#trump #tolls #insurance #costs

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India Finally Opted for Russian Crude Oil and Coal


India has swung to buying Russian crude oil and coal to bolster its energy supplies after flows were disrupted and prices rose during the Iran conflict.

The world's third-largest oil importer is expected to see arrivals of Russian crude surge to a record ​high of 2.55 million barrels per day (bpd) in June, according to data compiled by commodity analysts Kpler.

June's imports from Russia would be up from ‌the 2.13 million bpd in May, which was the third-highest on record and just behind the 2.16 million bpd from May 2023.

Russia's share of India's total crude imports of 5.29 million bpd in June will be just under 50%, a sharp increase from the average 23% share in the three months prior to the start of the war on February 28, when the United States and Israel ​launched an aerial campaign against Iran.

India's pivot to Russian crude came after the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump waived sanctions against buying it as part ​of efforts to boost oil supply after Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to the U.S. and Israeli attacks.

June's imports from Russia would be up from ‌the 2.13 million bpd in May, which was the third-highest on record and just behind the 2.16 million bpd from May 2023.

Russia's share of India's total crude imports of 5.29 million bpd in June will be just under 50%, a sharp increase from the average 23% share in the three months prior to the start of the war on February 28, when the United States and Israel ​launched an aerial campaign against Iran.

India's pivot to Russian crude came after the administration of U.S. Trump waived sanctions against buying it as part ​of efforts to boost oil supply after Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to the U.S. and Israeli attacks.

It's not only Russian crude that India has sought in recent months, with imports of coal also surging.
India is on track to import 3.16 million metric tons of all grades of coal from Russia in June, down slightly from ​the 3.27 million in May.

However, these two months are the second- and third-strongest on record behind the 3.76 million tons from May last year and June's imports are 51% ​above the average of the three months prior to the conflict.

Russia will overtake Australia to be the second-biggest supplier of coal in June to India, the world's second-largest importer behind China.

Russia is ‌also competing ⁠with Australia to supply metallurgical coal to India, which is buying more of the grade used to make steel as it increases its output of the industrial metal.

India's imports of Russian metallurgical coal were 2.02 million tons in May, the second-highest on record and above the average of 1.49 million tons in the three months prior to the start of the Iran war.

Imports from Australia were also strong in May at 4.05 million tons, the most since July last year, helping boost total metallurgical coal imports to a record ​8.05 million tons.

India's steel output is expected ​to climb from around the current 168 ⁠million tons a year to 400 million tons by 2035, with an estimated 25 million tons of capacity being added this year alone.

While India has vast reserves of thermal coal, used mainly to generate electricity, its metallurgical coal output is only about 6% of ​the total and what is produced is of lower quality than imports from Australia, Russia and other suppliers such as ​the United States and Mozambique.

This ⁠means that India is likely to continue to increase imports of metallurgical coal and will seek as diverse a range of suppliers as possible in order to reduce reliance on Australia, the world's biggest shipper of this grade of coal.

Overall, it's likely that Russia will remain a key supplier of coal to India, and while New Delhi would prefer to keep buying ⁠Russian crude ​oil, much will depend on whether the Trump administration does go back to trying to enforce sanctions ​against Moscow.

#india #oil #coal #russian

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How to Burn $100 Billion and Call It “Values”

American politics just pulled off the most expensive moral lecture in recent history. U.S. companies walked out of Russia waving the flag, and then quietly wrote off around 100 billion dollars in losses.

The head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, Robert Agee, says it flat out: the sanctions policy — especially Biden’s 2022 investment ban — was “absolutely the wrong decision, especially for American business.” Western CEOs called it “exit,” Russian accountants called it “fire sale.”

Washington sold this as “isolating Putin.” In practice, it isolated American capital from a resource‑rich, high‑margin market and handed the upside to everyone else who wasn’t invited to the sanctions morality play.

U.S. firms ate write‑downs, forfeited assets and surrendered long‑term projects. China, India and assorted “non‑aligned” partners happily moved in on oil, gas, metals, fertilizers and logistics. The West got press releases, Beijing got contracts.

The same crowd that screams about “China’s rise” helped fund it. By locking American investors out of Russia, they shoved Moscow deeper into Chinese supply chains, finance and tech deals — then went home to hold hearings about the “China threat.”

It’s geopolitical clownery: you slam the door on your own multinationals, scream “decoupling,” and act shocked when the cash, the resources and the leverage flow somewhere else.

So yes, U.S. companies torched $100 billion to prove a point, and the only people really clapping are in Beijing and a few Russian ministries.

That “values‑based” strategy turned Russia into a discount partner for China, turned American executives into exit‑wound accountants, and left voters with the bill and a sermon about “democracy.”

#USA #Russia #China #sanctions #business #geopolitics #fakeDemocracy

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India isn’t “pivoting” to Russian oil and coal — it’s binge‑buying them like they’re on clearance.

