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Sarah Khalifa, 39, charged with forming organised criminal gang to manufacture and traffic drugsAn Egyptian court sentenced a well-known television presenter and 11 others to death for manufacturing and trafficking narcotics in a sprawling drug case, official media reported on Saturday.The presenter, Sarah Khalifa, 39, is best known for her programme Mission Impossible, which dealt with issues concerning security and crime. Continue reading...

President Donald Trump's Cabinet members admit the war has spiked gas prices to record highs — but it's not the war you think. Both Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have given public interviews claiming the war in Ukraine is causing Americans to suffer at the pump. "Ukraine has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets," said Bessent during a Fox News interview. "That is creating a price pressure on a global basis.Duffy, during a "Fox & Friends" appearance on Saturday morning, said something very similar."When you look at diesel, you have to look at Russia and Ukraine," said Duffy. "That puts pressure on the global market." These comments caught the attention of progressive political commentator David Pakman whose initial response was, "Huh!?" Pakman argued the Trumpworld leaders were scrambling to find anyone else to blame besides Trump, the president who launched an optional war in Iran, one of the world's largest oil-producing regions. "There are a few layers of dishonesty here," said Pakman. Pakman admitted Ukraine's defensive attacks on Russian refineries had affected global prices by reducing exports of refined products to a limited extent, but then highlighted Bessent's usage of the words "has decided.""As though Ukraine woke up one morning and said, 'Let's blow stuff up in Russia,'" he said. Pakman then turned his attention to what he described as an "Iran-shaped elephant" looming over Bessent. "Trump chose to launch this war against Iran," Pakman said. "The predictable consequence is this massive disruption to global energy markets."

A MAGA firebrand put Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in her crosshairs just hours after the pair landed in Russia for peace talks.On Saturday, Kushner and Witkoff arrived in Moscow to meet with special representatives for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Trump said on Friday that Kushner and Witkoff are carrying a proposal to "end the war" in Ukraine, adding, "We have an idea for peace."Trump loyalist and MAGA diehard Laura Loomer wasn't buying the Trump administration's message, however. She took to X to cast doubt on the Trump envoy's mission and rally more of MAGA against them."Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are in Moscow, Russia," Loomer wrote. "They just arrived for more 'peace talks' despite the fact that Putin is aiding the Iranians in killing US soldiers."Loomer notably used to be fiercely anti-Ukraine, a country she once claimed was "full of Nazis," PBS reported. She visited the country in July, and since then, has reversed course. She said that she was "bamboozled by Russian propaganda" and "came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine," CNN reported. She called out Russia in her Saturday rant."Meanwhile, Russia continues to pummel Ukraine with ballistic missiles and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon," Loomer wrote. "Everyday, Ukrainian civilians are slaughtered and Putin has shown no good faith in ending the war."She then added that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky "has offered to travel to the US to sign a peace deal to end the war, but Putin continues his aggression against Ukraine." She then tied Putin to Iran again, writing that he hasn't stopped "his support for the Islamic regime of Iran despite pretending to support President Trump."Loomer demanded, "We should stop pretending like Russia isn't a terrorist state," and mentioned that "Russia is still holding 10 Americans hostage as well," although groups like the Foley Foundation report that at least six Americans are detained in Russia.

