A House-Senate conference report this week called on the Administration to accelerate the use of civilian unmanned aerial systems (UAS), or “drones,” in U.S. airspace.
The pending authorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration directs the Secretary of Transporation to develop within nine months “a comprehensive plan to safely accelerate the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.”
See Drones: Coming to the Skies Near You (Part I)
The Obama administration wants to sanction Iranian oil without negatively effecting global oil markets. No, seriously:
The White House said on Thursday the Iran sanctions proposed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama should be enforced in a way that does not hurt the United States’ allies or disrupt oil markets.
“We want to make sure that the implementation of those sanctions is handled in a way that does not inadvertently do any harm to our allies or to the oil markets,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.
But a recent Energy Brief from the Council on Foreign Relations concludes that is wishful thinking. The U.S.’s efforts “to sanction Iran’s crude oil exports,” says the CFR report, “has already pushed Iran to threaten ”to disrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint, through which nearly seventeen million barrels per day (mb/d), or about 35 percent of seaborne traded oil, moves.”
The escalation has already added a significant, perhaps five to ten dollars per barrel, risk premium into the price of crude oil. The prospect of any further “Iran premium” on oil prices deeply troubles U.S. and EU officials, given the fragile global economy. Currently, they are designing sanctions to minimize the risk that Iran’s exports will be reduced, since that would raise global oil prices. Instead, sanctions would aim at reducing what Iran earns on its sales. Nevertheless, market participants are concerned that the standoff will escalate beyond limited sanctions and disrupt physical supply at a time when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) spare capacity is insufficient to comfortably offset the loss.
The report lays out four scenarios and the deleterious effects each of them would have on oil markets and the economic outlook:
All of these possibilities carry dangerous consequences generally, and specifically on oil markets. The last scenario, the report says, “would dwarf any disruption in modern history.” So much for Obama’s cautious approach.
Yesterday’s bloody soccer riots in the Egyptian city of Port Said left at least 73 people dead, and top members of the new Egyptian parliament blame the military junta for escalating the violence.
Protesters, many of them soccer fans, are now taking to the streets of Egypt, condemning the junta. And while there are certainly plenty of reasons to condemn Egypt’s junta at any given moment, it isn’t clear that a soccer riot is one of them.
Indeed, soccer riots are a relatively common occurrence, and while 73 is a high death toll, it struggles to make it into the top ten deadliest soccer riots of the past fifty years. It almost seems tame in comparison to the riot at a Peruvian match in 1964, spurred by a referee’s blown call, which took 318 lives, or the October 1982 riot at Moscow’s Lenin Stadium, caused when a late goal convinced people who were leaving the game early to rush back to their seats.
In fact, this isn’t even the deadliest soccer riot in Africa in recent years. In 2001, police in Accra, Ghana, started a riot at a rivalry game, firing tear gas into the stands, resulting in the deaths of 120 fans who tried to leave the stadium. The death toll inspired a national day of mourning.
Five Republican lawmakers from Washington state have introduced legislation that condemns the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 for controversial measures regarding the detainment of terrorism suspects, according to the Tenth Amendment Center.
The $662 billion defense spending bill contained a controversial section that required terrorism suspects to be detained by the military without trial, regardless of where they were captured.
HB 2759, the Washington State Preservation of Liberty Act, was introduced by Reps. Jason Overstreet, Matt Shea, Vincent Buys, Cary Condotta, and David Taylor. The bill condemns the NDAA for authorizing the United States to “indefinitely detain United States citizens and lawful resident aliens captured within the United States of America without charge until the end of hostilities.”
Not sure what introducing “legislation that condemns” another piece of legislation actually means, and it seems quite clear this will go nowhere, but at least there’s somebody doing something against NDAA. Right?
The Senate’s latest in an interminable number of anti-Iran resolutions, in addition to including the usual “crippling sanctions,” calls on President Obama to “develop a more robust Internet freedom strategy for Iran.”
Iran, like a number of nations, does censor the Internet. They use a content control system to do so, similar to the censorship regime of China or, a bit closer to home, the one that the US would’ve created under SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA.
The resolution, the Johnson-Shelby Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act of 2012, is sponsored primarily by Sen. Tim Johnson (D – SD).
This is noteworthy because Sen. Johnson is also a co-sponsor for PIPA. Apparently freeing Iran’s Internet and unfreeing America’s are not mutually exclusive goals.
