The World Blog by humble servant.

Ukraine’s gas network operator on Wednesday stopped the transit of Russian natural gas to Europe through one of its key cross-border stations, citing “interference by the occupying [Russian] forces.” Here is what this development means for the European gas market and economy. What happened? Ukraine’s gas network operator, GTS Ukraine, announced late Tuesday that it would stop receiving Russian natural gas into the Sokhranovka gas metering station starting on Wednesday because it can no longer control the infrastructure in territory “occupied” by Russian troops. According to the statement of the company’s press service, “the occupying forces” interfered in the technological processes, jeopardizing the security of the country’s entire gas transportation system. The company said it views the situation as a force majeure, stating it is unable to provide deliveries to Europe for reasons beyond its control. How does this effect European gas supplies? They are declining. GTS Ukraine initiall...

Republicans in the US House of Representatives are increasingly divided over Washington’s aid pipeline to Ukraine, with establishment politicians touting a “proxy war” with Russia while members of the populist Freedom Caucus argue that Congress is neglecting domestic priorities while provoking a nuclear-armed adversary. The infighting escalated as the House passed a $39.8 billion military and economic aid package for Kiev. While Democrats voted in lockstep to support the spending binge, 57 Republicans gave the plan a thumbs-down. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who was among the 149 GOP members who voted yes, followed up on Wednesday by saying that “Investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military without losing a single American troop strikes me as a good idea.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) shot back that Crenshaw was pushing a “proxy war.” She added, “You speak as if Ukrainian lives should be thrown away, as if they have no value, just used and thrown away...

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said on Wednesday that he discussed setting up a “cartel” of oil buyers in order to persuade the OPEC countries to produce more oil, as well as imposing price caps on oil and gas, when he met with US President Joe Biden. Draghi told reporters that he and Biden shared a “dissatisfaction” with how global energy markets were structured and discussed the “general concept” of capping both oil and gas prices, when they met on Tuesday. “We are both dissatisfied with the way things work, in terms of oil for the US and in terms of gas for Europe,” Draghi told reporters in Washington. “Prices don’t have any relationship with supply and demand.” Capping gas prices would “reduce the financial help we are giving to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to continue the war” and make use of Europe’s “market power,” Draghi said, adding that the “same thinking could be applied to oil at a global level.” “The idea is to create a cartel of buyers, or to persuade the...

Nina Jankowicz, director of President Joe Biden’s newly created Disinformation Governance Board, has called for enabling blue-check Twitter users such as her to help police commentary on the social media platform by allowing them to edit tweets that they consider to be false or misleading. Jankowicz made her comments in a viral video that surfaced online on Tuesday. After lamenting that many verified Twitter users don’t deserve to have blue-check status because they aren’t trustworthy, she said, “So verified people can essentially start to edit Twitter the same sort of way that Wikipedia is so they can add context to certain tweets.” For example, Jankowicz argued, if former President Donald Trump weren’t banned from Twitter and posted a message claiming that there was voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a verified user could add context, such as information from lawsuits concerning the issue or comments by a state election official. Giving verified users such power would ...

Droughts have increased 29% in the space of a single generation, according to a paper the United Nations released on Wednesday, which observed that the problem is rapidly accelerating. Released to coincide with the 15th annual Conference of Parties held by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, the “Drought in Numbers 2022” report reveals that droughts comprise just 15% of natural disasters but account for 45% of disaster-related deaths, along with an encyclopedia of other disturbing statistics. From 1998 to 2017, droughts cost the world $124 billion, the report found. They also took some 650,000 lives between 1970 and 2019, and the report warns that over 2.3 billion people are currently living in water-insecure conditions, including 160 million children. In the US alone, drought-related economic losses have amounted to $249 billion since 1980. Worsening drought conditions will put upwards of 700 million people at risk of becoming climate refugees by 2030 if something is not do...

President Joe Biden’s Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has made an economic case for ensuring that all Americans have access to abortion services, arguing that half a century of allowing women to terminate their pregnancies has increased participation in the labor force. “I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” Yellen testified on Tuesday in a Senate hearing. She added that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court ruling that abortion is a constitutional right, has allowed more women to work outside the home and finish schooling to boost their earnings potential. The abortion issue was brought to the forefront last week, when a draft ruling by the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to a media outlet. The leak spurred protests – including demonstrations outside the homes of Supreme Court justices – and prompted attacks on C...

