Diesel fuel prices are already at record highs in Poland, but there are fears the situation on the Polish fuel market could become much worse. With the Saudi East-West pipeline now down after a series of drone strikes, not only prices are an issue but obtaining sufficient fuel supply could be the real worst-case scenario.
On Sept. 10, the East-West pipeline, which transports oil from Saudi Arabia’s oil fields to a port on the Red Sea, was hit with a wave of drone strikes from Iraq. The pipeline transmits 7 million barrels a day and was one of the most important ways to bypass the blocked Strait of Hormuz. There is still significant speculation of when the bombed out pumping station will reopen. A longer shutdown could have devastating consequences, as some experts predict. This oil supply accounts for approximately 4 percent of global oil flows and the question now remains whether repairs to the pumping station could just produce yet another round of drone strikes.
Polish drivers may also feel the consequences very soon. As Adam Sikorski, president of Unimot, points out, the market situation was already difficult before the escalation.
“The economy is inexorable. The published wholesale price of diesel fuel on Friday, including VAT, was already PLN 8.95 per liter ·(€2.07). At this level of wholesale price, the retail price above PLN 9 per liter may start appearing at other stations ” he told Polish media outlet Fakt.
Prices at stations are reacting with a delay because the fuel currently sold may have been purchased earlier, at lower prices.
How bad can it get?
An additional problem is the insufficient refining capacities in Europe and the shutdown of some plants in the Middle East. According to Sikorski, this leads to record refining profit margins.
“It is really very close to fuel in the country reaching PLN 10 per liter. And this is unfortunately not the most pessimistic scenario,” warns the president of Unimot.
The largest gas and oil company in Poland, Orlen, also commented on the situation. The company assures that it has a diversified portfolio of suppliers and its own resources, thanks to which it can respond to changes in the global market. The government may try to mitigate increases through tax changes, e.g. concerning VAT or excise duties.
Sikorski points out, however, that artificially lowering prices may increase demand in a situation of limited supply.
The most worrying scenario, however, is one in which the problem ceases to be the price itself.
“In an extreme scenario, I would no longer focus on price. The physical availability of fuels could become a much more serious problem,” warned the Unimot president.
For decades, African economies have operated within a system of rules established without their participation. Credit ratings, which dictate the cost of borrowing, are assigned by three Western agencies. Trade is conducted in dollars via SWIFT—a system that, as it turns out, can be switched off for political reasons. Today, that order is no longer […]
The real threat to global stability and the well-being of citizens is not China’s strong economic performance but Washington’s colossal military spending, which drains the social sector and provokes global conflicts. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly campaigned against China’s trade surplus, including rallying 19 G20 members to disrupt China’s $1.2 trillion trade surplus […]
Consumers could be facing higher borrowing costs for longer as bond markets are once again signalling rising economic risk to the finance and investing community.
Consumers could be facing higher borrowing costs for longer as bond markets are once again signalling rising economic risk to the finance and investing community.
The strategic choice facing India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and other large developing economies does not just boil down to choosing between BRICS and the West. These countries continue to follow a multi-vector policy, aiming to simultaneously reap the benefits of cooperation with BRICS, the G7, the EU, and regional institutions. However, it is important […]
The Circular VAT consultation seeks stakeholder input on how VAT rules can be adapted to better support circular business models. The focus will be on three key areas: the treatment of second-hand goods, the destruction of viable goods, and the VAT deduction rules for passenger cars used for business purposes.
The consultation is part of a broader evaluation and impact assessment process, which will run in parallel and is expected to conclude in early 2027. The findings from this process will inform a legislative proposal aimed at amending the VAT Directive to better align with the objectives of the circular and low emission economy.
The consultation is open for eight weeks and will be accessible via the Commission's 'Have your Say' portal. Stakeholders, including business federations, SMEs, trade associations, national tax authorities, academics, and the general public, are encouraged to participate and share their views.
This initiative is a crucial step towards creating a more coherent VAT framework that supports the circular economy and contributes to the EU's environmental sustainability objectives.
Businesses, tax experts & sustainability advocates – share your views by 4 November 2026.
Over the 2026 Labor Day weekend, I had the honor of speaking at the Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium in Wheeling, West Virginia, organized by the Wheeling Academy of Law & Science (WALS) Foundation. The symposium takes place in Wheeling every year and adopts a different theme each year; this year, the theme was “The Art of Labor.” I got to represent TRNN and speak alongside a truly incredible lineup of artists and working-class warriors, including: Tabitha Arnold, the great textile artist and tapestry maker; Erik Ruin, printmaker and shadow puppeteer; and Shaun Slifer, a multidisciplinary artist and the Creative Director for the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.
The text below is a transcript of the talk I gave at this year’s Symposium, which has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can also listen to the audio recording of my speech on The Real News Network podcast feed.
Thank you. It is genuinely an honor to be here on these hallowed grounds with all of you in Wheeling, West Virginia. It really, really means a lot to me to be here with all of you.
I didn’t start out to become a labor journalist or to do the kinds of interviews I do with working people. I didn’t set out to make a life reporting on working-class struggles from working-class areas around the country, on the front lines of a class war that is hitting all of us in similar and different ways. I didn’t start out to be or do any of that. I started because I didn’t want my dad, the greatest man I know, to go to his grave feeling like a failure after we had lost everything during the Recession, including the house I grew up in, just like millions of other families. And we have continued to struggle, just like millions and millions and billions of us around the world have continued to struggle. And so, to be here standing in front of all of you—having started the show back then as a ruse to get my dad to talk about something he was so deeply depressed about and wouldn’t talk about—it means a whole lot for me and my family.
I really do want to thank all of you for being here. And of course, I want to thank Seán P. Duffy, Vincent DeGeorge, and everyone at the WALS Foundation for bringing us all together here on this hallowed ground.
I came here today from Baltimore to talk with you all about why stories matter to me, and why I believe they matter to us, or should matter more.
I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me. And the same is true for all of us and every one of us.
And when I say “I wouldn’t be here,” to start, I mean it literally. I quite literally and very quantifiably would not be standing here right now, speaking in this room with you all, alongside all these amazing people—none of you would have ever had to hear my name or see my ugly face, if I wasn’t such a hopeless, relentless, lifelong lover of stories.
(Also, I know y’all were hoping Kim Kelly would be here today. I apologize, I am no Kim Kelly. I am a fill-in for Kim Kelly, but I am one-third of the tattoos and one-third of the talent. So that’s what you’re getting today!)
I wouldn’t be doing the work that I do now as a journalist and Co-Executive Director of a news organization, I certainly wouldn’t be doing it the way I do it, I would not have pursued all those ill-advised degrees in literature before that, I would not have written or said or filmed all the things that I have and will, if I wasn’t an eternal believer in the awesome, human-making, history-making, and society-making power of stories.
