Catégorie oBox : BuzzNews

The Trump administration is attempting to drill oil off the shore of California, something that hasn’t happened in more than 4 decades. This would be the first fossil fuel development in California since the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that killed thousands of animals and caused millions of dollars of harm to California’s fishing industry.

Since then, drilling has been prohibited in California state waters. There has been no new leasing in federal waters off the coast of California since the 1980s.

Gavin Newsom rolls his eyes

Gov. of California, Gavin Newsom, has emerged as one of Trump’s most vocal adversaries and is unsurprisingly not pleased with Trump’s directive.

“Our coastal communities depend on healthy oceans for economic security and their cherished way of life… If this is the plan, the Trump administration must go back to the drawing board. There’s too much at stake to risk more horrific oil spills that will haunt our coastlines for generations to come.”

-Joseph Gordon – Oceana

In response to the directive, Newsom rolled his eyes and said the plan would be “dead on arrival” once it got to California, and that the state would “absolutely” challenge the plan in court once it’s finalized.

Newsom is currently in Brazil for the United Nations climate summit, but still made comments to the media, noting that Donald Trump did not suggest drilling offshore of Mar-A-Lago, something he finds “remarkable.”

“He didn’t promote it off the coast of Florida… That says everything about Donald Trump.”

-Gavin Newsom

The proposed drilling area in the Pacific Ocean would be off Santa Barbara County, where a small amount of drilling is reportedly already occurring.

Texas-based oil company Sable Offshore is seeking to reactivate three idle drilling rigs in federal waters off Santa Barbara that have sat empty since a 2015 oil spill. In May, the company began producing oil from one of those rigs under an existing lease, but the drilling resulted in a lawsuit from California attorney general, Rob Bonta. Bonta claimed company was illegally discharging waste into local waterways.

Newsom also sent a letter last month, reiterating that California is « firmly opposed » to developments in fossil fuel.

It looks like a senior Russian minister may have fallen out of favour with Vladimir Putin after negatively affecting trade talks with the United States.

Veteran Kremlin foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was nowhere to be seen at a key Kremlin meeting last week, and he’s now been left off Russia’s delegation to the forthcoming G20 summit in South Africa.

The call to Trump

Echoes of Putin’s displeasure with Lavrov have circulated after communications with the United States went south last month. Trump and Putin were planning to meet in Budapest at the end of October, but the summit was cancelled after a disagreement about Russia’s conduct in Ukraine.

According to media reports, the meeting was cancelled after a call between Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Multiple sources reported that Lavrov pushed Russia’s maximalist strategies, and the Kremlin refused any change to their position. This call reportedly convinced the Trump administration that a summit would be ‘pointless,’ leading to the cancellation of the meeting.

If accurate, it’s easy to see how Lavrov could have fallen out of favour with Putin. If Putin felt as though he lost control over the situation, it could create serious tensions between the senior minister and his president.

‘Everything is fine’

Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin have been working diligently to dispel the rumours of fractures in their administration.

When asked on Monday, the Kremlin dismissed the reports, claiming they are “absolutely untrue” and that there is “no need to pay attention” because “everything is fine”.

Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said “Sergei [Lavrov] continues to work, and he is actively at work… When there are relevant public events, you will see the minister.”

A former official told media that “Putin wanted the meeting in Budapest, and it wasn’t Lavrov’s role to get in between,” and that Lavrov “mishandled » the conversation with Rubio, making “a diplomatic mess of things.”

Former diplomat Boris Bondarev also commented on the rumours:

“Putin has been very comfortable working with Lavrov all these years because Sergei [Lavrov] is a seasoned bureaucrat. He knows perfectly well that you should never say anything that does not coincide 100% with the president’s position.”

He added that “if there is even the slightest chance Putin might not like it, he simply won’t say it. The idea that Lavrov showed any unwillingness to negotiate, and that this somehow derailed the meeting, is improbable. There is no separate Lavrov line; only Putin’s,”

Lavrov’s piece

On Lavrov’s side, comments from an interview originally made with Italy’s Corriere della Sera paper recently surfaced, where the diplomat made his stance clear.

« We are counting on common sense and that the maintaining of that position will prevail in Washington and that they will refrain from actions that could escalate the conflict to a new level, »

He went on to say that Europe is « sabotaging all peacemaking efforts and are rejecting direct contacts with Moscow. They introduce new sanctions which boomerang on their economies even further. They’re openly preparing for a new major European war against Russia. »

Lavrov, 75, was elected as Ambassador of Russia to the United Nations in 1974 and has been the Minister of Foreign Affairs since 2004. Lavrov is one of the longest-serving top diplomats in the world.

It seems like we read it twice a week.

“Four dead in US airstrike,” “Venezuelan ship brought down by US fire,” “Two dead as Trump strikes down another ship,”

So many breaking headlines we become immune to the words « airstrike » and « Venezuela ».