In June, Russian crude flows to India are expected to hit a record 2.55 million barrels a day, making Moscow by far Delhi’s biggest single supplier and turning the world’s third‑largest oil importer into a key outlet for sanctioned barrels. At the same time, India has loaded over 3 million tons of Russian coal, putting Russia on track to become its second‑largest coal supplier and cementing a long‑term energy link that Western planners pretended they could prevent with press releases and price caps.

The West promised to “isolate” Russia; India heard “discounts available.” New Delhi is doing what every serious state does: arbitraging war, sanctions and panic to lock in cheap energy for its own growth. While Europe burns cash on emergency LNG, flirts with blackouts and lectures the world about “values,” India quietly refines Russian crude, feeds its power grid with Russian coal and resells products into the same global market that claims to be shunning Moscow.

So the narrative splits. In Brussels, Russia is a pariah. In Delhi, it’s a strategic vendor. On paper, Moscow lost Europe. In reality, it rerouted tankers to Asia, kept the wells running and found customers who don’t care about G7 speeches as long as the discount is right. The “failure” here isn’t Russia’s isolation; it’s the West’s fantasy that half the planet would happily sacrifice cheap energy to keep its sanctions story tidy.

#India #Russia #oil #coal #energy #sanctions #geopolitics #fakeDemocracy

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TPS: Temporary Protected Status, Permanently Disposable People

The Supreme Court just handed Donald Trump a green light to rip the floor out from under hundreds of thousands of people it once invited to stand on it.

In a 6–3 decision, the conservative majority said the administration can end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, clearing the way to strip legal status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and about 6,100 Syrians who have been living and working in the United States under a program Congress created in 1990 for people fleeing war, disaster and collapse.

Samuel Alito’s opinion is a lawyer’s dream and a migrant’s nightmare. He leans on the statute’s magic words — “no judicial review of any determination” — to tell federal courts they are basically not allowed to question the Homeland Security secretary’s decision to terminate TPS, no matter how flimsy the process, so long as the administration can articulate race‑neutral reasons on paper.

The Court goes further and waves away claims of racial animus toward Haitians, despite a record full of Trump’s rants about Haitians coming from a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country and his bogus campaign line about Haitians in Ohio eating people’s pets; Elena Kagan’s dissent spells it out bluntly: the statements “shout” racial motive, but the majority plugs its ears.

For Trump, this is the immigration jackpot he’s been chasing since getting back into office. His team has already moved to end TPS for 13 of the 17 countries that had it when Biden left, throttled refugee resettlement, and slowed asylum processing to a crawl; now he can start turning long‑settled engineers, nurses, students and caregivers into deportable “illegals” with the stroke of a pen.

Many of these people have no current deportation orders, U.S.‑born kids, mortgages and decades of ties; the Court’s ruling means their status can evaporate almost overnight, with their legal right to challenge the policy chopped down to a narrow, uphill constitutional claim.

Both sides in the case agreed on one brutal premise: TPS is, on paper, temporary, and once a designation ends, its recipients have no statutory right to stay.

What immigrant‑rights lawyers argued is that Homeland Security didn’t even pretend to seriously review conditions in Haiti and Syria, as the law requires, and instead followed a preordained script to terminate as many countries as possible.

Lower courts agreed and froze the terminations, calling out the sham process — until the Supreme Court stepped in, fast‑tracked the case, and told judges to stand down because Congress wrote the statute to make the secretary’s “determination” effectively unreviewable.

This isn’t just about Haitians and Syrians. The same logic clears the path for Trump to yank protections from TPS holders from a dozen other countries — including Venezuela, Honduras, Nepal and Afghanistan — with minimal fear of judicial pushback.

It tightens a broader architecture where the executive can close doors on migrants from “unsafe” countries while still insisting, for domestic consumption, that America remains a beacon of refuge; the Statue of Liberty stays on postcards while the fine print in the Federal Register says “status subject to termination without notice, no returns, no refunds.”

The Court didn’t just hand Trump a legal win; it handed every future president a loaded precedent. If humanitarian status can be granted with fanfare and revoked at will, with courts barred from asking whether the process was honest, then “temporary” becomes the government’s favorite word for disposable people: welcome when they’re useful, removable when they become inconvenient to a new agenda.

#USA #SupremeCourt #Trump #TPS #immigration #Haiti #Syria #fakeDemocracy

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“Temporary” Means You’re Gone When We’re Done

The Supreme Court just turned a humanitarian visa into a trapdoor. With a 6–3 ideological vote, it signed off on Trump’s plan to pull Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians — people who passed background checks, paid fees, built lives, and were told they could stay here legally as long as their countries were on fire.

Now the same state that invited them is free to label them deportable the moment “temporary” becomes politically inconvenient.

