Trump’s Sanctions Put Him on “Warpath” with Russia, Says Medvedev

Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic

Donald Trump has put the US on the “warpath” with Moscow with his decision to impose sanctions and cancel a peace summit, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has said. The Telegraph has more.

On Wednesday night, the US President announced sanctions against Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. The measures followed the collapse of a proposed meeting with Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin had signalled it was unwilling to meet America’s terms for a ceasefire.

“The US is our enemy, and its talkative ‘peacemaker’ has now fully embarked on the warpath with Russia,” Mr Medvedev wrote on Telegram. 

“The decisions taken are an act of war against Russia. And now Trump has fully aligned himself with loony Europe,” said the Deputy Chair of Russia’s National Security Council, reigniting his war of words with the US President.

The European Union also announced new sanctions on Russia, including a ban on the import of liquefied natural gas. The natural gas ban will phase out imports rather than halt them immediately. 

Read more

Iran Calls Reported Oil Tanker Attack in Gulf of Oman ‘More Than Suspicious’

Comment: "supicious" is right. Our Zio-con friends have been busy...

---------------------- 

Sputnik

On Thursday morning, reports emerged that two tankers were damaged near the Strait of Hormuz. It comes at a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East and just a month after four vessels were affected in a similar incident off the Emirati coast.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has seemingly hinted that Thursday’s reported attack on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman had something to do with Japan’s efforts to advance the peace process in the Middle East.

“Reported attacks on Japan-related tankers occurred while PM Shinzo Abe was meeting with Ayatollah Khamenei for extensive and friendly talks,” Zarif tweeted.

“‘Suspicious’ doesn’t begin to describe what likely transpired this morning,” he added.

Iran’s government spokesman, Ali Rabei, said Tehran was ready for regional cooperation to ensure the security of strategic waterways. “All countries in the region should be careful not to fall in the trap of those who benefit from regional insecurity,” he said.

On Thursday, two oil tankers operated by shipping companies Frontline and Bernhard Schulte were damaged in a suspected attack near the Strait of Hormuz, the most important oil artery in the world.
No casualties have been reported; the Bahrain-based US Navy 5th Fleet said it was assisting the tanker, while Iranian rescuers, according to local media, have saved and transported 44 crew members to an Iranian port.

Japan’s Trade Ministry said that the two tankers were carrying “Japan-related” cargo, without providing further details.

Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is visiting Iran as part of his effort to reduce tensions between the Islamic Republic and the United States. Abe noted on Wednesday that he and Iranian President Rouhani had ‘bluntly discussed’ how to reduce Iran-US tensions.

A similar yet-unsolved incident took place in the Gulf of Oman in mid-May, when four commercial vessels − among them two Saudi oil tankers − were damaged by limpet mines. UAE investigators blamed the attack on a “state actor” but failed to identify the culprit.

The United States, which is embroiled in an escalating war of words with Iran, was quick to accuse the Islamic Republic of orchestrating the attack, which the latter denied.

Read more

Maduro Moves Venezuela’s Oil Firm European Office To Moscow

oilprice

Nicolas Maduro has ordered an office in Europe of Venezuela’s state oil firm PDVSA to be moved to Moscow, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said on Friday after meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Russian capital.
 
Russia is one of Maduro’s key supporters in the political power struggle in the Latin American country sitting on top of the world’s largest oil reserves, while the U.S. and many European nations have recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate interim president.

Russia has stood by Maduro for years and has poured billions of U.S. dollars in Venezuela in the form of loans and oil investments, even when all other Venezuelan allies—including China—have shown reluctance to continue lending money to Maduro’s regime.

 

After meeting with Russia’s Lavron today, Venezuela’s Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said that “President Nicolas Maduro instructed the Lisbon branch of PDVSA to close this office and relocate the office to Moscow.” 

Read more

Venezuela arrests two Chevron executives in ongoing anti-corruption probe

venezuelanalysis.com

Two Chevron employees were arrested in the Venezuelan city of Puerto La Cruz on Monday, as part of the Bolivarian government’s ongoing anti-corruption drive.

Begun last September, Venezuela’s hardline campaign against corruption and influence peddling has led to legal action against dozens of employees and executives in the state oil sector, but these are the first arrests targeting personnel from a private foreign company.

According to sources interviewed by Reuters, agents of the Bolivarian Intelligence Services (SEBIN) raided PetroPiar’s Puerto la Cruz offices, located in the northeastern Venezuelan state of Anzoategui, to make the arrests.

