skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Shadow fleet dominates Hormuz crossings as Iran ramps up bypass loadings in ~transport
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Shadow fleet dominates Hormuz crossings as Iran ramps up bypass loadings
3 votes -
Comment on The billionaire ‘buccaneer’ braving the Strait of Hormuz in ~transport
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/dEtyl From the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
As Iranian missiles streaked over the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, bringing traffic across one of the world’s most vital trade lanes to a near halt, one Greek billionaire was steering his ships straight into the turmoil.
Dynacom Tankers, owned by 79-year-old George Prokopiou, has sent at least five tankers through the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Gulf since the outbreak of war with Iran on Saturday, making it one of a handful of legal operators willing to brave the journey.
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There are big rewards on offer. Freight rates for tankers leaving the Gulf have more than doubled since Friday, hitting record highs. A single very large crude carrier (VLCC) making the perilous voyage across the strait and into China would earn about $500,000 in revenue per day, excluding the cost of additional war-risk insurance, according to price-reporting agency Argus.
While the risks for the owners are money and tankers, the sailors onboard are putting their lives on the line. Iran has threatened to set any ships attempting the passage “on fire”, hitting at least nine since the conflict began with at least three seafarers killed.
All of Dynacom’s vessels turned off their transponders, devices that automatically transmit a vessel’s location and identity, for their passage through the strait.
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“He’s an industry legend and one of those people that does what we call ‘premium’ business,” said one ship broker who has worked with Prokopiou’s companies in recent years, using a euphemism for trades that are legal but carry much higher risks.
Prokopiou’s Dynacom Tankers has moved tens of millions of barrels of Russian crude oil over the past year and is one of the biggest lifters of the cargo since Moscow launched its assault on Ukraine in early 2022, according to FT analysis of Kpler data and ship ownership records.
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Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention put Dynacom Tankers on its list of “international sponsors of war” for its role shipping Russian crude, accusing it of “replenishing the budget of the aggressor country and financing the Russian invasion”. However, in 2023 it withdrew Dynacom from the list and in 2024 withdrew the list altogether, following pressure from its overseas partners.
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The billionaire ‘buccaneer’ braving the Strait of Hormuz
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Comment on I don’t know if my software engineering job will still exist in ten years in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentGarmin's Autoland is pretty cool, but it's an emergency system. The air traffic controller had to shut down the airport (not allowing other planes to take off or land) while the plane using the...Garmin's Autoland is pretty cool, but it's an emergency system. The air traffic controller had to shut down the airport (not allowing other planes to take off or land) while the plane using the autoland system landed.
Also, coordinating traffic around major airports is done by air traffic control and I don't think much of that is automated? It's air traffic control talking to pilots on the radio.
So in the end I'm basically agreeing with you that few jobs in aviation are likely to be automated away just because the LLM's are good now. The automation that's been done already is around the edges with things like reservation systems (largely replacing travel agents) and self-service kiosks.
An example of a task that might be automated, assuming the vision models are good enough, is screening carry-on luggage. It would reduce TSA agents' workloads if they didn't have to watch the screens. But if the AI sees something, it's going to alert a TSA agent and they would take it from there.
It would take a major government initiative to even do that much.
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Comment on Kristi Noem associate Madison Sheahan bought 2,500 marked vehicles for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
ICE’s top brass are quietly searching for a way to amend the remainder of a massive order of pick-up trucks and SUVs that were ordered last year and slated to be wrapped with the agency’s name, logo, and motto, as well as storing away many vehicles that have been delivered to ICE facilities across the country, the Washington Examiner has learned.
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Over the past year, assaults against ICE personnel have risen 8,000%, according to the DHS, and federal police have opted to hide their faces and identities while working in public. They have frequently switched license plates on rental vehicles to avoid detection by activists, who track the license plate numbers of suspected ICE vehicles in massive crowdsourced databases.
Despite the growing number of ways ICE employees have sought to protect their identities, ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan, placed a bulk order for vehicles clearly marked with ICE’s logo.
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“If leadership would have been consulted — leadership being the executive assistant directors, do you need marked vehicles, the people that have done this job would have said, ‘We don’t need marked vehicles, because you’re not going to use them,'” the first person said.
