Oil prices plummet as Biden considers releasing 180 million barrels
Oil prices fell sharply Thursday morning amid speculation that Joe Biden would order a record release from U.S. emergency reserves later today in a bid to ease Americans’ pain at the gas station. The plan to release up to one million barrels a day, as originally reported by Bloomberg, will be announced at the president’s scheduled noon briefing on energy. CNBC reported an initial drop of almost 6% in crude futures contracts on Thursday in the news, leaving the cost of a barrel hovering around $ 100. At its peak earlier this month, a barrel of Brent crude was about $ 139. The national average for a gallon of gas, meanwhile, was $ 4.22 on Thursday, according to the AAA. Analysts have linked high gasoline prices, largely triggered by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the inflation crisis, to Biden’s declining popularity and the Democratic Party’s prospects for the upcoming midterm elections. It is clear that Biden wanted to act sooner rather than later, with an NBC poll this week reflecting a turnout of just 40%, the lowest in his presidency to date. The White House said in a statement that Biden had been informed by his administration that “his administration’s efforts to reduce the impact of Putin’s rising energy prices and lower pump prices on American households.” The U.S. currently has about 568 million barrels in its strategic oil reserves stored in salt domes in Texas and Louisiana, and according to Bloomberg, the lottery will last up to six months and will release about 180 million barrels in the US market. . Biden has used the stock in the past, 50 million barrels last November to deal with supply issues, but the new plan would be a record. Updated at 14.44 BST Before 20 p.m. 16:20 It also emerged during Nancy Pelosi’s press conference that she was planning a hearing in the House on the ethics of the US Supreme Court, in the wake of the uprising scandal involving Judge Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni. Thomas remained silent amid calls for his wife to resign in support of Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Mendous, on January 6, the day of the Capitol Uprising, and Pelosi pointed out the lack of of judges of the Supreme Court. “They do not have a code of conduct,” he said, noting that Parliament had already passed the For the People Act, which seeks to introduce a code, but it was blocked in the US Senate. “It’s really the United States Supreme Court. They make judgments about the air we breathe and everything else and we do not even know what their moral standard is. “Why have lower standards and members of Congress for petitions and the rest?” Parliament Speaker Nancy Pelosi addresses journalists at the Capitol on Thursday. Photo: Tom Brenner / Reuters Pelosi added: “I would like to have a hearing, not the whole bill, but to bring out this part, to focus on the formal legislation on the ethics of the Supreme Court. “People say it’s a personal decision for a judge whether he should resign. “Well, if your wife is an acceptable and proud contributor to a coup in our country, maybe you should weigh it to your moral standards.” 1 hour before 15:44
Pelosi wants investigation into “Russia’s crimes against children”
Parliament Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for an investigation into Russia’s “crimes against humanity” in connection with the treatment of children in the conflict in Ukraine. In her weekly press conference on Thursday morning, Pelosi said she was horrified by what she learned from five female members of the Ukrainian parliament who were visited by members of parliament on Wednesday. “To hear the stories of children, you know, children are the reason I’m here,” Pelosi said. “When some of these parents are killed by the Russians, the children are sent to Russia. “I think we need to get more information and documentation about the crimes against humanity that Russians commit against children, in some cases with a parent, in some cases not.” Ukraine has already accused Russia of forcibly transferring hundreds of thousands of its citizens to its territory as “hostages” in order to force it to surrender. Pelosi said she was deeply moved to meet the women from Ukraine, who were introduced to her by Oksana Markarova, the country’s ambassador to the United States. “These women were small, they had children, one child was two, another eight years old, small children,” he said. “Their spouses to a large extent [are] on the battlefield. They thought it was important to come to the United States to tell the American people how they see it. It was real, inspiring, emotional. “ Updated on 17.08 BST 1 hour ago 15:23 Curry Pol As social media companies pledge to combat Russian misinformation about the war in Ukraine, studies show that they continue to lag behind, allowing refuted narratives to reach millions. Facebook failed to identify 80% of the articles on its platform that promote a rapidly spreading conspiracy theory