[Majorityrights News] KP interview with James Gilmore, former diplomat and insider from first Trump administration Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 05 January 2025 00:35.
[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Hannah Witheridge and David Miller were found brutally murdered in September last year.
From the moment their bodies were discovered on a Thai beach on 15 September last year, the investigation into the deaths of British backpackers Hannah Witheridge and David Miller has been a muddled affair.
Information from the police has been hazy, contradictory and sparse.
Miss Witheridge, 23, from Norfolk, and 24-year-old Mr Miller, from Jersey, were found bludgeoned to death on the southern island of Koh Tao.
The first officers on the scene were local police with rudimentary training and apparently no idea how to seal off a crime scene, with tourists wandering through it for days afterwards.
Thailand’s best-known forensic scientist, Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand, whose institute was not allowed any involvement in the investigation, testified at the trial that the crime scene had been poorly managed and evidence improperly collected.
Instead of limiting their comments to what they knew about the crime, the Thai police threw out a barrage of speculation about who the culprit might be. It could not have been a Thai, they said at first, and focused their efforts on the Burmese migrant worker community.
The case has brought widespread media attention to Thailand and the island resort.
At one point they highlighted a British friend of Mr Miller as a possible suspect, then just as quickly dropped him. The initial team of investigators hinted they were looking at someone from a powerful family on Koh Tao. Then their commander was abruptly transferred and all official talk of this family’s involvement was dropped.
Other flaws were exposed once the trial started in July, including the police’s failure to test Miss Witheridge’s clothes or the alleged murder weapon, a blood-stained hoe, for DNA.
A year later Dr Pornthip tested the hoe and found the DNA of two people on the handle, but none matched the defendants.
The court heard several CCTV cameras near the crime scene were not working and cameras by the pier were not inspected to see whether anyone had fled by boat after the crime.
Both defendants have also testified they were beaten and threatened into making confessions. No lawyers were present during the sessions and translators were of dubious reliability.
These factors raised serious questions over the integrity of the prosecution case. The most important question though, hung over one piece of evidence which did tie the defendants to the crime: the alleged match between their DNA, and that recovered from semen found on Miss Witheridge’s body.
Less than three days after the crime, police announced they had extracted the DNA profiles of two men from the semen. They also said these matched DNA found on a cigarette butt near the scene.
In court, a police officer testified those samples were received on the morning of 17 September and started DNA extraction at 08:00 local time. This seems unlikely as the pathologist only started his autopsy at 11:00. The successful profiling of two men was announced at around 22:00.
It suggests remarkably rapid analysis, in less than 12 hours, from samples in which at least three people’s DNA - the victim and the two men - were mixed.
The DNA profiles were used to match cheek swabs taken from the two Burmese defendants after they were detained on 2 October.
Jane Taupin, a renowned Australian forensic scientist brought in by the defence team, questioned the plausibility of working this quickly, saying extracting DNA from mixed samples was difficult and time-consuming.
Ms Taupin was not allowed to testify, one of several inexplicable decisions by the defence, but she highlighted several important aspects of DNA testing which neither the defence team, the police, nor the judges appeared to understand.
How DNA testing works
Questions surrounding the alleged guilt of Wai Phyo and Zaw Lin in the murder of the young British couple.
DNA analysis is a complex procedure which requires meticulous care and documentation. Contrary to popular belief, it does not offer “perfect matches”, only statistical probabilities.
Almost all DNA - 99.9% - is likely to be the same between two people. That distinct 0.1% is made up of what are known as “short tandem repeat” sequences. These are isolated and examined for patterns which offer a statistical likelihood of a match to other DNA samples.
Usually a reference sample from a third party is also analysed.
The statistical likelihood of the match must be demonstrated in court, with full documentation showing methodology, proof the samples have not been contaminated and peer review.
In the Koh Tao case, the prosecution provided only a one-page summary of their DNA tests, some of it handwritten, with parts crossed out and corrected, along with four supporting pages.
“The case files of the Thai forensic lab should have been provided to the defence,” Ms Taupin said.
“This is so the scientific data contained within, and used to provide conclusions, could be examined for a scientific review.
“The essence of scientific method is the testing and review of hypotheses. If these are not viewed, or even stated, then this does not inspire confidence in the scientific analysis.
“A one-page table with alterations is not a suitable document to provide to a court. A report should not have alterations, especially handwritten ones, with no explanation as to why they were altered.”
