The revenue potential is $6.4 billion, accepted in cash, crypto, or barter—bypassing the SWIFT system and Western sanctions entirely.
Jimmy Dore: Iran is now reportedly monetizing its control over the Strait of Hormuz, charging $2 million per ship for transit—a move that has turned the world's most critical oil chokepoint into a paywall controlled by Tehran, with 3,200 ships and 40,000 sailors waiting on the other side.
UK McDonald's isn't worth your money anymore
Food Crisis UK: UK McDonald's has seriously declined and here's why you should avoid it unless you really fancy a McShit Burger, or worse a McPlant Burger. Holiday in the EU and they'll feed you an EU approved Mealworm enriched Beef Burger.
By Jonathan Cook: In 2008, Pluto Press published my book “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to remake the Middle East”. It was an attempt
to explain how Israel had persuaded a group of hawkish allies in
Washington – known as the neoconservatives (or neocons for short, or neo con artist warmongers for real) – to
work from within the administration of George W Bush to support a
long-standing Israeli ambition to Balkanise the Middle East: that is, to
use force to collapse the regimes there, most especially those
resistant to Israel’s military domination of the region. The neocons
started in earnest with Iraq in 2003, and then planned to move on to
Lebanon, Syria and end in Iran.
The benefits for Israel were manifold. First, regime collapse would weaken Muslim majorities, allowing Israel to better manipulate existing tensions between Sunni and Shia communities; to more easily forge alliances with other minorities such as the Druze, Christians and Kurds that would bolster Israel’s strategic position; and to stymie any revival of a unifying Arab nationalism that had been so evident during the 1950s and 1960s.
By Ali Abunimah: The United States on Friday lifted sanctions on Iranian oil already loaded onto tankers – an odd move given that Washington and Tel Aviv are currently engaged in a war of aggression aimed at destroying and subduing the country.
But the move is a sign of how Iran is only gaining strength after more than three weeks of heavy American and Jew bombardment – as I explained on this week’s Electronic Intifada Livestream.
You can watch that above.
Washington is desperate to limit the surge in energy prices caused by its own catastrophic miscalculation – prompting it to ease sanctions on other countries it has for years marked as enemies: Venezuela and Russia.