that the US is financing the use of biological weapons in Ukraine, according to a study released Friday by the Center for the Fight against Digital Hate (CCDH). The non-profit misinformation research team studied a sample of posts from February 24 to March 14 that shared external articles containing baseless allegations about biological weapons. He found that in 80% of cases, Facebook failed to label posts as either “missing frames”, containing “partially false information” or “false information”. “If our investigators can detect false information about Ukraine that is circulating openly on its platform, it is within Meta’s capacity to do the same,” said CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed. “But we have found that in the vast majority of cases, conspiracy theories have free access.” Read the story here: Updated at 16.31 BST 2 hours ago 15:00 Martin Pengley North Carolina lawmaker Madison Cawthorn will not take immediate disciplinary action for claiming she was invited to orgies and that she saw Washington people using cocaine. Madison Cawthorn. Photo: Octavio Jones / Reuters After meeting with Cawthorn on Wednesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters the comments were “unacceptable.” “There are a lot of different things that can happen,” McCarthy added, referring to the possible consequences. “As soon as I told him that he had lost my confidence, he should win it back, and I stated what I found inappropriate. And you can not just say, “You can not do this again.” I mean, it has upset a lot of members. “ The whole story: 2 hours ago 14:40 Sam Levin The Guardian’s voting rights expert Sam Levine took a look at the US Supreme Court’s interest in the Wisconsin ballot papers and how his intervention reflects the National Equality Commission’s hostility: Even for experts closely following the U.S. Supreme Court, there was something surprising about an emergency ruling by judges on Wednesday. In an unexpected move, the court decided to reject new districts for the state legislature in Wisconsin that had been selected by the state supreme court. But what was even more astonishing was that the conservative majority of the court seemed to be doing everything it could to attack the Voting Rights Act, one of the most important civil rights laws designed to prevent discrimination in elections. USA. “Extra headspinning,” was the way Michael Li, a redistribution specialist at the Brennan Center for Justice, described it. “Strange,” said Richard Hasen, an electoral law expert at the University of California, Irvine. David Wasserman, a redistribution expert at the non-partisan Cook Political Report, wrote on Twitter that the Supreme Court had entered an “uncharted area”. The Wisconsin court ruling was the latest in a series of rulings that left few pretexts for how aggressively it seeks to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the most powerful provision in the law, which prohibits racially. discriminatory voting practices. The court does not hide its skepticism about the use of the tribe in redistribution, even when it is used to protect minority voters, and makes it more difficult for the parties to justify the possibility of the tribe when the district lines are redesigned. Read more here: Updated at 15.59 BST 2 hours ago 14:13 Mike Pence, the former vice president who has been embroiled in controversy with Donald Trump over his old boss’s persistent efforts to steal the 2020 election, has embarked on a political agenda urging Republicans to look ahead instead of back. “Elections are about the future,” Pence told reporters as he published a 19-page “Freedom Agenda” designed to guide his party’s political positions for this year’s midterm and 2024 presidential election, according to Politico. . Although the document promotes conservative policies designed to repair the “damage” it believes the “radical left” has caused the United States since Joe Biden took over the White House last year, Pence’s underlying message is unequivocal: Republicans have no job to support Trump’s continued efforts to repeat the 2020 election lost by more than 7 million votes. Mike Pence, Speaker of the Senate, certifies the election victory of Joe Biden on January 6, 2021. Photo: Reuters “He firmly believes that it is important to have a forward-looking agenda for the American people and not look back,” Marc Short, a former Pence chief of staff, told reporters Wednesday in a telephone interview. . The start of the agenda is seen by analysts as an attempt by Pence to position himself in the race to pursue the Republican nominee for the 2024 election. This is not the first time he has dealt such a blow to Trump, whose supporters wanted to hang the then-vice president on the day of the Jan. 6 uprising, after he refused to back down from a one-term president’s demand not to certify Biden’s victory. He brazenly told Trump at a conservative conference in Florida in February that he had made a “mistake” in believing that the election could be overturned.
