US Secretary of State John Kerry may be starting to enjoy the brinkmanship, as he says it's "unclear" whether the US and Iran would reach a political framework nuclear deal before the end of this month.

Loud applause may be heard in corridors ranging from Tel Aviv to Riyadh.

As negotiations resume in Lausanne, the fact is a potential nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (US, UK, France, BRICS members Russia and China, and Germany) is bound to open the possibility of more Iranian oil exports - thus leading oil prices to fall even further. As of early this week, Brent crude was trading at $54.26 a barrel.

Assuming the US and the EU nations that are part of P5+1 really agree to implement the suspension of UN sanctions by the summer (Russia and China already agree), not only will Iran be exporting more energy - that should take a few months - but also OPEC as a whole will be increasing its oversupply.

The EU badly wants to buy loads of Iranian energy - and invest in Iranian energy infrastructure. Beijing, a key yet discreet member of the P5+1, is also watching these developments very carefully.

Whatever happens, for China this is a win-win situation, as Beijing keeps actively building up its strategic petroleum reserves profiting from low prices. And even as oil prices also remain under pressure from the strong US dollar - which makes oil way more expensive if you are paying with a different currency - that's certainly no problem for China, with its mammoth US dollar reserves.

The oil price war essentially unleashed by Saudi Arabia has hit Iran with a bang. The country may be down, but not out. There were no good options for Tehran except to try to keep its market share by offering the same discounts - especially to Asia - the Saudis are offering.

Tehran has been under a tsunami of nasty Western sanctions for years, which limit its ability to export oil and increase production. It's extremely difficult for the Iranian governments to reduce the gap of the expected revenue based on previous high oil prices.

Now the name of the game among major oil producers is to keep market share at all costs. Iran can't escape it - as it needs to keep in check at all times the fear of oversupply and its desire to increase production. Some oil producing countries are definitely keeping upcoming oil supplies out of the market. The result is Iran will have serious trouble going for more production and more exports while trying to regain its pre-sanctions market share.

The Russian president has again denounced attempts to rewrite WWII history, noting that the authors seek to sow strife between peoples and nations for their own geopolitical purposes.

Putin said the cynical lies about the Great Patriotic War and the attempts to blacken the reputation of the Soviet people and the Red Army have nothing to do with the truth. The president's comments came at the Tuesday session of the committee preparing the May 9 celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The Great Patriotic war is the traditional Russian title for the 1941-45 campaign against Germany and its allies.

"I reject these shameless conclusions and so called observations that have nothing to do with the truth. Their objective is clear - they want to undermine the power and moral authority of modern Russia and deprive it of the winner nation status with all consequences that would follow in international law," Putin told the committee members. "They want to divide peoples and instigate conflicts among them, to use historical lies in geopolitical games."

The president urged all committee members to maintain their efforts in upholding the truth about the war and the Soviet Union's input in repelling the Nazi threat.

A multi-million dollar Australian Government funded project at the University of Sydney, linked to spin doctors in Washington, is using a biased and secretive method to help discredit elections in a range of 'enemy' countries. The Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) joins the United States Studies Centre (USSC), established in 2007, as another heavily politicised initiative which compromises the independence of Australia's oldest university (see Anderson 2010).

A key target is socialist Venezuela, which is facing yet another destabilisation campaign, backed by Washington. The recent rounds of violence began in early 2014 and recently led to the arrest of several opposition figures for murder and coup plotting. The pretext for the violence has been that the government of President Nicolas Maduro is somehow democratically illegitimate.

However the radical, popular 'Bolivarian' governments have won 12 of Venezuela's last 13 elections. Further, 80% of the voting age population participated in the 2013 election, won by Maduro (International IDEA 2015). That is a massive increase on 1990s levels, when the Chavez phenomenon effectively sidelined the old and moribund two party system. And the electoral system is secure. Even the political journalist for anti-government paper El Universal described Venezuela's electoral system as 'one of the most technologically advanced verifiable voting systems in the world', with protections against fraud and tampering and scrutineered random recount mechanisms (Martinez 2013).