There were other problems too. The date of the original DNA analysis was said to have been 17 September, but the report submitted to court was dated 5 October. This was two days after the police had announced a positive match with the two Burmese defendants. That unexplained discrepancy inevitably raises suspicion that perhaps the result was manipulated.
These weaknesses in the prosecution case should have given the defence a field day in court, but they were not raised until the closing statement.
The two police forensic witnesses were not cross-examined over the doubtful timings nor the scrappy and incomplete DNA documentation.
Had Ms Taupin been called, she could have exposed these flaws. Instead, she had to sit in the lawyers’ room, largely ignored, and then fly home without testifying. Whatever views the three judges formed of the quality of the prosecution’s evidence, it was never properly challenged in court.
I have asked one of the defence lawyers about their bafflingly non-adversarial tactics. He did not offer a convincing explanation.
Perhaps they were nervous of being seen to take too much advice from a foreigner, for fear they would lose sympathy from the judges.
Everyone in that court was aware how much Thailand’s reputation was on the line, and discrediting the police in such a public way might have felt like a dangerous step to take. We just don’t know.
This remains one of a number of frustrating unknowns about this murder case. These can only have added to the suffering of the victims’ families.
How could these kinds of ‘oversights’ actually come to manifest in Thailand? Not only are questions raised regarding the two Burmese migrant worker suspects, but additional questions are raised about the context giving rise to the murder and flawed investigation. A look at the context, where members of wealthy and powerful families on Koh Toh had grounds or had created grounds for the crime, directs inquiry further into how such persons manage to create these grounds, to cover their interests and manipulate the justice system.
The political situation in Thailand since 2014 would have to be taken into consideration. The Shinawatra government had enjoyed popular support from the public because its socioeconomic base was the working class in cities and the rural semi-peasant farmers, also known as the red shirts, who it was responsive to and whose policies it catered to. When the yellow shirts, the royal family, the military and international liberals decided that they want to overthrow the Shinawatra government in a coup, they installed particular military personnel and politicians who were beholden to rich liberal businessmen and bankers in the south of the country, who then proceeded to do whatever they wanted to do.
It doesn’t require much imagination to see how it could be that the justice system, the safety of tourism, priorities and perceptions of international relations would become structurally compromised as a result.
The conflict between the yellow shirts and the red shirts, and the multinational implications of it, as well as the domestic issues it centred around such as the national health service, rice subsidies, forced prostitution and human trafficking, as well as the divergent social basis of the yellow shirts when compared to the red shirts, is something that will be covered in a future article on the subject.
One thing is clear in summary though, and it is that the most degenerate social tendencies and the most retrograde economic forces were able to rise to preponderance after the effective yellow shirt victory during the coup in 2014.
Photos posted on Facebook claim to show US troops getting back on their plane shortly after landing.
US forces flown to Libya to support government troops had to leave after landing because of demands from a local militia group, US officials say.
It follows reports that 20 US special forces troops, equipped with advanced weaponry, landed on Monday at an airbase in western Libya.
The troops chose to leave “in an effort to avoid conflict”, a US Africa Command (Africom) spokesman told the BBC.
Libya has been in chaos since the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
The US forces had travelled to Libya in order to “foster relationships and enhance communication with their counterparts in the Libyan National Army”, Africom spokesman Anthony Falvo told the BBC.
The soldiers left without incident, he added.
Analysis: Rana Jawad - BBC North Africa correspondent
It is undoubtedly an embarrassing revelation for the Americans.
The timing of the incident, so close to the long-awaited deal signed by Libya’s rival parliaments on Thursday, has fuelled speculation among Libyans over what they see as the ulterior motives of the US and other Western nations.
There has been increasing suspicion that foreign troops are looking to establish their presence on the ground in Libya, especially with the so-called Islamic State grabbing more territory in recent months.
Reactions on social media ranged from accusations that the US was promoting one side of the conflict, to questions over the West’s long-term military aims in Libya.
Western nations have repeatedly spoken of their intent to support Libyan armed forces to help secure the country and combat extremism.
However, if nothing else, the incident chiefly serves as a reminder of the challenges foreign military forces will face trying to operate in a country with no central security structure.
Mr Falvo did not elaborate further on why the troops’ landing at al-Wattiya airbase had seemingly not been cleared with the relevant Libyan groups on the ground.
The airbase is not controlled directly by the Libyan army, but by a militia affiliated to it, which may explain the apparent breakdown in communication.
Unnamed Pentagon officials told national media that US forces had been “in and out of Libya” for some time, operating in an advisory, but not a combat role.