Whether I’m reading them, writing them, watching them, listening to them, studying them, teaching them, recording them, filming them, remembering them, dreaming about them, thinking about them, or thinking through them, I love stories, and I need stories to live. Always have, ever since I can remember remembering anything.
Like any fool in love would do, I followed that need wherever it took me. I have madly chased it headfirst into the best and worst times of my life. It got me to the most beautiful, ivy covered college campuses I’ve ever seen, and it got me through the most body-crushing, mind-numbing, soul-rotting jobs I’ve ever had. It led me to my wife and fellow literature dweeb Meg, who’s sitting back there, and it opened up the path for me to make the purpose-filled life I have now, and to do the purpose-filled work I do now.
I have continued to chase that love and that need for stories headfirst into the best and worst places in the world, where the best and worst of humanity is on display. From picket lines to protest marches, from union halls to student encampments on college campuses, from the horror-filled halls of immigration courts where masked federal thugs are kidnapping and disappearing innocent people daily, to rural, urban, and suburban communities fighting data centers all over the country, from “deep red” Texas to “deep blue” Maryland, from Occupied Palestine to East Palestine, Ohio, from communities that have been devastated by poverty, industrial pollution, and organized abandonment and disinvestment to communities that have been devastated by plant closures and school shootings, from poisoned coal mining towns in West Virginia to poisoned neighborhoods in South Baltimore where that very same coal ends up, where that very same coal sits and moves through the giant coal terminal pier right next to people’s houses, and where that very same coal ends up in the poisoned lung tissue of the people who live there and have been inhaling that toxic coal dust for generations.
I have followed my need for stories and our people’s need to have our stories told and heard. I have followed that need to wherever I need to be, and I have followed it all the way here to Wheeling, West Virginia. (You wanna talk about stories? There are a few more storied places than this.)
And though it has caused me and my family more pain and grief and debt and disappointment along the way than I can ever possibly sum up to you, I have learned to check myself by asking myself: If the need that I have, if the love that I’ve followed, brought me to this beautiful place and gave me the chance to be here now with you beautiful people, then how can it be wrong?
If that need and that love has led me to my life’s continuing work of lifting up the stories of our fellow workers around the US and around the world, of using every medium and platform and every tool and skill I have to offer to help people find confidence in their own voice and share their story in their own words—if it has guided me to the frontlines of the class war to report the news through the stories and voices and faces and lives and bodies and souls and firsthand realities of the people at the center of “the story”—if that absurd, magical, lifelong pursuit of stories has in any way helped me help other working people like me and my family believe that their stories are actually worth telling and hearing and remembering, that their lives truly do matter more than this world has led us to believe and that we all truly do deserve better than what this world has forced us to accept—and if it has helped me help others see that we can get better and make a better world the better we are to each other and the more we share our stories and listen to each other’s stories—if my love and my need for stories and my belief in stories has contributed anything at all to that, then how can it not be worth it?
But when I say, “I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me,” I also mean it in the sense that I wouldn’t be the “I” that I am. I am me because of the stories that made me, the stories that made me more me than who I was before I experienced them, the stories that continue to make me who I am now and who I will be in all those versions of me to come.
I come from a family of storytellers. Being here in West Virginia, I got a sense you guys will know what I’m talking about. One of many things Mexicans and West Virginians have in common. I am the me that I am because of the people who raised me, the people who are and continue to be my life, the people who taught me how to live and be a person and become a self through their presences, their absences, and their stories. The stories they told and the stories they showed me and my siblings. Stories that hit back to the deepest end of my childhood beginnings of consciousness, stories that built my consciousness, stories that brought me out of human mud and helped shape me into human being.
For the same reasons I can always remember it being such a natural feeling to look out car windows and be fascinated and dazzled by all the warm lights of being out there, all those other homes and other lives people-like-me-but-not-me are living—for the same reasons I’ve always wondered about those other homes and lives and people—for all the same reasons I have always projected myself outward onto them and thought about them out of genuine curiosity and interest and goodwill—and for all the same reasons I have grown as a person the more I consider selves and lives that are not mine, I have always been naturally drawn to stories as a lifesource. Stories my family told me, stories I heard on the radio or saw on the TV, stories I read, stories I created.
Stories about human-beings-like-me-but-not-me, living in selves-and-bodies-like-mine-but-not-mine, living in times, places, circumstances, and worlds that are not the ones I live in and experience everyday. Stories that take my lifeworld and my perspective and open them up, open me up, to lives-like-mine-but-not-mine, to human perspectives other than the only perspective I can ever have and have ever had ever since I was born, ever since I’ve been me, Maximillian Lee Alvarez. All those stories now live on in me, and will continue to live on in me, so long as I live on as me.
Those stories live on through me in the impressions they have left on me. And they will continue to live on in me as formative parts of the person I became once those stories and my experiences of them became part of me. And they will continue to be a part of me and every version of me—all those selves I’ll ever become—so long as I am gifted to live on this earth as me.
These stories live on in the words I say and in the stories I tell to others. Because they have shaped the “me” that I am and the ways I use language to communicate with others and with myself, and the ways I use language to communicate myself to others and to myself.
They live on in the ways I cope with pain and failure, and what I learn from them.
Those stories live on in my thoughts and in the way I think. Now and for the rest of my life, they have their place in the vast, dazzling multiverse of mindstuff that my mind has to draw upon and remember from and think and dream and imagine with.
Over my lifetime, the stories I’ve found, the stories I’ve made, and the stories I’ve been told have shaped, challenged, corrected, sharpened, and reinforced my internal sense of right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, and what it means to be good, do good, and live a good life.
And if you’re feeling lost about those things right now, I’m telling you: Go back to our stories! We are not the only ones to face hard times. Our ancestors who faced such times left us their stories so that we would know what to do now. Don’t let those stories go to waste! There is power in them. We have power in them. (More on that in a minute.)
All those stories live on in the ways I try and have tried and will try to live and act and see and be in the world, in the ways I try and have tried and will try to see and treat other people and other life. And again, what I’m saying is true for me is, I fully believe, true for each and every one of us. And that on its own—even if you just take the people here in this room—is a miracle of life and nature and god and a joyous wonder to behold, on par with gazing out at the stars in the sky!
And yet, we so disinterestedly take all this for granted every day. We don’t appreciate stories enough, including our own stories and the stories of others. And I don’t think we appreciate this enough about the stories that make us and the roles stories play in making us human (and the role storylessness plays in our loss of humanity).
Just like we have been trained and trained ourselves to accept an unacceptable culture of violence and mass death that takes and destroys life everywhere with the kind of scale and self-serving abandon that would make the ancient gods of old blush, we have been trained and trained ourselves to lose touch with the magical, life-giving force of stories. And our life-sustaining love for stories has been beaten out of us by AI slop, by a shitty, commercialized culture industry, by living under capitalism and end-times fascism, etc. I get why we feel that way, and I feel it, too. But there’s something really, really wrong there.
