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🇺🇦⚔️🇷🇺 The Black Sea war sends world wheat prices up
The US Department of Agriculture has cut its forecasts for Russian and Ukrainian grain exports because of the Black Sea shipping war, and every rival exporter's price has gone up.
The department's monthly Grain: World Markets and Trade report, published on August 12 by its Foreign Agricultural Service, cuts Russia's 2026/27 wheat exports to 46mn tonnes and Ukraine's to 13.5mn, blaming disruption to Black Sea shipping since hostilities intensified in mid-July.
The report's own headline is elsewhere - EU grain imports rising and exports falling on the back of a crop wrecked by heat and drought - but the two findings are the same story from opposite ends.
Grain trade has spent four years being reshaped by this war, and this is the month the price data caught up with the shipping data. Russia has been the world's cheapest large wheat seller throughout; in August it is discounting while everyone else raises quotes, because a discount is worth nothing if the cargo cannot leave Novorossiysk. All three of that port's big grain terminals stopped work this week.
Since the July estimates, wheat export quotes rose sharply among every major exporter apart from Russia. Russian quotes fell $3 a tonne to $224 on early harvest pressure and mounting supplies with some export routes inaccessible.
EU quotes jumped $25 to $262 a tonne on expected import demand despite a much smaller crop; US quotes rose $26 to $321, Canadian $20 to $292, Australian $13 to $291 and Argentine $12 to $239 - still the next most competitive after Russia. The US season-average farm price was raised 20 cents to $6.20 a bushel.
A seller with the world's cheapest wheat and no way to load it is not a price-setter. Russia is discounting into a market that is repricing upward around it, which is the clearest measure yet of what the port campaign has cost Moscow.
The department cut Russian wheat exports for 2026/27 by 1.5mn tonnes to 46mn, citing "disruptions in the Black Sea hindering shipments, especially from ports in the Sea of Azov", and Ukraine's by 1mn tonnes to 13.5mn, on disruption to its deep seaports. Kazakhstan and Canada picked up 1mn tonnes each, to 10mn and 28.5mn.
EU wheat and coarse grain production for 2026/27 is now forecast at 264.8mn tonnes, down 8% on the year, after excessive heat and dryness through the late spring and summer cut yields on wheat and barley. Corn is forecast at 50.2mn tonnes - which would be the smallest EU corn crop in nearly 20 years.
EU corn imports are raised 1mn tonnes to 23.5mn as a result, and its own corn exports cut to 1.6mn. Barley exports, at 9.1mn tonnes in 2025/26 and the highest since 2015/16, are forecast to fall 19%.
Filling that gap is harder than it looks. Ukraine, normally a top corn supplier to the EU, is dealing with the same Black Sea shipping disruption; Brazil's exports have started slowly despite a record crop, as domestic biofuel demand absorbs the corn; and Ukrainian wheat into the bloc is still constrained by EU import policy, particularly for the Visegrad Group. The department notes significant recent EU purchases of US corn instead.
🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/the-black-sea-war-sends-world-wheat-prices-up-461199/
Police in Winona Minnesota are stunned after every single one of their Flock cameras were suddenly removed in a single night.
According to the police department, all 8 of the town's cameras were cut down and hauled away.
Police are asking for the public's help to identify the individual, but the public has been responding with comments such as:
"The Flock cameras tore themselves down"
"Whoever did it, was fishing with me"
"Whoever it was, was at Bible study with me"
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Nearly 20,000 people are publicly vouching for a man accused of cutting down Flock cameras in a small West Virginia town.
People commented:
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"He was saving my neighbor's dog from a fire all day, couldn't be him."
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"This man is innocent. I saw him serving at a soup kitchen."
-"Couldn't be him. He was helping me replace the roof on a homeless shelter."
The man, Wesley Jackson, has pleaded Not Guilty.
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🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 Trump regime changed Iran but not in the way he wanted
Mojtaba Khamenei Is Planning for a Long War
Several months into his tenure as supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei is beginning to put his own stamp on Iran’s military and national security establishment. In a sweeping series of appointments, he has effectively recreated Iran’s senior command, reorganizing the institutions responsible for managing both war and diplomacy.
The emerging command structure points toward a broader shift in how Tehran intends to manage the next phase of the conflict: more centralized military command; a greater emphasis on offensive operations and imposing more severe costs to strengthen deterrence; and tighter integration of military, economic, diplomatic, and domestic-security policy.
Yet this does not necessarily mean abandoning negotiations. Rather, the appointments suggest that Tehran is trying to pair diplomacy with a harder conception of deterrence, centered on preserving and ...
🇮🇷🏆🇺🇸 They Saw It Coming
How American military planners anticipated failure in Iran
In mid-February 2026, before the US military initiated the airstrikes that began Operation “Epic Fury,” the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an agency of the executive branch created to synthesize the analysis of the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, submitted to the president a classified report detailing the prospects of an attack on Iran. This assessment, first reported on in the Washington Post and subsequently confirmed by the Associated Press, painted a grim picture.
It concluded that an offensive operation launched by the US military would be unlikely to dismantle the central pillars of the Iranian government. Assassinating Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei could backfire, resulting in the consolidation of Iranian military and political structures and the activation of emergency protocols the Iranians had been preparing for years. Iran’s domestic opposition was unlikely to be ...
