Here’s the latest from the New York Times:

Israel carried out covert attacks on two major gas pipelines inside Iran
this week, disrupting the flow of heat and cooking gas to provinces
with millions of people, according to two Western officials and a
military strategist affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Now I don’t know if that’s true or false. Earlier blame was placed groups in Saudi Arabia and other enemies in Iran. A chemical factory explosion was also done by Israel, according to the report.

What I can’t figure out is why this was leaked. To be clear, there are no ‚old fashioned‘ leaks on stuff like this except in extraordinary cases like Edward Snowden. When leaks like this happen — especially to the New York Times — it’s deliberate.

The ‚two Western officials‘ is vague but rules out Iran but it’s an odd thing for US officials to leak because it would seemingly escalate things towards a war that they seem to be trying to avoid.

Maybe this is a clue:

One Western official called it a major symbolic strike that was fairly
easy for Iran to repair and caused relatively little harm to civilians.
But, the official said, it sent a stark warning of the damage that
Israel could inflict, as conflict spreads across the Middle East and
tensions rise between Iran and its adversaries, notably Israel and the
United States

For me, that doesn’t add up because Iran would obviously know Israel is capable of sabotaging a pipeline, which is a trivial thing to do at the state level. Israel has sabotaged nuclear facilities in Iran and killed people, which are obviously tougher tasks.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what’s going on here. These are the three reporters behind the story:

This article was written by Adam Button at www.forexlive.com.

Likely Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump will have to write another big check after he lost a civil fraud case in New York. A judge fined him $364 million and barred him from running any business in the state for three years.

During the three-month trial he was accused of inflating asset values in order to get better terms on loans.

“In order to borrow more and at lower rates, defendants submitted
blatantly false financial data to the accountants, resulting in
fraudulent financial statements,” presiding judge Arthur Engoron wrote. “When confronted at
trial with the statements, defendants’ fact and expert witnesses simply
denied reality, and defendants failed to accept responsibility or to
impose internal controls to prevent future recurrences.”

The case was littered with legal mistakes from Trump’s team.

He will surely appeal but under New York law he will be required to put up a large chunk of the damages in escrow.

In a separate case last year of sexual assault and defamation he lost and was fined $88.3 million.

He remains the betting favourite to be in the White House at this time next year.

This article was written by Adam Button at www.forexlive.com.