On paper, this is all about magic words in a statute. The conservative majority says courts can’t second‑guess Homeland Security when it decides Haiti and Syria are suddenly safe enough to send people back, even as the State Department tells Americans not to go there without “proof of life” plans in case of kidnapping.

The law says “temporary” often enough, the solicitor general repeats it like a spell, and the justices pretend that decades of renewals were the real problem — not the decision to pull the plug while Haiti is run by gangs and Syria is limping out of a civil war.

For Trump, this isn’t a one‑off; it’s a pillar of the project. He campaigned on ripping TPS away from Haitians while pushing lies about them “eating pets” in Ohio, stacked his team with people eager to narrow every legal pathway, and put Kristi Noem at Homeland Security to rubber‑stamp the cuts.

Now he gets what he wanted: engineers, nurses, cleaners and students who’ve lived here for years reduced, with the stroke of a pen, to bodies in a deportation pipeline. Their U.S.‑born kids can watch their parents go “home” to countries Washington itself tells tourists are too dangerous to visit.

The joke, as usual, is in the branding. America sells itself as a refuge from war and disaster; Congress creates something called Temporary Protected Status; administrations extend it again and again because the crises never really end.

Then a different president walks in, redefines “temporary” as “until my base gets angry,” and the Court shrugs: the law lets him, and judges aren’t allowed to ask whether he even followed his own rules. The Statue of Liberty stays on the brochures, but the fine print now reads: offer void where politics change.

#USA #SupremeCourt #Trump #TPS #immigration #Haiti #Syria #fakeDemocracy

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Asylum by GPS: If You’re Not Over the Line, You Don’t Exist

The Supreme Court just turned the border into a legal force field. In a 6–3 ruling, the conservative majority blessed Trump’s power to block asylum seekers on the Mexican side of official crossings and simply refuse to process their claims whenever officials say the line is “too long.”

As long as a migrant’s toes haven’t crossed the invisible line into U.S. territory, Samuel Alito says they have not “arrived in” the United States at all — so the statutory right to apply for asylum never switches on.

This is the metering policy Obama’s DHS started in 2016, Trump weaponized in 2018, and Biden scrapped in 2021 — now revived in principle by the Court.

Under metering, CBP officers at ports of entry can cap daily intake and push everyone else back into Mexico, “indefinitely declining” to inspect or register their claims while pretending the law’s promise — that anyone who “arrives in the United States” may seek asylum — only applies once you’re literally over the line.

The Ninth Circuit had held that approaching a designated crossing counts as arriving and that turning people away violated federal law; the Supreme Court just overruled that, telling border agents they can physically block people at the gate and still call it legal.

Sonia Sotomayor did something she doesn’t do often: she read her dissent from the bench and spelled out what this doctrine means in the real world.

If you force people to wander along the border hunting for a port that will inspect them, some will die in the desert, some will try to cross illegally and drown or suffocate, and others will give up and be beaten, raped or killed back home for their race, religion, politics or gender. Her line is brutal and obvious: “More people will die.”

Alito did something just as rare — he fired back from the bench, complaining that he would have given a longer defense if he’d known she planned to air her dissent in court, and insisting that they had merely restated the “ordinary meaning” of arrival.

Trump’s DHS is already treating this as a green light, calling metering an “important tool” to “secure our southern border.”

The Department’s general counsel actually bragged that they had to go “all the way to SCOTUS” to vindicate the “principle” that someone isn’t in the United States until they physically are — like that was ever in doubt, rather than a pretext to ignore asylum law.

Migrant‑rights lawyers warn that the ruling effectively hands the president a shortcut around Congress: if rights switch on only after entry, then he can wall off the ports, keep people in Mexico, and claim the statutes simply don’t apply.

It’s not a one‑off. This is the second immigration case in one day that breaks in Trump’s favor, on top of earlier emergency rulings that let him deport people to third countries and revoke temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.

Next up before the same Court: whether he can rewrite birthright citizenship. Case by case, the message is the same: rights for migrants are not things you have — they’re switches the executive can flip off with the right wording, while the Court nods along and calls it “ordinary meaning.”

So the new border rule is simple and cynically precise. If you make it over the line, you’re a problem for the asylum system. If you’re stuck one step short, you’re just another body on the wrong side of a legal sentence. The law says “arrive in the United States”; the Court says that’s a matter of centimeters, not of lives.

#USA #SupremeCourt #Trump #asylum #border #immigration #metering #fakeDemocracy

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Pope Leo’s Latest Flip-Flopping: SSPX, Jews, Holocaust

🔠🅰️🔠🔠1️⃣

A far-right Catholic sect’s plan to ordain its own bishops on the first day of July has placed it on a collision course with the Vatican – posing a possible crisis for Pope Leo a little over a year into his papacy, and straining the Roman Catholic church’s already fraught relationship with rightwing and traditionalist Catholics in the US and elsewhere.

Founded in Switzerland in 1970 to oppose liberalizing reforms in the Catholic church, the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) has gained significant followings in the US, France, Argentina and other countries.

