"Really? I hadn't heard."

Asia Times ran an interesting article in the May 9, 2006 online edition, entitled, "The US's Geopolitical Nightmare," by William F. Engdahl. After a lot of background discussion, the author puts a lot of recent diplomacy into perspective when he says:

At the next SCO meeting on June 15, Iran will be invited to become a full SCO member.

And last month in Tehran, Chinese Ambassador Lio G Tan announced that a pending oil and gas deal between China and Iran was ready to be signed.

The deal is said to be worth at least $100 billion, and includes development of the huge Yadavaran onshore oilfield. China's Sinopec would agree to buy 250 million tons of liquefied natural gas over 25 years. No wonder China is not jumping to back Washington against Iran in the United Nations Security Council. The US had been trying to put massive pressure on Beijing to halt the deal, for obvious geopolitical reasons, to no avail. Another major defeat for Washington.

The context is very broad and reasonable.

We knew our mainstream media were censored, slanted, biased, but we didn't realize how much so. Given the extent of the omissions here, it is tempting to say the media have been nothing less than conspiratorial, if not just plain stupid.