Authored by Rick Perry via RealClear Politics (emphasis ours),

The oral arguments before the Supreme Court earlier this month is a reminder that our nation has a 66-year-old nuclear energy problem—and there is a ready and available solution in recycling used nuclear fuel.

The Problem

Nuclear energy produces nearly 20 percent of our electricity. The fuel used to run our reactor fleet loses its intensity over time. That used, but not yet depleted, fuel is called Used Nuclear Fuel (UNF). There are 90,000 metric tons of UNF currently stored at reactor sites across 39 states in America, including approximately 4,000 metric tons in my home State of Texas.

In 1982, the federal government was made responsible by an act of Congress for removal and disposal of UNF from reactor sites, and has collected over $20 billion from reactor owners to pay for disposal of UNF. To date, the government has not removed any significant quantity of UNF from any site anywhere in America, including Texas, nor is there a current plan to do so.

As Secretary of Energy under President Trump’s first term, it became clear that any plan to move tonnage of UNF required some practical consent of the receiving state and local community, even if legal consent was not required by the 1982 Act.

The consequence of not solving this problem results in a financial loss to America and leaves the UNF at the numerous reactor sites across America. There have been private efforts to establish UNF interim storage facilities in West Texas and New Mexico. Though there has been some local acceptance of an interim storage facility in Texas or New Mexico, there has also been significant opposition. Resistance to those private interim storage proposals led to the NRC v. Texas case currently before the Supreme Court.

The Solution

We should rethink our approach. There are options we should consider other than storage of UNF, either temporarily on an interim basis or permanently. Our country should explore taking an entirely different path to achieve our ultimate goal: the removal of UNF from reactor sites. Recycling UNF makes much more sense than permanent storage and creates an energy source that is needed and currently unused.

The technology for recycling was first developed in the United States and has been used in France, Japan, Russia, the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, China, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. I have personally toured many of these reprocessing facilities in other countries during my term as Energy Secretary.

The United States should establish a recycling policy so that the 90,000 metric tons of UNF in the country can be recycled and fabricated into mixed oxide fuel (“MOX fuel”). The resulting MOX fuel can be used in nuclear reactors to create reliable and clean energy.

Through establishing a recycling policy, the following four problems would be solved, and create economic opportunities:

First, the United States can solve the national problem of moving UNF away from reactor sites as it is obligated to do. Second, the U.S. can restart the discontinued payment program of the nuclear utilities for the removal of the UNF so that the Treasury can be replenished at the rate of $2 billion annually. Third, the concern of interim or long-term storage of UNF near our population centers is also addressed. Finally, MOX fuel can replace the 20 percent of U.S. nuclear fuel currently purchased from Russia.

The adoption of such a policy will create jobs and much needed energy for the grid as demand for energy skyrockets. Today, MOX fuel is widely used in Europe and Japan in their nuclear reactor fleet. America is behind its industrial neighbors in the treatment of UNF and needs to catch up.

Sometimes the greatest problems have simple and already discovered solutions.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Over the weekend The Washington Post revealed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth distributed a memo in mid-March which ordered the Pentagon to prioritize its war-planning focus on potential future conflict with China.

The memo, called the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance “outlines, in broad and sometimes partisan detail, the execution of President Donald Trump’s vision to prepare for and win a potential war against Beijing and defend the United States from threats in the ‘near abroad,’ including Greenland and the Panama Canal.”

It’s nothing new that the Pentagon considers China a ‘top pacing threat’ – but it does confirm that the Trump administration would likely be willing to go to war in the event of a mainland invasion of the self-ruled island.

The memo interestingly presented a strategy of “assuming risk” in Europe and other parts of the world, to refocus efforts on top nuclear-armed rivals. 

The Pentagon’s force planning and new focus “will consider conflict only with Beijing when planning contingencies for a major power war” and leave the “threat from Moscow largely attended by European allies” – according to the report.

Hegseth wrote that China “is the Department’s sole pacing threat, and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan — while simultaneously defending the US homeland is the Department’s sole pacing scenario.”

The memo urges NATO allies take on a “far greater” burden-sharing on defense, and puts Europe on notice in the event of greater threats from Russia:

Hegseth’s guidance acknowledges that the U.S. is unlikely to provide substantial, if any, support to Europe in the case of Russian military advances, noting that Washington intends to push NATO allies to take primary defense of the region. The U.S. will support Europe with nuclear deterrence of Russia, and NATO should only count on U.S. forces not required for homeland defense or China deterrence missions, the document says.

A significant increase in Europe sharing its defense burden, the document says, “will also ensure NATO can reliably deter or defeat Russian aggression even if deterrence fails and the United States is already engaged in, or must withhold forces to deter, a primary conflict in another region.”

As for Taiwan specifically, it lays out ways the Pentagon intends to help its ally bolster defenses, short of outright entering any direct conflict.

WaPo and others have said the Heritage Foundation think tank is the driving force behind the strategic ideas presented in the memo.

Secret Pentagon strategy memo on China and homeland defense has Heritage Foundation fingerprintshttps://t.co/EeTzPhlzEl

— Littlewisehen (@littlewisehen) March 29, 2025

Hegseth’s plans specify a “denial defense” of Taiwan – according to the memo – which will include “increasing the troop presence through submarines, bombers, unmanned ships, and specialty units from the Army and Marine Corps, as well as a greater focus on bombs that destroy reinforced and subterranean targets.”

Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations,

Topline: The City of Bell, California faced several scandals in the 2010s, culminating in corruption convictions for City Administrator Robert Rizzo and six other officials.

The “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn recounts a state audit that found $293,000 in possibly illegal spending by Rizzo and the city, but that was only the beginning. Rizzo and his colleagues were eventually charged with siphoning $5.5 million away from the city. That money would be worth $8.1 million today. 

Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname “Dr. No” by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn’t stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.   

Coburn’s Wastebook 2010 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth more than $11.5 billion, including the beginning of Bell’s years of controversy.

Key facts: California Controller John Chiang found that Rizzo spent $293,000 in federal grants without approval from Bell’s city council and without signing actual contracts.

The total included $100,000 from a federal oil recycling program that Rizzo gave to a local company owned by Bell’s director of planning services.

Later investigations found absurd salaries for Rizzo and other Bell employees. Rizzo was paying himself an annual salary and benefits package of $1.5 million. Prosecutors alleged that at one point, his total pay had reached $12 million. 

Four out of five city council members earned salaries above $100,000, even though the council met twice per year. The remaining councilman earned only $8,000.

At the time, a quarter of Bell’s population was living below the poverty line.

In 2014, Rizzo was sentenced to 10 to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay $8.8 million in restitution to the city. He got another 33 months in jail for federal tax fraud.

Summary: Today, Bell City Manager Michael Antwine II makes a salary of $205,000, while the poverty rate is still nearly 25%.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff deadline (April 2) is looming, with big implications for traders. This wildcard event could tip sector flows, shift hedging activity, and force institutions to adjust, fast. Yet this market catalyst comes with its own set of risks and opportunities. The difference comes down to how well you can see a setup before it happens. 

For those still trading based on valuation or headlines alone, that’s like playing checkers on a chessboard. Successful traders have long known that there is much more behind market movements.

Just take a look at SPX, one of the most liquid market instruments in the world. What caused price to violently retract from intraday highs on March 19 and 20? And why did price suddenly become particularly stable on March 24 after a tumultuous prior two weeks? As our derivative expert friends from SpotGamma write, it’s clear that something else is behind this market — something we’ve been tracking for years: options flows.

So, as part of our ongoing partnership with SpotGamma, and ahead of SpotGamma’s launch of their new and powerful tools – the Synthetic OI Lens and Compass Screener – both of which offer readers option-trading tools which until now were reserved only for Wall Street professionals, they present five options-driven trading insights to “weaponize” right now for those who want to stay sharp, trade with precision, and frontrun the herd.

1. Growth in Options Trading Isn’t Just a Fad. It’s the Market Now.

Next expiry options — better known as 0DTEs — aren’t just for a handful of meme stock speculators anymore. They make up more than 50% of all SPX options volume, up from just 17% in 2020. That means intraday flows are influencing price action more than ever.

And here’s the kicker: 88.5% of all options trading is happening on-exchange and retail. 

Translation? The pros are watching your moves. And if you don’t understand how your trades affect hedging flows, you’re the one getting played.

Trading Edge: Monitor 0DTE gamma positioning before the open. SpotGamma’s HIRO and TRACE tools show where dealers are getting pinned, or forced to chase.

* * *

2. Fundamentals Light the Fuse, Options Flows Decide the Blast Radius

Netflix’s post-earnings jump in January? The market expected a 7% move. It ripped 14% higher, directly toward a $1,000 call wall SpotGamma flagged the day before.

“There are large positions up at $1,000… there is enough gamma that NFLX could move more than just 7%” – SpotGamma Founder Brent Kochuba, January 21, 2025

Why was this?

By reading the options market, it was clear that options flows could exacerbate any price movement — with no overhead resistance until the $1,000 strike for NFLX.

Trading Edge: Use SpotGamma’s Equity Hub to track support/resistance levels defined by options open interest — not lagging technicals. If there’s a wall of gamma, you’d better believe price will bounce or stall there.

* * *

3. Market Makers Are the Real Movers

Every option trade needs a hedge, and that hedge moves markets. If 100,000 calls are bought by traders for 0.50 delta contracts, the dealer has to buy 50,000 shares to stay neutral. This is why it’s a good idea to pay attention to monthly options expiration (OPEX). These market makers establish huge positions that often need to be unwound post-OPEX.

What does this mean? Pent-up volatility often is released – and by knowing where market makers are positioned, you can tell which names will be most impacted.

Just last week, we saw SPX reverse after hitting intraday highs on both March 19th and 20th – exactly where dealers had to sell to hedge. That Friday (March 21st) was OPEX, and these positions were closed out. This cleared significant overhead resistance and created room for a 1.7% rally in SPX on March 24th.

Trading Edge: SpotGamma’s HIRO and TRACE tools visualize this in real-time. Learn to read delta and gamma pressure. If you see selling pressure building from dealer hedging, don’t go long into it blindly.

* * *

4. Correlations Are Breaking. So Where Are Trading Opportunity?

It used to be simple: VIX signaled fear, and traders paid attention when it jumped. But that era of tightly coupled movement is fading fast. Why? The predictable relationships that made sense in the past no longer hold true

Today, stocks are moving on their own terms. Sector-based trading is giving way to single-name volatility — and for traders who can spot the breakouts hiding under the surface, this is a major opportunity.

Why this matters for your trading? Volatility and direction are no longer synced across the board, and edge can be found in the names that are out of alignment. This makes it critical to check where your stock falls before you trade it to determine whether it is trading with the market or an outlier.

Trading Edge: When implied volatility is low, but sentiment or skew is shifting fast, it’s often a signal that the market is mispricing risk. And that’s where smart traders strike.

So how do you find these setups before they move?

* * *

5. You’re Not Fighting the Banks Anymore, They’re Coming to Us

For years, institutional desks had exclusive access to the kind of flow data that moves markets. That information edge is now at your fingertips.

SpotGamma’s exciting new tools — the Synthetic Open Interest (OI) Lens and Compass — are leveling the playing field by exposing real positioning, market pressure, and hidden high-conviction setups ahead of each trading day.

Most open interest models assume dealers sell options and hedge passively. But in 2025’s flow-driven market, that’s not good enough.

The Synthetic OI Lens breaks the mold. It tracks actual order flow with enhanced data feeds and SpotGamma’s proprietary classification system, so you know if market makers are really getting long or short, and how market makers are likely to react.

In short, this lens shows whether pressure is building with or against your trade, so you’re not flying blind.

Trading Edge: Use Synthetic OI to spot when large long positions are building at key levels. That’s your cue to size up and ride the dealer flow.

Compass: Pinpoint High-Conviction Setups in Seconds

Compass is SpotGamma’s powerful new tool that maps directional skew vs. volatility across the entire market. You’ll instantly see where options are expensive or cheap and where directional sentiment resides — giving you a constant stream of high-probability setups.

