satyendra ranjan

A Distant Observer
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Tweets of articles and news items as well all retweets are not endorsement.

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Iran's chief negotiator Ghalibaf has finalized the immediate release of $12 billion in frozen Iranian assets during the Switzerland talks, with Deputy FM Gharibabadi saying implementation is now urgently underway, per Tasnim. This directly contradicts VP Vance's new claim that "no money is being released to Iran."

Iran also refused to use the unfrozen funds to buy US agricultural products, saying Iran has "no obligation to buy agricultural products from the United States" under the existing agreement, rejecting Vance and Jared Kushner's framework requiring Iran to do so.

[Iran Observer @IranObserver0]

⚡️BREAKING: An Armada of oil Tankers loaded with Iranian oil is heading for East Asia

China, South Korea, and Japan have purchased all of the Iranian oil currently available

[Sushant Singh @SushantSin]

This is what Modi's response to Trump's demands has been. India's trade surplus with the US has shrunk by 40%.

[Saurabh Bharadwaj @Saurabh_MLAgk]

After loot of Ram’s Ayodhya, here comes loot of Mahakaal’s Ujjain.

Madhya Pradesh CM Mohan Yadav & his family members have been on buying huge land parcels in & around Ujjain. They obviously have prior insider information about the advantage this land will get on the basis of Govt decisions.

So thousands of crores will be made by this family and will legitimised as being earned out of real estate business.

SHAME is a small word for BJP !!

[Sachin Gupta @Sachingupta]

उत्तर प्रदेश के बरेली में ताजिया जुलूस के दौरान "पाकिस्तान जिंदाबाद" का नारा लगाया गया।

योगेन्द्रपाल ने यह Video सोशल मीडिया पर डाला और आरोप लगाया कि नारेबाजी का विरोध करने पर हिंदू समुदाय के लोगों को पीटा गया।

पुलिस जांच में खुलासा हुआ है कि योगेन्द्रपाल सिंह और भुवनेश कुमार ने 12 साल के मुस्लिम बच्चे से कहकर यह नारा लगवाया और माहौल भड़काने के लिए Video बनाकर खुद वायरल कर दिया। दोनों युवक गिरफ्तार हैं।
@Asifansari9410

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Iran rejects new claims by Trump, Vance, and Treasury Secretary Bessent that Iran has agreed to nuclear sites inspections as a "first step in permanently denuclearizing" Iran, saying the US claims are "very damaging" and the arrival of IAEA inspectors would itself violate the MOU, with Iranian officials having already prevented IAEA Director Grossi from attending Sunday's negotiations and emphasizing that Iran's "nuclear ambiguity" policy, where the location of enriched materials is unknown to the US, is one of Iran's most important strategic assets that it will not give up and "will only benefit the enemy" if compromised, per Tasnim.

Iran's FM Spokesperson Baghaei also said Iran made "no new commitments" on the nuclear file during the 18 hours of Switzerland talks, did not negotiate the nuclear issue at all and does not plan to in the future.

Iran further described IAEA inspectors as "America's foot soldiers," which Iran says is the reason why no official has agreed to inspections.

[Cockroach is Back @Cockroachisback]

1 am 23rd June

Delhi Police, in the dead of night began to move the barricades to squeeze the protest site into a smaller area.

Cockroaches got whiff and swarmed to the barricades to prevent the Police from carrying out its clandestine plans!

#SaddaHaq

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Iran's Ghalibaf:

In the middle of the discussions, I learned that Trump had made threatening remarks regarding our president, the negotiating team, and possible attacks on our territory.

I told Vance: “We are here engaged in talks, and according to the signed understanding, the first clause states that there should be no threats or coercion. Yet today your president has issued threats. Understand that we never negotiate under threats or pressure.”

We ended the negotiations, left the meeting, and did not return.

The American side sought another meeting through the mediators, but we refused. The Qatari and Pakistani mediators then came to us, and we told them that we would speak with them, but not with the American side directly.

The outcome of these discussions and the 80-minute negotiations was the statement later released by the Pakistani and Qatari side.

[BreakThrough News @BTnewsroom]

Colombian youth flooded the streets of Bogota Sunday night in support of presidential candidate Ivan Cepeda.

The preliminary count places the far-right, Trump-backed Abelardo de la Espriella in first place at 49.66% of the votes and the progressive Cepeda at 48.7%.

In a speech to his supporters Sunday night, Cepeda said the preliminary vote count was “not official nor binding” and vowed to challenge results from over 30,000 voting stations.

Throughout the leadup to Sunday’s runoff election, Cepeda supporters accused the other side of fraud, vote-buying, intimidation, and foreign interference.