Like our air and water and soil and atmosphere, I think we have been trained and trained ourselves to let stories be poisoned and polluted for so long that we will at worst cheer on their destruction or at best live monotonously without any urgent sense of duty or need to stop the destruction. Both paths inevitably lead to the same place: our own peril as a people, a society, and a species.
That’s why I think we miss the magic of stories and the magic in stories that’s all around us, available to us in so many forms, living in our heads and shaping who we are every day.
That’s why I think we tend to look at stories and the stories of others so mistrustfully or disinterestedly or scornfully or selfishly. We tend these days to not look for stories at all, let alone stories that challenge us and grow us. We don’t give them our time, and so many that are shoved in our faces aren’t worth our ime. And when we do look for them, we often look for the stories that we already know or stories that ultimately serve to stop us from growing and knowing more, stories that serve to stunt our being and reinforce the selves and prejudices we already have. What a waste of good magic!
Of course, we all want stories like that to some extent, and we all need stories that function like that to some extent. We all watched The Office five times during Covid. That’s fine. But what I’m talking about goes much deeper.
I’ll use myself as an example to try to explain.
I grew up in Southern California, post-Cold War, in the ‘90s. We were a middle-class mixed-immigrant family. We were the American Dream. And that’s why my dad and my mom and my family were so depressed after the 2008 Crash and the Recession, because we had had and lost the American Dream, and that really does a number on you and your soul.
The era I grew up in before the Crash was an era of America in which a lot of the dreams that I was foolish enough to have for my life still felt possible. And over the last 25-30 years, I think a lot of us have come to the awakening that many of those dreams, our dreams, are not possible in America anymore. At least not for working people like us. And after doing this kind of work for nearly a decade now, I’ve gotten confirmation from working people all over this country that I’m not the only one who feels that way.
It’s a real gift to contain all those different selves that I’ve been over my life, including the deep-red-conservative, Orange County dumbass who didn’t know much about life. I don’t despise or regret that version of myself, I accept him for all his faults. And I know I had a lot of right reasons for believing the wrong things back then. And I know that I still have so many good parts of me that were there in me when I was a conservative and that are here in me now as the lefty nut job you see before you. Because they’re just good things about being a good person. I don’t care who taught them to me, I’m just grateful they did.
I don’t see people in rigid identity or ideology boxes, and I try not to see myself that way either. And I definitely don’t like to see stories that way. And it’s in part because of stories that I don’t see the world that way. And yet, in this country, that is the way that we have trained ourselves to see each other and ourselves and our stories.
I remember being that younger, more conservative-type person and going into a Barnes & Noble and saying, “I want to read good, classic literature.” And the employee I talked to was like, “Oh, do you want French literature? Spanish literature? Feminist literature? African-American literature?” And I remember saying, “No, no, no. I want literature. I don’t want any of those ‘special interests.’”
That was a very juvenile way for me to think and feel about literature, but I think a lot of us can still relate to that feeling. I’m so grateful to literature especially, and to all the storytellers in my life and all the storytellers I’ve come across in my life, for teaching me over time, and for constantly reminding me, that that’s not what stories are there for. I’m grateful to them for teaching me how much it cheapens our relationship to stories—and the potential and beauty and magic we can derive from them—when we look at them and treat them this way. And stories themselves are the cure for this sickness. The more I read literature of all kinds, the less I thought about stories this way. The more I loved and connected with literature of all kinds, the more I grew and felt and thought and developed as a person with different kinds of me inside.
And so, I learned a very valuable lesson early on in life: That literature about other people, and that stories about other people—from other people’s perspectives, about the ways that they are living as people in this world—are not a threat to who I am. They make me who I am. They grow who I am.
And it’s for those reasons that it seems so clear and obvious when I say, “I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me, and you wouldn’t be here without the stories that made you.”
Think of all those stories that still live in your head today, that you still talk about with your friends and siblings, that you still have living somewhere in the recesses of your mind as warm memories of reading a good book, watching a good movie, or having a good conversation.
For me, I think about sitting in my living room with my whole family back home, watching the movie Glory, the epic historical drama about the 54th Massachusetts, the first Black regiment to fight in the Civil War. Why did our whole family of Alvarezes connect with that movie? I could go on a whole dissertation about why we connected with that movie (but I won’t do it here, don’t worry). We bawled our eyes out watching it then, and I still bawl my eyes out when I watch it now. We saw so much of ourselves—the Americans we believed we were, the America we believed we lived in and believed we were a part of—in that movie. And we clearly weren’t the only ones.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t know what it’s like to be a “freed” Black slave in the Antebellum South; and it doesn’t threaten my understanding or sense of being to watch a movie that storytellers, story-makers, and story-actors have produced to try to help me understand. It enhances my being. It gives me more access to beings- and selves- and lives-like-mine-but-not-mine, and they then become part of my experience and shape who I am and how I am in the world.
That’s part of the magic I’m talking about, the magic that makes us who we are, which we all just take for granted. It’s like we put on glasses that removed the power of stories from our vision, made it invisible to us. But it’s there. It’s all around us. It’s there in us.
It was there when I was listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” while driving here to Wheeling. Truly, one of the most beautiful stories about love and working-class life ever told in our language. And no matter what stage of my life I was in, it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t know what it was like to live as a Black, working-class lesbian in the industrial Midwest around the ‘80s and ‘90s. I still knew enough to know that to live was to love, to seek love, to be loved, and to pursue happiness, and I still knew enough to know why it is a heartbreaking tragedy for someone to have their love and their lives and their happiness denied or taken from them.
Who among us human beings hasn’t feared making the wrong choice immortalized in Chapman’s line, “We got to make a decision: leave tonight or live and die this way”? Who among us living people cannot relate to the pain and fear and drama and yearning in the stories of other people who spend their precious, short time on this earth living unfulfilled, unhappy lives full of unrequited love and unrealized dreams, even if they weren’t our dreams?
I could relate to that even as a kid. I relate to it so much more now as an adult, now that I am far more aware of the limited time we in general and I specifically have to live. And that gives me so much more capacity to feel empathy and solidarity with others whose lives and loves and happiness and flourishing are beaten, crushed, lost, or denied. How could I feel anything but the natural human solidarity my heart feels when listening to Chapman’s song? And how can I not remember that listening to the song as a kid helped me begin to imagine and explore the unknown emotional depths of my own human heart?
The specifics of the story and the selves involved do not describe the specific story and self I already know as my own, but they still embody dramatically heightened versions of what I have known and experienced in my own life, dramatically and beautifully heightened versions of our human experience of life and love and loss and yearning.
None of the details that differentiate the story in “Fast Car” and its lovelorn protagonist from my own life story are reasons for me to say, “That’s not my story.” Those are reasons for me to connect with another person’s story—to get closer to them, and to become more myself, the more they and their story become part of me and mine.