Photos of the secret mission were published on the official Facebook page of the Libyan Air Force, saying the troops had landed “without prior coordination”.
It described the forces arriving “in combat readiness wearing bullet proof jackets” carrying night-vision goggles, GPS devices and assault rifles.
Libya’s rival power bases (as of August 2015)
Libya has two rival governments, one based in the main city, Tripoli, and the other about 1,000km (620 miles) away in the port city of Tobruk.
Representatives of the two groups signed a deal in Morocco on Thursday, agreeing to form a national unity government, however their respective leaders voiced their reservations.
With the collapse of law and order in most of Libya, following the disastrous events of the Arab Spring, and the disastrous choice by some western leaders to utilise NATO as air cover for the reactionary Islamist forces that were unleashed by the process, the situation still remains unmanageable after 2011.
In the Greco-Roman era, the Roman Empire held the coastline of what is now known as modern day Libya, because it was a strategic imperative for them to hold it in order to more adequately manage the traffic on the Mediterranean Sea.
In light of the mass migration crisis, or the ‘immivasion’ as some people have taken to calling it, it may be time to consider that imperative again.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 15 December 2015 18:40.
There are war mongers operating behind the scenes of power whose motives highly resemble those of the Cold War era: Russia, adjacent geopolitical objectives, resource acquisition and control are seen as central problems which require strong military force.
What is insufficient in John Marshall’s investigative critique and whistle blowing article, however, is a failure to make clear the facts that:
1) The particular people, including at NATO, behind these strategies - viz., war with Russia, control in the Middle East and the borders of Russia - do not identify as White; and are not acting with White (i.e., European peoples) interests in mind first and foremost.
2) In normal ethno-nationalist terms, Russia is, in fact, a problematic nation, which is not circumscribed to their, let alone to our common White/European interests; not committed to cooperation in geopolitical ordering; border and demographic defense; and provisioning of The European Ethno-National Region and its necessary alliance with The Asian Region and its Ethno-Nations.
The point is, these are very real, not trumped-up concerns, and White Nationalism must take the helm in cooperation with Asian Nationalisms to handle these concerns.
I will venture an outline of why that is and how it might come about in few days. I will do this in anticipation that Kumiko will contribute her considerable insight to correct oversights, flesh-out a myriad of details and augment points where emphasis is needed.
My perspective on this is that we’ve got the stuff of war at hand all around us already. It is now up to us to wrest the lines from the hands of Jews and others who do not identify with Whites, to shape and craft the battle lines in White Nationalist interests instead. I will argue that that will require European and Asian cooperation and, in terms of their prior imperialist overreaches and capacity to offer cooperation, a significantly chastened U.S. and Russia.
First, a look at how “obscure people’ can start wars” by John Marshall - talking about Victoria Nuland and her fellow Jewish and neocon cohorts, though, of course, he does not name the YKW as such:
Exclusive: Official Washington’s anti-Russian “group think” is now so dominant that no one with career aspirations dares challenge it, a victory for “obscure” government bureaucrats, like Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, as Jonathan Marshall explains.
History isn’t just made by impersonal forces and “great men” or “great women.” Sometimes relatively obscure men and women acting in key bureaucratic posts make a real difference.
Thus, the international crisis in Syria traces back in part to the decision of President Barack Obama’s first ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, to reject peaceful rapprochement with the Damascus regime in favor of “radically redesign[ing] his mission” to promote anti-government protests that triggered the civil war in 2011.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)
In much the same way, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland did her best to foment the Feb. 22, 2014 putsch against the democratically elected Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych, “while convincing the ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for ‘democracy,’” as journalist Robert Parry wrote last July.
Nuland, a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and wife of neoconservative luminary Robert Kagan, helped achieve in Ukraine the kind of “regime change” that her husband had long promoted in the Middle East through the Project for a New American Century.
Nuland now has a new counterpart in the Department of Defense who bears close watching for signs of whether the Obama administration will keep escalating military confrontation with Russia over Eastern Europe, or look for opportunities to find common ground and ease tensions.
On Dec. 14, Dr. Michael Carpenter started work at the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, with added responsibilities for the Western Balkans and Conventional Arms Control. He replaced Evelyn Farkas, who stepped down in October.
Farkas was a firebrand who accused Russia of “shredding international law and conventions that have held firm for decades.” In a call to arms straight out of the early Cold War, she wrote, “Russia’s challenge is so fundamental to the international system, to democracy and free market capitalism that we cannot allow the Kremlin’s policy to succeed in Syria or elsewhere.”
In a remarkable display of “projection” — ascribing to others one’s own motives and actions — she declared that “Russia has invaded neighboring countries, occupied their territory, and funded NGOs and political parties not only in its periphery but also in NATO countries.” Its goal, she asserted, was nothing less than “breaking NATO, the EU and transatlantic unity.”
Farkas declared that the United States must continue its military buildup to deter Russia; provide “lethal assistance” to countries on Russia’s periphery, including Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova; and step up economic sanctions “to pressure Russia . . . so that U.S. national security interests and objectives prevail.”
With people like that helping to shape official policy over the past three years, it’s no wonder U.S.-Russia relations have hit such a low point. Might her replacement, Michael Carpenter, take a less confrontational approach?
Carpenter moved to the Pentagon from the office of Vice President Joe Biden, where he was special adviser for Europe and Eurasia. Previously he ran the Russia desk at the National Security Council and spent several years in the Foreign Service.
Carpenter has kept a low public profile, with few publications or speeches to his name. One of his few quasi-public appearances was this April at a symposium on “Baltic Defense & Security After Ukraine: New Challenges, New Threats,” sponsored by The Jamestown Foundation.
His prepared remarks were off the record, but they were greeted warmly — “you’ve hit it right on the head” — by discussant Kurt Volker, former NATO ambassador under President George W. Bush and foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain. McCain has demanded that the United States arm Ukraine to fight Russia and he helped inflame the Ukraine crisis by meeting with the anti-Semitic leader of the country’s right-wing nationalist party for photo-ops in 2013.
During a short Q&A session at the symposium, captured on video, Carpenter declared that “Russia has completely shredded the NATO-Russian Founding Act,” a choice of words strikingly reminiscent of Farkas’s denunciation of Russia for “shredding international law.” He accused Russia of “pursuing a neo-imperial revanchist policy” in Eastern Europe, inflammatory words that Sen. McCain lifted for an op-ed column in the Washington Post a couple of months later. Carpenter also indicated that he would personally favor permanent NATO bases in the Baltic states if such an escalation would not fragment the alliance.
The fact that Carpenter chose to make one of his few appearances at the The Jamestown Foundation is itself highly telling. According to IPS Right Web, which tracks conservative think tanks, the foundation’s president, Glen Howard, “is the former executive director of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, a largely neoconservative-led campaign aimed at undermining Russia by bolstering U.S. support for militant nationalist and Islamist movements in the North Caucasus.” He has also been consultant to the Pentagon and to “major oil companies operating in Central Asia and the Middle East.”
The foundation was formed in 1984 by “a leading Cold Warrior close to the Reagan administration,” with the blessing of CIA Director William Casey, to provide extra funding for Soviet bloc defectors to supplement meager stipends offered by the CIA. Its board members today include former CIA Director Michael Hayden, and previous board members included Dick Cheney and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, a prominent neoconservative activist.
All this matters hugely for several reasons. Increased confrontation with Russia, particularly along its highly sensitive Western border, will continue to poison relationships with Moscow that are crucial for achieving U.S. interests ranging from Afghanistan to Iran to Syria. Ratcheting up a new Cold War will divert tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into military spending at the expense of domestic priorities.
Most important, the action-reaction cycle between NATO and Russia in Eastern Europe is dramatically increasing chances for an unwanted, unneeded and disastrous war involving the world’s great nuclear powers. Ian Kearns, director of the European Leadership Network, noted in a recent commentary for the Arms Control Association:
“Despite protestations by both sides that the exercises are aimed at no particular adversary, it is clear that each side is exercising with the most likely war plans of the other in mind. The Russian military is preparing for a confrontation with NATO, and NATO is preparing for a confrontation with Russia. This does not mean either side has the political intent to start a war, but it does mean that both believe a war is no longer unthinkable. . . .
“Too few appear to recognize that the current cocktail of incidents, mistrust, changed military posture, and nuclear signaling is creating the conditions in which a single event or combination of events could result in a NATO-Russian war, even if neither side intends it.”
In such a way, the actions of relatively minor figures in history – if their provocations are not reined in – can lead the world to cataclysm.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Monday, 14 December 2015 03:40.
A still pond
Every action has reflections that ripple outward, like when a pebble is cast into a still pond. The enactment of free trade agreements such as NAFTA and, soon to come, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, have additional effects that are only seen in the criminal underworld. Every opening up of trade that occurs, also is an opening up of the potential for the transport of contraband of various sorts.