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The vehicles were dark navy blue with a red horizontal stripe that runs along each side. ICE’s name and logo adorn the sides in gold lettering, along with “Defend the Homeland” on the rear portion of the sides.
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In the second half of 2025, Sheahan upgraded much of the workforce’s fleet from unmarked cars to marked ones, purchasing a couple of thousand vehicles.
Sheahan, who graduated from college in Ohio in 2019, was hand-picked by Noem to be the second-in-command of the 20,000-employee federal agency and its $9 billion budget. Sheahan’s prior experience included serving as a political director when Noem was South Dakota’s governor, as executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party, and as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries under Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA).
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The order of 2,500 custom vehicles is the latest in a string of questionable expenditures by the DHS and its agencies over the past year, including hundreds of millions of dollars that the department put toward advertisements for illegal immigrants to self-deport.
ICE “absolutely” needs more vehicles, one source said. The agency is in the process of hiring and onboarding 10,000 additional personnel in its Enforcement and Removal Operations office, which had about 6,500 officers until last year.
However, the new vehicles cannot be used to go into communities and search for specific illegal immigrants that officers are searching for because they tip off anyone in eyesight that ICE is out. ICE operations in Democrat-run cities in particular have been met with large groups of activists trying to alert those nearby of ICE, even interfering in operations.
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A second source familiar with the purchases and fallout said the purchased marked vehicles are being used for custodial pick-ups, or when ICE asks a local jail or state prison to turn over someone in custody, and the jail agrees to do so. The marked vehicles cannot be used in general enforcement.
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Kristi Noem associate Madison Sheahan bought 2,500 marked vehicles for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
10 votes -
Comment on Armed robots take to the battlefield in Ukraine war in ~society
skybrian Link ParentI think that means it's not going to be resolved any time soon? I'm not sure the war would end even if Putin died. I assume the Ukrainians would try that if they could, though.I think that means it's not going to be resolved any time soon? I'm not sure the war would end even if Putin died. I assume the Ukrainians would try that if they could, though.
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Comment on I don’t know if my software engineering job will still exist in ten years in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentCould you share a link to where you read that about autopilots? I can say that in general aviation (flying a Cesna, for example) they are not that sophisticated. They are more like cruise control,...Could you share a link to where you read that about autopilots?
I can say that in general aviation (flying a Cesna, for example) they are not that sophisticated. They are more like cruise control, just controling altitude and heading. You can think of that as an alternative control for flying the plane that makes things easier in level flight.
There are considerably more sophisticated systems for commercial aviation, but I was under the impression that for landing, they rely on equipment installed on the ground.
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Comment on “The biggest cover-up of my adult life”: inside the CIA’s attempt to make Havana syndrome disappear in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
AHI is more colloquially known as “Havana Syndrome” owing to the cluster of cases reported in Cuba in 2016 and 2017, not long after the U.S. Embassy in Havana reopened there during the Obama administration’s rapprochement with the Castro regime. The syndrome has been one of the most perplexing controversies in American national security, the subject of countless news items, congressional investigations and government statements, with skeptics insisting it is either one of the most stubborn examples of social contagion — i.e. mass hysteria — or that it is triggered by environmental conditions such as crickets or heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems on the fritz. But biomarkers cannot manifest in someone’s bloodstream because of a psychological condition.
Several AHI victims with credible stories and verifiable medical records previously worked as spies, military officers, or diplomats overseas. And most have done work for their country aimed at countering threats from Russia. They share another thing in common: they speak of moral injuries more grievous than their physical ones because the former were inflicted not by trained Russian operatives but by cynical American ones.
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The GHIC was the brainchild of Bill Burns, a longtime State Department diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Russia. Shortly after being confirmed as President Joe Biden’s appointee to head the CIA in March 2021, Burns authorized a task force to investigate AHI. “I'm certainly persuaded that what our officers and some family members, as well as other U.S. government employees, have experienced is real, and it's serious,” he said four months into the job.
However, Thorne told The Insider that the GHIC’s investigation was driven not by rigorous fact-gathering and dispassionate analysis but by an agenda not to uncover the truth or even take its own remit seriously. Now retired from the CIA, he has stepped forward for the first time to reject his own organization’s official assessment and to speak of America’s foreign spy service as a house divided. “You had about 50 percent of the building that believed [AHI] was true. The other 50 percent believed that it was a fake issue. And it became very divisive. And it created a lot of infighting in the headquarters and within the intelligence community.”