PetroPiar is a 70/30 joint venture between state oil company PDVSA and Chevron, the largest US oil company operating in Venezuela today. One of the detained men, Carlos Agarra, is a chemical engineer recently relocated to Venezuela from Chevron’s Argentina operations, while the second detainee, Rene Vasquez, is a procurement advisor.

Read more

It’s Not the Economy Stupid, It’s Your Stupid Foreign Policy: How to Get Rid of Our Oligarchs

Disinfo.com
via chycho

Isn’t what’s going on in the Ukraine, this attempt at regime change, which is unfortunately on the verge of turning into a full blown proxy-civil war (2) threatening to bring about the Balkanization of the region, the same game that has been played out in countless other countries for the better part of the last century?

I. 1953 Regime Change in Iran

It was the 1953 CIA instigated coup of the democratically elected government of Iran that really began the regime changing endeavors of the Western superpowers.

The first attempt of a Middle Eastern country to free themselves of Western control of their resources occurred with Iran in 1951 when the democratically elected president, Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq, nationalizated Iran’s oil industry. Unfortunately, however, Western powers would not stand idly by while Iranians took control of their own resources, which is why in 1953 the CIA, following instructions from Britain, organized a coup against Dr. Mosaddeq and overthrew the government.

This was a well-documented event and general knowledge among all those who have lived in the Middle East and Asia for decades, but was not well known in the West until the year 2000 when the United States government released documents on the operation, and apologized to Iran and its people for the devastation that it unleashed.

The following short two-part documentary is a good introduction to this topic, and without a doubt, should be mandatory viewing in school curriculums in the United States and the UK.

Read more (videos)


 

Sex, Oil, Chaos & Corruption at American U. of Iraq

Students at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniya - photo by Chris De Bruyn

Who What Why

Anyone who still wonders why the Bush administration invaded Iraq would do well to become familiar with an institution whose existence few Americans are aware of: the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniya.

Located in Kurdistan, at the nexus of northern Iraq’s border with Iran and Turkey, AUI-S opened its doors in 2007. At the time, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote about it with the sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm that had generally accompanied the invasion itself four years before. “Imagine for a moment if one outcome of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been the creation of an American University of Iraq…Imagine if we had created an island of decency in Iraq…Well, stop imagining.”

You don’t have to imagine, though, when history provides enough clues. For more than one hundred years, American business leaders (usually with the cooperation of local potentates) have funded Christian missionaries to set up universities in foreign countries with valuable resources to exploit. This collaboration has served to create a more friendly environment for establishing a business foothold while simultaneously fulfilling the missionaries’ desire to spread the Word around the globe.

In the Middle East—where the business has primarily been oil—the Rockefellers and others generously funded such institutions as the American University of Beirut, which was established on the bedrock of conservative Christian values more than one hundred years ago. It began modestly, with one class of sixteen students in 1863. Over time, it became a venerable academic oasis, characterized by values that could be accurately described as cosmopolitan and liberal.

With AUI-S in contemporary Kurdistan, however, it was back to square one, ideologically speaking. Oil—or “The Prize” as it is often called—was once again the business at hand. This time, access to The Prize was given to George W. Bush’s good friend and contributor, the Texan Ray Hunt, whose Kurdish oil concession is potentially worth billions of dollars. And from the beginning, the academic component of this particular foreign foothold has been plagued by problems far worse than the usual disarray that attends any new university venture. That’s because the people setting it up were missionaries of a uniquely postmodern variety.

Read more

The New York Times is Misleading the Public on Iran

Al Jazeera

It's deja vu all over again. AIPAC is trying to trick the United States into another catastrophic war with a Middle Eastern country on behalf of the Likud Party's colonial ambitions, and the New York Times is misleading the public with allegations that say that the country is developing "weapons of mass destruction".

In an article attributed to Steven Erlanger on January 4 ("Europe Takes Bold Step Toward a Ban on Iranian Oil"), this paragraph appeared:

The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear programme has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign [emphasis my own].

The claim that there is "a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran's nuclear programme has a military objective" is misguided.

As Washington Post's Ombudsman Patrick Pexton noted on December 9:

But the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb.

Indeed, if you try now to find the offending paragraph on the New York Times website, you can't. They took it down. But there is no note, like there is supposed to be, acknowledging that they changed the article, and that there was something wrong with it before. Sneaky, huh?

You can still find the original here.

Indeed (at least at the time of writing), if you go to the New York Times website and search with the phrase "military objective", the article pops right up. But if you open the article, the text is gone. But again, there is no explanatory note saying that they changed the text.

This is not an isolated example in the Times' reporting. On the very same day, January 4, they published another article, attributed to Clifford Krauss ("Oil Price Would Skyrocket if Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz"), that contained the following paragraph:

Various Iranian officials in recent weeks have said they would blockade the strait, which is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, if the United States and Europe imposed a tight oil embargo on their country in an effort to thwart its development of nuclear weapons [emphasis again my own].

