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President Joe Biden’s administration sold 950,000 barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-owned gas company that has financial ties to a private equity firm cofounded by Hunter Biden, according to a Washington Free Beacon report. In April, Biden’s Department of Energy announced the nearly one million barrel sale to Unipec, which is the trading arm of Sinopec. Sinopec is wholly owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party. Unipec reportedly purchases oil across the globe and then apparently sells it through its Sinopec Marketing subsidiary. According to Unipec’s LinkedIn page: UNIPEC America, Inc. is...

The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would "support American consumers" and combat "Putin's price hike." Biden's Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government. The Biden administration claimed the move would "address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump" and "help lower energy costs."...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) proposed legislation on Wednesday that would block the United States from selling Strategic Petroleum Reserve oil to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as President Joe Biden has drained the SPR to the lowest level in decades, Breitbart News learned exclusively. Cruz sponsored the No Emergency Crude Oil for Foreign Adversaries Act, a bill that would block the United States from selling to adversarial nations. It permits a waiver for national security reasons and requires the Department of Energy to report the destination of exported oil from recent SPR auctions. The Texas conservative told Breitbart News...

Biden tapped into the US Strategic Oil Reserves in an attempt to bring down oil prices. Now we know that at least one ship, the Suezmax ship Advantage Spring, is sailing for Rotterdam filled with US oil. Zero Hedge reported: Joe Biden’s decision to release 180 million barrels of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve – one million barrels per day for 180 days, ending just before the midterm elections which the Democrats will lose in an avalanche – was meant to help lower US gasoline prices “because Putin price hike.” Instead, it is heading for Europe. According to...

ICBC and Agricultural Bank of China have run out of investment gold bars. And silver premiums over London spot are 13%. Comex silver contract is sinking into irrelevance. Last weekend, the US and Israel attacked Iran and the week’s news was dominated by another Middle East war. Markets’ gut reaction was to mark down investment assets and mark up dollars. Consequently, in the confusion gold and silver declined on the week as the dollar rallied. In European trade this morning gold was $5090, down $230 from last Friday’s close, and silver at $82.70 was down $11 over the same timescale....

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan is beefing up its arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles by embracing China as its new strategic arms partner and backing away from the U.S., analysts have told Fox News. Pakistan earlier this month test-fired a nuclear-capable missile from an undisclosed location – the second in a month of try-outs for its short-range surface-to-surface Hataf 2 class rocket, co-developed with the Chinese. It was the latest in a series of arms collaborations between the two nations, which view their strategic partnership as a counterweight to a boldly confident India, which has American support. Until the mid-1960s, the United States...

The United States began a large military exercise with South Korea involving thousands of troops on Monday (Mar 9) while also waging an escalating war in the Middle East. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff has said about 18,000 Korean troops will take part in Freedom Shield, which runs through Mar 19. US Forces Korea hasn’t confirmed the number of American troops participating in the training in South Korea. The allies’ combined exercise comes amid South Korean media speculation that Washington is relocating some assets from South Korea to support fighting against Iran.

Professor Jiang Xueqin made three big predictions back in 2024. The first was that Donald Trump would win the election and become President of the United States again. The second was that Donald Trump would start a war with Iran. Both of those predictions came true which makes the third prediction concerning for the United States. And that is because the professor predicted that it would lose the war to Iran. Jiang made an appearance on “Breaking Points” this week to lay out how he fears it all could play out. “Given my analysis of how the war is progressing,...

It’s easy to forget that ten years ago, candidate Donald Trump was the only national politician who took China’s growing geopolitical power seriously. He talked about China so frequently and pronounced those two syllables so deliberately — Chi-na — that comedians and voters alike enjoyed doing imitations of the MAGA-man taking America’s geopolitical adversary to task. On the stump, Trump called both Republicans and Democrats “stupid” for how they had permitted the Chinese Communist Party to devour American assets. He would list beautiful American buildings and historic American real estate that the Chinese had acquired since President Bill Clinton and...

This isn’t one war, but two. There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis. All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighbourhood. But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked...

Falling birth rates have governments worldwide in a state of panic. From Brussels to Tokyo to Beijing, policymakers are scrambling to reverse fertility decline, yet expensive pro-natal programs in countries such as South Korea and Hungary have delivered little results. To be clear, serious analysts do not claim that population decline mechanically produces economic collapse. But demographic aging does create real fiscal, labor-market, and growth headwinds. The more productive question is not whether demography matters, but which policy frameworks allow societies to adapt successfully to it. China and Singapore suggest that institutional design shapes how demographic pressures play out. Despite...