Thorne said the GHIC was rife with big egos and sinecurists, and two thick layers of upper and middle management that dismissed AHI as a hoax unworthy of CIA resources while characterizing the victims as fantasy merchants or grifters. The GHIC’s substantive work lasted mere months, with most eight-hour days dedicated to only a half hour of real effort for Thorne. “It took us a decade to find Osama Bin Laden but months to get to the bottom of Havana, which is: there is no bottom, because there is no Havana,” Thorne said, summarizing the GHIC’s mentality. The unit’s true purpose, he said, was “to bring down the temperature on AHI at CIA headquarters… The phrase was ‘there is no there there.’”
The hell there isn’t, Thorne counters.
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The Insider, 60 Minutes, and Der Spiegel have spent the last three years looking into AHI and the U.S. government’s dogged insistence that evidence is lacking to link these injuries to Russian actors. In 2024, we found there was evidence in two cases, one in Frankfurt, Germany in 2014 and the other in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2021, implicating members of Unit 29155 of the GRU, or Russian military intelligence, also responsible for a spate of well-documented poisonings and bombings throughout Europe, plus one abortive coup.
The Insider has spoken to dozens of former or active U.S. intelligence officers with familiarity with this investigation, which one high-level CIA official called “the biggest cover-up I’ve seen in my adult life.” Dr. David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University who helmed two studies of AHI — the first for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the other for the U.S. intelligence community — before going on to advise Biden’s White House, agrees there is a cover-up. “If there had been bigger ones than this,” Relman said, “I’d hate to see what those looked like.”
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For an ailment that is said not to exist, the CIA has put extraordinary effort into trying to silence or discredit those unsatisfied with the official explanation about AHI. Senior leadership even authorized one of their own to infiltrate a victims’ support network, hosted on encrypted messaging platforms, to conduct illegal domestic surveillance on their former colleagues, who by then were private citizens, according to confidential sources.
Moreover, those who adopted the see-no-evil approach at CIA were rewarded with promotion within the building, in some cases to the fabled Seventh Floor of CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, where executive leadership make decisions and judgment calls that can lead the United States into wars such as the one now raging with Iran. The former head of the GHIC, in fact, is now the Deputy Director for Analysis for the CIA.
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“The biggest cover-up of my adult life”: inside the CIA’s attempt to make Havana syndrome disappear
11 votes -
Comment on Yakult ladies are an icon in Japan in ~life.women
skybrian Link ParentYes, if you're trying to survive doing this, maybe you'll push yourself to do it all day and that could be pretty grueling. But from the article is sounded like many of them are doing it for a...Yes, if you're trying to survive doing this, maybe you'll push yourself to do it all day and that could be pretty grueling. But from the article is sounded like many of them are doing it for a half day or less:
“Most Yakult ladies start their shifts around 8:30 a.m. and finish by 1 p.m., unless they work a full-time shift"
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"average earnings of a Yakult lady are roughly $682 USD a month"
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Some say they work only three hours a day and make more than the company average. Others claim to work far more [...]
Unfortunately this is only anecdotal. It would be interesting to know how many hours they're working on average and how much it varies.
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Comment on GNU and the AI reimplementations in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Stallman [...] was well versed in the copyright nuances. He asked the other programmers to reimplement the UNIX userspace in a specific way. A way that would make each tool unique, recognizable, compared to the original copy. Either faster, or more feature rich, or scriptable; qualities that would serve two different goals: to make GNU Hurd better and, at the same time, to provide a protective layer against litigations. If somebody would claim that the GNU implementations were not limited to copying ideas and behaviours (which is legal), but “protected expressions” (that is, the source code verbatim), the added features and the deliberate push towards certain design directions would provide a counter argument that judges could understand.
He also asked to always reimplement the behavior itself, avoiding watching the actual implementation, using specifications and the real world mechanic of the tool, as tested manually by executing it. Still, it is fair to guess that many of the people working at the GNU project likely were exposed or had access to the UNIX source code.