Bewilderment and frustration roiled the nation Saturday morning as news spread President Donald Trump had threatened to cut trade with Canada because America doesn't need a cinnamon-flavored candy he mistakenly asserted came from Mexico. Trump made his confusing comment to a reporter in the Oval Office Friday during which he "explained" — or thought he did — how trade deficits work. "We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries," Trump said. "We lose, with the European Union, $200 billion a year. If I didn't trade with them, we'd lose nothing."This comment, posted on X by journalist account Acyn, was quickly subject to a fact-check from readers. "The trade deficit is not a debt, it does not represent losing money to the other country," the reader comment states. "It means more goods were imported from it than exported to it."The comment cites a Stanford University Hoover Institution by David R. Henderson called "Trade deficits aren't a problem.""It’s easiest to see that at the individual level," Henderson wrote. "My wife and I have about a $5,000 annual trade deficit with Safeway. We spend approximately $5,000 per year at Safeway and Safeway spends zero on my articles and speeches. More’s the pity, as the British say, but that’s the way it is."The president of the United States apparently couldn't grasp this concept."Just one swipe of the pen," he said. "We lose, with Mexico, $195 billion a year. If I don't trade with Mexico, they have nothing that we have to have. I mean, Hot Tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things. But basically they have nothing that we need."Hot Tamales are produced by the company Just Born, which was founded in New York, Trump's home state, in 1923 and has since moved to Pennsylvania, according to its website. They boast that they produce "America’s #1 Cinnamon flavored candy."Hot Tamales aside, Trump claimed he would not cut trade with Mexico because he respects their president, then quietly threatened that he could cut trade with Canada. "Canada would be in a heap of trouble," Trump said. "I don't think they'd exist."Critics were stunned. "Hot tamales?" replied Ron Filipowski. "WTF?"The Intellectualists summarized the statement thusly: "Trump claims trading is bad.""He's just stupid," X influencer RogerZenAF told his 37,000 followers. "Being a little dense or ditzy is normal, he's just plain f---ing dumb."Randy Shulman, editor of the Washington, D.C. LGBTQ+ magazine Metro Weekly, said simply, "He is the dumbest racist alive."

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."It has been more than two months since President Donald Trump’s tentative ceasefire with Iran broke down, and gasoline prices are still high. With the midterm elections looming, the president seems to have turned his attention to the problem, rolling out a series of actions he says will secure more crude oil from Venezuela and exempt refineries from renewable fuel mandates. Most recently, he summoned refiners to the White House earlier this week to discuss ways to lower prices at the pump, although the refiners left without making any public statements and the White House didn’t publish a list of the attendees.In the months since the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the world has found ways to conserve oil and move Middle East crude around, but structural factors are still keeping prices high. The U.S. average gas price on Thursday was around $4.11 per gallon, up more than 90 percent from this time last year, and diesel was even higher.The “crack spread,” which is the difference in price between crude oil and refined gasoline and diesel, soared to an historic high of more than $70 per barrel. This is a clear sign that the market for refined products is going haywire, and oil companies are raking in profits. The largest refineries in the United States have been operating at almost maximum capacity for several weeks now, longer than at any time in recent history, and they have deferred regular maintenance to take advantage of these soaring prices.The president’s frustration with the high fuel cost has become clear over the course of the summer.“Based on a shortage, they’re making too much money,” Trump said at an Oval Office briefing last month. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”The biggest reason prices have remained high is that there isn’t enough refining capacity to make gasoline from all the available oil. Many refineries in the Middle East have shut down during the conflict, and Russia’s diesel refineries are also offline thanks to Ukrainian drone attacks. The remaining refineries in North America and China are not large enough to fill that gap.In its effort to lower prices at the pump, the Trump administration first turned to Venezuela, where it kidnapped leader Nicolas Maduro in January and announced a plan to revive the country’s moribund oil industry. Experts said after the Maduro raid that American companies would be hesitant to tap Venezuela’s oil reserves, but the Trump administration has tried to make the country more palatable by easing sanctions and pushing interim leader Delcy Rodriguez to rewrite the country’s oil laws.These efforts seem to be paying off. The Pentagon announced last week that it would take a stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, a private Venezuelan company that controls around 20 percent of the country’s reserves; the company plans to increase production in oil fields that had once been drilled by China and Russia. Alejandro Betancourt, the head of the company, has been described as Trump’s “viceroy” in Venezuela, and earlier this year, the Trump administration helped him avoid a Swiss arrest warrant. Chevron, the largest U.S. company that operates in Venezuela, also announced on Wednesday that it would double its production there, signing an agreement with the Rodriguez government at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas.“In general, the read is positive,” said Ramón Andrade, a lawyer focused on the energy business and a partner at the law firm Ponte Andrade & Casanova in Caracas. He said that the business community in Venezuela is optimistic about a revival of the sector, but cautioned that on the Pentagon deal, “I think we need to look at what’s actually going to be signed.”Even so, there is no chance that this will help reduce gasoline prices, even after the midterms. For one thing, only a small number of U.S. refineries can process the heavy crude from Venezuela, and they are already working overtime to take advantage of high fuel prices.“Everything that the Venezuelans could produce right now, I’m sure they’re squeezing out,” said Al Salazar, an analyst at the energy firm Enverus Intelligence who studies oil and gas markets. “You could get incremental production out of there in six to twelve months, but what really is causing the gasoline and diesel price spike is the lack of refining capacity.”For another thing, scaling up production will take many years, if the legal agreement with the Pentagon even holds that long — the final details aren’t yet available, and some parties have alleged that conceding resource wealth to the United States would violate the Venezuelan constitution. The interim government has yet to face voters in an actual election.You need that long runway to be able to develop this resource,” said Salazar, who spent decades in the Canadian oil industry, which also produces heavy oil like Venezuela’s.The administration’s other major move this week might do more to keep prices down at the margins, though likely not enough for most consumers to notice. The Environmental Protection Agency ended its summer ethanol blending requirements early. The rules mandate that refiners and fuel importers add ethanol to the nation’s fuel supply to reduce gasoline-caused smog. It also announced a series of waivers that would exempt a few dozen refineries around the country from having to integrate biofuel into their diesel and gasoline products. The purpose of this “renewable fuels standard” is to support farmers and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since biofuels don’t warm the planet as oil does, but many oil industry parties argue that using ethanol drives up costs for refiners.A number of major lobbies opposed these waivers. Midwestern politicians and biofuel associations argued that they will harm farmers by reducing demand for the corn that makes ethanol, and even the American Petroleum Institute warned that sudden exemptions would create an unpredictable business environment for refineries. The two sides of the biofuel debate argue that the exemptions either will or won’t reduce gasoline prices. Given that crude oil prices are still high, it’s possible ethanol is a cheaper ingredient than oil, and it’s unclear whether the exempt refiners like Marathon and Chevron will pass costs on to customers.Even with the waivers, gasoline prices in many states are $1.50 above their pre-Iran highs. The early months of the conflict hinged on the question of the Strait of Hormuz, but even if the strait were to open tomorrow, the gasoline market will remain tight, and neither more oil from Venezuela nor cheaper inputs will free up refining capacity.“I think it’s going to have a tremendous impact; ultimately, prices are going to come down,” said Trump at the Oval Office on Monday. “Will it happen before the election? I can’t tell you that.” The stubborn high prices do not bode well for Republicans in the midterm elections. On average, the president’s party loses 25 more congressional seats in midterm elections after gas prices spike than in those after gas prices go down, according to a Politico analysis of elections since 1978.Things could get even worse by then. Around half of U.S. refining capacity is located on the Gulf of Mexico, in the bullseye for Atlantic hurricanes. Forecasters are predicting a quiet season, but there’s still potential for a massive outage. Tropical Depression Edouard formed in the Gulf of Mexico and passed over a Texas refinery complex this week, but it fizzled out before it could become a major storm.This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/trump-iran-venezuela-biofuels-gasoline/.Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.