Traders not only need the data, they need to be able to zero-in on opportunities amidst the noise. With Compass, you don’t need to flip through dozens of charts or data tables to access volatility and directional information. 

By adding your name to the chart, you can quickly see correlation between names and which stocks may be outliers, giving you critical information to inform your trades

Compass highlights names worth your attention with Guided Mode. Explorer Mode puts you in the driver’s seat to choose which stocks you want to watch.

Trading Tip: Scan for stocks in Compass’s low IV / high bullish skew quadrant. That combo often points to cheap upside trades before the crowd piles in.

See It in Action — Find Your Edge in Any Stock

So for those readers who want to find trades most traders miss, SpotGamma is offering a free webinar on April 2 (just in time for the day’s market rollercoaster) that shows you how. Learn how to find trades others miss, using the Synthetic OI Lens and Compass.

SpotGamma will cover: 

• How to uncover real support/resistance using actual positioning—not lagging charts
• Where to find high-reward setups like bullish risk reversals
• How to scan your entire watchlist for volatility shifts in seconds

So for those who want smarter entries, faster trade ideas, and the data edge institutions traditionally kept to themselve, this is one to watch.

Register here

Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, 41, says she’s got ‘days to live’ – writing on Instagram that she’s in renal failure as a result of injuries sustained after a collision with a bus.

“This year has been the worst start to a new year, but I won’t bore anyone with the details but I think it important to note that when a school bus driver comes at you driving 110km as we were slowing for a turn that no matter what your car is made of it might as well be a tin can,” she wrote on Sunday.

“I’ve gone into kidney renal failure, they’ve given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology. I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time, but you know what they say about wishes.”

Her father, Sky Roberts, responded to her post: “Virginia my daughter, I love you and praying for you to get the correct treatment to live a long and healthy life. If there is anything in this world I can do to help you, please let me know. My spirit with you now and holding your hand.”

According to Sky, a retired engineer living in Floriday, Virginia is “suffering.”

Giuffre’s representative, Dini von Meuffling, “Virginia has been in a serious accident and is receiving medical care in the hospital. She greatly appreciates the support and well wishes people are sending.”

As one of the most prominent Epstein victims, Giuffre has been speaking out for years about her sexual abuse at the hands of Epstein and friends. In 2021, she filed a civil lawsuit in New York against Prince Andrew, who she accused of rape. She also said that Epstein’s ‘madam’ Ghislaine Maxwell had trafficked her to London to have sex with Andrew when she was 17. She agreed to an out-of-court settlement with Andrew in 2022 – which is believed to be in the millions of dollars, while Andrew – who’s denied all allegations, has been forced to step down from royal duties (since the rest of the royal family totally aren’t longstanding uncaught pedophiles).

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking following her 2021 conviction. Following the settlement, Giuffre retreated from public life and moved to Perth, Australia with her husband Robert and their three children – though recent reports suggest that she and her husband have become estranged.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“The current conflict between Europe and America is not reducible towards contrasting approaches towards Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” 

– Frank Furedi on Substack

“Contrary to Western media’s trash talk, Russian military has not been degraded. If anything, it has been significantly upgraded.” 

– Alex Krainer

You’re going to see what a truly consequential span of weeks, looks like, as Western Civ goes into full churn on April’s doorstep. 

Remember, TS Eliot called it the “cruelest month.” 

Too many uncomfortable things are converging, too many ongoing operations are unwinding, too many tensions are breaking.

The conclusion of “Joe Biden’s” Ukraine War fiasco looms. You can tell because The New York Times published a gigantic piece Sunday detailing how the Pentagon and the CIA actually ran all of Ukraine’s tactical operations out of a base in Wiesbaden, Germany — after building a colossal Ukraine war machine post our 2014 color revolution in Kiev. Since the very start of the hot war in 2022, we did all the targeting for the weapons we gave them and planned their every move. What a surprise! (Not.)

The motive behind all that, as conceived by US neo-cons and NATO neo-morons, was to “weaken” Russia, bust it up, and seize its resources. All the sanctions piled on only induced Russia into an import-replacement campaign that actually strengthened its economy, while the war led to a revolution in Russian war-fighting tactics and advanced weaponry. Now, the whole thing is ending in Ukraine’s defeat and the West’s humiliation.

The Times could have published this in 2023-24, but it would have been a major embarrassment for “Joe Biden” and his shadow managers moving into the election. They put it out just now because the jig is up and the paper desperately needs to pretend that it’s ahead of events to preserve the last shreds of its credibility.

Mr. Trump, the uber-realist, knows that the Russians are going to roll up in Ukraine this spring and there is increasingly not much that can be done about that, except to try to put the best face on it — which is, that it wasn’t his war. As long as the coke freak Zelensky remains in charge, Ukraine will be negotiation-unworthy, as the Russian phrase goes. So, US-Russia peace talks were largely diplomatic showbiz. Both Putin and Mr. Trump were painfully aware of this, and hence, Mr. Trump’s latest performative bluster about “more sanctions” will probably not amount to anything.

And also hence, the synchronized idiocy on display in France, Germany, and the UK. They were all-in on the neo-con scheme that is now falling apart and its failure has driven them plumb crazy. As the US drops out of the stupid proxy war, they declare their intention to take it from here and go beat-up Russia. Their war-drums are teaspoons beating on so many quiches.

Soon-to-be chancellor Friedrich Merz proposes an 800-billion-Euro debt spree to finance the re-arming of Germany, which, just now, is utterly incapable of war. He is insane. 

German industry is collapsing from a lack of affordable natural gas (as arranged by “Joe Biden” blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, danke schön). Turning Volkswagen factories to missile production will not help the German people one bit. It probably will remind them about the Weimar hyper-inflation, though.

Macron pledges to put French boots on the ground in Ukraine. Ain’t gonna happen. 

Today, his stooge judiciary found political rival Marine LePen guilty of a Mickey Mouse offense in order to bar her from running against him in the next election. Ain’t gonna work. He will provoke the biggest national uprising since the Bastille. His government will be too busy putting down French Revolution 2.0 to play war games in history’s graveyard of armies. Maybe he’ll try nukes. I’m sure that’ll work — if you’re eager to see Russian hypersonic “hazelnuts” rain down on the Île-de-France.

And then, there is the amazing idiot PM Keir Starmer in the UK, calling on his “coalition of the willing” to step up and intervene in the lost cause that is Ukraine.

How many hands went up on that call? For practical purposes, the Brits have no war-fighting capacity whatsoever, and no resources for generating such capacity. And, anyway, they are facing some dreadful combo of a civil war / internal jihad against their own indigenous population, plus an economic collapse cherry-on-top.

In short, Europe has so many incipient existential problems that the whole story is about to shift its focus from the already-sealed fate of Ukraine to the very dark prospects for the core nations of Old-World Western Civ. 

I wouldn’t plan a vacation there this year.

Meanwhile, expect a pile-up of consequence in our own sore-beset USA in the upcoming cruelest month. Today, the DOGE team visits the CIA. It could spell an end to decades of mad frolics emanating from that gigantic black box of black ops. Director John Ratcliffe has cordially invited Mr. Musk’s technicians and he is probably eager to discover exactly what mischief has been hidden from him by the immense, secretive, foul bureaucracy he lately assumed command over.

The Epstein materials recently recovered out of the FBI’s rogue New York offices of the agency are considered so critical by Director Patel that he assigned 1000 agents to review and process the docs full-time. That includes redacting names of many additional sex-trafficked children. Expect to see the release of a lot of that in the next thirty days with dire reverberations in the celebrity realms of politics, finance, and showbiz.

JudgeGate is moving toward its climax at the same time. Tuesday this week, Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the DC circuit’s lawfare offensive against Mr. Trump’s executive authority. It would be nice to hear from DC district judges James Boasberg, Amy Berman Jackson, Tanya Chutkan, Beryl Howell, and Amir Ali, who have been zealously active in what looks like a coordinated lawfare campaign against the chief executive. Norm Eisen is not a judge, but he is the central conductor of the lawfare orchestra, and he has a bit of ‘splainin’ to do. One can even imagine something like a RICO referral emerge from that rather brazen operation. Anyway, the whole matter is going to land in the Supreme Court before April is out.