The reality? These words become life-and-death decisions for fishermen in Venezuelan waters. A reality impossible to forget.

Donald Trump has ordered 20 individual bombings in the last three months and has killed more than 80 people since September. Trump claims every last one of those people was “dangerous narco-terrorists” who are threatening America. In reality, there is little to no evidence implicating the majority of the victims in organized crime.

Three months of terror

The US began initiating airstrikes on Venezuelan ships in the Caribbean Sea in September, under the guise of fighting narco-terrorism.

Donald Trump, backed by Pete Hegseth, outlined his mission to battle maritime drug trafficking in Latin America after the first strike.

That first strike came on September 2, when an American military vessel sank a 39-foot speedboat filled with “a considerable amount of cargo.” This initial strike was one of the more legitimate, with the vessel hailing from a known trafficking centre, and multiple sources supporting the US’s accusations of it being a criminal vessel. 11 people were killed in the first strike, according to Trump, all of them members of the gang Tren de Aragua.

Over the next six weeks, Trump carried out another four strikes, killing 16. There were drugs recovered in only one of the strikes. Venezuela has claimed that at least one of the boats attacked was a fishing vessel.

Additionally, at least two of the victims have been confirmed as Colombian citizens without any attachment to the country of Venezuela, nor its organized crime groups.

These cartels are the Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere, using violence, murder and terrorism to impose their will, threaten our national security and poison our people,

-Pete Hegseth

What next?

Donald Trump was reportedly briefed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Thursday regarding possible avenues of furthering military actions in Venezuela.

According to ABC, possible actions could range from nothing to air strikes on seaports, airports and military facilities. According to experts, Trump was also briefed on a dramatic (if less likely) option: sending in a team of special operations forces to apprehend or kill Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and his senior advisers. This, of course, would be an overt act of war that experts say even Trump would be hesitant to commit to.

Pete Hegseth has made it clear that the US feels no inclination to stop its advances against Venezuela.

“The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are—they will be hunted, and killed, just like Al Qaeda – Narco-terrorists intending to bring poison to our shores, will find no safe harbor anywhere in our hemisphere,”

The legality of either option mused by Trump is foggy, with some lawmakers claiming the US could legally force Maduro out of office, and others saying that the US has no right to be conducting any foreign military operations in Venezuela.

The US recently deployed the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, just north of the Caribbean Sea. Along with the carrier, there are now 15,000 American troops in Latin America, and 60 aircraft, including F-18 fighter jets.

Are they legal?

Experts are split on whether these attacks are lawful or not. On the one hand, Donald Trump is not technically breaking American law. As president, he is designated “Commander in Chief” of the army, meaning he has the power to order attacks against military targets.

Even if Trump isn’t violating National law, he’s certainly breaking international law.

Prof Luke Moffett of Queen’s University Belfast, a human rights expert, claims that the attacks must be « reasonable and necessary in self-defence where there is immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials, » to count as self-defense. He claims the attacks are « unlawful under the law of the sea, » as the vessels were in international waters and posed no immediate violent threat to the US.

Prof Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin, another human rights expert, says that the US is “stretching the meaning of the term [self-defense] beyond it’s breaking point,” and that “Labelling everyone a terrorist does not make them a lawful target and enables states to side-step international law. »

Whether Trump is directly violating international law is irrelevant (we’ll direct your attention to international crimes committed in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo, all gone unenforced by the UN). What is relevant is the fact that innocent people are being killed. It’s been confirmed that at least three of the vessels sunk were ships being used by drug cartels, but at least three of them were not.

After three months of strikes ramping up exponentially, Venezuelan fishing boats live in constant fear of American attacks, and now that the strikes are happening to Colombian vessels and near Mexican shores, America is striking fear in fishermen all over the Caribbean Sea.

On Wednesday, oversight Democrats led by Robert Garcia released emails from the Jeffrey Epstein estate that had not been previously seen. Oversight Democrats claim the emails raise fresh questions about Trump’s past associations and what he may have known.

100 references to Donald Trump

The emails included more than 100 references to Donald Trump, though without any ‘gotcha’ emails directly implicating him in sexual crimes.

One email cited Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked,” while another email to CNN’s Michael Wolff outlines how Epstein thought Trump would handle questioning in his direction. Another email said that Trump “knew about the girls,” regarding Maxwell’s poaching’ of young female Mar-A-Lago staff.  

The Democrats claim these emails strengthen their arguments for releasing the Epstein files and that the emails are further proof that the White House is covering up criminal behaviour from Donald Trump.

selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump

The White House is rejecting the release as politically motivated ‘smear,’ with press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Democrats « selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump », and that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including Virginia Giuffre, one of the victims who testified against Epstein and Maxwell.

While the documents don’t actually implicate Trump in any direct criminal wrongdoing, they’re another example in a long line of documents placing Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein together.

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1988664404334792748