🇮🇷⚔️🇺🇸 WAPO: Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show.

Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.

Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the U.S. military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.

“The Iranian attacks were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the CSIS and a retired Marine Corps colonel, who reviewed the Iranian images at The Post’s request.

“The Iranians have deliberately targeted accommodation buildings across multiple sites with the intent to inflict mass casualties,” said William Goodhind, an investigator with the open-access research project Contested Ground who reviewed the imagery. “It is not just equipment, fuel storage and air base infrastructure under fire, but also soft targets, such as gyms, food halls and accommodation.”

The Post also found that the attacks hit a satellite communications site at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Patriot missile defense equipment at Riffa and Isa air bases in Bahrain and Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, a satellite dish at the Naval Support Activity Bahrain — which serves as the headquarters of the U.S. 5th Fleet — a power plant at Camp Buehring in Kuwait and five fuel storage bladder sites across three bases.

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❗️ Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, has died at 87

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🔼 🇺🇸 🖥 The S&P 500 closes at its highest level on record, now up +16.6% since the March 30th bottom.

That's +$9.6 TRILLION in market cap in 27 trading days.

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🇳🇴 Norway to reopen three gasfields closed down last century

The rich Scandinavian country’s centre-left government announced on Tuesday that the three North Sea fields — Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk and Tommeliten Gamma — would restart production in 2028, four decades after they last pumped out any gas.

The move, which drew howls of protest from environmentalists and some of the government’s leftwing support parties, is designed to meet demand for gas from Germany and the UK, two of Norway’s biggest customers.

“Norwegian production of oil and gas is an important contribution to energy security in Europe. The development of new gasfields helps Norway maintain high deliveries in the long term. This has become more important after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East,” said Terje Aasland, Norway’s energy minister.

Norway is western Europe’s largest petroleum producer, and has taken the crown from Russia as the main supplier of gas to many of the continent’s countries. Oslo has also increasingly positioned itself as the democratic oil and gas supplier of choice to try to force concessions out of Brussels in other areas, such as recognition of its right to drill in the Arctic.

Norway’s biggest three political parties are all firmly in favour of drilling for more oil and gas, and the minority Labour government also announced on Tuesday that it was offering 70 new blocks for exploration later this year. More than half of the blocks lie in the Barents Sea, inside the Arctic Circle.

But such exploration is controversial among smaller parties on which Labour depends for its parliamentary majority, while environmentalists argue that the world does not need new oil and gasfields if it wants to reach previously agreed climate targets.

🔗 https://archive.ph/WDZBl