Also expect a lot of movement in the Covid-19 story coming out of the newly-reorganized CDC, NIH, FDA, NIAID, and other corners of the public health bureaucracy. Evidence is piling up fast of tragic and awful blowback from the Covid vaccine. There is too much to be ignored any longer and momentous decisions must follow, starting with taking the Pfizer and Moderna shots off-line. The entire regime of data collection, processing, and public release is about to change and the nation will be shocked by what gets disclosed.

Then there are the financial markets. 

They do not like the kind of shifts in public perception that return of consequence must bring. Gold alone is sending out a very vivid distress signal for everything else pretending to be an asset or a form of collateral. The equity markets have been wobbling for weeks. Look out below as the Easter eggs roll.

Mark Zuckerberg is back in the hot seat, this time facing explosive allegations that Meta deliberately swiped millions of books from notorious digital pirate sites LibGen and Anna’s Archive to train its cutting-edge AI model, Llama 3.

According to recently filed court documents, Meta executives were allegedly openly discussing their desperate need for high-quality content, acknowledging in a damning email, “Books are actually more important than web data.” To that end, the company allegedly turned straight to piracy hubs stacked high with stolen literary treasures – without a second thought or a single cent paid to their rightful owners, according to Forbes.

Meta staff turned to LibGen, home to more than 7.5 million pirated books and 81 million stolen research papers, to fill that gap. They did the same with Anna’s Archive.

…

In recently filed court documents, Meta, led by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is alleged to have deliberately and explicitly authorized a raid on LibGen—and Anna’s Archive, another massive digital pirate haven—to train its latest AI model, Llama 3.

The fallout has infuriated authors worldwide whose life’s work may have been quietly scooped up and fed into Zuckerberg’s latest technological brainchild without credit, consent, or compensation.

As the article notes, Meta’s 2024 financial statements showcase revenues topping a staggering $164 billion, with profits nearing $62 billion. Clearly, Meta had the means and muscle to fairly compensate creators, publishers, and researchers. Instead, they allegedly chose to steal that content for training purposes.

Critics argue this saga is more than just corporate greed;

They might even have acted as the leader in LLM input data and created licensed arrangements that respected an author’s rights. Imagine if the company had the corporate culture to be a leader on one of society’s latest and most important questions: Who owns content in the LLM?

Coincidentally, Meta’s “focus on long-term impact” core value states: “We emphasize long-term thinking that encourages us to extend the timeline for the impact we have, rather than optimizing for near-term wins.”

It seems very clear that Meta was indeed optimizing for near-term wins in this case, instead of outlining a corporate culture and leadership position of collaboration and authenticity.

Meta’s defense, meanwhile, leans on the “fair use” argument – suggesting their AI transforms stolen content into something sufficiently new. But legal experts stress fair use typically applies to educators, reviewers, and critics – not trillion-dollar tech giants profiteering off mass commercial data harvesting.

The author of the Forbes piece checked The Atlantic‘s Alex Reisner’s LibGen tracking tool and made a disturbing discovery: all five of their own published books were found pirated and included in Meta’s dataset.

Why isn’t this criminal copyright infringement? https://t.co/hkZeYxlkJJ

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) March 31, 2025

A major class-action lawsuit has been filed alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition – while other firms “are likely guilty of similar sins,” according to the author.

Ultimately, this saga goes beyond Meta alone. The entire AI industry’s insatiable thirst for data urgently needs clear ethical guardrails. Tech giants must form sustainable, fair partnerships with content creators or risk stifling creativity, undermining intellectual property rights, and eroding public trust.

Authored by Luis Cornelio via Headline USA,

The Trump administration has fired nearly half the bureaucrats at the obscure—and infamously named—U.S. Institute of Peace, as part of DOGE’s effort to cut government waste and reduce the size of the federal government. 