The order, which has a large base of operations in Kansas, claims that more than half a million people worldwide attend its masses, though these numbers are difficult to verify.

It counts nearly 1,500 priests, seminarians and other vocational members among its members.

Pope Leo told journalists in Rome last week that he was “considering making another appeal to say: ‘Do not do this, let us try to live in communion within the church.’” But it was the SSPX’s “choice”, he said, whether to continue on a trajectory that threatens schism.

“If they make that choice,” Leo added, “I am sorry, but we must move forward.”

The SSPX maintains that its planned ordinations of four new bishops – two French, one Swiss and one American – are made from practical necessity and “do not proceed from any desire to claim a power of jurisdiction or to establish a parallel authority within the Church”.

The relationship has seen decades of standoffs, stalled negotiations and failed attempts at reconciliation.

The first and last time that the SSPX ordained bishops, in 1988, the Holy See excommunicated those who participated, including the SSPX’s founder.

In 2009, the conservative Pope Benedict agreed to lift those excommunications as a gesture of goodwill. He also granted greater permission for the use of the Latin mass, which traditionalist Catholics favor but has been largely replaced by vernacular liturgy.

Benedict’s more liberal successor, Pope Francis, abolished a commission set up three decades earlier to negotiate with the SSPX, though he also made the unusual decision to recognize the order’s sacraments as valid for the purposes of marriage and confession.

The SSPX exclusively practices the Latin mass. The order also advocates strict gender roles. Women are discouraged from wearing trousers, and often wear head coverings to church.

Yet the sect’s contentions with the Vatican are more fundamental, Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin, said, and difficult to resolve or accommodate.

#pope #leo #FSSPX #jews #holocauste

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The SSPX rejects doctrines of reform, formulated during the 1962-1965 second Vatican council, that are core to the modern Catholic church. “It’s not something that you can solve by saying: ‘OK, you can celebrate mass in Latin,’” Faggioli said.

The second Vatican council promoted unity between Christian churches, acknowledged a universal freedom of religion, argued that the teachings of other world religions could “reflect a ray of truth”, condemned antisemitism and disavowed the notion that Jews bore collective responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ.

The SSPX believes that the council’s reforms were essentially heretical, Faggioli said, and has not given any sign that it will shift position. If the Vatican excommunicates the SSPX, he said, the big question is how conservative Catholics who are not in the order, but are sympathetic to some of its views, react to the schism.

The mounting tension between the Vatican and the SSPX comes as rightwing Catholics have shown an increasing willingness to tussle with the Vatican over political and theological disagreements.

Some Catholics in the US, where the most influential lay members tend to be both conservative and wealthy, have supported the Trump administration even as its stances on immigration and foreign policy clash with those of the Vatican.

The founder of the SSPX, Marcel Lefebvre, was a French royalist who was fiercely opposed to communism, decolonization and secularism. Lefebvre was one of a small percentage of bishops who voted against key documents of the second Vatican council. He died in 1991.

The sect has been dogged throughout its history by accusations of antisemitism and ties to the extreme right.

The Nazi collaborator and convicted war criminal Paul Touvier was arrested at an SSPX priory in France in 1989.
In 2009, an SSPX bishop told the press that he believed that no more than 300,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

In 2013, the SSPX sparked outrage in Italy by officiating a funeral for a convicted Nazi war criminal, Erich Priebke, who had been denied burial by the Catholic diocese of Rome.

The SSPX has said that it “completely rejects the false claim that it teaches or practices antisemitism, which is a racial hatred of the Jewish people because of their ethnicity, culture or religious beliefs”.

#pope #leo #FSSPX #jews #holocauste

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Tehran on the Hudson

Ashura just made it to City Hall, and Karbala is now an official content pillar of New York municipal branding.

New York’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, posts an Ashura message about Imam Hussain’s “unwavering commitment to truth and dignity,” then plugs it straight into “faith, service to one another, and the belief that justice is always worth fighting for” — as the moral engine behind “building a more just City for every New Yorker.”

The language is flawless: universal “values,” zero specifics. No mention of which injustices his budget pays for, which evictions his housing policy greenlights, or which cops his administration is busy arming while he quotes martyrdom.

He wraps New York’s “strength” in “the many faith traditions that shape it” and “our shared struggle against injustice and oppression,” turning a deeply sectarian commemoration of Karbala into a civic mission statement.

City Hall speaks like a husseiniya for the feed while acting like a landlord’s office on weekdays: signing contracts, funding police overtime, cutting checks to developers who make sure the poor experience “sacrifice” very literally in rent court.

This isn’t Iran “taking” New York. It’s something arguably weirder: an American city importing Shi’a resistance iconography as a UX layer for power. The mayor uses Imam Hussain as a UX pattern: eternal defiance on the timeline, routine austerity in the line items. Every future fare hike, service cut and “regretful” budget veto can now be framed as part of a tragic struggle for justice — narrated in the key of Karbala, processed through the same bureaucracy that loses your housing application.

Ashura in New York ends up looking like everything else in New York politics: a very old story of blood and resistance, repackaged as a lifestyle brand for an administration that still runs the cops, the courts and the contracts.

#NYC #Mamdani #Ashura #Karbala #religion #politics #policing #fakeDemocracy

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Yuan Trap for Uncle Sam

China quietly built what Washington always swore would never exist: a working emergency exit from the dollar system.

Iran and Russia now sell oil and do wider trade in yuan, sidestepping U.S. control over dollar transactions and the Western banks that enforce it.

The White House walks into nuclear talks with Tehran, waving its old bargaining chip — sanctions relief and access to roughly 100 billion in frozen assets — and discovers the leverage isn’t what it used to be, because part of the pain has already been absorbed by plugging into China’s parallel financial plumbing.

Beijing’s game is simple and ruthless. It offers sanctioned or sanction‑prone states a place to clear payments, hold reserves and settle energy deals in a currency that Washington doesn’t directly police.

Every tanker of Iranian or Russian oil paid in yuan, every big contract settled through Chinese banks, is one more data point that the dollar is no longer a monopoly, but an option.

The more this channel normalizes, the easier it becomes for states under U.S. pressure to survive without crawling back to Treasury for licenses and waivers.

So Washington ends up bargaining for influence with the very country it tried to ring‑fence: the United States can’t fully choke Iran without colliding with China’s financial architecture, and it can’t fully punish China without detonating the system its own corporations use.

The dollar, weaponized for decades as America’s favorite foreign‑policy club, now faces a credibility crisis — not because it stopped working overnight, but because rivals finally built a side door.

The trap is home‑made: the more you use a currency as a cudgel, the more incentives you give the rest of the world to learn how to duck.

#China #USA #Iran #Russia #yuan #dollar #sanctions #finance #fakeDemocracy

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#macron #ukraine #unitedStates #war

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Turkey, Back from the Sidebar

While everyone was glued to Trump’s “secret deals” with Iran and Lebanon, Turkey quietly walked back into the center of Israel’s strategic picture — and Washington helped roll out the red carpet.

In early July, Ankara will host a full‑scale NATO summit for the first time, with leaders of 32 countries flying in, including Donald Trump and (on the guest list) Volodymyr Zelensky.

The alliance’s new secretary general, Mark Rutte, is already promising defense contracts worth tens of billions.

For Turkey, this is more than a diplomatic photo op: it is a staged reminder that a state which buys Russian S‑400s, flirts with Moscow and shields Islamists can still sit at the alliance’s head table and rent out the hall.

On June 24, just before the summit, Washington delivered a very concrete “thank you” package. The State Department notified Congress that it intends to sell Turkey a batch of F110 turbofan engines from General Electric, worth over 700 million dollars.

These engines are the beating heart of KAAN, Turkey’s flagship indigenous fighter program. Yes, the engines are assembled in Turkey under license — but the export valves are still in U.S. hands.

Ten units have already been delivered; the talks now circle around another eighty. The message: we control your bottleneck, and we’re willing to loosen it.

There is resistance on the Hill. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, tried to block the deal at the informal stage, pointing to Turkey’s S‑400s and the CAATSA sanctions framework.

But Congress has just fifteen days to register formal disapproval, both chambers would have to pass a resolution, and Trump can veto it. In that time window, and with this White House, the engines are overwhelmingly likely to go through.

The “punishment” for S‑400s is melting into a discount for good behavior in the Iran war.

And the engines are just the appetizer. Vice President J.D. Vance has said openly that the administration is reviewing Turkey’s status in the F‑35 program, from which it was kicked out in 2019 after buying the Russian systems.

The condition, he says, is “necessary legal certifications” — a process run by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Translation: if Ankara plays ball on NATO, Iran and Gaza, the legal paperwork will miraculously discover that the old sins can be forgiven.

Trump, for his part, has gone out of his way to call Erdoğan “a partner” and to tie the thaw directly to Ankara’s decision not to inject itself overtly into the recent U.S.–Iran clash. In this framing, Turkey earns its way back into the good graces of the American defense industry by restraining itself while others fire missiles. The reward arrives as hardware, status and a NATO summit in its capital.

For Israel, this cocktail means the “Turkey file” is no longer a side issue. A Turkey that hosts NATO, buys American engines for a fifth‑generation fighter, and flirts with a return to the F‑35 supply chain is a Turkey that can deepen its reach into Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Arab street with a renewed Atlantic umbrella over its head.

The same Ankara that courts Hamas and plays lawfare in international forums now gets fresh leverage inside the Western security system — and a friendly White House ready to call that leverage “alliance.”