[Saurabh Bharadwaj @Saurabh_MLAgk]

Jantar Mantar & Right wing toolkit

The policemen at Jantar Mantar befriend youth who distribute sharbat/water.

Then causally ask for their mobile number as a gesture of friendliness.

Then, police tracks their home address from mobile service provider’s database.

Then, Crime branch & local police officers go to the address to intimidate families.

[Cockroach is Back @Cockroachisback]

Delhi Police reached the home of one of the cockroaches who has been helping protesters with water bottles.

Has it become a crime to give water to the thirsty at a protest?

We are cockroaches - we ARE NOT SCARED of intimidation tactics 🪳

[The Cradle @TheCradleMedia]

China backs Iran sovereignty and urges implementation of breakthrough US peace roadmap
——
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi threw Beijing's weight behind the implementation of the new Iran-US memorandum of understanding, stating it will consolidate the region's fragile ceasefire and open new horizons for bilateral relations. Speaking during a meeting with an Iranian security official in India, Wang emphasized that Beijing firmly supports Tehran's right to protect its sovereignty and security amid the ongoing geopolitical shift.

The Chinese diplomat stated that Beijing remains ready to continue assisting in its own way to play a constructive role in restoring peace and tranquility to the region as soon as possible. The statement follows a major diplomatic breakthrough in Switzerland, where Iran and the US agreed to a 60-day roadmap toward a final peace deal to end the US-Israeli war launched on 28 February.

China's public endorsement highlights growing international backing for the Lake Lucerne Summit agreements, which include establishing a multilateral "deconfliction cell" to oversee the halt of Israeli aggression in Lebanon.

[Anant Goenka @anantgoenka_rpg]

I led a @ficci_india CEO delegation to China and visited companies like BYD, Geely, Midea, Mindray.

My 3 top takeaways:

1. China is like a no frills fighting ring. Extremely competitive. Businesses operate at margins (2-3%) global boards would never approve. Only market share matters and there is no concept of ROI. The few who survive are the toughest and the best.

2. R&D and automation are at the highest levels. The scale of automation and R&D investment at these companies is built for a 10-year time horizon, not a quarterly one. They celebrate innovators, have walls of patents and dark factories with unmatched efficiency.

3. The state is a silent shareholder everywhere. Cheap capital, land, power, and policy support at a scale that fundamentally changes unit economics. As long as you service interest (@ only 2-3%), debt doesn’t have to be paid back. This isn’t a level playing field.

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

BREAKING: Keir Starmer Resigns

Media sold Starmer as 'forensic, decent & capable' PM. He was NEVER that as we made clear yrs ago:

"Starmer is a LIAR in charge of a brutal, authoritarian, inhuman political machine but you wouldn't know about that if you read or watched UK media"

[Iran in India @Iran_in_India]

Iran’s Deputy Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council met with China’s Foreign Minister on the sidelines of the BRICS meeting in New Delhi to discuss regional developments, bilateral cooperation, and the implementation of the peace agreement. Dr. Ghadir Nezami expressed appreciation for China’s political support and emphasized the importance of strengthening the strategic partnership between Tehran and Beijing, as well as Iran’s readiness to respond to any potential threats. China’s Foreign Minister reaffirmed support for Iran’s security and territorial integrity, welcomed the improvement of Iran’s relations with regional countries, and expressed Beijing’s willingness to contribute to diplomatic efforts aimed at promoting regional stability. Both sides underscored the importance of maintaining close consultations and expanding bilateral cooperation.

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

A far-right millionaire backed by Donald Trump has won the Colombian presidential election by the thinnest of margins.

With more than 99.9% of the ballots counted, lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella received 12.96 million votes (49.66%) compared to his leftwing opponent Iván Cepeda’s 12.7 million (48.7%) – a difference of only 250,000 votes.

The margin was smaller than in the first round of voting, in which De la Espriella beat Cepeda by 673,000 votes.

De la Espriella’s victory represents a hard swing to the right for the South American nation after four years of president Gustavo Petro, who had promised to break with the country’s “neoliberal model”.

Petro, a member of the Marxist guerrilla 19th of April Movement (M-19) in his teens, pursued a progressive domestic agenda including strengthening worker protections, an increase in social spending and agrarian reform – redistributing 570,000 hectares to peasant farmers and indigenous communities.

The sitting president was unable to seek reelection, having reached his term limit under the Colombian constitution.

Cepeda, who stood as the leftwing Historic Pact candidate, was one of the key architects of the "total peace" negotiations with armed groups aimed at achieving a permanent end to paramilitary violence in Colombia.