Fears that President Donald Trump could freeze foreign assets are driving billions in gold out of New York's vaults, an economics journalist warned.In a Thursday article for The Bulwark, economics editor and columnist Catherine Rampell described the gold retreat as a signal of how far U.S. relationships, in particular with its European allies, have deteriorated."In a frightening sign of just how much trust has been lost between the United States and its erstwhile allies, billions of dollars of gold reserves are being repatriated or otherwise moved out of Trump's reach," Rampell wrote.The Dutch central bank announced on Wednesday that it had moved roughly $12 billion in gold, most of it held in New York, to vaults in London, Rampell noted. France's central bank recently sold about $15 billion in bullion stored in New York and replaced it with bars kept in Paris. Germany and Italy, which are the second- and third-largest holders of gold reserves behind the U.S., have spent the past year weighing whether to bring theirs home too, Rampell added.The concern is less that Trump would seize the gold than that he might freeze it, Rampell explained. Washington and its allies did the same with Russia's reserves after the invasion of Ukraine, she pointed out.A German member of the European Parliament, Markus Ferber, warned that the risk is impossible to dismiss, she noted."Trump is erratic, and one cannot rule out that someday he will come up with creative ideas how to treat foreign gold reserves," Ferber said, per Rampell.Rampell admitted the scale of the fear caught her off guard."It hadn't really occurred to me that investors might be diversifying away from U.S. dollar-denominated assets because they also feared losing access to them," she wrote.The nervousness has built during a string of Trump moves, including his "Liberation Day" tariffs, his threats to annex Greenland, his push to take "golden share" stakes in private companies, and his stated wish to personally inspect Fort Knox, according to Rampell.Because gold sits inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Trump's campaign to control the Federal Reserve feeds fears that foreign reserves could be next, Rampell wrote. A representative of Germany's Taxpayers Federation put it bluntly, she noted."It's our money," the representative said. "It should be brought back."