The mass firings, estimated to have affected between 200 and 300 workers and described by staffers as a “Friday night massacre,” came two weeks after President Donald Trump removed the agency’s president, Lise Grande. 

According to the liberal Washington Post, the Trump administration offered generous severance packages and an extra month of health insurance in exchange for workers signing agreements not to sue the government.  

The agreements are likely intended to avert additional lawsuits by bureaucrats attempting to force taxpayers to continue funding their salaries. 

What the U.S. Institute of Peace actually does was relatively unknown until it became a target of Trump’s downsizing efforts two weeks ago. 

Created by Congress in 1984, the self-described “nonpartisan” organization claimed via its Facebook page that it is “dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad.” 

It is unclear how USIP’s work differs from that of the already enormous Department of State and its global bureaucracy. 

“We put mediators in place to help stitch these communities back together,” an anonymous USIP employee told The Washington Post. 

“So it does have a dramatic effect on violence on the ground immediately by just pulling these assets out.” 

As recounted by the liberal newspaper, USIP attempted to challenge the White House’s authority to investigate its programs or fire workers, similar actions taken by the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development. 

USIP and members of the board filed a federal lawsuit, claiming that the executive branch lacks authority to shut down its operations because they were created by Congress. 

Sunday saw more threats directed at Iran by President Trump. He told NBC News in a phone interview, “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” This is the most explicit and direct threat yet, after similar rhetoric from the White House last week. Three weeks ago President Trump sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader, urging fresh negotiations toward a new nuclear deal. 

In that letter, which the Iranians only much belatedly acknowledged, Trump had issued a two-month deadline for Iran to sign a new deal, warning that if not then Tehran could face military action. Axios and other outlets have highlighted the movement of B-2 stealth bombers in the Indian Ocean, connected with the warnings issued to Iran:

In recent days, the U.S. military sent several B-2 stealth bombers to the Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean in a deployment a U.S. official said was “not disconnected” from Trump’s two-month deadline.

The same report notes, “The B-2 bombers can carry huge bunker buster bombs that would be a key element in any possible military action against Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.”

But the Islamic Republic has also long maintained underground ‘missile cities’. The immense size of these underground complexes would make it nearly impossible to take out all of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities without an intense, sustained war.

If a new major war in the Middle East kicked off under the Trump administration, it would become deeply unpopular even among the conservative base. The public is generally war-weary, which is also why Trump is pushing hard for peace in Ukraine.

Any new US bombing campaign in Iran could also complicate US efforts for peace in Ukraine, further as in parallel the US tries to keep the Abraham Accords in the Middle East alive.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has responded to these new Trump threats, saying Sunday that any future diplomatic discussion depends on Washington’s behavior. 

“While Iran’s response rules out the possibility of direct talks between the two sides, it states that the path for indirect negotiations remains open,” he said. “As we have stated before, Iran has never closed the channels of indirect communication. In its response, Iran reaffirmed that it has never shied away from engaging in negotiations, but rather, it has just been the United States’ repeated violations of agreements and commitments that have created problems on this path,” Pezeshkian added.

That’s when the Iranian leader emphasized, “It’s the behavior of the Americans that will determine whether the negotiations can move forward.” Iran has distrusted the Americans ever since Trump pulled out of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal in April 2018. Currently Iran is only offering ‘indirect’ talks on the nuclear issue.

Lately the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has described that the Islamic Republic’s current stockpile of 60% enriched uranium – if enriched to 90% – would be enough to produce six nuclear bombs.

Trump has recently brought back ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran, and has even this week advanced the possibility of cracking down on sanctions-busting Iranian oil exports on the high seas, using naval intervention. Clearly this is part of the big stick package of actions meant to push Tehran to the table. And now he’s talking secondary tariffs on Iranian oil as well.

An earlier Fox News interview in February marked the point at which Trump first laid out that Iran has two choices. “Everybody thinks Israel with our help or our approval will go in and bomb the hell out of them,” Trump had said at the time while discussing potential Israeli military action against Tehran.

