The Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF), Europe’s main benchmark for natural gas prices, rose to above €135 ($132) per megawatt-hour on Thursday, the highest in three weeks. The rise was triggered by concerns about delayed US LNG supplies. The EU's dependence on US gas has increased after the bloc imposed an energy embargo on Russia.
"At present, the EU is in line with the energy policy of the US, which does not seek to strengthen Europe and strives to deepen [the bloc's] dependence on American oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG). Since the beginning of the shale revolution, the US has been interested in diversifying its oil and gas supplies and arbitrating prices between the EU and the Asia-Pacific region," said Pavel Katyukha, associate professor of the Department of Oil and Gas Trading and Logistics at Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas.
Katykha believes that during the next two or three years, Europe will face an energy crisis. According to him, this crisis could end in the collapse of the entire European economy, which was built on cheap Russian energy resources.......
more below;
China has suspended several 2025 export controls on strategic materials — including rare earths, superhard materials, and lithium batteries – for a year. Is this a concession to the US, or a move in a far more complex game?
"The first aim of China’s export controls was to consolidate its leverage in negotiations. The second was to establish a long-term framework for managing such controls," says Yana Leksyutina, deputy director at the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).
Сhina could activate this mechanism at any moment, and now everyone knows it’s a lever it holds, she explains to Sputnik.
Balancing the Mineral Market
"The moratorium on export bans to the US essentially resets the rare earth market to where it was previously," Jeff J. Brown, author of 'The China Trilogy' and founder of Seek Truth From Facts Foundation, tells Sputnik.
In the meantime, there will be a global rush by the US and its NATO allies to acquire as many rare earth ...
The Israeli regime has reportedly signed contracts worth millions of dollars in recent months to sway American public opinion as part of attempts to launder the occupying entity’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Friday that the multimillion-dollar campaign aimed to reshape US public opinion, both online and offline, through coordinated influence operations combining digital marketing, AI, geotagging, and religious messaging.
The contracts, signed between the Israeli regime and firms linked to US President Donald Trump, reveal a “hasbara [propaganda] campaign” and schemes to target millions of US churchgoers, deploy bots, hire influencers, and try to make ChatGPT more pro-Israel.
The largest contract, worth $6 million, was signed with Clock Tower X, owned by Trump’s former digital campaign chief Brad Parscale, to produce and distribute roughly 100 core pieces of pro-Israel content per month and thousands......