Russia has ramped up its allegations about the sprawling network of secretive US-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine, stating that other NATO countries have been involved in the questionable research. Apart from the US, Germany and Poland have taken part in biological research programs on Ukrainian soil, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Force, said on Wednesday. “Not only the US, but also a number of their NATO allies are carrying out military biological projects on the territory of Ukraine,” he said. “The German leadership launched its national biosafety program independent of Washington back in 2013. Some 12 countries, including Ukraine, are involved in the program.” The effort involves such leading German scientific institutions as the Robert Koch Institute and the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces, Kirillov said. According to documents obtained by Moscow, the latter obtained some 3,50...

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has predicted that China will produce successful makers of electric vehicles because of the nation’s strong work ethic – an attribute that he sees as lacking in the US. “I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China,” Musk said on Tuesday in a Financial Times interview. “There's just a lot of super-talented hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing.” Musk, who ranks as the world’s richest person with a fortune estimated by Forbes at more than $225 billion, contrasted Chinese manufacturing workers with their counterparts in the US: “They won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they will be burning the 3 a.m. oil. They won't even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all." Tesla has reportedly employed some labor practices at its Shanghai factory that it clearly couldn’t or wouldn’t try in the ...

Prices of consumer goods continue to soar across America, the latest official print of the Consumer Price Index confirmed on Wednesday, showing price growth at 8.3% over the last 12 months as of April. This marks the eleventh straight month of inflation registering over 5% and exceeds the 8.1% expected by economists polled by Dow Jones, cited by CNBC. The sharpest cost increases came in the categories of shelter, food, airline fares, and new vehicles, and while the index for energy declined, the American Automobile Association revealed on Tuesday that the price of gasoline had hit record highs. Making matters worse, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that average hourly earnings for workers declined 2.6%, if adjusted for seasonal factors and inflation, since last April. With inflation at its highest rate in 40 years on top of so many other benchmarks presaging economic turbulence and no clear solutions emerging from the White House, Americans are reporting higher rates of finan...

Democrats in the US partnered with Big Pharma companies and friendly foundations led by George Soros and Bill Gates to set up biological research in Ukraine, using the project to generate additional funding for elections, the Russian military said on Wednesday in the latest biolab briefing. “It needs to be said that the ideologues of US military biological research in Ukraine are leaders of the Democratic Party,” said Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Force. The US government set up a way to fund the military bio-research directly from the federal budget, but also used government guarantees to raise funds from “non-governmental organizations controlled by the leadership of the Democratic Party,” Kirillov added. As an example of such organizations, he showed a slide with the names of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the [Bill and Hillary] Clinton Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society and investment funds, ...

The US asked Brazil in March to increase its crude oil output to curb soaring prices amid international sanctions against Russia, but Brazil refused, Reuters reported on Tuesday. US government officials approached Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras, the outlet quoted its sources as saying, as crude prices started to rise against the backdrop of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and the ensuing international sanctions. The officials came away empty-handed, however, as Petrobras said that output levels were determined by business strategy rather than diplomacy and also that a significant short-term production boost would not be logistically possible, Reuters says. Brazil is the world’s 11th largest oil exporter, with most of its crude going to China, the US, and India, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC). Also in March, the US approached Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, offering to ease some of the sanctions on the countr...

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said that the EU had failed to find a way to mitigate the damage from a proposed ban on oil supplies from Russia as part of sanctions over its military campaign in Ukraine. “Brussels has no proposal for a solution ... which could handle the atomic bomb-like impacts of this potential oil embargo against Russia on Hungary’s economy,” Szijjarto said on Wednesday. Last week, the European Commission proposed to do away with oil imports from Moscow by the end of the year. Budapest rejected the idea due to its heavy reliance on Russian energy. Szijjarto told Hungary’s parliament on Monday that the proposed sanctions were “problematic for the country.” Hungarian officials repeatedly warned that they would use their veto power to block an oil embargo. Hungary gets 65% of its oil through the Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline from Russia. Szijjarto said that Hungary would back a ban on maritime shipments, but not on deliveries through pipelines, acc...