“I would prefer that not happen. I’d much rather see a deal with Iran where we can do a deal, supervise, check it, inspect it,” the president had emphasized.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

• Some areas in the Permian have hit geological limits while others, yet to be drilled, are not expected to be as prolific as the prime Tier 1 acreage.

• Despite record U.S. crude oil production, limits to growth have started to emerge.

• In the Permian, the gas-to-oil ratio (GOR) has steadily risen from 34% of total production in 2014 to 40% in 2024.

After more than a decade of relentless drilling in the top U.S. oil-producing basin, the Permian, some areas have hit geological limits while others, yet to be drilled, are not expected to be as prolific as the prime Tier 1 acreage that producers have started to exhaust.

Top executives at major shale firms have already expressed opinions that Permian oil production could hit its peak as early as the end of this decade.

To be sure, crude oil output in the top basin continues to rise, but growth has slowed since 2022—not only because producers restrain capex and don’t drill themselves into oblivion.

Higher gas-to-oil ratio and water-to-oil ratio in the Permian suggest that some formations in the basin are reaching geological constraints, and more drilling isn’t necessarily proportionate to the oil volumes produced.

The Permian still leads U.S. oil production growth and will do so in the coming years, forecasters including the Energy Information Administration (EIA) say.

Total U.S. crude oil production is expected to average 13.61 million bpd this year, rising to 13.76 million bpd next year, according to the EIA’s latest Short-Term Energy Outlook. 

Despite record U.S. crude oil production, limits to the growth have started to emerge, executives acknowledge.

Vicki Hollub, the chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, said at the CERAWeek conference early this month, “We think that between 2027 and 2030 it’s likely that the U.S. will see peak production, and after that some decline.”

Ryan Lance, CEO at ConocoPhillips, expects U.S. oil production to plateau this decade and remain flat for an undefined period of time after 2030.

“It’s going to be a slow decline beyond that because there’s a lot of resource” left to drill, Lance told the CERAWeek conference.

However, what’s left to drill may not be as oil-yielding as the best Permian locations, which were the first to be tapped by drillers.

Production of associated natural gas from the Permian, the Eagle Ford, and the Bakken oil wells has surged over the past decade, the EIA says.

In the Permian, the gas-to-oil ratio (GOR) has steadily risen from 34% of total production in 2014 to 40% in 2024.

Pressure within the reservoir declines as more oil is brought to the surface, which allows more natural gas to be released from the geologic formation. The pressure will also decrease as more wells are concentrated within an area, the EIA says.

Another ratio is even more suggestive of the Permian oil wells and the operating costs for drilling wells—produced water.

The water-to-oil ratio in the Permian is much higher than in other basins. On average, four barrels of water are produced for each barrel of oil, according to data from oilfield water analytics firm B3 Insight cited by Reuters.

While the Permian crude production is set to exceed 6.5 million bpd in 2025, up from more than 6 million bpd in 2024, the basin “is simultaneously generating an unprecedented volume of produced water—a costly and complex byproduct of hydrocarbon extraction,” B3 Insight said this week.

Crude-focused wells in the Permian account for the vast majority of the produced water generated in the leading U.S. shale plays, analysts at RBN Energy said last year.

The higher produced water ratio will ultimately drive costs for oil producers higher, according to Shannon Flowers, director of crude and water marketing at Coterra Energy.

“There are only so many places to drill, inject and frac, and as that goes down, you still have to find a home for the rest of your produced water,” Flowers told Reuters.

Higher costs to dispose of, reuse, or recycle produced water isn’t good news for U.S. oil producers who are already concerned with the U.S. Administration’s preference of a $50 a barrel oil price.

“There cannot be “U.S. energy dominance” and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory. At $50-per-barrel oil, we will see U.S. oil production start to decline immediately and likely significantly (1 million barrels per day plus within a couple quarters),” an executive at an exploration and production firm wrote in comments to the Dallas Fed Energy Survey for the first quarter of 2025.

“The U.S. oil cost curve is in a different place than it was five years ago; $70 per barrel is the new $50 per barrel,” the executive noted.