Sydney University's 'Electoral Integrity Project' tells a very different story. According to their 2015 report, Venezuela's Presidential election in 2013 was one of the worst in the world, ranking 110 out of 127. They corroborate their data with a survey claiming President Maduro only had a 24% popularity rating, with '85% believing that the country was heading in the wrong direction' (Norris et al 2015: 31). The EIP did not mention the Hinterlaces Polls, which have had Maduro's popularity (during the recent crisis) ranging from 39% to 52%; nor do they cite polls showing overwhelming rejection of the opposition's violent attempts to remove the elected president (Dutka 2014).

A certain unhappy incident happened to my aunt in the summer of 1966. The Cultural Revolution—a political movement initiated by Mao Zedong—was beginning to engulf the country. That same year many American college students were protesting against the Vietnam War and Leonid Brezhnev was keeping his seat warm as the General Secretary of CPSU, having replaced the somewhat volatile Nikita Khrushchev two years earlier. My aunt was then a freshman studying literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.

It so happened that my aunt, then a sensitive and somewhat dreamy young woman, had stubbornly and haplessly clung to certain musical tastes which at that time in China came to be regarded as politically incorrect, being said, in the trendy ideological jargon of that time, to reflect "decadent bourgeois revisionist aesthetics." To wit, my aunt had kept in her record collection a rendition of "The Urals Mountain-Ash" (Уральская Рябинушка), a Russian folk song in which a young girl meets two nice boys under a mountain-ash tree and must choose between them, performed by the National Choir of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was an old-style LP spinning at 78 RPM. It had a red emblem in the middle emblazoned with "CCCP."

One of my aunt's roommates, who probably had always resented her for one reason or another, found out about it and reported her to the authorities. For this rather serious infraction, student members of the Red Guard made my aunt publicly smash her beloved record, then kneel upon the fragments and recite an apology to Chairman Mao while fellow-students threw trash at her face shouting "Down with Soviet revisionists!" This generation of Chinese young people, who once donned Red Guard uniforms, beat people up around the country and smashed various cultural artifacts, is now mostly living on government pensions or earning meagre profits from home businesses, but some have prospered and can be found among the upper crust of contemporary China's business, cultural, and political elites.

Kiev has withdrawn its heavy artillery from the line of contact in eastern Ukraine and is prepared to deliver humanitarian aid to the region, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Tuesday.

"Today, we have come to agreement on fulfilling the Minsk agreements...Ukraine announces that it will fulfill each point...Ukraine has withdrawn heavy artillery in accordance with the procedure set out by the OSCE, and Ukraine is ready to provide a solution to the humanitarian issue to occupied territories of individual regions of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," Poroshenko said after talks with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in Kiev.

Continual violence in Donbas pushed the leaders of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine to negotiate a reconciliation deal on February 12 in Minsk. Alongside the February 15 ceasefire and heavy weapon withdrawal, the agreement includes an "all-for-all" prisoners exchange.

East Ukraine's regions of Donetsk and Luhansk completed the pullout of heavy artillery March 1. The withdrawal is one of the key points of the ceasefire deal, hammered out by the leaders of Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine in February and signed by Kiev forces and independence supporters.

US Army Europe Commander Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges announced Tuesday that training of three battalions of the Ukrainian army by US instructors had been delayed, Bloomberg reported.

Speaking at Defense Writers Group breakfast, Hodges said the training, originally scheduled to begin next week, had been delayed "to give more time for Minsk agreement implementation."

In early March, the US government announced that it had deployed 300 military personnel to Ukraine for a joint training mission.

The announcement was made amid fulfillment of a truce between Kiev forces and Donbas pro-independence militias signed in Minsk, Belarus. Under the peace plan, the sides ceased fire a month ago and pulled heavy weaponry away from the line of contact.

Washington has been providing Kiev with non-lethal military support since the beginning of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine in April 2014. The US Congress authorized President Obama to supply Kiev with weapons, but he remains publicly reluctant to do so.