When Linus reimplemented UNIX, writing the Linux kernel, the situation was somewhat more complicated, with an additional layer of indirection. He was exposed to UNIX just as a user, but, apparently, had no access to the source code of UNIX. On the other hand, he was massively exposed to the Minix source code (an implementation of UNIX, but using a microkernel), and to the book describing such implementation as well. But, in turn, when Tanenbaum wrote Minix, he did so after being massively exposed to the UNIX source code. So, SCO (during the IBM litigation) had a hard time trying to claim that Linux contained any protected expressions. Yet, when Linus used Minix as an inspiration, not only was he very familiar with something (Minix) implemented with knowledge of the UNIX code, but (more interestingly) the license of Minix was restrictive, it became open source only in 2000. Still, even in such a setup, Tanenbaum protested about the architecture (in the famous exchange), not about copyright infringement. So, we could reasonably assume Tanenbaum considered rewrites fair, even if Linus was exposed to Minix (and having himself followed a similar process when writing Minix).
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So, reimplementations were always possible. What changes, now, is the fact they are brutally faster and cheaper to accomplish. In the past, you had to hire developers, or to be enthusiastic and passionate enough to create a reimplementation yourself, because of business aspirations or because you wanted to share it with the world at large.
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One thing that allowed software to evolve much faster than most other human fields is the fact the discipline is less anchored to patents and protections (and this, in turn, is likely as it is because of a sharing culture around the software). If the copyright law were more stringent, we could likely not have what we have today. Is the protection of single individuals' interests and companies more important than the general evolution of human culture? I don’t think so, and, besides, the copyright law is a common playfield: the rules are the same for all. Moreover, it is not a stretch to say that despite a more relaxed approach, software remains one of the fields where it is simpler to make money; it does not look like the business side was impacted by the ability to reimplement things. Probably, the contrary is true: think of how many businesses were made possible by an open source software stack (not that OSS is mostly made of copies, but it definitely inherited many ideas about past systems). I believe, even with AI, those fundamental tensions remain all valid. Reimplementations are cheap to make, but this is the new playfield for all of us, and just reimplementing things in an automated fashion, without putting something novel inside, in terms of ideas, engineering, functionalities, will have modest value in the long run. What will matter is the exact way you create something: Is it well designed, interesting to use, supported, somewhat novel, fast, documented and useful? Moreover, this time the inbalance of force is in the right direction: big corporations always had the ability to spend obscene amounts of money in order to copy systems, provide them in a way that is irresistible for users (free, for many years, for instance, to later switch model) and position themselves as leaders of ideas they didn’t really invent. Now, small groups of individuals can do the same to big companies' software systems: they can compete on ideas now that a synthetic workforce is cheaper for many.
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There is another fundamental idea that we all need to internalize. Software is created and evolved as an incremental continuous process, where each new innovation is building on what somebody else invented before us. We are all very quick to build something and believe we “own” it, which is correct, if we stop at the exact code we wrote. But we build things on top of work and ideas already done, and given that the current development of IT is due to the fundamental paradigm that makes ideas and behaviors not covered by copyright, we need to accept that reimplementations are a fair process. If they don’t contain any novelty, maybe they are a lazy effort? That’s possible, yet: they are fair, and nobody is violating anything. Yet, if we want to be good citizens of the ecosystem, we should try, when replicating some work, to also evolve it, invent something new: to specialize the implementation for a lower memory footprint, or to make it more useful in certain contexts, or less buggy: the Stallman way.
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GNU and the AI reimplementations
22 votes -
Comment on Yakult ladies are an icon in Japan in ~life.women
skybrian Link ParentIt doesn't sound like "hard physical and emotional labor" unless you push yourself too much? Particularly in Japan, which is very safe and where people are polite. (Or so I've read.)It doesn't sound like "hard physical and emotional labor" unless you push yourself too much? Particularly in Japan, which is very safe and where people are polite. (Or so I've read.)
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Comment on Iran war spreading economic damage far beyond oil and gas markets in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Just one week into the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran, the war’s economic casualties extend well beyond the oil and natural gas shipments that normally transit the Strait of Hormuz. The closure of several international airports in the conflict zone, including the world’s busiest in Dubai, idled nearly one-fifth of global airfreight capacity, interrupting shipments of consumer electronics, pharmaceuticals and precious metals.
But the pain is not being felt equally. The cost of shipping goods by air from Asia to Europe is up 45 percent since the war began, more than twice the increase for sending items from Asia to the United States, said Ryan Petersen, chief executive of Flexport, a freight forwarder and logistics company in San Francisco.
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Air cargo thus far has been more heavily affected than seaborne shipments. Amid intense missile, drone and aircraft bombardments, several countries such as the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran closed their airspace. A limited number of flights from the region have resumed, meaning a sharp reduction in cargo capacity.
For each week that air shipments are suspended, cargo carriers will need at least a week-and-a-half to catch up, said Oscar de Bok, CEO of DHL Global Forwarding, which moves more than 2 million tons of airfreight annually.
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The gap between available airfreight capacity and demand is leading to cargo backlogs in Southeast Asia and China, Stefan Paul, CEO of Kuehne + Nagel Management, a Swiss logistics giant, told investors on Tuesday. The emerging situation is “similar to the covid times,” he added.
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Aircraft originating in China and other parts of north Asia must fly a “meticulous route” over nations such as Turkmenistan, threading the needle between the Iranian battlefield to the south and prohibited Russian airspace to the north, said Brian Bourke, chief commercial officer for SEKO Logistics in Chicago.
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The near-blockage of Persian Gulf oil shipments is sending jet fuel prices soaring, which will only add to air cargo bills. One European gauge of jet fuel prices is up 72 percent since the war began, rapidly approaching its 2022 peak following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Spiking airfreight costs on the Asia-to-Europe route will act like “surge pricing on Uber,” drawing aircraft from other routes, such as Asia-to-U.S., and causing those prices to rise as well, Bourke said.
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The freight market upheaval could be exacerbated by companies responding to changes in U.S. tariffs, which are temporarily lower following the Supreme Court ruling invalidating Trump’s emergency levies. Indian goods, for example, are now subject to a 10 percent tariff, down from as high as 50 percent before the court ruling.
Administration officials have said they intend to re-create the original tariff lineup as much as possible before the 10 percent global tariff expires in late July. In the meantime, U.S. importers have an incentive to rush Indian goods such as telecommunications gear and generic drugs into American ports. Any increase in demand for airfreight from New Delhi could run straight into airlines’ limited capacity, driving shipping costs higher, analysts said.
Farmers, meanwhile, will probably be among the first Americans to feel a financial jolt from the war. Three of the world’s top 10 producers of urea and anhydrous ammonia fertilizer are in the conflict zone: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran.
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Iran war spreading economic damage far beyond oil and gas markets
25 votes -
Comment on I don’t know if my software engineering job will still exist in ten years in ~comp
skybrian LinkI don't think anyone really knows where we'll be in two years, let alone ten.I don't think anyone really knows where we'll be in two years, let alone ten.
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Comment on Israel strikes oil facilities in Iran in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
The attacks, seen in videos circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times, appeared to be the first on Iran’s energy infrastructure since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran last weekend. Until this weekend, the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign had been largely focused on ravaging Iran’s leadership and security services, and police stations, while also trying to eliminate its ability to produce and launch missiles and prevent Tehran from being able to produce nuclear weapons.
But Tehran is a sprawling metropolis of 10 million people, with densely packed neighborhoods, and as in many cities, residential, commercial and military structures are in proximity to one another. Iranian media and residents have reported widespread destruction to residential homes, shops, roads, water pipes and several hospitals and schools, located near targets sites.
Iran’s Ministry of Oil said in a statement that multiple oil storage depots in the provinces of Tehran and Alborz had been targeted.
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Tehran’s main oil refinery is next to one of the storage facilities, in the city’s southern Shahr Rey district, that was attacked, according to state media. Videos circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times showed huge columns of fire lighting up the sky, and rising from what appeared to be the area of the oil depot.
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The Shahran oil depot in northwestern Tehran, which Israel targeted last June, was hit again, sending a dark plume of smoke swirling into the sky.
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The Iranian oil ministry statement said fire and emergency crews were working to put out the flames from the strikes, and asserted there would be no fuel or energy shortages because the ministry had taken precautions, anticipating strikes on its facilities.
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Israel strikes oil facilities in Iran
11 votes
From the article:
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