The 63-year-old alleged irregularities in the vote count and said that lawyers for his party were “proceeding to challenge 33,000 polling stations across the country” as supporters demonstrated across the country, The Guardian reported.

De la Espriella has been a US citizen since 2023 after living and working as a lawyer in Miami. He has styled himself as his country’s answer to Donald Trump, with some of his supporters even donning hats reading "Make Colombia Great Again!"

The admiration cuts both ways, with Trump vocally backing De la Espriella and responding to the Colombian’s electoral victory with a Truth Social post that read: "He Won, BIG!"

During the campaign the US president offered his endorsement to De la Espriella and said he would have the "total support and strength of the United States behind him" while denouncing Cepeda as a “radical left Marxist”.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Keir Starmer could have ended child poverty, homelessness and the grotesque levels of inequality in this country.

Instead, he abandoned those in need, destroyed our civil liberties and facilitated genocide in Gaza.

That is how this Prime Minister will be remembered - and that is the legacy of moral and political bankruptcy he leaves behind.

The crises in our society are not going away. Neither are we - and we will keep fighting for a more equal, peaceful and dignified society for all.

[Sachin Gupta @Sachingupta]

पेरेंट्स की थिंकिंग है कि मोदी भगवान हैं। उन्हीं की बेटी ज्योति दिल्ली के जंतर–मंतर पर कॉकरोच जनता पार्टी के प्रोटेस्ट में पहुंची है। पूरी बात सुनिए...
@dilnawazpasha

[Nel B. @noirnen]

A Note on Trump's Praise as a Signal of Concession

A reader asked me to expand on something I wrote recently: that there is a distinct pattern in which Trump's public approval of a foreign leader indicates a structural concession has already been made somewhere or will soon be made. I want to unpack that, because it's a pattern that holds consistently once you start looking for it, and it reveals something important about how the current imperial apparatus operates.

First, a clarification. I am not pointing to Trump because I think he personally drives US foreign policy. He is a signaler, a public face of a much larger apparatus that includes finance, the security establishment, and the transnational corporate networks that actually set the terms. But in the current media structure, his statements function as cues.

Venezuela is the clearest and most brutal case. Maduro was kidnapped. A concessionary framework was imposed: Treasury waivers, de facto control over oil revenues, the reintegration of Venezuela into US-policed financial circuits under the guise of "reconstruction." Trump publicly signaled approval of the new arrangement almost immediately. In Iran, we had a similar situation at the height of the war, when Trump tweeted praise about new leadership, while an article in Foreign Affairs by Javad Zarif titled “How Iran should End the War” came out, in which basically the terms of the current MoU had been written down. I’m not saying that this is a coup, but again, maybe just the possibility of the MoU was seen as a concession.

But the pattern extends beyond Venezuela and Iran. In Mexico, to a certain degree. In Colombia. In Brazil. Across Latin America, whenever a left-wing or progressive government grants a structural concession—something the public doesn't yet see, something not yet announced—Trump's tone shifts. He praises the leader. He says they're "reasonable," "doing a great job," "a very smart man." Shortly after, the action becomes visible: an increase in tariffs on Chinese products, a Chinese infrastructure project quietly cancelled, a critical minerals deal reopened, some form of military cooperation forcefully agreed to.

Now, let me be clear about something important. The US-led imperial core still prefers right-wing governments outright. Full stop. They are more reliable, more compliant, require less management, and align ideologically with the project of deregulation, extraction, and militarization that the core requires. The concessions extracted from left-wing or progressive governments are a second-best outcome: a way to secure leverage when outright regime change is temporarily unfeasible, too costly, or diplomatically inconvenient.

That is why, across Latin America and the Caribbean right now, we are seeing a parallel process. On one track, soft coups and hybrid warfare against governments that resist: lawfare, economic strangulation, media campaigns, the mobilization of comprador factions. On the other track, integrationist deals with factions that are willing to negotiate their country's insertion into the imperial financial and logistical architecture, most likely under threat of kinetic action. Cuba is the extreme case—a full siege.

The pattern, then, is not about Trump's whims or his personal deal-making prowess. It is about what his public statements reveal about the concessions that have already been extracted behind closed doors. When he praises a leader who was previously an adversary, the deal is already done or they are at least quite sure, that some steps will be taken toward it.

This is part of what I mean when I talk about the fragmentationist grand strategy and the multi-layered cage. The empire needs compliant elites, open financial circuits, and the quiet, incremental surrender of sovereign leverage.

[Shashank Mattoo @MattooShashank]

Breaking: Indians are among the 15 dead and 66 reported injured in massive explosion at an LNG facility in Qatar, says the country's energy minister