It’s a beautiful, incredible book. Everyone should go read it. It’s a Catalan novel about Spanish Civil War times. I don’t know what the hell that’s like, but for the same reasons that my Mexican ass got two useless degrees in Russian literature, I don’t care. I don’t need anyone’s cultural permission to connect with my fellow human beings. Reading the stories of other people has only ever given me light and goodness. It’s never taken anything away from me or made me a worse person.
Reading the first chapter of Goodbye, Ramona transports me to the mind of a trapped woman—a woman whose husband is a tyrant and makes her feel powerless—as she wanders like a ghost in the streets looking for him after he has suddenly gone missing in the wake of a bombing in Barcelona. In Roig’s beautiful, harrowing description—and in Meg and Cristina’s beautiful, harrowing translation—you see the damage of his tyranny on her psyche, and you feel the fear and anxiety in the way she describes what she’s doing and what she’s thinking.
That’s the raw, human stuff that makes me feel as close as I can get to living and seeing through the head of another person. What a gift that is! And how necessary it is, especially in times like these when we live and exist so far away from each other, when we are so alienated from each other and isolated from each other, when we can be standing next to other people in the grocery store line or sitting next to each other in traffic but the spaces between us and our minds and hearts feels as vast as the distance between us and the moon.
We have stories to bring us closer, and yet we continue to let capitalism, a broken society, and the wickedness of the powerful push us away from each other. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And I hope that the stories that I have helped to tell, all these stories I’ve recorded and published, will continue to remind people of that. I hope these stories remind people of who we really are and who our neighbors really are. I hope these stories by and for our fellow workers not only remind us that every life is precious, but that they remind us what life is all about. I hope that they remind us what a gift it is that we are all here, and what a cosmic tragedy it is that we allow life itself and our lives to be treated with such inhumane disregard.
For 19 years, with a virtually spotless record, Evan worked at a local Kroger grocery store in Milford, where he eventually became the dairy department manager. But from October 2020 to March 2021, Evan suffered a torturous campaign of bullying, harassment, and sabotage from two store managers, and his union abandoned him when he needed help. Evan took his own life, and his family will never be the same, and the world will never be as bright as it was with Evan in it. I thank god that I don’t know firsthand what it’s like to go through such a horrific tragedy, but because I heard them tell it, every other thing about me and my human being feels the Seyfried’s story and their pain and their fight for justice as my own. After learning about Evan’s story and after speaking with his loved ones about his story many times, I am forever changed by him and by them.
So, of course, I thought of Evan and the Seyfrieds, and I thought of my own family, when I saw the soul-crushing news story this past week of Pierre Damas Bel, the poor 20-year old young man who committed suicide in Springfield and walked into traffic after our government slapped a criminal ankle bracelet on him and told him he was a worthless cockroach. I know what it feels like to have others in my own country, even my own government, see me this way. Everyone here has some way of trying to understand what that feels like, but we don’t try hard enough. Stories help us get better at trying. And we need to get better, we need to do better, we need to be better. For Evan, for Pierre, for all of us.
I’m not the same person I was when I walked into that Barnes & Noble way back when looking for “just good literature.” I don’t look to stories or look for stories in that same one-way, transactional mode anymore; I don’t look to stories or look for stories that are just going to reflect me back to me.
I don’t just gravitate to stories that I gravitate to because I see something of me reflected in them. I gravitate to stories because a light in them draws me in, and that light then reflects in me and stays with me after I connect with them.
Every great human-made creation, construction, and operation embodies a whole that would not exist but for the sum of every worker and every ounce of human work that contributed to its existence. All those workers with all their lives and all their labor contributed to bringing all these magnificent things into existence, and all of us workers with all our lives and all our labor contribute to them, improve upon them, and keep them running. So, too, have all these stories contributed to bringing the me that I am into existence. And these stories will continue their work of shaping how I live and act and see and feel and think.
Stories have been and continue to be the most ever-present, ever-abundant, ever-beautiful reminder that I need other people to live, to be, to be me.
And the ever-present, ever-abundant, ever-beautiful number and forms of human stories all around us—all the stories that have already been told, all the stories yet to be told, all the stories that live on in our books, our films, our songs, our campfire tales—each and every one of them is a reminder to us that we need each other, too.
Inflation in Greece rose to 3.8% in August from 3.4% in the previous month, compared with an increase of 2.9% in August 2025, Greek Statistics Authority ELSTAT announced on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. According to ELSTAT, the development was largely driven by energy prices, as well as increases across a range of services. Price increases […]
The price of oil surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time since July after attacks on oil facilities and ships in the Middle East threatened an already weakened supply chain.
The price of oil surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time since July after attacks on oil facilities and ships in the Middle East threatened an already weakened supply chain.
Public records show that businesses associated with Tavira have undergone changes to their custody operations following regulatory intervention in Dubai and Monaco. Separately, Tavira Monaco is a defendant in English civil proceedings concerning shares provided as collateral for a stock-backed loan.
The civil allegations remain disputed, and the public judgments reviewed for this article do not establish that Tavira knowingly participated in fraud. Neither Tavira nor its founder, Eliot Goodfellow, is charged in the related United States criminal case.
An international financial group
Tavira was founded in London in 2005 as Tavira Securities. It has since expanded into areas including agency brokerage, asset management, corporate broking and custody.
The group has operated through regulated businesses in several jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, Monaco, Dubai, Australia and the United States.
Goodfellow remains Tavira Financial Limited’s controlling shareholder. Companies House records state that he owns at least 75 per cent of its shares and voting rights and has the right to appoint or remove directors.
Tavira Financial’s accounts for the year ending 31 March 2025 reported increased revenue alongside a wider annual loss. The accounts also referred to the closure of its contracts-for-difference business and restructuring of its custody activities as the group concentrated on agency brokerage, asset management and corporate broking.
The Salinas civil proceedings
Tavira Monaco is one of six defendants in English civil proceedings brought by Mexican businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego and Corporacion RBS.
According to the claimants’ case, as summarised in a 2024 High Court judgment, Salinas transferred Grupo Elektra shares worth more than $400 million to two custodians, Weiser Global Capital Markets and Tavira Monaco. The shares were provided as security for loans under a stock-loan agreement concluded in July 2021.
The claimants allege that they entered the transaction after being led to believe that the lender was associated with the prominent American Astor family and that the shares would not be sold unless an event of default occurred.
They further allege that Vladimir Sklarov, who used the name “Gregory Mitchell” in connection with the transaction, caused the shares to be transferred and sold without their authority and used part of the proceeds to fund the loans themselves.
Financial Mail reported in June 2025, citing trading logs reviewed by Salinas’s team, that some of the disputed shares were sold through transactions involving Morgan Stanley, BBVA and Merrill Lynch. The report did not allege that those banks knew of or participated in the alleged fraud. Their appearance in a transaction chain does not, by itself, establish misconduct or knowledge of any underlying dispute.
These remain allegations in continuing civil litigation. In the interlocutory proceedings, the Sklarov defendants maintained that the transaction documents entitled them to trade the collateral and that Salinas’s advisers had been told this. The public decisions reviewed for this article do not amount to a final determination of Tavira Monaco’s liability.
The High Court granted freezing and proprietary injunctions in August 2024. An application by the Sklarov defendants to discharge those injunctions was rejected in October 2024. Later appellate proceedings concerned procedural and evidential issues rather than a final trial of the underlying claims. Tavira Monaco was not involved in the most recent appeal.
Separate US criminal case
A US federal indictment filed on 30 April 2026 and unsealed in May charges Sklarov with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York alleges that Sklarov operated an entity presented as an established stock-backed lender associated with the Astor family. Prosecutors allege that he used aliases and false representations to obtain control of shares worth approximately $450 million.
Sklarov has not been convicted in that case. The charges are allegations, and he is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
The publicly available indictment charges Sklarov, not Tavira Financial, Tavira Monaco, Goodfellow, Morgan Stanley, BBVA or Merrill Lynch. The existence of the criminal case should therefore not be taken as establishing criminal conduct by any of those companies or individuals.
Restrictions in Dubai
On 10 September 2024, the Dubai Financial Services Authority imposed restrictions on Tavira Financial Limited’s Dubai branch.
According to the DFSA public register, the firm was restricted from soliciting or conducting specified regulated financial-services business with new clients. It was also restricted from soliciting or onboarding new clients in connection with financial promotions.
The public register does not state the reason for the restrictions and does not connect them to the Salinas litigation.
Tavira’s accounts subsequently referred to a decision to close the Dubai branch’s custody operation and to restructure custody activities across the group. The DFSA register nevertheless continues to list Tavira Financial as an authorised firm, subject to the published restrictions.
Companies House records show that Goodfellow ceased to be a Tavira Financial director on 13 September 2024, three days after the restrictions were imposed. Neither the DFSA entry nor the Companies House filing gives a reason for his departure or establishes that it was connected to the restrictions or the Salinas proceedings.
Monaco sanction suspended pending challenge
Tavira Monaco has also been the subject of regulatory action.
On 12 February 2026, Monaco’s Commission de Contrôle des Activités Financières ordered the withdrawal of Tavira Monaco’s authorisation after upholding four regulatory breaches.
The published CCAF decision found that the company had failed to submit required accounts, activity reports and auditors’ reports within statutory deadlines. It also found that the company had not continuously maintained two people responsible for its strategic direction and management, had lacked a bank account in its own name with a Monaco credit institution since July 2023, and had lacked sufficient human and technical resources since 2023.
Tavira Monaco challenged the decision. On 21 May 2026, the President of Monaco’s Supreme Court suspended its execution. According to the CCAF’s current case notice, Tavira Monaco’s application to annul the decision remains pending.
The withdrawal decision should therefore not be described as presently effective without also reporting the suspension and continuing challenge.
Questions about custody controls
The Dubai restrictions, restructuring of custody operations and Monaco proceedings raise legitimate questions about governance and operational controls. They do not, by themselves, prove any connection to the alleged misconduct in the Salinas transaction.
The English civil case raises separate, disputed questions about the instructions received by Tavira Monaco, the authority it understood the relevant parties to possess, the movement of the collateral and the custody records maintained during the transaction. Those matters remain for determination in the civil proceedings.
Right of reply
EU Reporter sent Tavira Financial, Tavira Monaco and Eliot Goodfellow a detailed summary of the matters in this article and asked for their responses concerning the civil allegations, regulatory decisions, custody restructuring and Goodfellow’s departure from the board. EU Reporter has received no replies from Tavira Financial, Tavira Monaco and Eliot Goodfellow
EU Reporter also asked Morgan Stanley, BBVA and Bank of America, the parent company of Merrill Lynch, whether they could confirm the reported transactions and whether they wished to comment. Morgan Stanley replied, saying “no comment”. The others, BBVA and Bank of America, the parent company of Merrill Lynch, have not replied at all.
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Ouano Tante worked the afternoon shift at the Tyson beef plant in Joslin, Illinois, for five years. But when she and hundreds of her co-workers arrived at work on August 13, they found the plant closed.
They speculated that someone on the morning shift might have gotten injured. Then two mid-level supervisors came outside in tears. Plant supervisors told workers the plant was closing permanently, effective immediately.
Inside, the early-morning shift had just ended when the workers were informed it would be their last. The cafeteria erupted into chaos. Plant supervisors stood guard by the doors, workers said, while everyone received their closure paperwork.
“People were crying, shaking,” Tante said. “When we were leaving the parking lot, there were so many car accidents. People were so upset.”
“They gave no reason, nothing,” said Ahoro Asselissime. “People have no job. No money to pay our bills. For 11 years, I made money for them. And now they’re not doing anything for me.”
DISASTER FOR COMMUNITY
Joslin is home to just 56 residents. But 2,500 workers from Africa, Latin America, and Burma toiled at the meatpacking plant there, butchering cattle for Tyson, one of the world’s largest meatpacking companies. The workers were represented by Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1546.
Most of the workers live in the Quad Cities, clustered around the Illinois-Iowa border 160 miles west of Chicago. Everyone there knows someone who works at Tyson, the area’s ninth-largest employer. The closure announcement sent the community into a tailspin.
Tante, originally from Togo, had the job of determining the age of cattle by checking the size of their teeth. An overhead conveyor would move carcasses, suspended by their ankles, along the chain. Tante checked the teeth, sprinted up a set of stairs to mark the cattle’s ankles with ink, then sprinted back down to catch the next carcass.
Simultaneously, other workers drained blood from the animal by slicing the neck with knives. If Tante didn’t work fast enough or was off-pace with the other workers, she said, she could get cut by their knives.
PALTRY SEVERANCE
The laid-off workers will be paid for 36 hours a week until October, but that’s far less than they had been making with overtime.
“I got $500 this week,” said Asselissime. “My rent is $925. I have to put gas in my car, buy food for my kids. Everything is so expensive now.” Prior to the closure, Asselissime could expect around $900 a week.
“I’ve been sounding the alarm about how Tyson treats their workers for years,” said Nana Ouro-Agoro, founder of Akwaaba, a nonprofit organization that provides support to the Quad Cities’ immigrant population.
Originally from Togo, Ouro-Agoro came to the Quad Cities after winning the immigration lottery in 2008. She learned that many of her neighbors worked at Tyson, where they were frequently injured on the job and afraid to speak out. Workers told her they were being treated “worse than the cattle.”
“It was hard for me to sleep at night, hearing my fellow immigrants were working hard, getting injured, and nothing was being done,” she said.
Akwaaba helped Tyson workers with translation services and resources to help them assert their rights, including when Tyson abruptly fired dozens of Togolese workers as alleged retaliation for reporting injuries and sexual harassment. Now, about 500 of their clients—roughly 1 in 4—are out of work.
And because so much of the local economy depends on income from Tyson workers, “we’re going to see a crisis in every sector,” Ouro-Agoro said.