Read more

EU Reaches Agreement to Ban Imports of Iranian Oil

Reuters

European Union governments have reached a preliminary agreement to ban imports of Iranian crude to the EU but have yet to decide when such an embargo would be put in place, EU diplomats said on Wednesday.

The agreement, news of which sent crude oil prices higher, followed talks in the last days of December between EU envoys, diplomats said. Objections to the idea, notably from Greece, were dropped during the talks, they said.

"A lot of progress has been made," one EU diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The principle of an oil embargo is agreed. It is not being debated anymore."

A European ban on Iranian crude would be part of concerted Western action to put pressure on Tehran to abandon its nuclear program, which many governments worry aims at producing an atom bomb. Tehran says its aims are peaceful only.

The United States imposed new sanctions on New Year's Eve to cut financial institutions that work with Iran's central bank off from the U.S. financial system, thus blocking off the main source of Tehran's payments for crude.

Europe started preparing a new push against Iran's financial and energy sectors in December, with the aim of agreeing sanctions by the end of January.

A ban on exporting oil-related technology to Iran and more measures against shipping of crude are also under discussion, diplomats said.

Diplomats said there was still a debate among European capitals over whether to enforce a crude ban immediately after it is agreed or to wait a few months. Some EU member states are concerned about the economic impact of an embargo at a time when Europe is struggling with massive debt problems.

Greece, in particular, has been hesitant but Greek government sources said on Tuesday that Athens would not break ranks with its EU partners on the issue.

Tensions between the West and Iran -- the second biggest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries -- have already pushed up oil prices.

On Wednesday, the price of a barrel of benchmark Brent crude rose more than a dollar from its previous close to a session peak of nearly $114, following the news that Europeans had agreed in principle to ban Iranian crude.

Iran supplies a total of around 450,000 barrels per day to EU member states, making the bloc collectively the second-largest market for Iranian oil after China.

EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has said that if there were a ban on Iranian imports, supplies could be bought from elsewhere, notably leading OPEC member Saudi Arabia.

BP Awarded $27 Million in Leases for Gulf Oil, Gas Exploration

What this article doesn't mention is the deaths, destroyed livelihoods and toxic legacy from Corexit, let alone the oil itself that still contaminates much of the environment in many parts of the Gulf. It is a huge environmental and social catastrophe. After what BP did it's nauseating that they're actually being rewarded for it. Rather like Obama and his nobel peace prize.

---------------------------

Common Dreams

Olga Belogolova 

BP is officially getting back into deep water exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, the Interior Department announced on Wednesday.

The British energy giant, responsible for the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history last year in the Gulf, won $27 million worth of leases to conduct new oil-and-gas exploration in the Gulf. The awards from the Interior Department came in the first Gulf lease sale since the BP spill last year, with all winning bids bringing $337.6 million into government coffers.

The lease sale, which involved oil and gas rights for tracts in the western Gulf, attracted 241 bids from 20 companies totaling $712 million, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

BP bid a total of $109.9 million on 15 leases and won 11 for $27.4 million, Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reported in a list of sales posted on its website.

The lease sale, which involved oil and gas rights for tracts in the western Gulf, attracted 241 bids from 20 companies totaling $712 million, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said from the site of the sale in New Orleans.

ConocoPhillips made the highest total bids in the lease sale, offering $173.2 million for 97 leases; the company received 75 leases for $157.8 million, according to a list released by Interior on Wednesday afternoon.

BP bid a total of $109.9 million on 15 leases and won 11 for $27.4 million, Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reported.

"This marks a milestone with respect to the greatest overhaul in the America’s history,” Salazar said of the offshore-drilling safety reforms and changes implemented by Interior since the April 2010 explosion of a BP well in the Gulf led to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. “We believe we can move forward with oil and gas development.”

Salazar's initial announcement did not include any mention of whether BP was awarded any leases, but the British oil giant had made clear for months that it intended to get back into deepwater exploration in the Gulf as quickly as possible. BP was not excluded from bidding on any leases, much to the chagrin of environmentalists who say the company should be banned from further drilling until last year's spill has been fully cleaned up.

Former Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Director Michael Bromwich in October defended the Interior’s decision to include BP in the lease sale.

“They don’t have a deeply flawed record offshore,” he said of BP. “We’ve done analyses over time on the relative safety records of offshore operators and they were in close to the top crew.”

“The question is, do you administer the administrative death penalty based on one incident?," Bromwich told reporters. “And we've concluded, I’ve concluded, that's not appropriate in these circumstances."

