Monday, May 15, 2017

The duality of Trump's insanity. He is sleeping with Putin and pretending to be prosecuting Assad.

May 15, 2017
By Colin Dwyer

The U.S. State Department (click here) laid out a new case against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime on Monday: Not only has the Syrian government committed mass atrocities at its military prison complex outside Damascus, but for years, it has also added to the structure in order to burn and secretly dispose of thousands of its victims' remains.

"Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Saydnaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium," Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for Near East affairs, told reporters at a special media briefing, circulating satellite photographs that he says depict that crematorium.

"Although the regime's many atrocities are well-documented," Jones continued, "we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison."...

May 15, 2017
By Andy Szal

ExxonMobil last week (click here) announced plans to add one of the world's top aromatics facilities to its chemical operations in Singapore later this year.

The Singapore affiliate of ExxonMobil Chemical Company reached an agreement to purchase the plant from Jurong Aromatics Corp. Terms were not disclosed, but reports placed the purchase price at about $1.7 billion.

The Jurong facility has an annual production capacity of 1.4 million metric tons, which ExxonMobil said makes it one of the largest aromatics plants in the world.

Singapore is home to ExxonMobil’s largest integrated refinery and petrochemical complex, and officials said that the deal would increase the company's annual aromatics production capacity in the country to more than 3.5 million metric tons — 1.8 million of which would be paraxylene.

The company said that the deal would bolster its offerings in key markets in Asia. Officials said that the Asia Pacific region — with its increasing wealth and burgeoning middle class — would account for an estimated 75 percent of the growth in global chemical product demand over the next decade....