ONE MONOPOLY AFTER ANOTHER
It’s been a profitable few years for Tyson. So why shutter the plant? Tyson cites the nationwide cattle shortage.
Cattle stock in the United States is at a 75-year low. The costs of raising cattle have gone up significantly for ranchers, in part due to drought and higher prices for fertilizer and diesel, exacerbated by the war on Iran.
But the crisis facing Tyson workers and cattle ranchers alike is driven by one major factor: corporate consolidation. The “Big Four”—Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—own over 80 percent of the U.S. beef industry.
The Big Four have, according to multiple court decisions, colluded to fix prices for just about everything, from the price customers pay at the grocery store to the price cattle ranchers receive for their livestock.
Yet despite the strain placed on cattle herds, U.S. beef production in real terms has remained relatively steady, due to the heavier weight of today’s cattle compared to decades ago.
Tyson isn’t the only one closing plants. JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, closed a facility in Memphis in June, laying off 200. JBS also announced plans to close a 1,500-worker processing plant in Souderton, Pennsylvania, but efforts from union and political leaders pushed JBS to convert the plant to a smaller facility, saving 400 jobs.
With nearly 4,000 meatpacking jobs cut just this summer, is the cattle shortage really to blame?
As of the most recent fiscal quarter, Tyson’s operating income is up 8 percent, or $547 million, over last year. Tyson attributes the increase to growth in its chicken and prepared foods segments.
Tyson CEO Donnie King took home nearly $35 million in total compensation last year, 781 times more than the median Tyson worker and double the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio among S&P 500 companies.
While cattle shortages could be cutting into beef profits (Tyson reported a third-quarter beef operating loss of $138 million), overall the company is making money hand over fist. And as the meatpackers squeeze cattle producers, the shortage itself is a problem of the Big Four’s own making.
But meatpacker consolidation is only one piece of the puzzle. The meatpackers may claim that they are also the victims of collusion—by the grocery giants.
Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, and Albertsons can collude to lower prices paid to meatpackers too. Estimates place Walmart at between 20 and 25 percent ownership of the grocery industry, while Amazon (thanks to its acquisition of Whole Foods) is now the second-largest grocery retailer in the U.S.
Grocers are pushing down prices paid to packers, while packers are slashing prices paid to ranchers. In 1980, cattle producers took home $0.63 of every consumer beef dollar and the packers and retailers took home a combined $0.37. As of 2021, that number is exactly flipped, according to More Perfect Union. All the while, workers and consumers get the shortest end of the stick; price collusion lines the pockets of meatpacking and grocery store executives, while depressing worker wages and inflating consumer prices.
UNION PENS AGREEMENT
After the Joslin plant closure, the union released the following statement: “UFCW Local 1546 has a long-standing and proud union partnership with Tyson Foods, and we were extremely disappointed in not receiving advance notice of this news. If given the opportunity, we could have sat down and found an economic solution to keep this plant operating, but sadly our voice was silenced.”
Four days after the company’s closure announcement, Local 1546 President Robert O’Toole signed an agreement with Tyson, which includes severance pay of one to four weeks, depending on years of service, on top of the two months of payments.
The UFCW agrees to “not to take any steps or action to… interfere in any way with the orderly closing of the Plant, and the Union agrees not to support any such steps or action by others.”
Many workers feel their union leadership has left them hung out to dry. “The union doesn’t care about us, Tyson doesn’t care about us,” said Asselissime. “A lot of immigrants work for this company, from Mexico, from Africa. That’s why they don’t care.”
Some workers were already mobilizing independently. The day after Tyson announced the closure, laid-off workers rallied outside the plant gates with community supporters and political groups. The workers demanded Tyson make a plan to keep the plant open; if that wasn’t possible, they wanted six months of severance pay, not two.
At various points in its history, the UFCW has taken up key fights against the packers. In 2007, it spearheaded a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security after ICE raids detained 12,000 workers at six meatpacking plants.And in 2008, after a 16-year battle, it organized the world’s largest pork processing plant, the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina.
But in recent years, the International union seems to have changed its tune, tying itself to the meat cartels in exchange for short-term, modest gains. Now Tyson workers say that labor-management “partnership” is swinging back at the members, with little response from union leadership.
“The union hasn’t said anything, aside from telling us to go apply for unemployment,” said Tante. “I thought the union should defend us, so I was surprised they didn’t do anything. The union could have fought for us to get more severance, but they didn’t.”
PROTESTS CONTINUE
Several hundred maintenance workers who remain in the plant are reportedly dismantling equipment and preparing the plant for demolition.
Meatpackers are notorious for refusing to sell plants to other packers, wanting to stifle competition. In 2018, for example, when Tyson closed a plant in Cherokee, Iowa, it refused to sell until the next owners agreed to limit the number of cattle they would slaughter there.
While some workers might move and get jobs at other plants, Tyson has not outlined formal transfer rights or relocation stipends (in previous plant closures, relocation bonuses have been up to $15,000). JBS has held mass hiring events in the Quad Cities for those willing to relocate to Nebraska or Utah.
Veronica Ceballos, originally from Mexico, worked at Tyson for 19 years, commuting on rural backroads through harsh Iowa winters. Even after she injured her back working on the line, she transferred to a different position and continued working. Since her children are now adults, she says, she has the flexibility to relocate if necessary. But she worries for co-workers who don’t have that option.
Several hundred Tyson workers and their families have continued organizing protests and rallies, calling on Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker to invoke eminent domain to bring the plant under state ownership and re-open its doors, and on Tyson to increase severance pay to six months. On September 3, workers and community supporters will caravan to Springfield to march on the state capitol building at noon.
“There are people who’ve worked at Tyson for 20 years, 30 years. People with health issues, people who are sick, people who can no longer work elsewhere,” Asselissime said in a speech at a rally of about 100 workers on August 27. “We need fair severance pay, so we can have a future.”
Caitlyn Clark is a national organizer at Essential Workers for Democracy (www.ew4d.org), an organization dedicated to rank and file member education and empowerment for workers in grocery, meatpacking, and retail.
Correction 09/10/2026: Workers were informed about the plant closure on August 13, not August 14 as previously stated.
They asked for a Circular Economy Act that goes beyond waste management to focus on using resources more efficiently, among other things.European Commissioner Jessica Roswall met on Monday (31 Aug) with 16 young people who helped shape the European Commission's Youth Check on the upcoming Circular Economy Act (CEA).
The meeting with the Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy was part of the participatory process launched earlier this year to ensure that young people's views help guide the Commission's flagship initiative for Europe's circular economy.
It followed her first exchange with young participantsat the annual conference of the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform (ECESP) in April. Since then, a team of youth representatives has worked to develop a Youth Position Papersetting out their recommendations.