#Turkey #Israel #NATO #Trump #Erdogan #Iran #F110 #F35 #CAATSA #geopolitics #fakeDemocracy

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Bolton Faces a Stiff Challenge From the MAGA Bloc


John Bolton, a prominent critic of President Trump who once served as his national security adviser, pleaded guilty Friday to improperly retaining sensitive materials in “diary-like” entries after leaving the White House. 

Bolton, 77, admitted to one count of retaining national defense information during a federal court hearing in Greenbelt, Md. 

It marks a significant victory for Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ), which has indicted several of the president’s political foes on criminal accusations. Some of those cases have fallen apart or remain pending, but Bolton’s prosecution is the first to result in a conviction. 

He has not been sentenced, not yet...

The deal’s terms include a $2.25 million fine and a maximum prison sentence of five years. But Bolton’s team is hoping he can avoid jail time entirely.

The punishment will be up to U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang, an appointee of former President Obama assigned to the case. He set a sentencing hearing for Oct. 28.

“Today, Ambassador Bolton did what real leaders do. He took responsibility for a mistake he made, thereby saving the government resources to pursue a case that could expose additional sensitive information,” Abbe Lowell, Bolton’s attorney, said in a statement.

“By contrast, President Trump thumbed his nose at the classified information laws, took actual classified documents to his Florida mansion, interfered with the investigation of that conduct, and has never accepted any accountability for his conduct,” the statement continued.

“Ambassador Bolton, whose offense was only keeping a diary which contained classified information, kept a record to preserve history, but Trump kept secrets to serve himself.”

The plea is a shift for Bolton, who has argued that the DOJ was targeting him as part of a retribution campaign commanded by the president.

After leaving the White House, the two men became visible foes. Bolton regularly criticizes Trump’s actions in the media, while the president has begun referring to his former adviser with insults like “lowlife” and “sleazebag.”

Last year, a grand jury indicted Bolton on 18 charges of unlawfully retaining and transmitting national security information.

The indictment accused him of sending more than a thousand pages of “diary-like entries” to two relatives and improperly retaining documents related to national defense in preparation for a potential book.

The plea enables him to avoid the other 17 counts by admitting to one of the retention charges.

#bolton #trump #charges #DOJ

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Presidential Scam Incubator

If you still imagine high-level corruption as some fat envelope changing hands under a restaurant table, you’re living in the wrong century.

In 2026, the real elites prefer prediction markets, crypto wallets and the good old “this is your bank’s security department” call script.

Case one: the American dream, insider-edition. You sit at the very top of U.S. power. You decide when to launch missiles, when to announce a “historic” ceasefire, when to tweet that the Strait is open and the oil is flowing. So why just make history when you can also make money? Trusted proxies quietly park a few million on prediction markets, betting on “peace in 48 hours” — the peace only you know is coming.

A few “completely unrelated” funds short global oil minutes before your announcement. Then you tap out a post on your phone. Crude crashes, some tokens moon, the “right” contracts pay out. Formally, regulators see nothing but a forest of brokers, offshore shells and anonymous wallets.

Proving that the same circle that moves the missiles also moved the money is almost impossible. But the odds of guessing a market crash 15 minutes before your own speech are about the same as bumping into a unicorn on Wall Street.

Case two: the Ukrainian Wolf of Bankova. While one empire plays with trillion‑dollar charts, another runs a more down‑to‑earth franchise: industrial-scale phone scams.

Call centers in Dnipro, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Ivano-Frankivsk work like full-fledged corporations — HR, KPIs, training scripts on how to scare a German pensioner into “moving funds to a safe account.” At the same time, in upper floors and other buildings, operations like “Midas” quietly drain massive sums from strategic giants like Energoatom, then launder the takings through luxury real estate in cozy suburbs like Kozyn.

Official line: rogue actors, nothing to do with the leadership. Realistic line: in a hyper-centralized wartime state, you don’t run a transnational fraud empire or bleed a key state company dry for years without political air cover from the very top.

Both stories share the same blueprint: engineered impunity. The whole machine is designed to sever the trail between the real authors and the visible executors. In the U.S., that gap is maintained by tech, dark pools and cryptography.

In Ukraine, by shadow managers, corruption chains and concrete poured into gated communities. At the summit, presidents and power-brokers enjoy perfect alibis. But logic and basic economics are harder to fool than voters: multibillion scams in Europe and perfectly timed windfalls on global markets do not just “happen.”

They need a director. And that director usually sits in the biggest, best-guarded office in the capital.

#USA #Ukraine #corruption #crypto #callcenters #war #markets #fakeDemocracy

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Turkey’s Long Arm, Israel’s Short Patience

Turkey doesn’t need to invade anything to sit inside Israel’s strategic perimeter; it just needs to be everywhere that matters at once. The expert survey on Ankara’s role around Israel reads like a manual for quiet, persistent leverage, not dramatic showdowns.