Carney and Modi announced Monday what they're calling a "new partnership," a series of multimillion-dollar deals and a commitment to sign a free trade agreement by year's end .. Carney said Canada is going all-in on diversifying trade. The two countries have set a goal to more than double two-way trade to some $70 billion a year by 2030, he said ...Carney framed this new course as not just a return to how things were but rather an ambitious revisioning of what the two Commonwealth countries can do together in an uncertain era marked by instability. At the centre of...

EU Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné on Wednesday presented a strategy shutting Beijing out of EU public funding by introducing a European preference in strategic sectors. Countries which limit access to their own markets through local content rules would also be cut off. The European Commission on Wednesday unveiled its long-awaited industrial plan, rolling out a “European Preference” that shuts China out of European public funding and tightens the screws on Beijing’s future investments in the European Union. The move comes after 200,000 European jobs were wiped out in energy-intensive industries and the automotive sector since 2024, with 600,000 losses projected this...

One thing unites the three great powers: all stand in increasingly strained relations with Brussels and the leading capitals of the European Union. The European Union is steering purposefully toward the introduction of Eurobonds. At the preparatory EU summit at Alden Biesen Castle in Belgium, numerous signs suggest that the multi-billion-euro Draghi plan could soon be set in motion. At the same time, geopolitically, a possible Russian comeback is emerging as fresh trouble for Brussels. The ability to analyze mistakes and rationally weigh realistic courses of action belongs, in evolutionary terms, to our conditio humana. Experience teaches us: those who...

The men in Zhongnanhai do not rattle easily. Decades of patient statecraft, a foreign policy built on studied ambiguity, and an economy engineered to absorb external shocks have granted Beijing’s leadership a remarkable tolerance for turbulence. Operation Epic Fury, the American-Israeli air campaign now dismantling Iran’s military architecture, has produced something unusual in the corridors of Chinese power: visible confusion. Xi Jinping is scrambling. The word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, the current moment is acutely dangerous. Not because China faces a direct military threat, but because...

On Sunday afternoon, protesters in Islamabad pressed shoulder to shoulder, most of them dressed in black, and chanted slogans that rippled through the crowd. “Death to America, death to Israel,” they shouted in unison. Among them was also Kazim Hussain, who clutched a portrait of Ayatollah Khamenei. The student, also an activist affiliated with Shia group Imamia Students Organisation (ISO), believes that the crisis unfolding in Iran was not a distant geopolitical conflict playing out beyond Pakistan’s western border. For him, it is deeply personal and emotionally moving.“This is not just an attack on Iran. It concerns all Shia Muslims,”...

A small cadre of activist judges and environmentalist litigators wields outsized power, crippling industries, mismanaging forests, and undermining America’s interests. With the world anxiously watching the conflict in Iran, it was no surprise that the first segment in the March 1 edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes featured an interview with Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last Shah. The second segment, however, returned to a staple theme of the CBS news team. It presented a perspective on a current issue calculated to discredit the Trump administration and its supporters. In this case it was threats leveled against activist judges...

In today’s world, there are 193 countries in the UN. The large majority of those countries will vote consistently against the United States on measures that come before the General Assembly. Then again, the international system that counts is not the UN, but rather the U.S.-led commercial and legal order of alliances and trade. Almost all of the 193 UN member countries participate willingly in that system, to their great benefit. They may oppose the U.S. on many issues, and they may have disputes with their immediate neighbors, but they don’t make themselves constant troublemakers threatening to disrupt world peace...

A submarine attack on an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka has left at least 101 people missing, one dead and 78 injured, sources in Sri Lanka's navy and defence ministry told Reuters on Wednesday. It was unclear who attacked the ship, which the sources said has now sunk.

The “Life in Venice” housing development, a multibillion-dollar replica of the Italian city on the Chinese coast, stands silent. But in recent years the remote, partially abandoned complex has drawn unlikely new residents like Sasa Chen, a burned-out young Chinese woman who until recently worked a high-earning finance job in Shanghai, China’s bustling commerce hub. The appeal? Chen pays just 1200 RMB, or $168, a month for her apartment in faux Venice in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. It’s so cheap that it's allowed Chen to retire at the tender age of 28. Experts say Chen is part of...