Rubber Meets Road for Inflation Thesis as Truckers Strike

Reuters: Chinese truckers demonstrate over high fuel costs, truck-hailing app Manbang
The Guardian: Brazil faces calls for return to military dictatorship amid truckers' strike
Al-Monitor: Truckers display new face of popular protest in Iran
Telesur: Argentine Trucker Unions Set To Halt the Country Thursday
HindustanTimes: Pune trucker association on strike from July 26 demanding increase in service cost necessitated by fuel price hike
Hindu Business Line: Truckers flay daily fuel price change
Freight Waves: Trucking prices post large gains in May with spillover causing intermodal price rises
Supply Chain Dive: Trucker pay is up 15% amid driver shortage

U.S. launches the Age of Cyberwarfare

While there has been talk of cyberwar for years and various attacks around the globe have been blamed on various foreign governments, with the U.S. often citing China as a source of mischief, it is the U.S. itself that has just given the green light to cyberwar. In what I can only assume is the Obama administration's attempt to look tough on Iran and supportive of Israel ahead of a tough election, they have publicly disclosed that they are behind the Stuxnet worm.

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks - begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games - even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm's "escape," Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America's most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran's nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

"Should we shut this thing down?" Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president's national security team who were in the room.

The conclusion is key:

Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using - and particularly to overusing - the weapon. In fact, no country's infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

U.S war with Iran: speculation heats up

US anticipates May as tentative date for clash with Iran. Floating SEALs base for Gulf

A hurried decision not to de-commission the USS Ponce helicopter marine carrier after duty in Libya - but to refit it for deployment by May in the Persian Gulf as a floating base for commando teams - was confirmed by the US Pentagon and Navy Sunday, Dec. 29. This transportable floating base will expand the commandos' range in coastal areas and support counter-measure against mines which Iran has threatened to plant in the Strait of Hormuz in reprisal for the US-EU oil embargo. The SEALs will also take on Iran's menacing fleet of military speedboats

There has been speculation, with date projections, and nothing materialized. Even if this is just a psy-op designed to ratchet up pressure on Iran, it is a step closer to a full-out shooting war.

Iran has scattered hundreds of speedboats of different types around uninhabited islands off the Iranian mainland, tucking them out of sight in well-hidden inlets and bays. The US commando teams based on the Ponce platform will have the task of ferreting out and destroying this fleet.

The US Defense Department aims to get the Ponce ready for its new mission as a floating commando base with all possible speed. To save time, the US military published one no-bid contract for the engineering work, waiving normal procurement rules on the grounds that any delay presented a "national security risk."

The contract carries pointers to the timeline expected in Washington for a military confrontation to erupt between the United States and Iran, as well as the form it may take, say DEBKAfile's military sources.

The timing suggests a spring or summer offensive, if the timeline is one for war.