This narrowly tailored, short-term measure applies only to oil already in transit and will not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated this regarding the 30-day license authorizing the sale of Russian petroleum products, emphasizing the temporary and limited nature of the sanctions easing.
If you don't read Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence. Everything she does is funny and wise. Her columns have the exact spirit of the 70's writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny-and also deeply in the know. She has been described as the lovechild of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion and the funniest writer in America.
Uncertainty over US and Israeli war aims is slowing the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups urged by President Donald Trump to rise up against the Islamic Republic, Kurdish analysts have told Al Jazeera. From Trump's call for Iranians to topple their government, to arguments from the United States that it was forced into attacking Iran by its ally Israel, to discredited claims that the strikes on Tehran were somehow defensive, Washington has yet to offer a clear explanation for its attacks on Iran or what its plans might be beyond them.
We've got no shortage of munitions. Our stockpiles of defensive and offensive weapons allow us to sustain this campaign as long as we need. Iran is hoping that we cannot sustain this, which is a really bad miscalculation.
There have been so many deeply disturbing headlines related to the new U.S. war with Iran in the last 48 hours that it's difficult to even know where to begin in attempting to express how the second Trump administration has thrown the Middle East and the world at large into a fresh era of chaos and death.