Menas Associates Blog
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Haftar finally agrees to attend this month’s Palermo summit
By dangling his participation at Palermo over the Italian government’s head, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar may have sought to exploit Italian desperation for his own benefit. After weeks of hinting that he would not attend, and raising Rome’s anxiety that the 12-13...
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Appointment of Abdul-Mahdi as Prime minister is a promising development for Iraq
Iraq has made further strides in its efforts to get its political process back up and running. There was a major breakthrough on 2 October when the parliament elected Barham Saleh as the country’s new president, which in turn opened up the way for the selection of a...
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Mexico’s Pemex downgraded as it imports light crude
After a month of speculation over Pemex's comments about importing light crude from the US to increase the feedstock for its aging refineries, the state-owned company revealed on 22 October that it would be importing four 350,000 barrel shipments from the Bakken...
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Chinese investment in Brazil’s oil sector
China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) and Petrobras have signed an agreement defining the proposed structure of joint ventures that envision: CNPC buying 20% of Petrobras’ unfinished Complexo Petroquímica do Rio de Janeiro (Comperj) refinery project; and 20% of a...
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Inevitable Bolsonaro victory fuels tensions in Brazil
The bitter polarisation of Brazil’s politics reached new heights in the final weeks before the country’s 28 October second-round run-off presidential election which pits the Partido Social Liberal’s (PSL) right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro against Partido dos...
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Algeria’s regime targets journalists
Algeria’s trend of targeting journalists is worrying. France-based blogger Amir Boukers, an Algerian who writes the Facebook blog under the hashtag name of AmarDZ, came under vicious attack from Anis Rahmani’s Arab-language Ennahar channel. Those suspected of helping...
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Morocco’s king focuses on rural development
Morocco's King Mohammed VI's 12 October speech to both Houses of Parliament in Rabat to open the new legislative year mainly focused on the disparity between economic development in the country’s rural and urban areas, and the subsequent need for rural development....
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Biafra separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu reappears
Nnamdi Kanu — the leader of the separatist Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement — has mysteriously reappeared after around 13 months of absence. He disappeared after the army and security services invaded his family home as part of the government’s alleged...
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US’ new IDFC development fund to shake up geopolitics
For nearly 50 years, the US has been at a competitive disadvantage in the realm of commercial diplomacy. After the Marshall Plan — which was the gold standard in aligning commercial and development interests in the 1940s and 1950s — the US ceded leadership on...
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Menas and Iran: The first 30 years
Three months before Menas Associates published the first issue of Iran Focus – later renamed Iran Strategic Focus – in October 1988, Iran had accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598, putting an end to the devastating 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War. It had cost the lives...
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