obtain access to the records took more than three years, but Ellison’s office eventually filed a civil enforcement action alleging violations of the state’s Fair Labor Standards Act.

Madison Equities, then led by principal Jim Crockarell, argued that the civil action was moot as a two-year statute of limitations for wage-theft claims had run out. Ramsey County District Court agreed, as did the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota Supreme Court overruled the lower courts, reopening the case by sending it back to the district court to reinstate the wage-theft claims for further proceedings. The opinion was not unanimous, and raised concern with two dissenting justices that it effectively rewrites civil procedure, however narrowly.

Question of ‘tolling’

The question before the justices centered on “tolling,” or when to suspend a time clock around the statute of limitations. The court noted that six security guards came forward with concerns about wage theft in the fall of 2019, prompting the attorney general’s office to file a civil investigative demand for payroll records that Crockarell refused to produce until July 2022.

Madison Equities initially responded with litigation of its own calling the records request overly broad, a case that was decided by the Minnesota Supreme Court in December 2021. The court found at the time that Ellison’s office could seek payroll information related specifically to the company’s hourly workers at 10 downtown buildings, but not related to all workers within the company’s 30 or more subsidiaries.

After finally obtaining the payroll records, Ellison’s office sued Madison Equities in June 2023, arguing that the company failed to pay overtime wages to security guards working at the First National Bank Building, the Lowry Building, the U.S. Bank Center, the Alliance Center, Park Square Court and the Stadium Ramp. The attorney general’s office alleged that workers would punch in and out of the job as they moved from building to building, as if each subsidiary was a separate company.

When the security guards worked more than 48 hours, they received separate paychecks, allowing Madison Equities to avoid paying time-and-a-half, according to the attorney general’s office.

Case dismissed — and then reinstated

Madison Equities then convinced the district court that under the rules of civil procedure, the time clock on the two-year statute of limitations began in late 2019 at the latest, not late 2021, and the case should be dismissed for lack of timeliness. The Court of Appeals agreed. The Supreme Court on Monday said otherwise.

Madison Equities “produced no responsive documents until February 2022 … and did not submit its last set of responsive documents until July 2022,” wrote Justice Anne McKeig for the majority.

“We hold that the litigation over the (civil investigative demand) tolled the applicable limitations period,” she wrote. “Our holding today applies narrowly to a situation where the Attorney General exercises authority granted by the Legislature under Minnesota Statutes … to investigate and enforce … laws respecting unfair, discriminatory or other unlawful practices in business, commerce, or trade.”

Ellison’s office had expressed concern that in future cases, companies could use litigation to stall for time and likewise run out the clock. The Supreme Court clarified that the attorney general’s civil investigative demand for payroll records alone did not pause the statute of limitations, but the legal resistance to it did.

“It is the litigation over the CID that tolls the limitations period — not simply the service of the CID that triggers tolling,” McKeig wrote.

Dissenting opinion

The 23-page decision was followed by a 23-page dissent authored by Justice Paul Thissen, who was joined in dissent by Justice Sarah Hennesy.

The dissent argued that under the court decision, the statute of limitations could, in theory, be extended indefinitely based on when the attorney general arbitrarily “becomes satisfied” that enough evidence has been handed over to begin a legal claim, effectively running the clock forever. The office, he wrote, could have sued earlier.

“From where I stand, it appears the court is manufacturing a new tolling rule because the Attorney General missed a limitations period deadline in a single case,” Thissen wrote.

Crockarell, who held stakes in at least 32 buildings across the metro, died in January 2024, and several Madison Equities properties in downtown St. Paul have since fallen into foreclosure after being put up for sale en masse by his widow.