Kiev will recognize only those Donetsk and Luhansk officials elected under Ukrainian law, President Petro Poroshenko said Tuesday.

"Ukraine's stand is as follows: we will deal with Donetsk and Luhansk representative legitimately elected under Ukrainian law," Poroshenko wrote in his Twitter.

Donetsk and Luhansk's special status is one of 13 conditions agreed to last month in Minsk. Previous attempts to grant these regions legal status were made in talks in the Belarusian capital last fall, but were scrapped by winter.

His remarks followed a Monday legislative initiative granting special status to the southeast Ukrainian regions after local elections are held, which the country's parliament will consider Tuesday.

The measure is part of the latest effort to end the 11-month conflict in the region that the United Nations documents has to date claimed over 6,000 lives.

Moscow has expressed concern that despite Kiev's undertaking to devolve its powers to southeast Ukraine ahead of constitutional reform expected by the end of 2015, Poroshenko's proposal is crammed with unnegotiated amendments and preconditions.

Liberal and conservative groups rarely agree on any issue, but when it comes to the White House trying to play a cat and mouse game with information, the groups are united in crying foul.

The White House is exempting its Office of Administration from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, saying it is not a federal agency and therefore not bound by the FOIA law. FOIA requests allow the public to request information from federal agencies. The Office of Administration handles White House record keeping, such as archiving emails.

The office had always complied with FOIA requests - in fact, it has been for the last 30 years since the FOIA law went into effect — and the change comes from a White House that promised greater transparency under an Obama administration.

Ironically, the change was announced on National Freedom of Information Day and at the start of Sunshine Week, an effort by news organizations and watchdog groups to highlight issues of government transparency.

"The irony of this being Sunshine Week is not lost on me," said Anne Weismann of the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

It appears the sea of de-dollarization has reached the shores of Europe. With Australia and UK having already moved in the direction of joining the China-led AIIB, The FT reports that France, Germany, and Italy have now all agreed to join the development bank as 'pivot to Asia' appears to be Plan B for Europe. As Greg Sheridan previously noted, "the saga of the China Bank is almost a textbook case of the failure of Obama's foreign policy," but as The FT concludes, the European decisions represent a significant setback for the Obama administration, which has argued that western countries could have more influence over the workings of the new bank if they stayed together on the outside. As Forbes notes, this leaves Obama with 3 uncomfortable options...

As The FT reports,

France, Germany and Italy have all agreed to follow Britain's lead and join a China-led international development bank, according to European officials, delivering a blow to US efforts to keep leading western countries out of the new institution.

The decision by the three European governments comes after Britain announced last week that it would join the $50bn Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a potential rival to the Washington-based World Bank.

...

The European decisions represent a significant setback for the Obama administration, which has argued that western countries could have more influence over the workings of the new bank if they stayed together on the outside and pushed for higher lending standards.

The AIIB, which was formally launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping last year, is one element of a broader Chinese push to create new financial and economic institutions that will increase its international influence. It has become a central issue in the growing contest between China and the US over who will define the economic and trade rules in Asia over the coming decades.

Three more suspects in last month's assassination of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov have been officially charged with his murder, the Interfax news agency reported Monday, as the main suspect's lawyer said his client had an alibi.

Zaur Dadayev's lawyer, Ivan Gerasimov, told the RBC newspaper Monday that his client had an alibi on the night Nemtsov was killed. Gerasimov told the newspaper that Dadayev was in Moscow, but nowhere near where the murder took place, without elaborating.

Earlier Monday, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov, Shagid Gubashev and Khamzat Bakhayev, three of the five Chechen men arrested earlier this month in connection with Nemtsov's murder, joined Dadayev — a senior police officer — and Anzor Gubashev in being charged with the killing.

An unnamed source close to the investigation told Interfax that law enforcement had changed the charges against the suspects, replacing the charge of murder motivated by greed or mercenary purposes with that of murder based on "political, ideological, racial, ethnic or religious hatred or enmity."