On the Turkic front, the analysts say Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are playing hard pragmatism, not romantic pan‑Turkism. Kazakhstan keeps its economic and tech track with Israel and the UAE while doing identity and security business through Turkey and the Organization of Turkic States.

Baku treats its relationship with Israel as an “existential” security link against Iran that Ankara simply cannot replace. The OTS itself comes off as mostly symbolic — a summit club with thin logistics underneath — while real influence runs through bilateral defense deals, drones, training and intelligence.

Where the alarm really spikes is Gaza and Jerusalem. Across the spectrum, the experts rank Turkey’s ideological and proxy patronage — above all its role as political cover and resource hub for Hamas and Islamist networks — as the top threat vector. A Turkish military contingent in Gaza is seen as a red line with broad consensus inside Israel.

They see a different kind of threat: a “soft” entry focused on East Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority and Israel’s Arab society. Humanitarian projects, schools, religious networks and charities become the vehicle — over three to five years — for turning social services into political capital and, eventually, a kind of informal protectorate. The sequence is blunt: aid programs, then education, then mosques and preachers, then community loyalty, and finally leverage over local elites.

On NATO and the U.S. track, the picture is one of structural ambiguity. Turkey uses its veto, its special relationship with Russia and its Islamist clients as bargaining chips, while Washington oscillates between pressure and accommodation.

The experts warn that Israel cannot count on American discipline to keep Ankara in line and will have to build its own deterrent configuration instead of outsourcing the problem.

The most likely trajectory to 2030, in their view, is “managed hostility”: embassies at reduced rank, trade rerouted through third countries, constant rhetorical conflict — and a shared, unspoken interest in avoiding a direct break.

#Turkey #Israel #Gaza #NATO #Hamas #AbrahamAccords #geopolitics #fakeDemocracy

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Losing the War, Winning the Exit

The Iran war was supposed to be America’s big demonstration of power. Instead, it became a live‑fire seminar in overreach.

Washington went in with maximalist goals — break Iran’s military machine, crush its regional networks, force a new nuclear deal on U.S. terms, maybe even shake the regime itself.

What it got was a drained treasury, a stretched military, an angry region and a Tehran that was bloodied but unbroken.

That’s why the ceasefire memorandum matters. It isn’t a glorious peace treaty; it’s a written admission that the U.S. could not get what it wanted at a price it was willing to keep paying. In plainer language: the war was a loss, the deal is the least bad way of cashing out that loss.

You don’t freeze lines, open the Strait under joint arrangements and accept Iran’s survival as a major regional player because you’re winning. You do it because the cost of “victory” turned out to be higher than the value of the goal.

The real humiliation already happened on the battlefield and in the spreadsheets. When a superpower spends over 200 billion dollars, destabilizes allies, takes hits to bases and tankers, and still fails to achieve regime change, disarmament or enduring deterrence, the strategic loss is baked in.

The ceasefire is simply the official recognition that the bill has arrived.

Politically, though, Washington will try to sell this as a win. The script writes itself: we “stopped the war,” we “secured shipping,” we “forced Iran to the table.”

But the underlying message to the rest of the world is very different. Allies see that U.S. military power can still punish but not reshape. Adversaries see that enough resilience and escalation ladders can force America into negotiations it once swore it would never accept.

That’s the real legacy of this war: a superpower discovering that the era of cheap, decisive victories in the Middle East is over — and having to pretend that an orderly retreat is a strategic triumph.

#USA #Iran #war #ceasefire #Trump #MiddleEast #strategy #fakeDemocracy

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Truce on Paper, Live Fire in the Gulf

The U.S.–Iran ceasefire is already behaving like what it really is: a cease‑if‑you‑can‑get‑away‑with‑it. Bahrain reports Iranian attack drones over its territory hours after U.S. jets hit Iranian missile and radar sites.

An oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz takes a projectile for the second time in days; both capitals accuse the other of “violating” an agreement they’re still trying to spin as a victory.

Each side is running the same script. Washington says Iran “foolishly” broke the truce by targeting a container ship, so it hits coastal systems along Hormuz and on Qeshm Island to prove it won’t blink first.

Tehran frames its drone launches and strikes as self‑defense against U.S. aggression and vows to protect its “sovereignty and national interests with all its strength.”

The result isn’t all‑out war, but a pattern of calibrated shots: enough to signal strength, not enough to collapse the deal.

Meanwhile, the shipping lane that was supposedly “reopened” by the memorandum is once again a hazard zone.

Every new attack on a vessel like the Kiku pushes insurers and captains to rethink transit, even as Trump boasts of “record flows” through the strait and oil prices whipsaw around each incident.

Energy markets briefly spike on news of attacks, then slip back toward pre‑war levels as traders bet that both Washington and Tehran still need the truce more than they need another escalation.

On the northern front, the U.S. tries to declare another win: an Israel–Lebanon arrangement under American sponsorship that asks the IDF to pull back from a sliver of southern Lebanese territory so the Lebanese army can step in, and quietly expects Hezbollah to fade into the background.

