China is poised to add another key section to its sometimes defiant, seemingly inexorable plan to create commercial corridors extending in all directions from its borders. Its latest move: building a natural gas pipeline linking the hitherto pariah state of Iran to security-challenged Pakistan.
Shell today fired the first shot in the battle for survival among the last few members of an old, rarefied and insular club—Big Oil. Its $70 billion acquisition of BG, a successful pioneer at some of the world’s richest frontiers, isn’t exactly a surprise, since the market has expected the onset of merger mania in Big Oil. Still, there had been no word that Shell was courting the company until just hours before the deal was announced.
It was only a matter of time.
Starting the second half of the year, the biggest game on Earth—if you happen to be an oil company—will be Iran.
Disputes have broken out over just what each side agreed to in the nuclear deal between six leading nations and Iran, with one of the chief topics when exactly sanctions will be lifted: Iran has said the restrictions on its sale of oil and its banking system will terminate as soon as the deal is signed in June; the so-called P5+1 group says the sanctions will come off in stages.
Iranian and international negotiators today described the outline of a nuclear agreement that they say gives them the confidence to proceed with an attempt to finalize a deal by June 30.
The Iran nuclear talks are now a day into overtime. The Chinese and French foreign ministers have left Lausanne, the Swiss city where the negotiations are continuing after the March 31 deadline for a framework agreement.
The signs seem to favor a next-stage accord between international negotiators and Iran today or in the early hours tomorrow—traders continue to bid down prices, expecting a deal, and hence a flood of pent-up Iranian oil on the market. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov says the chances of agreement “are high.”
The high-tech patent wars have spread to a new front, engaging two of the world’s largest industrial companies in a multibillion-dollar court battle over lithium-ion batteries. At issue is a battery chemistry that, while little known to the public, many experts believe currently holds the best chance of electric cars penetrating the mass market.
One of Lee Kuan Yew’s accomplishments is Singapore, the shining city-state he built into a global economic powerhouse from scratch. But his other main legacy is the example he made to strongmen near and far, autocrats to whom he was an example that you could rule sternly but still create a vibrant economy with a thriving middle class.
ISIL has been knocked back on its heels on its home ground in Iraq and Syria, but a deadly spate of bombings elsewhere–including more than 120 killed in Yemen today, March 20—has helped maintain its reputation for exceptional brutality.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that in a few months’ time, his showcase Model S electric car will be updated to include an auto-pilot mode for use on large, meandering highways.
Elon Musk suggested today that “range anxiety”—the malady that afflicts electric car drivers fearing that they will run out of charge in a bad neighborhood, at night, while it is snowing—is a curable mental condition. And he has just the fix.
Binyamin Netanyahu’s resounding re-election in Israel hasn’t worsened the chances of striking a nuclear deal with Iran, the US claims. His hostility to any nuclear accord will simply go on as before—no better, no worse.
As weak prices make oil production an increasingly less attractive business, OPEC seems confident that its battle plan against US shale producers—to simply outlast them—will force a surrender by the end of the year.
Update: Vladimir Putin reappeared today for a scheduled meeting with Kyrgyz president Almazbek Atambaev in St. Petersburg.
Is Russia’s Vladimir Putin deathly ill? Is Iran’s Ali Khamenei too? What about Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu—is he about to lose re-election?
Turns out there’s a close precedent for the spectacle of a poisonously contrary opposing party urging Americans and foreigners alike to ignore the sitting US president. But we must reach back all the way to George Washington and the 1790s, says a leading scholar.
Since opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was shot dead near the Kremlin, one key mystery has been who paid for the hit. The other has been who in the Kremlin gave the nod that it could proceed.
Of all the many murders of prominent Russians over the last decade or so, no one has ever identified the customer: the person or people who commissioned the hit. Authorities have sometimes carted off a gunman to prison, but never the mastermind behind the crimes.
Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has been shot dead on a Moscow street close to the Kremlin, in what may be a gangland-style hit.
Oil prices surged today as traders learned that the work of yet more rigs has been halted on the US shale oil patch. Baker Hughes, which keeps track of rigs operating in the field, reported that the count dropped below 1,000 for the first time since June 2011. At 986, the number of rigs is now down almost 39% since October.
The estranged former son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s president has been found hanged in a Vienna jail cell, after an eight-year effort by the Central Asian government to bring him home to face murder and racketeering charges.
Four years ago, no one forecast that a freak suicide in Tunisia would rock the Middle East, bring down governments and spread civil unrest. Before last March, no one suggested that a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine was in the offing. Nor did anyone warn that oil prices were about to halve, and undercut all these governments.