War on Iran has already begun. Act before it threatens all of us

Great article. What the author doesn't know or realise is that these guys WANT a third world war. The crazies at the top of the pile from coporatists to religious fundamentialists to the Zionist mafia all want this war for different but very much aligned reasons. This is not geo-political myopia or bravado. At certain top level tiers of the pathocratic pyramid: this is part of a long-term strategy.

---------------------


Guardian

Escalation of the covert US-Israeli campaign against Tehran risks a global storm. Opposition has to get more serious

Iranians carry honorary coffins and pictures of a Revolutionary Guards 

commander killed in an explosion at the Alghadir missile base. 

Photograph: Reuters

They don't give up. After a decade of blood-drenched failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, violent destabilisation of Pakistan and Yemen, the devastation of Lebanon and slaughter in Libya, you might hope the US and its friends had had their fill of invasion and intervention in the Muslim world.

It seems not. For months the evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war against Iran has already begun, backed by Britain and France. Covert support for armed opposition groups has spread into a campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and missile installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others.

The attacks are not directly acknowledged, but accompanied by intelligence-steered nods and winks as the media are fed a stream of hostile tales – the most outlandish so far being an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US – and the western powers ratchet up pressure for yet more sanctions over Iran's nuclear programme.

The British government's decision to take the lead in imposing sanctions on all Iranian banks and pressing for an EU boycott of Iranian oil triggered the trashing of its embassy in Tehran by demonstrators last week and subsequent expulsion of Iranian diplomats from London.

It's a taste of how the conflict can quickly escalate, as was the downing of a US spyplane over Iranian territory at the weekend. What one Israeli official has called a "new kind of war" has the potential to become a much more old-fashioned one that would threaten us all.

Read more

Halliburton 'destroyed' Gulf of Mexico spill evidence

BBC News

Oil giant BP has accused oilfields services firm Halliburton of destroying damaging evidence relating to last year's oil well blast in the Gulf of Mexico in which 11 people were killed.

At a hearing in a New Orleans court, BP said Halliburton had "intentionally" destroyed test results on its cement product used at the Macondo well.

Halliburton denied this, saying the claims were "without merit". Cement was a key factor in causing America's worst offshore oil spill.The blast that followed at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April led to the release of 780m litres (206m gallons) of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP and Halliburton are locked in a legal battle ahead of a trial on damages early next year.

Through their lawyers, the former partners in the venture are seeking maximum pre-trial advantage, the BBC's Steve Kingstone in Washington reports. 

Trading allegations

 

BP made its accusations in a court filing on Monday. It said that after reviewing the test results, Halliburton "destroyed records of the testing as well as the physical cement samples used in the testing". The company also said that Halliburton had failed to produce computer modelling evidence, which showed how the cement performed.

In its motion, BP asked for sanctions against Halliburton, claiming that the company's cement slurry was "unstable". In its turn, Halliburton rejected the claim, saying it would contest it in court. 

The world's second-largest oilfields services provider also accused BP of fraud and defamation in the investigation. The contractor alleged that BP had ordered last-minute changes to the cement. The two companies traded allegations ahead of the trial over the spill disaster in February. 

The trial is expected to apportion blame and quantify damages arising from the spill.

There will also be other phases of the case over clean-up costs and other claims.

Abiotic Oil: A Theory Worth Exploring

 
Peak oil is a scam. The science has never added up. Yet it is a very convenient tool for imperialism. Here's why the Abiotic theory makes complete sense and is simply good science. 


------------------

 

http://sdai-tech1.blogspot.com/2010/06/abiotic-oil-secret-of-bp-oil-spill.html

US News and World Report

[Abiotic oil theorists] hold that oil can be derived from hydrocarbons that existed eons ago in massive pools deep within the earth's core. That source of hydrocarbons seeps up through the earth's layers and slowly replenishes oil sources. In other words, it turns the fossil-fuel paradigm upside down.

Thomas Gold, a respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, has held for years that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. 

As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs, he says. That ... raises the tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be. In 2008 ... a group of Russian and Ukrainian scientists [said] that oil and gas don't come from fossils; they're synthesized deep within the earth's mantle by heat, pressure, and other purely chemical means, before gradually rising to the surface. The idea that oil comes from fossils "is a myth" that needs changing according to petroleum engineer Vladimir Kutcherov, speaking at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. "All kinds of rocks could have oil and gas deposits." Alexander Kitchka of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences estimates that 60 percent of the content of all oil is abiotic in origin and not from fossil fuels. 

Read More

See also: Study appears to support theory of Abiotic Oil