One of the webs of associations that have grown and become more complex over the past decade is the international drug trade, particularly those groups who interface with the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico. As of December 2015, the components of the international drug trade surrounding the Sinaloa Cartel are as follows:
Sinaloa Cartel and associates (Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Philippines, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, Nicaragua)
Gente Nueva (Mexico)
Artistas Asesinos (Mexico)
Los Mexicles (Mexico)
Los Antrax (Mexico)
Mara Salvatrucha (Mexico, Canada, United States)
Cosa Nostra (Transatlantic)
French Mafia (Transatlantic)
FARC (Colombia)
United States DEA
Elements of Mexican government
Elements of Columbian government
Elements of Taiwanese government
Elements of Myanmar government
Elements of Laotian government
Elements of Japanese government
Elements of British government
Elements of Kosovo government
Elements of Afghan government
Kurdish Workers Movement (Middle East)
Albanian-connected syndicates (Europe, Caucasus)
Russian Mafia (Russia, Central Asia, Europe)
Chicago street gangs (Chicago)
Yamaguchi-gumi (Japan, Transpacific)
Inagawa-kai (Japan, Transpacific)
Sumiyoshi-kai (Japan, Transpacific)
The Seven Star Mob (South Korea, Transpacific)
The H.S.S. Mob (South Korea, Transpacific)
14K (Hong Kong, Transpacific)
Sun Yee On (Hong Kong, Transpacific)
The United Bamboo Gang (Taiwan, United States)
Celestial Alliance (Taiwan, China)
etc.
Ordinarily I’d draw up a map of how these all interact, along with mainstream news sources, but that would be a time-consuming task, and illustrating how they are all together is not the main purpose of this article. I provide that list only to say that they are together.
The alleged email
With Sinaloa Cartel sitting in the middle of that enterprise with the most to lose and most to gain from the success of the expansion of their operations and the linkages that they are cultivating around the world, it is not surprising that when this amalgamation of interests wishes to take on a human voice without disguise or artifice, it manifests as an email from Joaqin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman to Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, which allegedly reads as follows:
As drugs are not a part of the organizations ideology for a Muslim State, ISIS fighters have been destroying shipments of drugs from the cartels.
The cartels have made it clear that ISIS just made a huge mistake by destroying their shipments. It’s clear from the leaked emails that they are not only extremely mad, but are definitely willing to step up and take the organization out if they continue to mess with their business.
Here’s part of the leaked email:
“You [ISIS] are not soldiers. You are nothing but lowly pussies. Your god cannot save you from the true terror that my men will levy at you if you continue to impact my operation.”
“My men will destroy you. The world is not yours to dictate. I pity the next son of a whore that tries to interfere with the business of the Sinaloa Cartel. I will have their heart and tongue torn from them.”
[...]
To the pious Islamist readers out there, and I know you are out there, be aware of this when you set out on your jihad. Whether that email is real or a creative mock-up of what such an email would look like if it were to be composed, it is basically an accurate reflection of what the mood must be among the high ranks of the various criminal syndicates around the world.
And do not doubt that hearts and tongues will be torn out. So think twice before getting involved. Do you really want your heart and tongue torn out?
With what army?
ISIL fighters have managed to negatively impact the bottom line of weapons manufacturers, oil services companies, agribusinesses, and now drug cartels and those who are invested in the movements of drugs around the world. That has ramifications.
For example, if Yamaguchi-gumi were ever to be listed as a ‘legitimate’ business conglomerate on the Japanese market instead of as multiple companies with obfuscated revenue streams and connections to ‘legitimate’ banks, it would actually be the second-largest private equity group in Japan. And in the west, this same logic applies, as many might remember from the situation involving Citigroup, and Barclays, and Bank of America, and so on.
Some people may have heard of the idea that the world revolves around guns, oil, grain, and drugs. They are right, it does. And some may ask, “What army will open the way for drugs to traverse the Middle East without interception again? The criminal organisations don’t have an army.”
Actually, there is an army which will accomplish that task, although it is not one assembled for that specific purpose. I wonder if anyone can guess which army that is?
Chess and not checkers
The world really is an interesting place, and people sometimes end up with really interesting unintentional-allies. In the coming period, I would propose that it would be prudent for ethno-nationalist groups to adopt a rhetorically nuanced approach to the drug war—much like the one I’m taking in this post—one which takes into account that the criminal syndicates have a potential to be a pseudo-ally to the NATO war effort because of shared interests, although not shared ideals.
People like Donald Trump and his supporters seem not to understand this dynamic, because they seem to want to fight ISIL and the Sinaloa Cartel at the same time. For what purpose? Surely it would always be more sensible to make good use of the cartels against ISIL. Government piggybacking on the trade—which is to say, standing on both sides of the trade—would also generate money from the fact that contraband tends to have enormous profit margins because it is illegal, and piggybacking would also enable the government to understand the market better and to mitigate the trade’s most socially-harmful side-effects ahead of time.
OPEC members failed to agree an oil production ceiling on Friday at a meeting that ended in acrimony, after Iran said it would not consider any production curbs until it restores output scaled back for years under Western sanctions.
Friday’s developments set up the fractious cartel for more price wars in an already heavily oversupplied market.
Oil prices have more than halved over the past 18 months to a fraction of what most OPEC members need to balance their budgets. Brent oil futures fell by 1 percent on Friday to trade around $43, only a few dollars off a six year low.
Banks such as Goldman Sachs predict they could fall further to as low as $20 per barrel as the world produces more oil than it consumes and runs out of capacity to store the excess.
A final OPEC statement was issued with no mention of a new production ceiling. The last time OPEC failed to reach a deal was in 2011 when Saudi Arabia was pushing the group to increase output to avoid a price spike amid a Libyan uprising.
“We have no decision, no number,” Iranian oil minister Bijan Zangeneh told reporters after the meeting.
OPEC’s secretary general Abdullah al-Badri said OPEC could not agree on any figures because it could not predict how much oil Iran would add to the market next year, as sanctions are withdrawn under a deal reached six months ago with world powers over its nuclear program.
Most ministers left the meeting without making comments.
Badri tried to lessen the embarrassment by saying OPEC was as strong as ever, only to hear an outburst of laughter from reporters and analysts in the conference room.
This is of course an absolutely fantastic development which is part of the reason why securing the Iran nuclear deal was so incredibly important.
Some quick bullet point observations on what this means for the world:
The OPEC countries will have to keep pumping oil in order to maintain their market share in a vain attempt to prevent Iran from taking it.
In such a scenario, oil prices fall significantly because of the glut of oil on the market.
State budgets of oil-producing countries who have not significantly diversified their economies are damaged significantly, sending them possibly into recession and curtailing their geopolitical influence. These include countries like Russia, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf countries that we can enjoy laughing at.
The price floor could end up being as low as USD $10 a barrel (WTI) if this keeps up.
The price ceiling would also be constricted to around USD $50 a barrel (WTI) as the shale producers who are pummelled by the fall in price (at lower prices shale production is non-viable) either optimise their processes or merge with other enterprises that enable them to have the kind of alternate revenue streams that allow them to ‘park’ their shale operations when the price is low and reactivate them when it reaches $50. By this mechanism, a price ceiling is created.
All oil-purchasing economies benefit from these developments. The European Union benefits, and also most East Asian economies benefit enormously.
In the case of the poorest East Asian states, the fall in oil prices allows those states the ability to carry out internal adjustments that will enable them to expand welfare provisions, optimise food production, and upgrade hospitals and schools in ways that have needed to be done for a long time.
The European Union will be able to diversify its energy supply, thus preventing it from being so easily held hostage to Russian geopolitical demands.
If you’re thinking that this sounds like fun, it’s because it is definitely fun.
Fourteen people were killed and at least 17 wounded
“Three lions made us proud. They are still alive,” one ISIS adherent tweeted in Arabic after the shootings at Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. “California streets are full with soldiers with heavy weapons. The Unites States is burning #America_Burning #Takbir”
Translation:
“Three lions made us proud. They are still alive,” tweeted after the shootings in San Bernardino
After the Paris attacks, confirmed ISIS accounts praised “Lions” as well.
Around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, two assailants opened fire in San Bernardino at a party in the Inland Regional Center, police said.
Fourteen people were killed and 21 wounded. The names of all those injured have not yet been released, but The Times is collecting their names and stories.
After a Wednesday afternoon car chase, the two armed suspects were killed by police: Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.
The attackers’ motive is unknown. President Obama, in a statement from the Oval Office Thursday morning, said the shooting was possibly related to terrorism, but might also be workplace related.
Police said there was “some degree of planning.” The suspects were heavily armed, wearing tactical attire, and had an arsenal of ammunition and pipe bombs in their Redlands home.
A silver lining to terrorism is that it moves us in the direction of having to classify people - e.g., non-White middle-easterners, as a whole - as we are less able to distinguish “the good ones from the bad ones.” That is a necessary step in racial, systemic maintenance.