Will Saletan from The Bulwark unloaded on Thursday about President Donald Trump's new oil deal with Venezuela — a turn of events that, he said, lays bare how "absolutely disgusting" Trump's plot has been all along.Trump, said Saletan, "said it more than doubles American oil reserves ... and he wrote this: 'One of the things I'm going to do with the Venezuelan oil is fill up the strategic national reserves,'" which were depleted severely by Trump's war with Iran. He claims that this oil is a "gift from Venezuela to the people of the United States."Right-wing outlets aren't even trying to hide what this is anymore, said Saletan. They aren't claiming that Trump's operation to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro was about liberating the people, he added, leading him to conclude that it was always about oil.For example, Saletan noted, right-wing commentator Ben Ferguson said of the deal, "I think this vice president and president understand this is a moment in Venezuela where you could have a lot of leverage, and you could get something good, and clearly they're willing to play ball. Now, that's big — they're willing to play along because we have leverage." The leverage, Saletan noted, is the fact that America just attacked their country.Meanwhile, he said, Rachel Campos-Duffy, the wife of Trump's Transportation Secretary, acknowledged on Fox News, "I think in Venezuela, the reviews on this are very mixed — mostly negative — among them, not because they're not happy about the potential economic upsides, but they don't trust Delcy Rodríguez" — that being the acting president the U.S. installed in place of Maduro, despite her having all the same policies as her predecessor apart from being more open to do oil deals.Even Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) — who has talked a big game about genuine liberation for Latin American countries — is now saying, "The United States helped them liberate themselves from Maduro. So the reward is to give fair benefits to the oil companies," including "100 years" of being able to exploit the country's oil reserves. "This is the way Trump and his allies in Congress think — it's always, always about the money," said Saletan.But perhaps the most damning admission, said Saletan, came from former Trump deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates, who said Venezuelan oil contracts should "enshrine this deal so a change of government will not imperil those billions of dollars of investment we're going to have to see out of our private sector to make this work." In other words, it needs to be set up so even if the current regime is replaced with a democracy, the oil still flows no matter what the Venezuelan people want."Look, I don't know what your political views are. Maybe you believe in capitalism, maybe you don't," concluded Saletan. "But one thing we should all agree on is that this corrupt, coercive deal is disgusting and ruthless, and it's wrong. It is a total perversion of capitalism combined with the worst kind of socialism." - YouTube www.youtube.com

MS NOW anchor and former Republican Party chairman Michael Steele barely concealed his anger on Thursday while laying out the suffering that President Donald Trump's war in Iran has inflicted on U.S. Navy sailors.The USS Abraham Lincoln has become a poster child for the issue, having been deployed to the Persian Gulf for a record amount of time, leaving sailors with strained resources and a mental health crisis."There are 18 families who have proof ... when we look at how this began, where we are now, and the lack, I think, of regard for the sacrifice of those 18 service members," said Steele.Steele then went on to tear down remarks on the subject made today by Vice President JD Vance.His red flags, he said, were "on high, high red alert when he says, we're not going to set an artificial timeline. What if I told you three weeks? Well, the president told us four. Mr. Vice President, do you remember that? Did he miss that part of the conversation? In the month of February? March? He told us four weeks when he says, you know, I have a problem with the phrase an end to the war. I want to push back on that just a little, because major combat operations are currently not ongoing.""Well, sir, that's not the definition of a war," said Steele. Regardless of whether combat operations are taking place, he said, "once I can still shoot at you and you still be in war, that's what Iran is doing. You have no response to that."It's high time, he continued, for Congress to "step in and bring some coherent sanity to this madness before more lives are lost.""We have the USS Lincoln just docking, taking, getting to a port after how many months at sea. And no one in this government had the common sense to realize we can't leave that big-behind ship out there all this time, with none of the soldiers or sailors getting off at a port. Someone has got to take control of this. The country at this November election is going to be looking to someone to do that, because clearly these numbnuts can't do it." - YouTube www.youtube.com