United States

China recently tested a new, advanced type of guided missile in the sea near the Korean peninsula, the Chinese defense ministry said Tuesday cited by the Times of India, just as South Korea concluded its presidential elections amid rising regional tensions. The test in the Bohai Sea was conducted to “raise the operational capability of the armed forces and effectively respond to threats to national security,” the ministry said in a brief statement.

When it comes to the oil market, the narrative over the past year, ever since OPEC's first aborted meeting last April, has been just one: limit crude supply in hopes of rebelancing the oil market, reducing excess inventories, in the process sending the price of oil higher. However, echoing what we have warned for many months, overnight the world’s biggest independent oil trader said OPEC's efforts could be in vain because the oil producing cartel is seeking to control the wrong thing: it's not a matter of supply, but global demand which is simply not there.

Following yesterday's news that the White House had radically changed its strategy involving Syrian military intervention, and that it had decided to provide weapons to Kurdish militants in the region, we were curious to see just how livid Turkey would be when it inevitably responded to Trump's announcement. One day later we got the answer when the Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Isik was quoted by Reuters that the U.S. decision to provide weapons for Kurdish militants in the fight against ISIS "is a crisis" and warned it would not benefit the United States or the region.

The U.S. economy will fall short of the Trump administration's goal of 3 percent growth this year and will only achieve that when its regulatory, tax, trade and energy policies are fully in place, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Tuesday.

The GDP target "is certainly not achievable this year," Ross told Reuters in an interview. "The Congress has been slow-walking everything. We don't even have half the people in place."

The US and Jordanian military forces may be prepping a massive invasion of Syria, if intelligence reports gathered from surveillance drones suggest.

Following reports today that President Trump confirmed US will provide arms directly to The Kurds to fight ISIS, AlMasdarNews.com reports, Damascus is reportedly on high alert after some 400 American and Jordanian military vehicles were located at a Jordanian military base near the Syrian desert border earlier today.

More pictures of the drone surveillance here: