Russia’s oil industry
WHEN the price of oil reached another record on May 6th, of over $122 a barrel, analysts pointed to attacks on pipelines in Nigeria and turmoil in Iraq as the immediate causes. Even small disruptions to supplies from such places can cause the price to jump, since only Saudi Arabia has the capacity [...]

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The reality is that as far as the current run-up in gasoline prices is concerned, other factors are more to blame: shrinking oil output from such key producers as Mexico, Russia and Venezuela; internal violence in Iraq and Nigeria; refinery inadequacies in the U.S. and elsewhere; speculative stockpiling by global oil brokers, and so on. [...]

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The principal characteristic of twenty-first-century international relations is turning out to be nonpolarity: a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power. This represents a tectonic shift from the past.
The twentieth century started out distinctly multipolar. But after almost [...]

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While our attention has been directed toward threats to our economy from terror attacks resulting in disruptions of oil shipments from the Middle East, a titanic situation has been brewing in Nigeria. FSM Contributing Editor J. Peter Pham, Ph.D., has this critically important story.
In a study published several years ago, two scholars who themselves hail [...]

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