Over the weekend we reported that in the latest unspoken mockery of the Obama administration, the Iranian military had successfully carried out another two launches of short-range ballistic missiles - the Nazeat and the Fajr-5 - during ground forces exercises.
Thomas Juneau explained last week that Yemen’s Houthis are not Iranian puppets:
Saudi Arabia claims that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy, leading it to frame the war as an effort to counter Iran’s influence. The Saudis are not the only ones to label the Houthis puppets of Iran. Politicians and media in the West, in particular, also frequently describe them as Iranian proxies.
Following numerous violations of last summer's landmark comprehensive nuclear agreement, as Iran repeatedly test fired ballistic missile rockets in direct contravention of the treaty terms, a curious tangent emerged last week when a senior Iranian military commander claimed that U.S. officials had been "appeasing" the Iranian regime, and quietly encouraging the Islamic Republic to keep its illicit ballistic missile tests a secret so as not to raise concerns in the region, according to Persian language comments.
Submitted by Rakesh Upadhyay via OilPrice.com,
The next OPEC meeting on the 2nd of June will act as little more than a forum for continued altercations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The 2 June 2016 OPEC meeting will be held amid a backdrop of oil prices near $50 per barrel, a sharp drop in Nigerian production due to sabotage, turmoil in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia operating with a new oil minister, and Iran aggressively pumping close to pre-sanction levels.
I have to admit, I found David Samuels’s defense of his now-infamous New York Times Magazine article to be delightfully amusing. From my perspective, the important paragraph of his defense is this one: