Reuters posted:

OSLO/MOSCOW (Reuters) - A gap in U.S. sanctions allows Western companies to help Russia develop some of its most technically challenging oil reserves, and risks undermining the broad aim of the measures, a Reuters investigation has found.

When Washington imposed the sanctions on Moscow in 2014 over its annexation of Crimea and role in the Ukraine conflict, the U.S Treasury said it wanted to "impede Russia's ability to develop so-called frontier or unconventional oil resources".

The restrictions were designed to prevent Russia countering declining output from conventional wells by tapping these hard-to-recover reserves which require newer extraction techniques like fracking, an area where it relies on Western technology.

Three years on, however, Norway's Statoil is helping Kremlin oil giant Rosneft (ROSN.MM) develop unconventional resources while British major BP (BP.L) is considering a similar project.

Statoil is not breaching sanctions, nor would BP be doing so.

LITERALLY SHAKING posted:

NUKES CURE NORKS posted:

Who cares. They're fighting against Nazis and they could call themselves Dickhead McTwinklefootz for all I care.

quote:

On the same weekend that the white supremacists held their rally in charlottesville, another small group of them was holding an event in seattle, and there was an anti-hate rally being held at the same time in protest. I'd known about it and was already planning to go before all this happened. Ours was on sunday, so we heard about the protester who was killed in charlottesville the day before, and our facebook event went from 140 people to 1200 by the end of the day, and a group of anti-fascist anarchists called Antifa started coming into seattle to join in.

I posted the pictures from it to https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BwF4aXWPQXruRWRRTW9OZnRlSVE?usp=sharing. Note that the march starts peacefully with signs promoting love and solidarity, but then as it got bigger it started getting infiltrated by people in black masks who then broke off to go confront the nationalist group, with a pretty big part of the original crowd following them. The cops were ready for them and had set a barricade. It didn't turn violent like virginia's but it was pretty tense and they eventually started throwing concussion grenades to disperse the crowd. While the protesters and cops were squaring off i managed to climb up onto a lightpost so i was able to get pictures of the clash.

MRC48B posted:

Gloves are coming off, and it's gonna get messy.

quote:

One of the few organizations in the United States that’s dedicated to helping people leave far-right white-extremism groups of the type that rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend had its funding halted by the White House less than two months ago.

Life After Hate is a Chicago-based non-profit whose group of co-founders includes Christian Picciolini, a prominent former neo-Nazi. Since last November, when Donald Trump was elected, Life After Hate has seen a 20-fold increase in requests for help, Picciolini told Politico. In June, however, the group learned that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had decided to halt a $400,000 grant that the outgoing Obama administration had allocated to it in mid-January.

WAR CRIME SYNDICAT posted:

Eh my air force rescue buddies logged 255 rescues by Monday. That's not to mention army navy and cg helos working overtime too.