Oil, Oil, Oil bloody Oil - the barons are fighting

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/

Putin's hands on the oil pumps

Until Vladimir Putin became Russia's president in 2000, the country's oil policy was dictated by an alliance of Russian oil producers and the US government. Putin's campaign against oil giant Yukos has put a stop to that. Further, the president is aggressively using oil exports in his strategic policy, especially in terms of the US. - John Helmer

(there is a link for this article but it comes up as "this link cannot be found")

Houston, we have a Yukos problem

The deal was straightforward: Washington/Houston injects tons of dollars into the Russian oil sector, and Russia becomes America's number one supplier. Then came the Kremlin's attack on Yukos, the oil company which was closest to Washington, and now all bets are off. - Pepe Escobar

(link here is the same "this link cannot be found")

Caspian capers

When senior diplomats of the five littoral states of the Caspian Sea meet in Moscow soon to discuss - once again - sharing the region's immense oil and gas resources, Russia will have a new negotiator, the previous anti-US one having been fired. Whether this will make a difference to Moscow's grand plans is another matter. - Sergei Blagov

(link the same)

INTERESTINGLY this link, on the same page as the above articles, works perfectly well.

There are veterans, and veterans
By Ian Williams

The new advertisement in the United States from the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" may be doing Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry a favor - if he can bring himself to rise to the occasion. The SBVFT now accuse him of slandering all veterans because he said there were atrocities in Vietnam, after the previous ad accused him of lying to get his medals.

-snip-

Are these people saying that US forces committed no atrocities? Because unlike the weapons of mass destruction that Bush thought existed in Iraq even as the evidence mounted that they did not, there is plenty of evidence of war crimes in Vietnam.

All Kerry has to do is to recite the transcript of the trial of Lieutenant William Calley for the My Lai massacre that killed hundreds of civilians, and ask which veterans these Republicans identify with most closely: Calley, who was found guilty of murdering civilians, or helicopter pilot Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his door gunner Lawrence Colburn, whom he ordered to shoot the GIs if necessary to stop the killing at My Lai?

Thompson and Colburn took 30 years to get a medal for their genuine moral and physical courage in confronting Calley's C Company when it was rampaging red in tooth and claw. Would the SBVFT rescind their medals?
-snip-
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