At the meeting, the group presented their main messages and discussed with Commissioner Roswall the opportunities and challenges of Europe's circular transition. They called for a Circular Economy Act that goes beyond waste management to focus on using resources more efficiently, making products easier to repair and reuse, ensuring safe, high-quality secondary materials, keeping the transition affordable and fair, investing in circular skills, and maintaining meaningful youth involvement throughout implementation.
The discussion also allowed the Commissioner to respond to the youth recommendations, reflect on the contribution of the Youth Check to the policy-making process and reaffirm the Commission's commitment to effective youth involvement.
“Young people are not only stakeholders in Europe’s circular transition; they are essential partners in shaping it. We need young people to voice their ideas and be part of the change that will make Europe’s circular economy a reality. I am happy to receive their ambitious recommendations today, which will help inform our work as we prepare the Circular Economy Act.”
Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy Commissioner Jessika Roswall
"In the last few months we have seen what effective and tangible youth input can look like in policy-making. We appreciate the opportunity to openly share our recommendations with Commissioner Roswall and DG Environment to shape the Circular Economy Act. This is a significant step forward for meaningful youth participation in environmental policy. The Act will set the framework for a future that we, as young people, will feel the effect of, and we are ready to continue contributing to it with our ideas."
Representatives of Generation Climate Europe and Academics for a Circular Economy
Background
The CEA, due to be adopted before the end of 2026, aims to accelerate the transition to a more circular economy, increasing the EU’s economic security, resilience, competitiveness and decarbonisation.
It is intended to improve the business case for circularity by facilitating the cross-border movement of recycled products, materials, and waste across Europe. It will also increase the supply of high-quality recycled materials and stimulate demand for these materials in the EU.
The CEA Youth Checkcombined a targeted online consultation of young people aged 15 to 29, a dedicated youth session during the ECESP Annual Conference, and additional exchanges with youth stakeholders. It will also inform the Impact Assessment prepared for the Circular Economy Act in line with the Commission's Better Regulation Guidelines.
by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio – Gospa News founder and director
UPDATE ON SEPTEMBER, 7, 2026
Iranian Judiciary Findings: The Bombing on a wedding ceremony by a Raytheon Weapon
«The Iranian judiciary has released the initial findings of an investigation showing that weapons used in a US bombing attack earlier this week on a wedding ceremony in the south of the country were American-made», Iranian Press TV Reported yesterday.
The head of the Iranian judiciary’s local branch in the southern province of Hormozgan said on Saturday that projectile fragments scattered around the site of a wedding ceremony on September 1, killing five people including a children, had been examined as part of the investigation, showing they were manufactured by US company Raytheon.
“The nature of the weapons used in the terrorist attack on civilian gatherings in Kohestak, Sirik, has been fully documented using advanced technical analysis tools and image data processing,” said Mojtaba Ghahremani.
Ghahremani said investigators had carried out a meticulous examination of the inscriptions, barcodes, and other details engraved on the projectile remains, leaving no doubt that the munitions belong to the US military.
He said the type of military thermal battery used in the ammunition revealed that it is from a series of high-voltage batteries used exclusively in the flight guidance systems of precision-guided bombs operated by US military forces.
The official said a military identification code, CAGE Code: 96214, registered on the projectile fragments directly links it to the weapons company Raytheon Missiles & Defense, a major US defense contractor and industrial corporation that manufactures weapons as well as military and commercial electronics.
The Massacre perpetrated by an AGM 154-C 500 lb Thermal Glide-Bombe
Much more important than official release is the image and the video from wreckage that at first had induced the experts to identify the weapon as am AGM-84H SLAM-ER cruise missile (read below).
The wreckage of the weapon shows that it is an AGM 154 C glide-bomb produced by Raytheon
On the tiny identification plate there is in fact the writing AGM – I 154 C-I which corresponds to the glide-bomb AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) produced by Raytheon under the stamp NAVAIR which is the matrix of the American weapons used in the joint activity formed by the US Navy and US Air Force.
The AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) is a glide bomb that resulted from a joint venture between the United States Navy and Air Force to deploy a standardized medium-range precision-guided weapon, especially for engagement of defended targets from outside the range of standard anti-aircraft defenses, thereby increasing aircraft survivability and minimizing friendly losses.
It is intended to be used against soft targets such as parked aircraft, trucks, armored personnel carriers (APCs), and surface-to-air missile sites (SAMs). Prior to launch, it is given a destination through either a predesignated waypoint or a point marked through a targeting pod. It glides, using two wings that pop out for added lift, to the marked destination and dispenses submunitions in a short, roughly linear pattern.
The designation of the Joint Standoff Weapon as an “air-to-ground missile” is a misnomer, as it is an unpowered bomb with guidance avionics, similar to the older GBU-15.
The AGM-154C is Designed to Attack Hardened Targets
But in this specific case, a more sophisticated weapon was used for the attack on the wedding ceremony…
The AGM-154C uses an Imaging Infrared (IIR) terminal seeker with autonomous guidance. The AGM-154C carries the BROACH warhead. This two stage 225 kg (500 lb) warhead is made up from a WDU-44 shaped augmenting warhead and a WDU-45 follow through bomb. The weapon is designed to attack hardened targets. It entered service with the US Navy in February 2005.
The use of this projectile minimally mitigates the implications of the attack ordered by the US Navy by US President Donald Trump; in fact, autonomous guidance oriented by the target’s heat source implies the possibility of an error that the SALM-ER guided cruise missile does not allow.
Below is a live-fire video released by the Royal Australian Air Force demonstrating the actual use of an AGM 154-C glide bomb
But at the same time, it appears to be a completely disproportionate weapon to hit a transmission tower, which, according to leaks from US officials, was the target of the attack (read detaisl below).
Therefore, the hypothesis of a targeted bombing to destroy a civilian home, as on Qeshm Island, remains valid.
This is why Iran has filed an international complaint for war crimes…
Iranian Red Crescent calls for ICC to investigate deadly US wedding attack
Iran’s Red Crescent Society (IRCS) has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate a US missile attack on a wedding reception in the country’s southern province of Hormozgan, which killed at least five people and wounded 68 others.
The deadly incident occurred when shrapnel from a US attack struck a residential building where a wedding reception was being held in the city of Kouhestak, in Hormozgan’s Sirik County on Tuesday.
In a letter to the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor, the IRCS said the attack raised serious concerns under international humanitarian law and warranted an independent, impartial, thorough and effective investigation.
“Given the reported civilian character of the location as the venue of a family wedding ceremony, as well as the presence of civilians at the site, the incident raises serious concerns under international humanitarian law and warrants an independent, impartial, thorough, and effective investigation,” the organization said.
The IRCS said preliminary information initially indicated that four people had been killed and 67 others wounded. Iranian health officials later raised the toll to at least five fatalities and 68 injuries, with a child among those killed.
The IRCS warned that the number of casualties could rise because some of those wounded were in critical condition.
