Music: Yebba — ‘Seven Years’
The most severe shock to energy markets since the 1970s is now cascading through the world economy
The Wall Street Journal reports: The chairman of oil producer DNO was flying from New York to Oslo early on Feb. 28 when he told staff to turn off the company’s oil wells in Iraq. America and Israel had just attacked neighboring Iran. Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani wasn’t taking any chances, having weathered a drone strike on the company’s oil fields in Iraqi Kurdistan last summer. By the time he landed, the pumps had stopped—the first oil shutdown of the war. To…
Iran’s successful targeting of critical missile defense radars highlights global vulnerabilities
TWZ reports: As expected, Iran has repeatedly targeted prized missile defense radars across the Middle East in retaliation for the joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign that is ongoing. Iran’s attacks on high-value radars that enable the region’s missile defense capabilities appear to have succeeded on multiple occasions. The irony that lower-end long-range kamikaze drones are perhaps the biggest threat to extremely advanced radars capable of providing telemetry for intercepting targets traveling at hypersonic speeds, sometimes in space, is glaring. The losses…
Oil built the Persian Gulf but desalination keeps it alive. War could threaten both
The Associated Press reports: As missiles and drones curtail energy production across the Persian Gulf, analysts warn that water, not oil, may be the resource most at risk in the energy-rich but arid region. On Sunday, Bahrain accused Iran of damaging one of its desalination plants. Earlier, Iran said a U.S. airstrike had damaged an Iranian plant. Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Persian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile…
Dept. of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against citizens
The Wall Street Journal reports: Protesters, observers and passersby taken into custody by federal agents were declared terrorists and attackers in hundreds of social-media posts by U.S. officials and departments since the start of the immigration sweeps in cities. This includes Minneapolis, where two citizens were excoriated by officials after they were killed by federal agents in January. The Wall Street Journal found that the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against…
Putin resurrected and exported a fascist ideology to the West
Zaza Bibilashvili and Tom G. Palmer in conversation at The Unpopulist: Zaza Bibilashvili: Over the last decades we’ve witnessed the rise of authoritarianism and a worldwide crisis of liberal democracy. What caused such developments and what should be done to reverse the trend? Tom G. Palmer: Most prognoses focus on demographics, technological changes, economic structures, and so on, which gives an air of inevitability to trends. I think that there are such contributing factors, notably the rise of media fragmentation…
How the rapture explains the rupture over Israel on the American right
Joshua Zeitz writes: It’s no secret that Israel is losing ground in American public opinion on both the left and the right, even as many American Jews feel newly besieged by rising antisemitism. On much of the left, activists and intellectuals increasingly interpret Israel and Zionism through anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks, casting the conflict in the moral language of oppressor and oppressed. On the right, a different but equally consequential shift is underway. Influential conservatives like Tucker Carlson have come…
Why, for the West, it will always be ‘five minutes to midnight’ for the two-state solution
Michael Lynk writes: In 1982, Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, spoke to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., about research that he and other social scientists in Israel were conducting into the political implications of the rapidly expanding Israeli settler population in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). That year, there were 22,000 settlers living in the occupied West Bank, with another 76,000 settlers in East Jerusalem and 6,500 in the Gaza Strip. According to an Anthony…
Music: Yebba — ‘Alright’
Intel report warns large-scale war ‘unlikely’ to oust Iran’s regime
The Washington Post reports: A classified report by the National Intelligence Council found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment, a sobering assessment as the Trump administration raises the specter of an extended military campaign that officials say has “only just begun.” The findings, confirmed to The Washington Post by three people familiar with the report’s contents, raise doubts about President Donald…
Iran rejects Trump’s demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ as a ‘dream’
The Guardian reports: The president of Iran has rejected Donald Trump’s call for the country’s unconditional surrender as a “dream”, while issuing a rare apology for Iranian attacks that hit neighbouring states, even as missiles and drones continued to strike Gulf countries. In a prerecorded address broadcast on state television on Saturday, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said the country would never capitulate, responding to remarks by the US president, who said on Friday that only Iran’s total submission could bring…
Drone strikes targeting Amazon datacenters raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower
The Guardian reports: It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacentre by the armed forces of a country at war. At 4.30am on Sunday morning, an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacentre in the United Arab Emirates, setting off a devastating fire and forcing a shutdown of the power supply. Further damage was inflicted as attempts were made to suppress the flames with water. Soon after, a second data centre…
Iraqi Kurds insist on neutrality while ‘there is no clarity for us on what the U.S. policy is’ on Iran
Axios reports: Iraq’s Kurds are caught in a three-way vise as the Iran war spills across their border: They’re uncertain, based on President Trump’s messaging, whether the U.S. actually wants regime change next door. They’re under pressure to open the border from Iranian Kurds who want to fight the regime. And they’re facing a public threat — backed by a private warning — that Iran will retaliate if those militants attack from Iraqi Kurdish soil. Why it matters: The Kurds of northern Iraq…
‘Operation Epstein Distraction’: Trump’s bloody Iran ‘hype videos’ seem to target rightwing Gen Z males
The Guardian reports: Rap and EDM. Clips from action movies. Heads-up displays from video games. As the war with Iran approaches its second week, the White House has leaned into an online propaganda campaign that seems less about intimidating Iran or projecting US strength abroad than it is about reaching a rather niche domestic audience: young rightwing American men who spend a lot of time online. Over the past couple of days, the White House and officials affiliated with the…
White House blocks intelligence report warning of rising homeland terror threat linked to Iran war
The Daily Mail reports: Donald Trump’s White House is blocking top US intelligence agencies from warning law enforcement across the country about rising threats to the homeland tied to his war with Iran, the Daily Mail can reveal. The FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center were preparing to put out a joint intelligence statement on Friday to state and local authorities alerting them of a heightened threat due to the ongoing war in Iran, a senior DHS official…
Bodycam video indicates ICE lied about fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas
CBS News reports: Video of the March 2025 fatal shooting of American citizen Ruben Ray Martinez obtained by CBS News appears to contradict claims by federal officials that Martinez was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent because he “accelerated” and “intentionally ran over” another agent with his car. The killing of Martinez, who was 23 at the time, in South Padre Island, Texas, on March 15, 2025, was reported by local news outlets at the time. But it…