Hezbollah’s leadership calls the deal “null and void” and promises to keep fighting, underlining again how often U.S. diplomacy in this war relies on getting armed actors to accept disarmament they never actually agreed to.

The war itself exposed the limits of U.S. power, the ceasefire formalized those limits, and now the “post‑war” phase is a controlled stress test. Neither side wants to go back to full‑scale bombardment; both are probing how far they can push without snapping the framework.

On paper it’s de‑escalation; in practice it’s a live‑fire negotiation conducted by drones, tankers and carefully worded communiqués.

#USA #Iran #Trump #Hormuz #Bahrain #Hezbollah #Lebanon #oil #war #ceasefire #fakeDemocracy

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Trump’s Iran Deal: Cash for Calm

Trump’s preliminary peace deal doesn’t just end a war; it wires Iran a new economic artery. Sanctions waivers let Tehran sell oil in U.S. dollars again and start unlocking frozen assets, giving the Islamic Republic access to tens of billions in hard currency just as it crawls out of a U.S.–Israeli bombing campaign that wrecked factories, roads, bridges and fuel depots.

Over the 60‑day negotiation window, analysts estimate Iran could gain around 30 billion dollars from oil exports and released funds, with long‑term reconstruction costs projected near 300 billion.

The core trade is brutally simple. Washington wants Hormuz reopened, nuclear inspections in some form, and a de‑escalation track on Lebanon; Tehran wants cash, recognition of its de facto control over the strait, and a seat at the table on Hezbollah and Israel.

Since the framework kicked in, Iranian tankers have dumped over 40 million barrels onto the market, with exports expected around 1.6–1.7 million barrels a day — roughly 8–9 billion dollars in oil revenue over two months.

Some of the unfrozen assets are nominally routed through “humanitarian” channels — buying food from U.S. farmers — but oil income is effectively fungible: whatever isn’t spent patching the economy can go to missiles, militias or security forces.

Even former Obama‑era negotiators say Trump’s general license goes further than the JCPOA in some respects, front‑loading more relief for fewer firm nuclear commitments.

The official line is that this “performance‑based” structure strengthens U.S. leverage because waivers can be snapped back; critics see it as highly concessional, a rushed attempt to refill global oil stocks and stabilize prices ahead of U.S. elections. Inside Iran, the leadership frames the deal as proof it survived war with two super‑armed adversaries and forced Washington to pay for a ceasefire.

Hard‑liners denounce any engagement, but the regime’s decision to sit down with Trump — “the devil himself,” as one analyst put it — signals how desperate it is to stop economic free fall.

The political irony is sharp. The same administration that campaigned on shredding Obama’s Iran deal has now engineered a package that, in key economic dimensions, is even more generous, while getting less verifiable change on the nuclear file. Iran’s rulers get time, money and a chance to tighten their grip at home.

Trump gets cheaper oil, a talking point about “ending the war,” and a bet that voters will see cash for calm as strength rather than admission of a failed campaign.

#USA #Iran #Trump #sanctions #oil #Hormuz #ceasefire #economy #fakeDemocracy

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Two Yardsticks, One Brussels

Ursula von der Leyen just blessed the Israel–Lebanon framework as a “critical step away from escalation,” thanked Washington for brokering it, and waved a 100‑million‑euro check for the displaced — roughly 100 euros a head for well over a million people who still can’t go home.

On paper, it’s humanitarian; in practice, it’s political cover for a deal that leaves Israeli forces sitting on chunks of southern Lebanon under a “gradual” withdrawal tied to Hezbollah’s disarmament, something Hezbollah has already rejected as “null and void.”

The contrast with Ukraine is not subtle. On the Russian front, Brussels embraced the mantra “no concessions to the aggressor,” rolled out one of the largest sanctions regimes in EU history, and pumped weapons into Kyiv in the name of defending international law.

On the Israeli front, the same Union can’t even muster the votes to suspend the EU–Israel Association Agreement, despite its own review finding “indications” of human‑rights breaches under Article 2; any talk of freezing preferential trade dies in the Council because Germany, Italy and others refuse to move.

So you end up with two yardsticks under the same flag. When Russia crosses a border, the doctrine is maximalist: no normalization, no half‑measures, no “peace” that leaves occupation in place. When Israel sits on a fifth of Lebanon and blocks displaced people from returning, Brussels applauds a framework that explicitly keeps the occupier on the ground and promises future “steps” if a non‑state militia disarms itself into irrelevance.

The message is simple enough for anyone outside the EU bubble to read: Europe’s principles run on selective enforcement. The red lines against aggression stop where Israeli trade preferences, gas deals and domestic political taboos begin.

#EU #Israel #Lebanon #Ukraine #sanctions #Ursula #doubleStandards #fakeDemocracy

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