FIRST POSTED ON GOSPA NEWS ON SEPTEMBER, 4, AT 7,28 AM GMT + 2 (Italy)
A US-made AGM-84H cruise missile among the wreckage after American strike on a wedding
A US-made AGM-84H SLAM-ER cruise missile has been identified among the wreckage following the American strike on a wedding ceremony in Sirik, southern Iran, late Tuesday, adding further evidence of the US military’s role in the attack that killed and wounded civilians.
Weapons analyst Trevor Ball identified the remnants as belonging to the SLAM-ER, a precision-guided, air-launched cruise missile manufactured by Boeing, according OsintWarfare which posted on X the first video of wreckage and was quoted by Al Mayaeedn English Lebanese TV.
Boeing describes the SLAM-ER as being the most accurate air-launched munition in the US Navy’s arsenal;
Enlargement of the piece of a U.S. AGM-84H SLAM-ER among the wreckage in the wedding massacre in Sirik posted on X by @OsintWarfare
Trevor Ball, a former US Army explosive ordnance disposal technician who now works as a weapons technical analyst for Armament Research Services, was among the experts asked by Reuters to examine the photographs and video.
“The damage seen appears to be from a munition which detonated on contact with the roof, or just above the roof,”he said, adding it was apparently a direct hit.
The strike in the small town of Kuhestak on Tuesday killed five people and injured at least 70 others.
The Exclusive Video of the Wreckage
VIDEO LEGEND:
1st footage – The US-made AGM-84H SLAM-ER cruise missile has among the wreckage following the American strike on the wedding cerimony
2nd footage – Children’s slippers lie scattered in the aftermath of the US aggression at a wedding in Sirik, where civilians, including children, were killed and dozens more were injured. Footage from the scene shows slippers belonging to women and children amid the destruction.
After this initial analysis, both Iranian and international sources tried to identify the weapon, with some ballistics experts even launching the bizarre hypothesis that it was a ricochet shot, a hypothesis considered unlikely by most, however.
The Reuter Experts confirmed our Investigation
But one thing seems certain…
«A US munition struck a home hosting a wedding celebration in southern Iran directly, rather than ricocheting from another target, weapons experts who reviewed images and video verified by Reuters revealed» Al Mayadeen reported.
The strike in the small town of Kuhestak on Tuesday killed five people and injured at least 70 others.
So on Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance he was induced to declare that Washington was investigating the incident, despite the initially Pentagon deny of any responsibility…
“We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know,”Vance said during a White House press briefing.
«Four military weapons experts who checked visual material told Reuters that the damage was consistent with a direct strike rather than secondary damage caused by a munition ricocheting from another target. Three of the experts stressed that the weapon was likely American rather than a misfired Iranian air defense missile» Al Mayadeen added many hours after its and our first articles posted on September 4, at 7,28 AM GMT + 2 (Italy)
The main room of the weddin cerimony in Sirik
Two US officials, speaking anonymously, said the US military had conducted strikes near Kuhestak on Sept. 1, with the town’s telecommunications tower as a specific target.
Satellite imagery places the tower about 135 meters from the wedding site. Iranian media reported that the tower was struck at about 9:30 pm local time.
But the same expert Trevor Ball debunked US Official speculation…
“The visible blast damage could not result from fragments from the nearby strike on the communications tower striking the area,” he stressed.
A Likely Trump’s US Navy Deliberate Massacre on Iranian Wedding
AGM-84H SLAM-ER cruise missile is a weapon designed for precise strikes and can be retargeted during flight by a human operator.
Therefore, if it were confirmed that this very powerful rocket, the wreckage of which was found on site, was used, the issue would take on an unprecedented gravity.
But in Tehran, there is a very serious religious theocracy, armed above all with hypersonic missiles, and perhaps even nuclear ones, donated by Russia, China, or North Korea…
Speaking about the attack, Head of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council Sheikh Amoli Larijani said, “The crime in Sirik and the killing of unarmed women and children embody the savage nature and deceptive self of the United States, and expose the falsehood and audacity of those who trade in human rights.”
Sirik mourns victims killed in US attack, including a 4-year-old
A four-year-old child was among four people laid to rest in the southern Iranian city of Kuhestak on Thursday, as grieving families and residents gathered to bid farewell to loved ones killed in a US attack on the area, Al Matadeen Lebanese TV reported.
The funeral ceremonies in Kuhestak, in Sirik County of Hormozgan Province, began at 4 pm from a street at the city’s entrance, with mourners walking together toward the city’s Martyrs’ Cemetery, where the victims were laid to rest.
The authorities identified the four victims as four-year-old Amirali Karimi, 16-year-old Mohammad Mollahi, 43-year-old Kolthoum Mollahi Nezhadnia, and 50-year-old Zarkhatoun Taheri.
According to the announced figures, the US aggression left 68 people injured, several of whom remain under medical treatment. Al Mayadeen’s correspondent reported that the death toll from the US aggression targeting the wedding ceremony in Sirik had risen to five.
VIDEO – “Horrific, appalling”: Iran urges UN Security Council to condemn deadly US attack on wedding ceremony
Iran has called on the UN Security Council to condemn an unprovoked and deadly US attack on a residential home hosting a wedding ceremony in southern Islamic Republic that led to the martyrdom of five civilians, including a four-year-old child, and injured more than 70 others.
Gholamhossein Darzi, the Islamic Republic’s ambassador and chargé d’affaires to the United Nations, made the appeal in a letter addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the president of the Security Council on Wednesday following a new wave of such American strikes targeting southern Iranian cities, which together claimed the lives of at least 18 people and wounded 108 others.
IRGC vows Revenge for US wedding attacks: “will never go unanswered”
The chief commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has said that the blood of those killed in a US attack on a wedding ceremony in Kouhestak, Hormozgan Province, “will never go unanswered” and that it will ultimately “catch up with those who ordered and carried out this heinous crime.”, Iranian Press TV wrote.
State media reports debris recovered from a home attacked in southern Iran during a wedding celebration was “most likely” from a US-made, AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon – a guided-glide munition, also Al Jazeera reported before the exatly identification as pieces of a US-made AGM-84H SLAM-ER cruise missile
Broadcaster IRIB said images released by US Central Command of attacks in southern Iran showed a F/A-18 Super Hornet loaded with a similar munition.
Another Trump’s Heinous War Crimes in Iranian Genocide caused US Troops Deaths
The targeted house was 200 metres (650 feet) from a communications tower, and the strike could not have been an error given the munition’s accuracy, reports said.
The Sirik strike came amid a renewed wave of US aggression against Iran, with American forces targeting sites across the country’s southern provinces.
Iranian authorities reported attacks on Bandar Abbas, Jask, Minab, Chabahar, Konarak, Lengeh, Qeshm Island, and other areas, including communications and service infrastructure.
The escalation prompted Iran to launch retaliatory missile and drone strikes against US military positions across the region, including bases in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, and Erbil, in which several US troops lost their lifes in the name of Trump’s Zionist.
The heinous Trump’s Military strikes on civilians in Iran caused a genocide of more than 7 thousand people.
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